OpenSource

OS Software & Content

Review: Moodle Teaching Techniques

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I had written a review of William Rice’s previous book and noted that it was rather technical. Moodle Teaching Techniques is more pedagogical and gets down to the details of how to develop online courses in Moodle.

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Moodle adoption is growing and it is probably the most widely-used open source learning content management system in the world. That makes this book rather timely [not like my review which I had hoped to write in 2007].

This is a good guidebook for anyone developing online courses with Moodle. The introduction covers some basic instructional techniques and then the book gets right into the “how-to’s” of course building. One comment I found interesting was how Rice recommends that wikis, forums and blogs should be used:

In Moodle, each student can have a blog. This is turned on by default. However, a student’s blog is not attached to any course. That is, you do not access a Moodle blog by going into a course and selecting the blog. Instead, you view the user’s profile, and access that user’s blog from there. In a Moodle student’s blog, there is no way to associate a post with a course that the student is taking. This results in “blogging outside of the course”. Also, as of version 1.9, you cannot leave comments on Moodle blogs.

These comments show the inherent weakness of the “course” model when used online. Everything has to fit neatly inside the box that contains the course. Having blogs outside of the course is a good concept, because student’s posts can travel with them from course to course. The use of “tags” could alleviate the problem of finding blog comments, but would require another tool for aggregation of these tags. Once again, several tools (blogs, wikis, social bookmarks, etc.) loosely joined may give more flexibility than a single system, such as Moodle. Furthermore, I cannot understand why the comment function was removed from Moodle blogs. Why have a blog at all if you cannot comment? You may as well just have an HTML editor and a place to publish web pages.

The bottom line for this book is that 1) if you are using Moodle and 2) you are designing courses, it’s full of helpful tips and techniques. An excellent review of this book is available from Susan Smith Nash.

Fair Copyright for Canada

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Have you joined yet?

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From the Facebook group description:

In December 2007, it became apparent that the Canadian government was about to introduce new copyright legislation that would have been a complete sell-out to U.S. government and lobbyist demands. The new Canadian legislation was to have mirrored the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act with strong anti-circumvention legislation that goes far beyond what is needed to comply with the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet treaties … Instead, the government was about to choose locks over learning, property over privacy, enforcement over education, (law)suits over security, lobbyists over librarians, and U.S. policy over a “Canadian-made” solution.

 Update: Now is the time to put pressure on your Member of Parliament. Check out Michael Geist’s list of Copyright MP’s.

The e-lance economy?

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In 1937, economist Ronald Coase published an article, The Nature of the Firm, in the journal Economica. Within the article, Coase argues that firms exist because there are costs inherent to free markets – such as costs of communication, of sharing information, of trying to find goods and services. Given these costs, Coase suggests that firms are formed because it is more efficient and less expensive to complete many of these tasks internally within a formal organization rather than outsourcing them to the market and thus incurring these added costs.

Alex Slawsby on the Innosight Blog looks at the nature of the corporation and how advances in information and communications technologies may be enabling a more modular approach to work, especially networked free-lancers, or e-lancers.

… the ‘e-lance economy’ may represent a modular stage of organizational evolution – indeed, an architecture of easily swappable or plug-and-play components (e.g. individuals or resources). In an age where closed, proprietary systems are recognized as inhibiting the ability of organizations to respond to or even identify innovation-borne change, modularity seems a promising answer; virtually every element of the value chain could come together on an ad-hoc, objective, modular basis without being hamstrung by the subjectivity and myopias brought on by business process and the long-term commitments to physical infrastructure, a capital investment in which innovation may quickly make irrelevant.

An example of this economy would be open source software development, with its lack of organisational structure and the ability for anyone with the right skills to plug in or out of the project, yet maintain the integrity of the code. A key question though is whether e-lancing will become the dominant economic model, as the corporation is, or only suitable for certain industries, such as the film industry’s project-based work model. If e-lancing is more effective in most industries and becomes our dominant work model, then organisations will have to rethink everything from HR to supply chain management.

