dkeats.com

Beyond the traditional learning management system: moving towards personal learning environments Tweet
738 days ago

Prof Derek Keats, Ms Juliet Stoltenkamp and the eLearning team from the University of the Western Cape


Recent years have seen the emergence of the personal learning environment (PLE), which is a way of learning using technology, not a particular technology.  PLE has been seen as a challenge to the dominant design of eLearning based on the concept of the "learning management system". With a  PLE approach, learners may take control of and manage their own learning. This includes providing support for learners to

- set their own learning goals
- manage their learning, including both content and process
- communicate with others in the process of learning

and thereby achieve learning goals.

At one extreme, PLE may be viewed as entirely without formal structure, and there is a school of thought that says formal institutional involvement in learning is not necessary. However, a more moderate perspective views PLE as the integration of both formal and informal learning episodes into a single experience, the use of social networks that can cross institutional boundaries, and the use of networking protocols (peer-to-peer, web services, syndication) to connect a range of resources and systems within a personally-managed space.

The PLE is fundamental to the evolution of collaborative education, having a set of characteristics that we have called Education 3.0. There are four key features that characterize Education 3.0:

- the role of students in making choices of a different kind than are available today, for example, designing their own programs of study rather than participating in exclusive programs;
- students as socially networked producers of reusable learning content which is available in abundance under licenses that permit the free sharing and creation of derivative works;
- increasing cross institutional, decentralized or even non-institutional participation in education;
- institutional arrangements that permit the accreditation of learning achieved, not just of courses taught.

The technologies for implementing PLEs may be desktop applications, one or more web-based applications or services, or a combination of the two. Almost anything that allows for the aggregation of RSS feeds, use of web widgets, creation of fairly rich mashups, and communication can act as a PLE. Perhaps one of the best tools available today for individualizing learning opportunities is the blog, supplemented by a wiki where collaboration is needed. In fact, even the humble word processor can be a PLE of sorts.

Of course, a PLE requires a those learning to have certain characteristics, inclding

- being independent, self-regulated;
- being a self-directed learner;
- actively participating in networking
- having a high degree of self-efficacy
- possessing a high level of motivation, working best where there is a passion for the subject
- having a high degree of technical and information fluency

While we have the phrase "Beyond the learning management system" in the title of this workshop, perhaps we should have used "Beyond the TRADITIONAL learning management system" because many learning management tools are now acquiring the ability to provide for the more moderate approach to combining formal and informal learning.

In designing the KEWL3 platform, we took both the traditional approach and the PLE into consideration not just in the interface, but also in the underlying architecture which allows KEWL3 to be integrated with anything else, and almost anything else to provide functionality into KEWL3. In this workshop, we will therefore use KEWL3 to show how formal and informal sources of learning can be blended into one tool, with online and offline components that integrate. Specifically, we will make use of the following modules:

- blog
- podcast
- personal blocks
- presentation sharing

In addition, we will use content and widgets from the following sources as examples:

- Google Maps
- YouTube
- TeacherTube
- Slideshare
- Chameleon WebPresent

We will also make use of the Personal Learning Desktop and the PodderLive classroom podcasting system.
 

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Wuala, the social online storage Tweet
739 days ago

I just came across Wuala beta, which claims to enable you to start managing and sharing your files online - free, simple, and secure. I like the principles, but got a whole bunch of Java errors when trying to register an account. They give 1Gb of free storage, and options to purchase extra for about $25 per year for 10 Gb. I am looking for options for storing content for this sites, so I am going to follow them to see if they eventually become stable enough to use. This kind of hardware as a service approach fits with my thoughts on the technologies that enable personal learning environments.

http://www.wua.la

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Creating a Podcast system using the EEE, PodderLive and Ubuntu-eee Tweet
742 days ago

Background

At UWC, we use KEWL3 for our eLearning platform, and Paul Scott  developed a podcasting application based on the the gstreamer framework. The application is written in Python, and designed to make podcasting a simple process for lecturers in the classroom. The podcast application has three main functions:

Record - Stop - Publish

Clicking publish sends the recorded podcast to the eLearning (or blog, etc) application which is based on the Chisimba framework. For more on the Chisimba framework and KEWL3, visit http://avoir.uwc.ac.za

The Asus EEE PC is the ideal tool for this purpose, as it is small, lightweight and can be signed out by a lecturer (when we finish the pilot) from our Audiovisual department. It fits in well with the other items a lecturer may carry to the classroom. Of course, it can also work in corporate training, schools, other training situations or conference podcasting as well.

