All posts in good things

Summer of Code 2008

Posted March 27th, 2008 by Bill

The planning for the Summer of Code is well underway.

This summer, we're working within the Drupal community, and with the Open Source Labs.

If you're a student, and want to get involved, read over the project lists (linked to above), and submit a proposal. Students receive 5,000.00 for their work.

So, if you're a college or university student anywhere on the planet itching to expand the amount of freely available code in this world, sign up and make a proposal.

Thoughts on Sharing Lessons

Posted December 17th, 2007 by Bill

I'm writing these ideas out quickly -- there are sure to be holes in this, and gaps in this reasoning -- please point them out in the comments.

For some context on this post, see these two threads on Dan Meyer's blog.

Users working with online lessons will generally fall into at least one of the following categories:

People searching for lesson ideas (probably the majority)
People already creating content on their own blogs (a growing number of folks, but still a very small percentage, compared to people in category 1, or even teacher-bloggers)

Yeah. Schools Really Need To Ban Cell Phones

Posted December 8th, 2007 by Bill

In an article from the Sydney Morning Herald (which I found via, of all places, Techcrunch), "half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed ... on the tiny handset of a mobile phone."

Yes, you read that correctly. Novels written on cell phones.

As noted in the article, the cell phone tales often lack complex scene and character development.

OERs, Licensing, and Are We There Yet?

Posted December 1st, 2007 by Bill

From some comments I made on Tom Hoffman's blog, in response to the Capetown Declaration -- Stephen Downes also has a great take on this.

As I see it, the thing to be avoided is:

A person or a community creates a resource that is freely available, and can be easily moved from one site to another. Some other entity comes along, uses that resource as a base for their work, distributes that resource, charges money for access to that resource, yet does not the new source material freely available.

On Aggregation, and Crow

Posted November 24th, 2007 by Bill

A mildly edited version of my response to Jim Groom's post over on the bava --

D'Arcy mentioned the need for this to scale, and he's right. With that said, I don't think we need to have scalability to 100K students as a first goal. The beauty of the small pieces loosely joined is that it's easier, and that it's a step away from the monolithic LMS's so beloved by so many --

Toward that end, it's good to consider what we'd need to carry from the blog to the aggregator in order to connect a student work with an institutional SIS/LMS. To start, I see two factors as essential: first, mapping a feed to a student, and second, mapping individual posts from within a feed to a course.

Jeff Graham Is In The House!

Posted November 9th, 2007 by Bill

File this under "Better Late then Never."

In August of this year, Jeff Graham joined the team at FunnyMonkey. We had been looking for a talented developer for a while, but hiring the right person -- especially for a small company -- is tricky. The fit needs to go beyond more than skill set -- there also needs to be some philosophical overlap, and some similarities concerning the approach to getting work done.

Prior to joining us, Jeff did a large amount of Moodle development as part of the Moodle development team at Humboldt State University (HSU) and as an independent contractor. Jeff was the lead Moodle developer at HSU when HSU won the Andrew W. Mellon award for Technology Collaboration in 2006. Jeff was also one of the primary developers on Moodle's gradebook for Moodle 1.5 through 1.8, and has contributed numerous other patches that have been incorporated into Moodle core. As an independent contractor, Jeff worked on projects for the likes of Intel doing custom development to extend Moodle to support their "Teach Essentials Online Course", and he has worked with other clients to support single sign on between multiple applications.