Licenses, Features and the Open Source Community in Higher Education

03-August-2005

[ Open Source Conferences ]
By Jim Farmer, OSS Watch, July 4, 2005
Good presentation indicating the size of the e-learning market (about 30 billion USD (+/- 30%)) and the importance of open source in serving that market. The author emphasizes several times that open standards, rather than open source, will be key to accessing that market. Some good discussion near the end of the presentation describing open source business models. Via Stephen Downes and Scott Leslie, who also provides a link to the rest of the presentations from the Building Open Source Communities conference , held recently in Edinburgh.
Building Open Source Communities was a one-day conference held in Edinburgh that explored such topics as:

  • how do open source software projects organise themselves
  • why do some projects grow rapidly
  • how does the licence choice affect the kind of community that develops
  • what is the relationship between developers and end-users how important is leadership


    • Other Presentations included:
  • What is an open source software community? Sebastian Rahtz, Manager, OSS Watch
  • Licences, Features, and Community: The Path to Sustainability Jim Farmer, Community Liaison, Sakai Educational Partners Program
  • Co-located agile development Helen Sharp, The Open University
  • Serving Maths: Experiences from a JISC Distributed e-Learning Project Gustav Delius, University of York
    • Life and times in the Apache community Andrew Savory, Director, Luminas
  • MoodleMoot: Meeting Real People from a Virtual Community Sean Keogh, UK Moodle Partner


    • Building Open Source Communities was organised by OSS Watch, the open source software advisory service for UK HE and FE.

    Fiona Concannon; 03-August-2005 09:58:34 forum (0)

    Eduforge - Innovation for Education

    05-August-2005

    [ developing open-source software , Educational Technology , Open-Content , Open-Source , Open-Standards , Software Development ]
    Eduforge (www.eduforge.org) has recently been upgraded with the help of the eXe Editor Project (www.exelearning.org). Eduforge is an open access environment designed for the sharing of ideas, research outcomes, open content and open source software for education. You are welcome to use our community resources or start your own project space. Registration is free. Eduforge offers a wide range of collaborative tools as well as project spaces for the development of educational software, content or to faciltate collaborative research and discussion. I believe there is a lot of alignment and synergy with the SIGOSSEE initiatives.
    Eduforge was founded in early 2004 as part of the New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment (NZOSVLE) project (https://eduforge.org/projects/nzvle/). The NZOSVLE is a major collaborative education project funded by the New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission, an arm of the NZ Government. The project’s goals are to adopt and contribute to open source solutions for education. The consortium is composed of polytechnics, universities, and a private training organisations. Part of the vision for Eduforge is to create an environment that is robust enough to support large scale collaborative software development, but friendly enough to be used by non-programmers who want to collaborate on a range of projects. Projects may include learning materials design, application testing, and research as well as contributing documentation, tutorials, and help files to software development projects. In addition to reducing the economic and organisational barriers associated with large scale distributed collaboration, Eduforge is envisioned to reduce the technology usability barrier often confronted by non-ICT professionals. We've recently added Planet Eduforge, a blog aggregator at http://planet.eduforge.org, and integrated a fully featured blogging tool. Eduforge is developed using FOSS - GForge, Serendipity, and PHPWiki. While this started with somewhat of a NZ flavour due to the projects on it, the intent has always been a global shared resource. Recently we shifted the hosting to the US to improve latency for many of the interantional users. We would very much welcome participation - either in using the resources or in helping us develop the reources available on Eduforge. Or simply feedback, we're committed to continuous improvements. regards Richard Wyles

    Richard Wyles; 05-August-2005 01:15:27 forum (1)

    1 comments.

    Latest comment:
    Education after school; 11-June-2007 03:29:22 by Karif

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