Technology

information & communication technology

Open Source and Small Businesses

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In a recent article in the Small Business Survival Guide, Raymond Keating states that the open source software development model will lead to economic stagnation.

The underlying question that open-source software brings to the fore is: do we want to go back to those dark days before intellectual property rights were clearly defined and protected? If one prefers robust entrepreneurship, invention, innovation, growth and job creation in the economy, then the only choice is to protect intellectual property rights. The open-source theory only opens society to stagnation.

There are better economic minds than mine that could refute his argument, so let me focus on my own case. As a very small business, I use Open Office as my desktop suite. It is free, stable and has features like "export as PDF", that the major vendor will not provide me. I can always purchase "Open Office for Dummies" should I need help, but haven’t required it yet. This zero cost option is money in the bank for me, and good for my business.

This website is built using an open source CMS. It is hosted by another local, small business. Open source gives me a powerful tool, at a low cost, that I could not afford otherwise. It also provides revenue to the hosting company. I am using open source applications for some of my client projects as well. These applications, like Mambo or Tikiwiki, allow me to implement pilot projects at about 25% of the cost of projects using proprietary enterprise software. My clients can test out new methodologies without software license fees; lowering the financial risk of innovation. Using open source software is a competitive advantage, and in some cases is the critical factor in getting a contract.

The bottom line – without open source software, it would be difficult to compete. Open source is very good for my small business.

Via Small Business Trends.

Blogs and the Laws of Media

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According to McLuhan’s Laws of Media, every technology (in the broad sense of the word) that we use has precisely four effects on us – to extend, to retrieve, to obsolesce and to reverse. According to Federman and deKerckhove, the retrieves quadrant can be the most revealling. It can provide us with some insight on possible effect of new technologies. Jon Husband makes this observation about what weblogs retrieve:

Much in the same way that email revived the lost art of letter writing, Blogs are reviving the lost art of civilized civic dialogue – of argument, of well reasoned thought and response.

As Federman and deKerckhove state in their book, “McLuhan for Managers“:

For a manager who is considering how the next innovation will affect his or her staff or target market, studying the precedent can be particularly revealing. The RETRIEVES quadrant directly furnishes the lessons and experiences of history.

McLuhan’s laws of media can be used as a lens that can help us to make business and organisational decisions regarding new technologies.

Blogs are Personal

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I’m currently managing a few blogs. One is for a community of practice focused on elearning for R&D. It doesn’t get much traffic, and so far I’m the only one to post. Another one is a joint effort, but there aren’t many posts. I noticed that my colleague Hal has not made many posts on this one either, but is writing for his own blog.

My experiences confirm (to me anyway) that blogging is personal. You can’t really just dip into it because you won’t be passionate, and your readers will know it – and leave. You also have to feel that you have ownership of the content. This blog gets the most hits of any of my blogs, even more than some of my previous blogs. I don’t think that group blogging will take off; an exception being Many2Many. Each medium has its strengths and weaknesses, and blogs seem best for personal, passionate individual dialogue (is that an oxymoron?). Personally, I blog to connect with others and for the knowledge management aspects of blogging. It keeps a lot of my thoughts and ideas together.

Learning …

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I’ve been on my own for just over a year, and as I had a couple of days off over the holiday weekend, I thought I’d reflect on what I’ve learned, or confirmed, this past year:

  • Learning: is a process, not a product — subject-based teaching is a mistake — we have to focus on process skills like metacognition, problem solving and collaborating, because the subjects will change. I first realized this through Kieran Egan’s writing, and it has been reconfirmed many times.
  • Work: Markets are conversations — it’s only through conversation that we begin to understand each other — success comes when producers and users understand each other, and help each other.
  • Technology: It’s a world of ends, and innovation happens on the edges — look at the edges to find opportunities (but not traditional financing).
  • All Three: Marshall McLuhan was right, especially regarding the Laws of Media.

These are the messages that are staying with me.

Firefox and Drupal

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OK, I’m trying to use more open source technologies and am using Firefox 0.9.1 and I like it. Unfortunately, there is a function that does not work with the Drupal text editor. Firefox won’t let me paste text from the clipboard into the body of a post. That means that I can’t quote text from other blogs – an essential part of blogging. The help file from Mozilla that automatically pops up makes no sense at all to me. I’ve looked into the forums but to no avail. Is there an easy way to do this, or should I just use IE, which lets me copy & paste with no difficulty. If I can surmount this obstacle, I will gladly dump IE and its security issues. Help.

Open Source CMS

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Here is some solid, unbiased, advice from CMS Watch on using open source CMS; which is also applicable for using open source learning content management systems.

In my opinion, one major issue with every OSS CMS package is that most require a major developer learning curve to fulfill even small content requirements. So you can count on configuration and customization, regardless of your environment.

… However, OSS CMS software has really evolved lately, some even becoming, in my opinion, "enterprise capable." Having access to all the source code can allow you to build to almost any content requirements that you may have. OSS also allows you to "try before you commit." You can run a prototype whenever and for however long you want. So, you can certainly pay out on your investment.

There you have it from Tony.

Course + LMS = Solution

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Local e-learning company, Engage Interactive, is offering its LMS free with every custom-developed course. Once again, we are seeing LMS’s becoming commodities. [Economists say that with any commodity – "price tends to zero"]

From Engage:

Recently, many of our clients have been asking us to provide some form of learning management system (LMS) with their courseware. With the help of the National Research Council, we now have an LMS that will allow our clients to enroll students, track their progress, and generate reports. And best of all, we include the LMS free of charge when you contract for two or more hours of courseware development.

Copyright in Education

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Via Mark Oehlert is this article from the Toronto Star by Michael Geist on copyright law in Canada.

The challenge facing Canada’s parliamentarians and copyright policy makers is they must find a way to reconcile these opposing visions [Internet as distribution channel versus Internet as creation medium]. The Supreme Court of Canada has indicated that a balanced approach is to be the guiding objective in that regard, noting in one recent case that “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.

According to Geist, our elected representatives in the Bulte committee (part of the Standing Committe on Canadian Heritage), have not taken the time and effort to arrive at a unique Canadian solution for copyright in the education sector, but “… rather than working toward a balanced and limited Internet exception for education, the Bulte committee simply considered the competing proposals presented by educational groups and rights holder groups and recommended the latter proposal.”

The section of Bulte’s report on technology-enhanced learning is interesting. Instead of recommending to “Amend the Copyright Act to clearly state that the “fair dealing” defence in section 29 applies to education and teaching purposes, in addition to research or private study, review or news reporting”, the committee recommended:

… that the Government of Canada put in place a regime of extended collective licensing to ensure that educational institutions’ use of information and communications technologies to deliver copyright protected works can be more efficiently licensed. Such a licensing regime must recognize that the collective should not apply a fee to publicly available material (as defined in Recommendation 5 of this report).

More efficient licensing is not going to help us provide the access to quality online education that we need. It will only increase the costs of development for educational institutions. But the federal government is not responsible for education; the provinces are. These extra costs will be foisted on the Provincial departments of education and our universities.