Technology

information & communication technology

OS Portals in Education

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I came across this reference from Linux du-Québec to a study (in French) on the comparitive costs of proprietary and open source portals in education. The study was conducted by Michael Wybo, a visiting professor at the Montreal business school, HEC, who specialises in open source. According to Wybo:

Les coûts d’acquisition de la solution logicielle libre sont approximativement la moitié des coûts d’acquisition de la solution propriétaire le moins chère, et cela en tenant compte des coûts de migration d’une technologie à un autre.
[My translation: Acquisition costs for open source are about half the costs of the cheapest proprietary solution, even when taking into account any system migration costs]

The OS system in question is based on the MILLE project (an open source framework for education). According to the comments on the extract, the complete report is available from CRIM, but is not readily available to the public, even though it appears that public money was used to fund this study.

Does anyone have any more information on this study?

Questioning our Models

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Elliott Masie reports from Hong Kong that e-learning in Asia may have some advantages due to its later start than in North America.

Many Asian countries have skipped the first phase of e-Learning. They didn’t have the model of porting CBT (Computer Based Training) to the web. Instead, they started using e-Learning more recently, avoiding a number of growing pains. For example, we see fewer organizations in the midst of LMS remorse and more sophisticated use of “Google” like search modes rather than long portal lists on learning offering pages.

This got me thinking about my recent conversations with Jon Husband :

… at the same time I keep being surprised by how deeply anchored in existing structures and the dynamics they generate are most peoples’ consciousness and daily work/life habits.
Our comfortable, established mental models slow us from accepting new ones. I guess that’s why it’s so much fun to work with the young.

One challenge in this business of designing learning systems is to constantly question our models and assumptions — a very McLuhanesque perspective: The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.

A saying we had in the Army was that the only thing harder than getting a new idea into an officer’s mind was getting the old one out [yes, I was an officer].

Eric McLuhan, “The new media won’t fit into the classroom”

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I had the pleasure of sitting down and reading the Walrus Magazine this evening. There was a rather unflattering article on The McLuhan International Festival of the Future held recently in Toronto. This piece at the end of the article really caught my attention:

“As the last few intellectual thrusts of ‘Probing McLuhan’ wound down, a figure rose from the crowd and said a few words. The voice was eerily reminiscent of the Master, as was the rhetoric. It was Eric McLuhan. ‘The new media won’t fit into the classroom”, he told the audience. “It already surrounds it. Perhaps that is the challenge of the counterculture. The problem is to know what questions to ask.’

For the first time that afternoon there was silence, and it spoke volumes.”

All of the action is outside the classroom — blogs, wikis, IM, podcasting — you name it. Soon, the only place to get away from media will be inside the classroom. Hey, they don’t even have a telephone (c. 1876) in every classroom yet.

From the CBO to the Suits

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Chris Locke, co-author of The Cluetrain Mainfesto and Chief Blogging Officer gives this latest advice on corporate blogging:

Moreover, nota bene, I’d like to not-so-humbly hint to all the suits out there in CorporateLand who are wondering how they’re going to "leverage" blogging in "their operations" that they should be paying close attention to what’s going on just beneath the radar here on CBO. Those aren’t Chinese subs, you fools! They’re potential customers. But if you create blogs that don’t tell stories, aren’t the least bit funny or irreverent, but only read like thinly disguised advertising copy, then those potential customers are going to treat you like Chinese subs — and send Tomahawk missiles straight up your RSS.

Ya gotta read the whole post though (note to self – get funnier).

Latest email scam

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Just in case you haven’t noticed the increase in scams concerning bank accounts, here comes another one, this time for eBay. Even my Gmail filter didn’t pick it up, as the address was "service AT eBay.com". However, within 5 minutes of my marking it as spam, Gmail added a red warning to the e-mail – good work folks.

The scam is called physhing and is used to get personal information, especially credit card information, in order to commit fraud through identity theft. Never give out any personal information, and don’t follow an e-mail link.

NOTE: THIS IS A SCAM

FIP NOTICE: eBay Registration Suspension



Dear eBay Member,

We regret to inform you that your eBay account has been suspended due to the violation of our site policy below:

False or missing contact information – Falsifying or omitting your name, address, and/or telephone number (including use of fax machines pager numbers, modems or disconnected numbers).

Due to the suspension of this account, please be advised you are prohibited from using eBay in any way. This prohibition includes the registering of a new account.
Please note that any seller fees due to eBay will immediately become due and payable.
eBay will charge any amounts you have not previously disputed to the billing method currently on file.

you are required to verify your eBay account by following the link below.
[Link Deleted]
We appreciate your support and understating [note spelling mistake], as we work together to keep eBay a safe place to trade.


Thank you for your patience in this matter.


Respectfully,

Trust and Safety Department
eBay Inc.