The only problem is that the EEE comes with a hard to maintain version of Xandros, so the first thing that has to be done is to setup a version of GNU/Linux that is easier to maintain. We settled on Ubuntu, and I came across the Ubuntu-eee project, by Jon Ramvi, to whom I am soooooooo greatful for making this available.

This blog post describes getting the ISO file, making a bootable USB memory stick, installing Ubuntu on the EEE, and getting started with PodderLive from the AVOIR project. These instructions have been used on Ubuntu Hardy using the ISO file as provided by Ubuntu-eee.

Getting started

To set up the USB memory stick as a bootable device with a Live setup of the EEE version of Ubuntu, download UNetbootin (Universal Netboot Installer) from

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

UNetbootin allows for the installation of various GNU/Linux or BSD distributions to a partition or USB drive, so it's no different from a standard install, only it doesn't need a CD. It can create a dual-boot install, or replace the existing OS entirely. There are versions for GNU/Linux and Windows.

IMPORTANT: Before installing, remember to back up all your data, in case you do something wrong in the partitioning stage of the installer.

The following steps were documented during my setup.

1. Install mtools, which is needed for the USB drive install mode of UNetbootin

2. Install p7zip-full, which is needed UNetbootin

3. Make the downloaded unetbootin-linux-272 file executable, either from the properties menu or by running

4.  Double click the file or type

5. Select Diskimage from the startup screen of UNetbootin and browse to where you downloaded the ISO file.

The startup screen of UNetbootin.  Note that Diskimage is selected.

6. Browse for the ubuntu-eee-804.iso file and select it, and click open.

Browsing for the ubuntu-eee-804.iso file.

7. Select the USB drive, and the Drive that you want to install to. Make sure you KNOW what the correct drive is, and the safest way to do this is to unmount any other USB drives that you are using, and unplug them or switch them off. When you are certain, click OK.
 

Selecting the USB drive. Note that mine is sdd1. Yours may differ.

I found it stuck on 4% for a long time, and was just about to kill it whent off it went again, so leave it to do its job. Go get a cup of coffee or a nice glass of South African Shiraz.

8. At the end of the process, you will be prompted to reboot or exit. You can exit here, unless you want to boot the system you are working on with Ubuntu-eee.

Reboot or exit prompt.
 

Setting up the EEE PC

9. Move to the EEE PC, insert the memory stick, switch it on, and while the machine is booting press the ESC key a few times, then select USB boot. When prompted, select Install Ubuntu, and complete the install process.

10. Fixing the shutdown problem

The EEE does not shut down cleanly with the Ubuntu install, it only blanks the screen. The following recommended fix was applied:

Add the following contents to the script and save the file:

Make it executable

Now in /etc/rc0.d (scripts run at shutdown), create a symbolic link named K60eeepc, pointing to ../init.d/eeepc
By renaming the symbolic link, one can control exactly when the module is removed.

Pressing on the shutdown button should now power off completly the Eee Pc.

11. Setup PodderLive for podcasting (download PodderLive and Chisimba from http://avoir.uwc.ac.za).  To set up for PodderLive Podcasting:

Either open Synaptic and enable all repositories, or using a terminal type the following:
gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
Check that all repositoriess are enabled, especially multiverse at the bottom of the file. Also enable Partner repositories.

Then update your sources:

Install python-wxgtk2.8

Install the gstreamer framework

Create a directory for PodderLive to work from

The easiest way to get PodderLive is to check it out of Subversion
aptitude install subversion

Start PodderLive by typing the following into a terminal:


You can also add it to the menu, or make a applet and give it your favorite icon as well. I will write another post with some information about how to set up and use PodderLive in a day or two.

Getting sound recording working

To get sound recording, you need to install alsa-oss

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Notes: On start up, there was a message that the battery was old or broken because it had only 1% charge. I have not figured that one out, but eventually it went away, and the power applet seems to display the battery status correctly.

