Open-Source in Education - Links and Resources

Open-of-course.org is a new website for courses and tutorials that are published as open content. Our focus is at the start mainly on open source software courses but as we grow more will be added. Our goal is to create a multi-lingual platform for free quality educational information. Open-of-course is set up as an open source project and therefore we look for people to help us in further develloping this. Take a look at our website for more information.

A new community release at http://www.dokeos.om Furio Petrossi

Revolution-Education wiki This website covers a very large range of topics, of interest of education software developers, from beginner to advanced.

• Introduction: Motivations to use computers to support teaching, Benefits of Multimedia enhanced learning, Evaluating the efficiency of the computer-based Learning.
• Engaging e-learning: Why, after years or rather unsuccessful use of the web for learning content publishing, educators should start to invest in web-aware desktop applications. Web-browsers excel at content presentation, not at content creation or manipulation.
• Learning Activities: Self-paced training, blended learning, simulations, quizzes, assessment, etc. Including link to reusable e-tivities online.
• Learning Objects: Learning Objects = content + interface + Metadata. Discussion of the use, coding of learning objects. List of links of learning object repositories.
• Delivery Environments: Information specific to some delivery environment, like web-browsers, webCT, PDAs, standalone applications. Includes a wiki-essay on using wikis to support teaching.
• An Open World: Open Source Software, Open Content, etc.
• Software and Tools: Software and tools useful to educators and academics.
• Coding and Programming: Information specific to some programming languages and information about techniques to solve specific problems (for instance, automatic graph drawing).
• XML specifications: Markup specifications for the encoding of web or learning material (IMS, SCORM, and many others).
• Ontologies: Ontologies, text classification, recommender systems, etc.
• Adding Media: Finding images, sound, videos, on the web. Creating multimedia content.
• Design: Principles of design, usability, accessibility, interface components, functionalities.
• Distribution: Licensing/copyright, Digital Rights Management
• Further Links and References: Resources specific to some types of learners (K12, University), specific to some learning topics, specific to some countries, etc.

Stuart Yeates notes the following in his EDUCAUSE Blogs:

There is a discussion on slashdot (a very high traffic technie news site) entitled: "An Open Source Alternative to Blackboard?" Many of the comments are of low information value, but there are also many with good links to various sites of one kind or another.

Open Source VLE discussion on slashdot

Slashdot is an extremely high-traffic site and thus may attract some commenters rarely heard from discussing developments we do not already know about, so it may be worth tracking that discussion.

The University of Cork open source resources for researchers site, run by Joseph Feller, contains many resources of interest to OS researchers, in the following areas:

research bibliography | advocacy sites | project repositories | news sites

opensource.ucc.ie: resources for researchers

Via Stephen Downes

Open Admin for Schools
Posted on school-discuss: "Open Admin for Schools is a freely available web based school administration program. It now includes an online gradebook, and allows parent viewing of attendance, report cards, and gradebook, if desired. This is being developed by both the Battlefords School Division and the North West Catholic School Division in Saskatchewan, Canada." Version 1.80 was released today

Authors/Editors:
Geoff Mulgan, Omar Salem, Tom Steinberg
Publication Type:
Book
Publication Date:
2005
ISBN:
1841801429
Cost:
£10.00
Categories:
Citizenship, Innovation, Organisational change, Technology & Science

Download (pdf) the full report, or order a copy.

The rise of the Internet has made it possible for knowledge to be created and shared in ways that emphasise its character as a common good, rather than as something to be owned.

In the world of open source programming, the computer software is distributed under licence, allowing users to change or share the software’s source code – the human readable version of a computer programme.

This open and collaborative approach to creating knowledge has produced remarkable results, such as the Linux operating system and the web-based encyclopaedia Wikipedia. In defiance of the conventional wisdom of modern business, open source methods have led the main underlying innovations around the Internet.

Other fields have much to learn from open source methods – because they bring principles and working methods which can help to produce better knowledge, goods or services, or make them available on more widely beneficial terms.

From the formulation of public policy to more open forms of academic peer review, setting up mutual support groups for people facing similar health problems to collaborative forms of social innovation, the principles of open source promise to radically alter the we approach complex social problems.

The future potential of these methods is such that they will soon become commonplace in our lives. Just as it is now impossible to think about getting things done without considering the role of the Internet, so will it soon be impossible to think about how to solve a large social problem without considering the role of open methods.

Geoff Mulgan is Director of the Young Foundation and former Head of Policy in the Prime Minister's Office. Tom Steinberg is Director of mySociety and is currently a fellow at the Young Foundation. Omar Salem is a student at Oxford University and an intern at the Young Foundation.

Open Forum Europe - Open Skills Initiative:

Don't know how I missed this before. Many thanks to stuart Yates from the UK OSSwatch who told me about it.

This looks a great initiative - there are a sereies of projects in europe looking to promote education and training in Open Source and i think agreement to adapt this frameowrk woudl provide a degree of coherence to these steps. Need to look at this in some detail. But what interests me even more is the way the framework has been designed to allow a common standard for education and professional development without forcing unessarily rigid stanadrisation of learning.

In Europe major effort is being expended into trying to develop a common framework for qualifications - effort which in my view is making little headway. this is largely because moves towards standardizing qualifications fails to recognise the diversity of contexts in which learning takes place and the different cultures which have not only shaped our education systems but also impact on the organisation of learning at work. Will come back to this in next few days....

"OpenForum Europe introduces a new OSS skills initiative "The OSCoP Competency Framework" a definition of the skills needed by IT Professionals to excel within the open source environment. It has been developed in conjunction with many of the major open source product providers (including HP, IBM, Novell, Sun, RedHat), and endorsed by independent organisations such as the LPI.

The Competency Framework is at an early stage of development and nows needs review and input from the OSS community before the next stage of drill down is undertaken. We therefore welcome your comments and suggestions on both the concepts behind and the current limited detail within the OSCoP Competency Framework.

Public Knowledge Project:

Been taking a look at teis project from the University of British Columbia. I like the approach

"...the Public Knowledge Project is also evaluating ways of integrating research studies with other forms of knowledge, including documents pertaining to, in the case of the social sciences, for example, practices, programs, and policies. It is also looking at ways of integrating this research with access to digital archival sources, whether consisting of documents or multimedia files. It is assessing the collaborative potential of knowledge sharing among communities of interest, in such areas as education, with an eye to reducing the theory-practice and research-policy gaps. It uses an iterative and participatory design model that will involve professionals, practitioners, researchers, policy makers, and the public in building and evaluating a series of collaborative knowledge management website prototypes."

The web site is a bit esoteric but has links to some interesting sites and a few research papers. What particularly caught my eye was a couple of Open Source products - one - Open Conference Systems - for organising conferences and the other - Open Journal Systems (OJS) - for hosting on line journals. Both these could be very useful. Moreover, they join a growing list of open source products and tools which match the real life workflow in which educationalists and researchers work - rather than trying to impose their own structures and ways of working.

cme - continuing medical education