actually http://moodle.org/ is the place to go if you want more info on Moodle. Moodle is a phenomenal Open Source casestudy. It has grown logarithmically over the past couple of years to accomodate almost every feature available from the proprietary offerings and more. The user/developer community of Moodle is one of the strongest of any open source project I have ever seen. Moodle is also designed from a particular pedagogical standpoint, which is I think one of it's strenghts and is incredibly simple for users (particularly teachers) to understand and use.
brent.
----
eXe: http://exelearning.org/
----
I'd say that this merger is directly in response to an LMS market that is increasingly becoming dominated by excellent Open Source offerings, ie. Moodle and Sakai. There's becoming fewer and fewer reasons to pay the high prices for licensing either of these products, especially as the Open Source ones are so good and getting better and better. The developers community for Moodle for example is phenomenal.
definitely worth noting!... I think that Atom may well survive in areas where such 2 way functionality is required, not just one way syndication. i work in elearning and many people think Atom is potentially a great tool for the next-generation learning environment where students can post to discussion forums, blogs, etc using Atom.
There's also a nice site in New Zealand (even though we won't be able to see the Transit this time round) about the T of V and Cook's 'voyage of discovery' that took place partially funded by the Royal Society sending him to Tahiti to record the transit.
http://transitofvenus.auckland.ac.nz/
One of the most damaging misconceptions about metadata is perhap that metadata is objective, authoritative information about a resource to the exlusion of all other alternative interpretations. Shirky's article suggests this kind of approach to metadata with his anecdotes about the Soviet library, global ontologies, etc. I've never considered the Semantic Web project to be about 'global ontologies'. Metadata should be viewed as a 'work in progress' where updating and modifying descriptions is part of the metadata process. Granted this is going to be difficult to do, but there are areas where some metadata can be auto-generated alongside authoring processes. I'm also somewhat suprised by Shirky's lack of attention to the function of the network to replicate valuable data and lose that that is less valuable - useful metadata will be replicated, bubble to the top so to speak, where as much will be lost as is so much existent noise on the internet.
This article almost addresses point for point the misconceptions that Shirky reproduces about metadata: http://www2002.org/CDROM/alternate/744/index.html
I've also been doing some research on web based chat in a production environment for elearning courses. This module released by the University of Toronto's Atutor project looks promising: http://www.atutor.ca/achat/
Check out Moodle (http://moodle.org) it is the best open source LMS available right now and does an awesome job of facilitating discussions. Discussion should be the center piece of any type of online learning. Moodle is easy to setup, easy to configure and easy to use.
I'm holding out for a Neuros; according to their site they're investigating Ogg and Linux support, and they have this cool function of wirelessly broadcasting through an FM channel on your tuner. http://neurosaudio.com/
Most of the apps they talk about including on the CD have the "polish, ease of use" that their windows counterparts have... i don't think that this is the major problem. What most of them fail miserably at is having any good documentation. How often do you look at the docs for Open Source softwares and find that sections are just left unfinished, or not even started. Most proprietary products don't ship without some kind of help system in place either shipped with the product or online. I think that this project could do well, especially if as a side effect it tried to encourage more "repressed, zealous, skinny Linux geeks" to try to write good docs.
If you look at the number of CS graduates at any level: bachelors, masters, Ph.D you will find that since the early 80s the numbers all go down.
The numbers though may actually hide what is really going on. While I was working at the University of Texas in Austin the largest increased enrollment of any department was CS; but, CS was also the department with the least amount of people graduating. Many CS students got the programming down, and left for high paying jobs before graduation - many in fact were and may still be recruited before graduation.
Another reason why Open Source software makes more and more sense; one would hope that with a thousand eyeballs and an open source, sneaking spyware into any kind of popular application would be almost impossible, or at least quickly found out. The more proprietary software keeps blatantly invading user's privacy the more appealing open systems become because of an almost built in safeguard from this kind of thing.
Flash is also pretty useless for people with visual disabilities who access your content via screen readers. Current versions of the development environment from Macromedia are also quite complicated and would involve a steep learning curve, so not only do you have to get over the pricing issue, you also need to consider how long it will take someone to learn how to develop Flash pieces.
