OpenSource

Elgg is a social networking (like MySpace) and learning (not like Blackboard) platform that I use and have implemented for clients. It is free and open source, under the GNU Public License or GPL.

Recently, Ben, the main programmer for Elgg, has been getting some comments about the lack of documentation for Elgg. He has responded, correctly, that the voluntary developer team has not been able to complete all of the documentation but volunteers are always needed and appreciated. Dave, the concept guy behind Elgg, has set things straight with his post, Understanding Open Source.

I think that these misconceptions about open source being free and fully supported come from the now common phenomenon of free web applications, like Gmail or Skype. Perhaps the average user doesn’t know that there can be a difference between “free” and “open source”. Initially, it may not make much difference to the user, but it can be important later.

Open source software is released under a variety of licenses such as the GPL. Free software that is not OS is owned by someone else and only its use is made available for free, under certain conditions. With open source, the rub is that the community has to stay involved to make the software better. If you’re looking at OS software, check out the size and involvement of the developer and supporter communities first. With free software, you usually have to give something away in order to use it. Quite often it’s your privacy, as you do not own your data, or you may have to put up with advertising on your application. Someone has to pay.

Open source gives you something extra though, and that is the ability to take the whole application, source code and all, and move it or even modify it. For instance, my website uses WordPress, an OS blogging platform. If I am not satisfied with my host, I can take the whole application and set it up somewhere else. I cannot do that with Gmail or Skype. Therefore, I own my data and the application that makes my data available to my readers. With almost 1,000 posts on this blog, this data is becoming quite important to me as my knowledge base. The decision to use an OS system as well as an OS database gives me a certain amount of flexibility, evidenced by my switch from Drupal to WordPress this year. My only costs were labour. I could not have taken my data out of a proprietary system (like Blackboard) as easily.

Using open source requires a commitment. That commitment may be less with the more popular programs (OpenOffice, Firefox) which have corporate or foundation backing. The little guys need your help, but you can also have a lot of influence on smaller projects.

So if you’re using open source applications, get involved; because you get what you pay for.

I’m back into learning how to use Moodle, after a couple of years (yes, it’s been that long) away from Development (the second “D” in ADDIE). We are using Moodle to create the knowledge base for our Unworkshops, so I’m back into content development. What we’re doing is less structured than a course but Moodle fits the bill quite nicely.

I’m using the book, Moodle: e-learning course development by William Rice as my guide, and it’s quite practical. I had already asked Wendy Wikham for feedback on this book, and here is what she told me:

So far, I’ve found 2 Moodle books – Rice’s and Jason Cole’s Using Moodle. They seem to be written for different audiences.

Rice’s book is more for course administrators and more technically-oriented teachers. It describes the setup and functions in detail. During the initial basic Moodle setup – it was easier to find the information in this book than in the forums. Since we are installing Moodle within a corporate network, we had more issues than the book rightly covered. Ta found it was a good introduction to what Moodle does from a technical perspective. For more advanced issues – the forum is more useful.

Rice doesn’t focus on the pedagogy and doesn’t give step-by-steps for completing particular tasks. Cole’s book focuses more on step-by-step how to’s and the pedagogy behind each of the modules. I would hand teachers the Cole book before the Rice book.

I suspect that I will be referring more to Cole’s book than to Rice’s book now that we have the baseline courses set up. Cole’s organization makes more sense and he does a better job of putting the tools in context.

For me, getting back into the technical aspects of creating and organising a knowledge base, the Rice book is great. I’ve also noticed that Susan Nash has reviewed this book:

Packt’s Moodle is a fantastic resource, although the title is a bit misleading. It is, in reality, a technical manual for using Moodle. It has very little to say about e-learning, except in the sense that it is implicit that learning via Moodle is e-learning. Its major deficiency is that it does not include any elements of instructional design that would allow a user to start developing courses that are pedagogically sound in terms of commonly accepted best practices for e-learning. Further, it does not contain templates for typical courses, which would also be quite valuable for institutions that would be most likely to be interested in open-source learning management systems.

Anyway, it’s one more for my virtual bookshelf.

MIT’s open courseware initiative (OCW), which put all of its course notes and resources online for free, has expanded to the Open Courseware Consortium, asking participating higher education institutions to freely share material.

An OpenCourseWare site…

• is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses.
• is available for use and adaptation under an open license.
• does not typically provide certification or access to instructors.

Only one Canadian institution participates in this +100 member consortium; Capilano College in BC.

Obviously, there are some big software vendors that just don’t know how to be good citizens. For many, it’s all about the bottom line, no matter what.

Anyone in the learning technology space knows about Blackboard’s greedy grab for intellectual property that was originally created by the community (yes, the initial suit is against D2L, but will open source be next?). And now along comes Oracle into the open source space and tries to squeeze Red Hat out of the enterprise Linux market, as reported by Matt Asay.

I would say that this proves Churchill’s adage that first we shape our institutions and then they shape us. The nature of the beast that is the corporation is that it is self-serving and motivated by profit at all costs. Community-based projects, like open source are built on a different premise.

One thing I’ve learned as a free-agent is that your real partners are the ones who have the same level of risk as you. When I partner on a handshake with another free-agent, I know that that person has as much at stake as I do. When I’m asked to enter into a partnership with a corporation, I know that it cannot be a real partnership with the same risk on each side. What happens if one of us decides to change the rules of engagement? If it’s the corporation, then I’m left high & dry because I don’t have the means to take on their retained legal counsel.

Therefore, I only partner with equals and I sub-contract to larger corporations. With corporations, it’s a contract, not a relationship. I can have a relationship with a person, but not with a disembodied corporation.

As open source projects of all varieties get bigger, they will be befriended by large corporations. My advice is to choose your bedfellows carefully.

“Six years ago today, OpenOffice.org was launched as an open-source project.”

For anyone who still may not have heard of OpenOffice, it is a free, open source, office productivity suite that includes a word processor, spreadsheet, slide presentation creator, database and more. OOo can open Microsoft Office documents and save documents in multiple formats. It includes native OpenOffice formats that are based on open, worldwide standards. OpenOffice is available for Linux, Windows and Mac. There is a special mac version available through NeoOffice. You can view the development timeline of OOo on Wikipedia.

OpenOffice is available for a complete and free download and you can have as many copies on as many computers as you want. Think it’s not ready for prime time? Here’s a true story of what happened to me this week. My colleague and I received an MS Excell spreadsheet from a client. When my colleague tried to open the document in Office XP it came out as gibberish. He thought it was a corrupted file, but I was able to open the document in OpenOffice Calc and then saved it as a new *.xls file. I sent the newly named document to my colleague and it worked; all for free :-)

If you haven’t tried it yet, download this stable, six-year old software:

Read/Write Web has a good overview of Elgg Learning landscape and an interview with Dave and Ben, the co-founders. [I had mentioned that I believe that Elgg is one of the few online learning systems that is not affected by the current Blackboard LMS patent suit, though there are other Blackboard patents that may be a cause for concern].

The overview is a brief look at what Elgg currently offers and what is coming soon, including Elgg Spaces. This article is excellent for anyone unfamilar with Elgg, as Read/Write Web is not about educational technology, so they don’t assume that the reader knows everything about the field.