My Gmail account is the address that I post on the web, so that it can be my spam filter. For the most part, it works well, and I would recommend it for any small business. The other option is to set up a form on your website, but that’s too much effort for me ;-)

The Long Tail

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The long tail has been getting a lot of press lately. The basic premise seems to be that there is a larger market of those willing to buy unpopular items (or services) than all of those people who buy the “hot” items. It puts aside the traditional wisdom to only focus on items that can be sold many times because you may be missing an even larger opportunity. Instead, the long tail theory is to sell a few things to a few people at a time, but many times over. According to Joe Kraus, the same is true for software:

These three facts
  • every business has multiple processes
  • processes that are similar in name between businesses are actually often highly customized
  • there exist a large number of processes unique to millions of small clusters of industries.
means that there is a combinatorial explosion of process problems to solve and, it turns out, little software to actually support them.
Said another way, there is a long tail of very custom process problems that software is supposed to help businesses solve.

It’s like being a specialty bookstore, but with the right software development processes you could create niche software products and be able to sell just one at a profit. Look at his slide presentation for more details on this.

Seth Godin also talks about the long tail and how to approach it as a budding entrepreneur:

So, what I would say to the struggling entrepreneur or pundit or expert or consultant or musician or person spreading that important idea is this:
  1. it’s okay if it doesn’t happen fast
  2. don’t worry so much about getting the approval of those who came before and are farther along the curve
  3. keep costs as low as possible so you can do this without panicking when it doesn’t work so fast
  4. surround yourself with friends and colleagues who “get it” and root for you, even when it’s not going so fast
    (variant: fire the friends and mothers-in-law who aren’t supporting you so much!)
  5. realize that it’s not about you or the way you look or what you wear. It’s about the tail.

His advice is to be patient, persistent and keep your costs low – pretty good advice for any business.

and continuing on this theme …

You can also see the effects of the long tail in academic course blogging, and how the moderator can work with it to support the learning goals in The Learning Blogosphere(2): The Long Tail.

Tagback

Open Source in Education: A European Perspective

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Just perused this 91 page PDF (now available as HTML) produced by Teemu Arina and Timo Tervo of the FLOSSE Posse. This is an excellent overview of many trends affecting online learning. It covers everything from the long tail, power law, connectivism, small world networks, blogs and wikis. It’s a bit short on detail, but if you’re familiar with these concepts, then it’s a fast read. If you’re not familiar with these concepts, then read the references.

The second part of the presentation covers the results of a workshop on open source in education and discusses a number of future scenarios that were ranked by the participants, for instance:

100% [of workshop participants] agreed:


Rip, Mix and Learn is the new metaphor for constructing learning objects

Amateur audio and video enters learning
Connectiveness a core competency
ePortfolios focusing on capturing informal learning appear

These will give you an idea of what has traction on the other side of the pond in the OS world. Most of the paper is CC licensed and there are a lot of interesting diagrams. Definitely a keeper for your digital archives.

Learning Networks – The New Framework

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Stephen Downes presented a work in progress in Palermo this week, Learning Networks – Theory & Practice. In order to better understand it myself, I have put my notes up here, but please listen to Stephen’s audio file and look at his slide presentation. This presentation begs for a lot more discussion. What follows is my summary and any errors or omissions are my own:

First of all, traditional online learning has been institution-based, consisting of online courses, learning management systems, and closed networks of licensed content. Content is seen in terms of course packs and learning design linearly sequencing.

On the other hand, learning networks are not institution-based but resource-based within an open network. On the Web, content is not packaged but aggregated. E-learning is more of an
engagement and a conversation than an event.

From these premises, Stephen has developed several learning network design principles (works in progress he says) that specify how networks differ from traditional learning. These can be used as a means of evaluating new technology, to determine whether it is network-centric (see the slides for details).

  1. Decentralization
  2. Distribution
  3. Disintermediation
  4. Disaggregation
  5. Dis-integration
  6. Democratization
  7. Dynamism

These principles are based on Connectivism (see George Siemens’ post) and Stephen also links these principles to what Robert Paterson has written in Going Home: Our Reformation:

E-Learning has been based on centralized systems

But these centralized systems, such as the LMS, are like a dysfunctional crutch –
There’s so much going on out there – you have to leave the cocoon and experience the web.
Stop trying to do online what you do in the classoom – it’s a different world online.

My own opinion is that the Web offered a lot of options for learner control, but this was co-opted by technology vendors and institutions. For instance, there are still “web-based learning program” that disable your browser’s navigation functions.

The fact is that the genie is out of the bottle, and we are in the metaphorical process of casting off the horseless carriage and adopting the automobile. Stephen’s framework, Rob’s vision and George’s pedagogy provide some of the foundation and now there are new tools, such as DrupalED, coming out of the artisans’ workshops to help us implement this framework. Allons-y!

DrupalED Now Available

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Boris and Will are two of the founding members of a new site called DrupalED with an aggregated edtech feed.

DrupalED is a distribution that combines core Drupal.org with a selection of modules optimized for use in educational settings. These range from K-12 to university, as well as per-class, per-department, and per-institution scenarios.

It is free, open source, libre, and available for you.

I think that this one is going to grow :)

Update: Please read Will’s comment to this post.