One of my best movie experiences was seeing Tron at the Alamo. Watching movies at the Alamo is kind of like watching videos with your friends - people yell out stuff, and make fun of the movie... for some movies' (like Tron) this makes for a really fun time. I remember yelling out while Tron was injured "Call tech support" - many laughs.
You are not seriously suggesting that GIMP is the same or even close to equal to Photoshop are you? Granted, alot of students probably would not need the advanced features of PS, nor do they want to learn them... but what about the students who need advanced features or want to expand their knowledge and learn them... you just screwed them. Just an observation... I HATE GIMP, free or not... it is so often misconstrued as a competitor for PS, when in fact it is not even in the same ball park.
Sure am. I've used both extensively over the past 4 or 5 years and I don't see many advanced features in Photoshop that aren't in the GIMP. Besides, these people aren't high level graphic designers and most k-12 kids aren't either. Photoshop is overpriced for what it is. It's not the features that make good graphic designers, it's creativity.
Student's who go to college should hopefully be able to figure out that if I click this button for save on AbiWord, it is the same as clicking this button on Microsoft Word. Technical skills might better be served using Linux systems where the actual workings of software, the operating system, etc are apparent rather than Microsoft products where the assumption is that the user doesn't want to and shouldn't have access to this stuff.
I'm not glaringly anti-Microsoft either, but as someone rightly pointed out in response to another post how many high school kids go and work in offices anyways? With just a high school diploma you're likely to be flipping burgers, or helping people at Home Depot.
The point is that in a school if you need an office suite application then Star Office will save you heaps compared to all the licensing costs of Microsoft Office. These aren't the type of apps most schools need anyways. Take the GIMP for example, which is currently being ported to Win and works great on Mac OS X. If you had to install Photoshop for kids to fiddle around with image manipulation on 20 machines it would cost you about $10000. One macGIMP CD on the other hand will cost you $25. You do the math.
1. MS is the mainstream... if you teach a child a radically different system than from what they will face a few years down the road, either in terms of software or the core OS, they are unprepared for college and/or the working world they are supposed to enter into. Seriously, how much of the world is open source in business? Not nearly as much as MS or even Mac (or both), not even close. These kids need realistic education.
The point of education is not to prepare little business people. And besides, I think that you underestimate peoples intelligence when you suggest that just because the learn KDE or Star Office that they're not going to be able to figure out Win XP or Microsoft Office. Come on. It's a damn GUI. They're basically the same thing. I don't buy this argument at all.
I don't think that Linux is poised to take over many schools completely, but I do think that schools can benefit greatly from looking at alternative software to replace some of the costly packages they're stuck with now. I just convinced the Psychology Dept at UCLA to install GIMP on 20 or so machines running OSX in a lab rather than Photoshop for every one. This saved the dept around $7000 with one change, and for what students do with photoshop the GIMP does exaclty the same.
Totally agree. It's belittling to students intelligence to think that they can't go from Star Office to Word. I mean really - a word processor is a word processor is a word processor. If you're familiar with the tropes of one you can pretty much rest assure that you can figure out the next one. I don't buy this argument at all and in fact think that open source software actually in the long run may encourage *more* students to really see the power of computing is underneat the hood and not just in all the pretty widgets to click.
This article on OpenSourceSchools.org relates how Australia's Northern Territory has just completed an installation of state- wide network infrastructure in all schools that is based on Linux LAN servers and makes wide use of open source software. I was very impressed with their accomplishment. They use SquirrelMail (PHP) for the mail, and the network infrastructure is Linux. The desktops are all Win 98 but they do include StarOffice as the productivity app so would save some more cash there.
My experience over the last 3 months of OpenSourceSchools.org is that while a complete takeover of Linux in schools is unlikely, there are many places where costly licensing can be replaces with OS equivalents to great savings.
