Open-Source in Education News

SourceLabs is offering a very interesting service - Swik - The free and open database of Open Source projects.

Swik is a project to create a useful free-content directory for open source software. Swik was inspired by the wiki concept used by projects like Wikipedia and WikiWikiWeb. Anyone can edit Swik project pages, including you.

About Swik

According to the swik about page, "Swik project pages are different from the typical wiki pages you may have seen before. Each project page has a bunch of topics: anyone can add or edit topics, or add or edit entries in topics". Swik also has the two key buzz features whcih may make it an essential resource: social-bookmark-like tagging and powerful exposure of RSS Feeds

A very good point made here: open source gives communities the power to ensure that their language can be used for computing work. Coming from Nova Scotia - where there was more Scots Gaelic spoken than in Scotland last time I checked - and living in Welsh-speaking Gwynedd, I can see how much this means to communities whose first language is declining. Good news!

By itself, the release of OpenOffice.org for Scots Gaelic is a small event within the communities of free and open source software (FOSS). It is only one of the more than 50 localizations available for OpenOffice.org 1.x. However, the release shows a potential for FOSS that is often overlooked, particularly by those for whom English is their native language. Specifically, FOSS has the potential to help resuscitate a declining language and thereby aid in revitalizing a disintegrating culture.

NewsForge | OpenOffice.org, FOSS, and the preservation of Gaelic

Via Dave Wiley...

It’s that time of year again! Last year’s Open Education Conference at USU was described by several as “the best conference I ever attended.” This year’s conference should be even better. Keynotes this year include John Seely Brown (Social Life of Information) and Yochai Benkler (Coase’s Penguin).

The Call for Papers is available now. Please submit something! General information on the conference, including a Flyer and Presentation Slide you can use to help us advertise, is available at http://cosl.usu.edu/conference/.

iterating toward openness » Open Education Conference 2005

Advances in information technology have spread communications capabilities to every clime. There is a great potential and responsbility for educators, instructional technologists, and learning scientists to leverage these advances in order to extend educational opportunity to literally everyone who desires it. As Epictetus said, "Only the educated are free."

...Please join us September 28 - 30, 2005 on the Utah State University campus to discuss, share, and work together in this important area of educational and technological research...

Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education Conference

more from the Call for papers...

Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education Conference is a multidisciplinary event designed to promote discussion of research and development activities that advance the effectiveness and sustainability of the open education movement.

We invite you to present at the conference. Presentations should address at least one of the four conference themes: open educational resources, overcoming barriers to open education, international issues in open education, and policy and administrative issues in open education. Preference will be given to presentations that synthesize multiple themes in robust ways.

Submissions are due by July 15, 2005.

Acceptance announcements will be made by August 1, 2005. Once accepted, we strongly encourage you to submit your paper for publication in the proceedings. Full papers are due no later than September 1, 2005, and must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Via Dave Wiley...

It's that time of year again! Last year's Open Education Conference at USU was described by several as "the best conference I ever attended." This year's conference should be even better. Keynotes this year include John Seely Brown (Social Life of Information) and Yochai Benkler (Coase's Penguin).

The Call for Papers is available now. Please submit something! General information on the conference, including a Flyer and Presentation Slide you can use to help us advertise, is available at http://cosl.usu.edu/conference/.

iterating toward openness " Open Education Conference 2005

Advances in information technology have spread communications capabilities to every clime. There is a great potential and responsbility for educators, instructional technologists, and learning scientists to leverage these advances in order to extend educational opportunity to literally everyone who desires it. As Epictetus said, "Only the educated are free."

...Please join us September 28 - 30, 2005 on the Utah State University campus to discuss, share, and work together in this important area of educational and technological research...

Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education Conference

more from the Call for papers...

Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education Conference is a multidisciplinary event designed to promote discussion of research and development activities that advance the effectiveness and sustainability of the open education movement.