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Education 3.0 presentation featured on Slideshare Tweet
743 days ago

My presentation Education 3.0: Why should Africa care? was made presentation of the day on Slideshare, and I was intensely proud of it. I thought there must be some intellectual interest in the notion, and therefore some hope!

Then I took a look this afternoon, and saw that it was succeeded by a presentation entitled Return of the Bunny Suicides:  Watership Down for the deeply sick. Is there a message there, or am I just too concerned  that Education 3.0 might be mistaken for a suicidal bunny?

 I hope I don't get in the rabbit of this.

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Education 3.0: why should Africa care? Tweet
745 days ago

This presentation uses some stats about Africa and the world to suggest that collaboration is the only way for Africa to build critical mass to address some of the challenges that we face. Once vehicle for collaboration is the set of conditions we describe as Education 3.0.

Note that the license for the images used in this presentation may vary from the license for my own part of it.

You can download this presentation from our Chameleon server.

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Chismiba development with Eclipse Ganymede (3.4) Tweet
752 days ago

To do Chisimba development with Eclipse 3.4, you need to do some manual work to get it installed. The version in the Ubuntu repositories is the way outdated ersion 3.2. The current version is 3.4, called Ganymede. These instructions are for using Ganymede on Ubuntu Hardy Heronm which is available from  http://www.eclipse.org/ganymede/">http://www.eclipse.org/ganymede/ .

The version you need is Eclipse Classic 3.4 (151 MB), unless you intend doing Java EE development as well. 

1. Download Eclipse from the Eclipse website or mirror, and move it to a temporary directory.

You can use wget to download it from the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University if you want:

Move it to a temporary directory. For example,

Then using the Nautilus file manager or the mv terminal command, move the eclipse download to that directory. I used the terminal because it is faster:

2. Unzip the file using Nautilus file manager or the tar command on a terminal.

To use Nautilus, right click the file, and select Extract here from the menu. Alternatively, in a terminal type:

Either way, you will end up with a directory called 'eclipse'. If you do not, then something went wrong.

3. Create a home for eclipse on your system.

I keep eclipse in /usr/local/opt/eclipse/ as this seems to be a fairly standard place for manual install of eclipse. On a fairly fresh install, the opt/ directory may not exist, so in a terminal type

4. Move eclipse to /usr/local/opt/

In a terminal, type

Yes, I know, you could just put it there in the first place, but I prefer to download and extract in my home directory.

5. Grant Eclipse execute permissions

Go into the eclipse directory

and give execute permissions

6. You need a JDK to use eclipse

Get the Sun Open JDK either by installing from the Synaptic package manager or a terminal. In a terminal type:

Make sure that this is the version used by configuring its settings:

Edit the JVM configuration file

and add the following line at the top of the file:

There is a bug that causes Eclipse to ignore the default java setings in Ubuntu, so it is necessary to ensure that Eclipse uses the JVM that you  installed.

and add the following to the top of the file:

7. Start Eclipse and configure workspace

You should now be able to start Eclipse using the command

When Eclipse first starts, it will present a dialogue box for you to input your workspace. It defaults to /home/dkeats/workspace but I prefer to use /home/dkeats/eclipse-workspace just so I know what application owns the workspace. You may configure it to be whatever you want it to be, but eclipse-workspace is an unambiguous name.

You should also check 'Use this as the default and do not ask again'.

8. Create a menu entry


Right click on the Gnome Ubuntu icon on the top left of the Gnome toolbar, the icon to the left of 'Applications' and select 'Edit menus' from the menu that appears.

Click on Programming in the left pane of the resulting dialogue, and on the right pane click New Item (the one with the plus sign).

In the dialogue that appears, select or enter

and click OK. You now have Eclipse on the Pogramming menu.

You can also provide an icon for it if you want. To do so, if you have saved already, right click on Eclipse IDE in the menu editor, and click the Icon button (the one that is unlabelled, that looks like a platform atop a spring). And brows to the icon that you want to use. You can download an Eclipse icon from the web. Use a search engine to find one. I use the icon from:

http://www.iconlet.com/download_32x32_/vistainspirate/32x32/apps/eclipse.png

I made a directory in my home directory, under Pictures, called icons and put it there.