Big Consulting Companies Jumping on Bandwagon 2.0

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It looks like social media (wikis, blogs & social networking) are going the way of e-learning and knowledge management (KM). That means big companies charging big fees for cookie-cutter solutions. Jon Husband reports on this phenomenon for 2008 and advises Caveat emptor:

Big firms either 1) develop standardized methodologies and practices (their business models depend upon it), or 2) if their business model does not depend upon the standardization, they will charge you a mint and a half (McKinsey ?)

The organization(s) [clients] will in my opinion get better advice rooted in critical thinking and experience and focused on results, as opposed to maintaining an expensive dependency on canned rhetoric that may not be based in much experience. For example, what exactly is “Advanced” Web 2.0 technology ? Blogs with lots of colourful widgets ?

As I’ve said before, Free-agents and natural enterprises are better. The upstart independents and small consultancies have Clayton Christensen’s disruptive Sword & Shield which the incumbents (large consultants) don’t have. With early motivation to enter this emerging field (Shield) and now with with years of experience and skills (Sword), we the “upstarts” should be able to hold our own.

When e-learning and KM first came out, it was difficult to market your services without expensive campaigns. On top of that, the IT tools were expensive. Now the best tools are open source, leveling the playing field even more. The rules have changed for 2008, and we upstarts can significantly engage in a conversation with our markets using our own tools with which we’ve developed a certain expertise.

The game is afoot!

Own Your Data

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The impending closure of the Eduspaces service has many people wondering what to do and several options are cropping up in the online discussions.

For those not in the know, Eduspaces is/was a free, social networking and blogging service built on the Elgg open source platform. It used to be called elgg.net but was changed to Eduspaces when it became obvious that the community came mostly from the educational sector. I’ve used Elgg for some of my clients and have had an Eduspaces account, but my main site has always been here. I pay for my hosting, own the data, and use an open source platform so that I can export my blog in the event that I want to move to a different service provider.

Anyone who asks me about blogging or setting up a community on the Web using wikis or some other application is given pretty well the same advice.  If the site is important and the data are of some significance for the long term, then:

  1. Use an open source platform from a stable and functioning community.
  2. Own your own domain, and have a Service Level Agreement for your hosting.

Using open source gives you freedom from vendors and ensures that you are not handcuffed to your technology provider. Having your own domain name and paying for a service provider (or hosting on your own server) ensure that you have control over your data.

The users of Eduspaces are in a much better position than would be those of Blogger in a similar event. At least the Eduspaces community can migrate to another Elgg host. There is no other Blogger platform to move to.

If I had to move a large Eduspaces account, I would find another Elgg installation. I migrated from Drupal to WordPress (which I don’t regret) a couple of years ago, but it’s a heck of a lot easier to stick with the same platform.

Open Source Social Networking Application

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I recently joined Xing, a business social networking site. In one of the forums I came across an open source social networking system (SNS). Dolphin is Creative Commons licensed, not the more typical GPL for open source, with the following restrictions:

Dolphin is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. This means that you are free to use it the way you need, adapt it, change code, distribute, share with friends or even sell it. You must, however attribute the work as specified by BoonEx. And the specification is dead simple – don’t remove links to BoonEx and the Dolphin Page in the footer of all Dolphin pages, unless you paid for it.

An example website built with Dolphin is the German/English language LearnTube! Community, though it doesn’t have many members yet.

I get a lot of hits on this website from searches looking for open source alternatives to Facebook. I have recommended Elgg, which hosts Eduspaces, or sometimes Drupal, and now I know of another one. I’d appreciate finding anyone with first-hand experience of a Dolphin installation.

Update: It looks like Eduspaces will be shutting down its free service as of 10 Jan 2008. It’s too bad, but a free service still has to pay for the cost of hosting hundreds of blogs :-(  More on Eduspaces at IncSub.

Taking action for fair copyright in Canada

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Following up from Copy Leftovers, here are some resources focused especially on the Canadian perspective. We should all be concerned and get informed before the Canadian DMCA is allowed to pass.