We invite you to present at the conference. Presentations should address at least one of the four conference themes: open educational resources, overcoming barriers to open education, international issues in open education, and policy and administrative issues in open education. Preference will be given to presentations that synthesize multiple themes in robust ways.

Submissions are due by July 15, 2005.

Acceptance announcements will be made by August 1, 2005. Once accepted, we strongly encourage you to submit your paper for publication in the proceedings. Full papers are due no later than September 1, 2005, and must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Michael Feldstein quotes an excerpt from Sakai’s press release (note, the link on e-Literate to the press release is now broken, use the one below) regarding a demonstration of the IMS Tool Interoperability (TI) standard:

The demonstration included four LMS systems including BlackBoard, WebCT, Sakai, and Moodle.  The demonstration included three applications: Concept Tutor, Samigo(Sakai), and QuestionMark.  All LMS/Application combinations worked and were demonstrated at the meeting which validates the interoperability of the IMS TI specification.

The demonstration was the culmination of nine months of significant co-design and engineering between all of the participants.

Now that the interoperability demonstration is complete, the standard is expected to be published Fall 2005.  As long as the standard is finalized in time, we expect that this feature will be present in the Sakai 2.1 release in the Fall 2005.

Sakai Press Release

...and goes on to make a point about standards, services, interoperbility and FOSS:

So tit for tat; now Sakai and Moodle can integrate proprietary pieces like QuestionMark as easily as WebCT and Blackboard can integrate FOSS pieces like Samigo. Note that it doesn’t matter whether your LMS is written in, say, PHP (like Moodle) or Java (like Sakai and WebCT). That’s part of the magic of web services.

In the short term, the P.R. mileage that the proprietary vendors get out of announcing integration with a given specialized tool vendor gets drastically reduced if not eliminated. Anything that complies with TI will run on at least two FOSS platforms as well.

In the long run, this is a first step toward the disintegration of the LMS and the creation of the LMOS. Why can’t every single tool in Moodle, Sakai, Blackboard, or WebCT interoperate this way? Why do I have to pick one package for 90% of my functionality and only be able to make choices about the last 10%?

e-Literate: Now, That's What I'm Talkin' 'bout!

I'd missed this. Tim Bray ( one of the creators of XML ) notes the importance of this open standard for office application documents. He includes, of course, a link to the OpenDocument announcement from OASIS.

ASIDES: Note that this is about an open standard for the document format, as opposed to open-source software applications to process the format, such as Open Office (the two are, of course, very closely related :o) Also note that this is, sadly, not a revival of the wonders of OpenDoc as a standard for docucentric user interfaces and software architectures (see the Standards and Architectures Working Group's area of the site - especially its History weblog - for more about the story of OpenDoc).

On Monday there was what seems to me like a major news story: the announcementthat OpenDocument 1.0 has been approved as an OASIS Standard.As I’ve said before, OpenDocument is almost exactly what we had in mind whenwe built XML, starting back in 1996.

Right now, it is the only XML office document format that is standardized, andit is also the only one that is complete; Microsoft’s offering is full ofholes, starting with the absence of PowerPoint.It’s also completely 100% free of intellectual-property issues, anyone can useit for anything anytime anywhere without asking anyone first.Let me put it this way: if you occasionally create documents or spreadsheetsor presentations, and if you think that you’d like to own them,independent of your Office software vendor, well, you have exactly one choice:OpenDocument.

If those docs/spreadsheets/presos might be long-lived, or contain high-valuedata that you might want to re-use later, and you don’t use OpenDocument, wellthere’s a word for that but I’m not going to put it up on the front page atongoing.By the way, at the request of our friends in the European Commission, we’vecommitted to getting behind making OpenDocument an ISO Standard, too.

ongoing · OpenDocument! (breaks inserted by Mike)

I'd missed this. Tim Bray ( one of the creators of XML ) notes the importance of this open standard for office application documents. He includes, of course, a link to the OpenDocument announcement from OASIS.