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actually http://moodle.org/ is the place to go if you want more info on Moodle. Moodle is a phenomenal Open Source casestudy. It has grown logarithmically over the past couple of years to accomodate almost every feature available from the proprietary offerings and more. The user/developer community of Moodle is one of the strongest of any open source project I have ever seen. Moodle is also designed from a particular pedagogical standpoint, which is I think one of it's strenghts and is incredibly simple for users (particularly teachers) to understand and use. brent. ---- eXe: http://exelearning.org/ ----
I'd say that this merger is directly in response to an LMS market that is increasingly becoming dominated by excellent Open Source offerings, ie. Moodle and Sakai. There's becoming fewer and fewer reasons to pay the high prices for licensing either of these products, especially as the Open Source ones are so good and getting better and better. The developers community for Moodle for example is phenomenal.
definitely worth noting! ... I think that Atom may well survive in areas where such 2 way functionality is required, not just one way syndication. i work in elearning and many people think Atom is potentially a great tool for the next-generation learning environment where students can post to discussion forums, blogs, etc using Atom.
There's also a nice site in New Zealand (even though we won't be able to see the Transit this time round) about the T of V and Cook's 'voyage of discovery' that took place partially funded by the Royal Society sending him to Tahiti to record the transit. http://transitofvenus.auckland.ac.nz/
One of the most damaging misconceptions about metadata is perhap that metadata is objective, authoritative information about a resource to the exlusion of all other alternative interpretations. Shirky's article suggests this kind of approach to metadata with his anecdotes about the Soviet library, global ontologies, etc. I've never considered the Semantic Web project to be about 'global ontologies'. Metadata should be viewed as a 'work in progress' where updating and modifying descriptions is part of the metadata process. Granted this is going to be difficult to do, but there are areas where some metadata can be auto-generated alongside authoring processes. I'm also somewhat suprised by Shirky's lack of attention to the function of the network to replicate valuable data and lose that that is less valuable - useful metadata will be replicated, bubble to the top so to speak, where as much will be lost as is so much existent noise on the internet. This article almost addresses point for point the misconceptions that Shirky reproduces about metadata: http://www2002.org/CDROM/alternate/744/index.html
I've also been doing some research on web based chat in a production environment for elearning courses. This module released by the University of Toronto's Atutor project looks promising: http://www.atutor.ca/achat/
One of the best South Pacific hip-hop artists is part Niue: Che Fu. http://www.che-fu.com/homepage.html
Check out Moodle (http://moodle.org) it is the best open source LMS available right now and does an awesome job of facilitating discussions. Discussion should be the center piece of any type of online learning. Moodle is easy to setup, easy to configure and easy to use.
What you fail to realize is that the Matrix is actually coded in BASIC.
I'm holding out for a Neuros; according to their site they're investigating Ogg and Linux support, and they have this cool function of wirelessly broadcasting through an FM channel on your tuner. http://neurosaudio.com/
one of my all time favs as well. plus an awesome hip-hop soundtrack by the Rizza (Wu-Tang) that I listen to regularly.
Most of the apps they talk about including on the CD have the "polish, ease of use" that their windows counterparts have ... i don't think that this is the major problem. What most of them fail miserably at is having any good documentation. How often do you look at the docs for Open Source softwares and find that sections are just left unfinished, or not even started. Most proprietary products don't ship without some kind of help system in place either shipped with the product or online. I think that this project could do well, especially if as a side effect it tried to encourage more "repressed, zealous, skinny Linux geeks" to try to write good docs.
The numbers though may actually hide what is really going on. While I was working at the University of Texas in Austin the largest increased enrollment of any department was CS; but, CS was also the department with the least amount of people graduating. Many CS students got the programming down, and left for high paying jobs before graduation - many in fact were and may still be recruited before graduation.
Flash is also pretty useless for people with visual disabilities who access your content via screen readers. Current versions of the development environment from Macromedia are also quite complicated and would involve a steep learning curve, so not only do you have to get over the pricing issue, you also need to consider how long it will take someone to learn how to develop Flash pieces.
One of my best movie experiences was seeing Tron at the Alamo. Watching movies at the Alamo is kind of like watching videos with your friends - people yell out stuff, and make fun of the movie ... for some movies' (like Tron) this makes for a really fun time. I remember yelling out while Tron was injured "Call tech support" - many laughs.