First off, you can join the Facebook group, Fair Copyright for Canada, which already has over 10,000 members. I have also been saving articles on del.icio.us relating to Copyright. Consider that Canadians pay for their RIGHT to copy digital media every day, according to Michael Geist:

The Copyright Board of Canada last week released its proposed tariff for 2007 for the private copying levy. The numbers remain unchanged: 21 cents per CD-R. As prices have dropped, however, the levy now frequently comprises a significant percentage of the retail price. Consider the purchase of 100 blank Maxell CDs. Future Shop retails the 100 CDs for $69.99. The breakdown of this sale is $48.99 for the CDs and $21.00 for the levy (even worse is a current Future Shop deal of 200 blank CD-Rs from HP, which retails for $59.99. The levy alone on this sale is $42.00 (200 CDs x 21 cents/CD) which leaves the consumers paying $17.99 for the CDs and $42.00 for the levy).

According to Steve Jobs, the music companies sell more DRM-free music than anyone else:

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

On a lighter note, you can watch this video of a puppet saying why we should Stop the Canadian DMCA, with some interesting recommendations on what to do with our politicians.

Copy leftovers

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Rather than including consumer concerns such as flexible fair dealing, time shifting, format shifting, parody, and the future of the private copying levy within the forthcoming bill, Prentice [Canada’s Industry Minister] will instead strike a Copyright Review Panel to consider future copyright reforms.

Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, once again shows that corporate interests trump the public interest in Canada.

It seems that this 2002 Supreme Court ruling is being completely ignored by the powers that be:

Excessive control by holders of copyrights and other forms of intellectual property may unduly limit the ability of the public domain to incorporate and embellish creative innovation in the long–term interests of society as a whole, or create practical obstacles to proper utilization.

Consider that before movable type, we didn’t have copyright laws because there was no available technology to easily copy text. Monks and scribes did the heavy lifting and shared within the literate world. Minstrels, troubadours and town criers passed on information orally to the non-literate. Enter the printing press and we see the Stationers Company with a comfortable monopoly on printing from 1556 until the Statute of Anne in 1710, which gave rights to authors and book buyers. Are we doomed to face the equivalent of the Stationers Company monopoly for a century before we get laws that reflect the realities of the digital age and give more power to individuals than corporations?

The early American economy blossomed by ignoring British copyright and patent laws, so that American goods could be produced and sold cheaply. If our government restrains our collective creativity through stringent copyright protection, will our economy be threatened by some country that cheaply produces the desired goods of the digital economy? These “business-friendly” government policies may be setting all of us up for a big fall.

More FUD?

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The mass media are spreading a variety of stories about the Internet’s inability to carry traffic in as little as two years. I’m not an investigative journalist but I wonder if this is a concerted FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) campaign to put pressure on governments and regulators to allow the telecommunications oligopoly to more freely implement packet shaping. First tell everyone that there is no more capacity and then say that it’s the fault of all those youngsters using peer2peer file sharing and voice over IP, two areas where the telco’s aren’t making any money.

For example: Financial Post; ABC News; The Star.

It just seems to me that the Internet’s inherent structure is flexible enough to route around capacity issues and allow for innovative solutions to speed traffic without imposing a system reminiscent of Ma Bell’s telephone monopoly. Personally, I would put more faith in a loose bunch of researchers, coders and hackers (à la open source) to solve any capacity problems that may arise in the near future.

Three stories and an argument

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I’ve supported Creative Commons (and use a CC license for this site) for several years and see it as a leader as we move to a digital economy. Larry Lessig’s presentations are usually quite informative, but it’s obvious that he put a lot of effort into his TED Talk this year. As Larry says, this talk is “Somethings old, somethings new, lots that’s borrowed, none that’s blue.”

He points out that we are living in a society where most of our children are doing illegal activities (AKA piracy) because we haven’t figured out this whole digital universe yet. Let’s get it right for our kids

Take 20 minutes and watch the presentation on how creativity is being strangled by the law.

Update: Don’t believe me? Here’s what Garr Reynolds has to say:

The 18-minute constraint forced Larry into making the best talk I have ever seen him make. He nailed it. His content was good, the argument was logical (even if you do not agree with it) and his visuals and the way he effortlessly controlled the visuals behind him is the perfect demo for the way it should be done.Â