ASIDES: Note that this is about an open standard for the document format, as opposed to open-source software applications to process the format, such as Open Office (the two are, of course, very closely related :o) Also note that this is, sadly, not a revival of the wonders of OpenDoc as a standard for docucentric user interfaces and software architectures (see the Standards and Architectures Working Group's area of the site - especially its History weblog - for more about the story of OpenDoc).

On Monday there was what seems to me like a major news story: the announcementthat OpenDocument 1.0 has been approved as an OASIS Standard.As I've said before, OpenDocument is almost exactly what we had in mind whenwe built XML, starting back in 1996.

Right now, it is the only XML office document format that is standardized, andit is also the only one that is complete; Microsoft's offering is full ofholes, starting with the absence of PowerPoint.It's also completely 100% free of intellectual-property issues, anyone can useit for anything anytime anywhere without asking anyone first.Let me put it this way: if you occasionally create documents or spreadsheetsor presentations, and if you think that you'd like to own them,independent of your Office software vendor, well, you have exactly one choice:OpenDocument.

If those docs/spreadsheets/presos might be long-lived, or contain high-valuedata that you might want to re-use later, and you don't use OpenDocument, wellthere's a word for that but I'm not going to put it up on the front page atongoing.By the way, at the request of our friends in the European Commission, we'vecommitted to getting behind making OpenDocument an ISO Standard, too.

ongoing . OpenDocument! (breaks inserted by Mike)

This is a development that should make many educators and open source advocates very happy:

We have just launched BBC OpenSource – the new repository for open source code released by the BBC.

For the BBC, open source software development is an extension of our Public Service remit. Releasing open source software helps our audience get additional value from the work they've funded, and also get tools for free that they couldn't get any other way. It also allows people outside the BBC to extend projects in such a way that may in future be used in the BBC.

We hope there will be opportunities for cross-pollination between backstage.bbc.co.uk and BBC OpenSource.

backstage.bbc.co.uk :: Backstage News :: BBC launches Open Source website

New features

The 0.6 release has fixed many bugs from 0.5 and includes two new iDevices: the Wikipedia iDevice and the ability to include attachments with the Attachment iDevice. Users can now also align images align left or right using the Image with Text iDevice. eXe content can be exported for the majority of LMSs using the IMS & SCORM exports (for example WebCT, Blackboard, Moodle, ATutor, Illias, Claroline etc.). You can also reference eXe content in a LAMS sequence. Screenshot examples are provided on the developers wiki .

We need your help

Please try eXe out and let us know what you think by using the survey link on the project homepage. As an open source software project, this is an important part of our testing and user requests for new features.

Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sunday July 17, @09:32AM
from the and-more-probably-don't-realize-they-do dept.
cfelde writes " 56.2% of software developers use open source components by ZDNet's ZDNet -- Evans Data has found a rising trend toward including open source modules in software development world. While 38.1% said they used OSS modules in their applications in Spring of 2001, in the most recent survey, 56.2% said they had."

Slashdot | 56.2% of Software Developers use Open Source

SPEAKERS and TOPICS The conference is focused potential of open source for the secondary software sector. It includes topics such as: open source for the automotive industry, air traffic control; and industrial case studies on agile methods and distributed software development. A number of speakers will address commercial licensing issues and the organisational implications of open source. The CALIBRE team are also delighted to welcome international experts from Japan and Africa: Prof. Victor van Reijswoud Head of CSIS, Uganda Martyrs University, Africa, and Yukaka Niibe, Chairman of Free Software Initiative, Japan. Government officials include: Minister Michael Ahern, Department of Enterprise Trade and Employment, Ireland and Jesus Villasante, Head of the Directorate-General Information Society and Media, from the European Commission. For further details please contact the conference organiser Andrea Deverell Tel: +353 61 202737 Email: andrea.deverell@ul.ie Website: www.calibre.ie