I'm not belittling the youth, just suggesting that it wasn't photoshop that made these kids good designers.
What are the HUGE differences that you notice between the two?
You are not seriously suggesting that GIMP is the same or even close to equal to Photoshop are you? Granted, alot of students probably would not need the advanced features of PS, nor do they want to learn them... but what about the students who need advanced features or want to expand their knowledge and learn them... you just screwed them. Just an observation... I HATE GIMP, free or not... it is so often misconstrued as a competitor for PS, when in fact it is not even in the same ball park.
Sure am. I've used both extensively over the past 4 or 5 years and I don't see many advanced features in Photoshop that aren't in the GIMP. Besides, these people aren't high level graphic designers and most k-12 kids aren't either. Photoshop is overpriced for what it is. It's not the features that make good graphic designers, it's creativity.
Student's who go to college should hopefully be able to figure out that if I click this button for save on AbiWord, it is the same as clicking this button on Microsoft Word. Technical skills might better be served using Linux systems where the actual workings of software, the operating system, etc are apparent rather than Microsoft products where the assumption is that the user doesn't want to and shouldn't have access to this stuff.
I'm not glaringly anti-Microsoft either, but as someone rightly pointed out in response to another post how many high school kids go and work in offices anyways? With just a high school diploma you're likely to be flipping burgers, or helping people at Home Depot.
The point is that in a school if you need an office suite application then Star Office will save you heaps compared to all the licensing costs of Microsoft Office. These aren't the type of apps most schools need anyways. Take the GIMP for example, which is currently being ported to Win and works great on Mac OS X. If you had to install Photoshop for kids to fiddle around with image manipulation on 20 machines it would cost you about $10000. One macGIMP CD on the other hand will cost you $25. You do the math.
1. MS is the mainstream... if you teach a child a radically different system than from what they will face a few years down the road, either in terms of software or the core OS, they are unprepared for college and/or the working world they are supposed to enter into. Seriously, how much of the world is open source in business? Not nearly as much as MS or even Mac (or both), not even close. These kids need realistic education.
The point of education is not to prepare little business people. And besides, I think that you underestimate peoples intelligence when you suggest that just because the learn KDE or Star Office that they're not going to be able to figure out Win XP or Microsoft Office. Come on. It's a damn GUI. They're basically the same thing. I don't buy this argument at all.
I don't think that Linux is poised to take over many schools completely, but I do think that schools can benefit greatly from looking at alternative software to replace some of the costly packages they're stuck with now. I just convinced the Psychology Dept at UCLA to install GIMP on 20 or so machines running OSX in a lab rather than Photoshop for every one. This saved the dept around $7000 with one change, and for what students do with photoshop the GIMP does exaclty the same.
Ever tried Evolution by Ximian Gnome?
How many k-12 kids do you think need to learn Office productivity suites? Not many my friend.
Totally agree. It's belittling to students intelligence to think that they can't go from Star Office to Word. I mean really - a word processor is a word processor is a word processor. If you're familiar with the tropes of one you can pretty much rest assure that you can figure out the next one. I don't buy this argument at all and in fact think that open source software actually in the long run may encourage *more* students to really see the power of computing is underneat the hood and not just in all the pretty widgets to click.
This article on OpenSourceSchools.org relates how Australia's Northern Territory has just completed an installation of state- wide network infrastructure in all schools that is based on Linux LAN servers and makes wide use of open source software. I was very impressed with their accomplishment. They use SquirrelMail (PHP) for the mail, and the network infrastructure is Linux. The desktops are all Win 98 but they do include StarOffice as the productivity app so would save some more cash there.
My experience over the last 3 months of OpenSourceSchools.org is that while a complete takeover of Linux in schools is unlikely, there are many places where costly licensing can be replaces with OS equivalents to great savings.
Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" was brilliant and his early work "True Names" predated "Snow Crash" and a lot of the cyber-punks. His theory of the singularity might have been enough to cement his place 50 years from now, assuming that the singularity doesn't actually occur of course, in which case none of this will be relevent.