All posts in Classroom

Open Content -- Musings

Posted October 3rd, 2007 by Bill

I've been thinking about Open Content recently for a few reasons -- As he does with many things, Jim Groom had a great post over on his blog about his experiences at Open Ed 2007.

Here is a lightly edited version of my comment on his post:

On days when I'm feeling cynical, I can't get around the sensation that some of the motivation driving the discussion on "issues of scalability, sustainability, localization, and other infra-structural issues" has less to do with scalability, sustainability, and culturally competent/translated content than it has to do with controlling the flow of content, or slowing the process while businesses figure out how to make money off of licensing.

imbee.com

Posted September 4th, 2007 by Bill

On a listserv in which I participate, a member recently asked about safe blogging tools for students. I was surprised to see several people recommend imbee.com, a social networking service targeted at kids. This was my response to the list:

imbee's terms of service rule it out as a tool I would recommend to anyone.

From http://www.imbee.com/discover/terms

"You understand and agree that you have no ownership rights in your imbee.com account. imbee may cancel your account and delete all content associated with your account at any time, and without notice, if we deem that you have violated the terms of this agreement, or for any other reason."

This Would Be Easier If You Were Joking

Posted August 17th, 2007 by Bill

I'll admit it at the outset: I'm in a bad mood today.

But when I see things like this, and this, and this, all talking about running courses in Facebook, I can't help myself

(Okay, really I can. But in this case, I don't want to).

Read Facebook's terms of service.

The "User Content Posted on the Site" section is particularly relevant here:

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

DrupalEd -- Updated

Posted July 16th, 2007 by Bill

In the few months since we released DrupalEd, there have been some upgrades in the codebase running the application. None of these upgrades are security issues, but many of them offer performance and functionality improvements.

If you are running the original version, there is no *need* to upgrade -- unless you want to have the newest, shiniest version of DrupalEd there is :)

Be sure to read the upgrade_notes.txt file that accompanies the download -- it gives an overview of the upgrades, and includes instructions for the upgrade. For more complete upgrade instructions, you should also refer to the Drupal handbook.

We Know The Difference

Posted June 22nd, 2007 by Bill

I posted this comment in response to this post by George Siemens -- as of this writing, it's in his moderation queue, but I cut and pasted it here before hitting the submit button.

Hello, George,

Web 2.0 and open source are related but separate entities -- I wrote about this in a couple posts last year -- http://www.funnymonkey.com/free-service-open-api and http://www.funnymonkey.com/best-things-are-free --

Look At That Doggy In The Window

Posted May 25th, 2007 by Bill

David Wiley recently posted on what some folks are calling Open Educational Resources, or OER's. This post extends my comment left on David's original post.

In his post, David starts by examining the difference between producers and consumers of Open Educational Resources, with an emphasis that Good Things '„¢ start happening when the Consumers become the Producers through the magic of wiki-style group editing.

He suggests that one of the impediments to broader re-use of OER's results from the original R living in a strict context -- ie, the R came into existence because of a specific educational need in a specific educational place, and reusing the R will be difficult in part because no two contexts are alike.

This Is Awesome (aka I'm a Geek)

Posted May 9th, 2007 by Bill

This came to me by way of Tom Hoffman --

NECC Presentation, Atlanta, 2007

Posted May 2nd, 2007 by Bill

I've been meaning to get this post out for a while, but hey, better late than never.

I'm running an all day workshop in Atlanta for NECC. For all those interested in learning more about how to install and use new technologies in their schools and classrooms, come on down.

This Is A Joke, Right?

Posted April 9th, 2007 by Bill

Classroom

In yet another example that all of us need lessons in information literacy, I came across this post today: http://blog.elonhall.org/examining-the-public-school-system/

I'm not going to link to the post because it looks more like a version of a prank designed to feed at the trough of Google Adwords than what it claims to be: a study detailing the myriad flaws of the public education system. Either that, or the post is part of a study on information literacy, and they are looking to cull some wisdom analyzing the relative lack of critical thinking in the comments.

The post supposedly originates from a researcher at the Project Analysis think tank. Want to learn more about Project Analysis? Try their web site. Oh, that's right, you can't. As of this writing, the site is down, and, according to the author of the post, "Project Analysis' online division is still in beta..."

DIY: Private Video Sharing for a school, a district, or an organization

Posted April 7th, 2007 by Bill

I've been involved in a couple conversations recently about setting up tools within institutions to maintain video archives. Andy Rush wrote up a post describing some great work integrating Wordpress and Mediawiki; and on a listserv discussion about tools for sharing video, I mentioned that this could be done using Drupal. My remark prompted Miguel Guhlin to ask The Question: How would you do it?

So, here are a few ways to get this done. As with any technical solution, the best approach will be determined by the combination of an organization's mission and their technological resources. At the risk of stating the obvious, all the tools discussed in this post are Open Source tools, and available under a GPL or LGPL license.