I wrote about the importance of owning your data for blogging a while back and last week’s Twitter crash coupled with the demise of an URL shortener only reinforce that in my mind. The case of tr.im may not be so obvious to some, but whenever you use a URL shortener, that connection gets stored [...]
Filed under: OpenSource, Work | 22 Comments »
In an attempt to make my finds on Twitter more explicit, this may be the start of regular posts on some of the things I learned this past week (weekly seems better than monthly).
Numbers & Measurement
From Charles Green at The Trusted Advisor:
If you can measure it, you can manage it; if you can’t measure it, [...]
Filed under: Friday's Finds, Learning, OpenSource, Work | 3 Comments »
Dave Cormier has written a great article on selecting a content management system (CMS). Dave discusses three platforms, all of which I have used – WordPress, Moodle, Drupal. All are open source and there are a variety of hosting models available for most budgets. Like Dave, I’m not crazy about Moodle because it replicates the [...]
Filed under: OpenSource, Technology | 2 Comments »
Bill Fitzgerald has written a comprehensive technical guide for the Drupal open source content management system with a focus on its use in formal education. Drupal for Education and E-Learning, by Packt Publishing, walks you through the setup of a Drupal installation, step by step. This is a how-to book, covering everything from themes to [...]
Filed under: Learning, OpenSource | 3 Comments »
In my 2009 predictions for eLearn Magazine I said that “There will be an increased interest in open source software as well as tools and methods that enable online collaboration.” Ryan Cameron took me to task on open source in the comments:
Open source is not, actually, free. Someone has to build it, someone has to [...]
Filed under: Learning, OpenSource | 5 Comments »
In Innovating in the Great Disruption, Scott Anthony suggests three disciplines necessary to foster innovation in difficult economic times – placing a premium on progress; mastering paradox; and learning to love the low end. He also discusses the importance of learning;
Innovators will need to continue to find creative, cheap ways to bring their ideas forward. [...]
Filed under: Informal Learning, OpenSource | 1 Comment »
I’ve been a fan of Elgg, the open source social networking platform, since I first saw it. Not only do I like the technology but also its underlying framework of user-centricty (which also means learner-centric). I came across Elgg while working on a project to support several professional communities of practice working in a health [...]
Filed under: OpenSource | 2 Comments »
Martin Weller mulls over the notion that the Open University or OU should call itself the Open U, with an emphasis on “open”:
Open Source
Open educational resources
Open API
Open content
Open courses
Open participation
In an inter-networked society, open is the only way to remain relevant. Most newspapers have realized this by opening their online versions. Closed archives don’t get [...]
Filed under: Learning, OpenSource | 2 Comments »
Dave Snowden relates an experience with Wikipedia where the inner circle decides that the actions of a user are not appropriate and he is subsequently banned.
I don’t know all of the details here, but my interest is in the underlying model of Wikipedia. There is a major difference between open source and a free Web [...]
Filed under: OpenSource | 6 Comments »
Another new tool found via Benoit Brosseau is Deki Wiki. This product from MindTouch is open source and seems to have all the right attributes to make it wildly popular:
Similar to CMS web frameworks like Drupal, Mambo, Joomla and DotNetNuke, Deki Wiki delivers a remarkably extensible platform, but it’s a wiki in nature; therefore making [...]
Filed under: OpenSource | No Comments »