 

9. Install a subversion plugin for Eclipse

Previously, I used the Subclipse subversion plugin with Eclipse, but Subclipse 1.4.x requires Subversion 1.5.0 version but the Ubuntu repository contains Subversion 1.5.0.  Installing this version of Subversion might break your operating system, so it is better to work with the Subversive plugin rather than Subclipse when using Eclipse Ganymede.

Instead of using Subversion, Subversive uses a native Java implementation of the Subversion protocol. You need to install the Java HL API:

Then you need to add this to the eclipse.ini file located in

In a terminal, type

and then add the line below to the end of the file and save
 
Now you can install Subversive. The subversive installation includes Subversive team provider and Subversive Team Provider Sources. In order to start work with Subversive you should install both of them. This is now part of the Ganymede update site so you can access it from Eclipse using:

And install them in the normal Eclipse way.


You also need to add

and install the connectors. License incompatibility prevents them from being distributed together, so you have to live with this inconvenience.

10. Install a PHP plugin

I prefer PHPEclipse, rather that PDT, but either should work. The instructions below are for PHPEclipse.

From the Eclipse menu choose Help -> Software Updates and switch to the tab named 'Available Software'.

On the bottom of the dialog, make sure 'Show only the latest versions of available software' is checked, and 'Include items that have already been installed' is unchecked.

Click the 'Add site' button to open the 'Add site' dialog.

Enter the URL http://update.phpeclipse.net/update/nightly and click 'OK'.

Highlight the new entry 'Update site: http://update.phpeclipse.net/update/nightly' and drop it down using the little arrow handler left to the checkbox.

The sub-entry 'PHP Eclipse Nightly Builds' should appear. There may be others as well, but make sure you check the Nightley Builds one by selecting the appropriate checkbox.

Make sure that none of the other checkboxes are selected and click the 'Install' button.

After the despendencies have been successfully resolved, a confirmation screen is displayed. Click the 'Next' button.

On the license dialog, select 'I accept the terms of the license agreements' and click 'Finish'.

When prompted to do so, restart Eclipse.

After installation, the PHP perspective needs to be activated by going to Window -> Open Perspective -> Other -> Select PHP -> OK.

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Thats it, you now have an Eclipse based development environment for Chisimba development.

Sources of information used in setting up my eclipse setup:

• http://www.practicalweb.co.uk/blog/08/07/06/eclipse-34-ganymede-first-impressions
• http://www.digitalbase.eu/blog/installing-eclipse-3-4-pdt-2-x-nightly-build
• http://olafsblog.sysbsb.de/?p=53
• http://www.eclipse.org/subversive/downloads.php

 

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Demo of inserting a podcast into a page Tweet
756 days ago

I did this while demonstrating how to embed a podcast in a page. I figured I may as well leave it here.

The steps are:

1. Upload a MP3 file in file manager or using the podcast interface

2. Copy the embed code

3. Paste the embed code

4. Save the page

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My birthday card Tweet
756 days ago

Paul and the FSIU team sent me this cute birthday card.

What's scary about this, is that I recognize people! Thanks team!

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Education 3.0: How the coevolution of technology and society will change education Tweet
761 days ago

Below is my presentation from a talk that I gave at Wits on Aug 4th, 2008, that you will also see a few posts ago without the sound. I have added the sound using a Slideshare slidecast. The presentation was on Education 3.0: How the coevolution of technology and society will change higher education over the next decade.

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Personal learning environment Tweet
762 days ago

I am getting ready to deliver a workshop on Personal Learning Environironements (PLE) with Juliet Stoltenkamp and a few other staff of ICS at the WWW conference in September in Cape Town. I was hunting around for some raw materials to use to illustrate the aggregation aspects of creating a PLE, and I found this really neat video on PLE by Graham Attwell. He has such a neat accent that he would be interesting even if he was talking about cabbage farming, but this is a good overview of the key notion of PLE.

The workshop is actually called "Beyond the learning management system: moving towards personal learning environments" and will take place at the University of Cape Town.

I think we will use this in the workshop, not that people will be expected to watch it, but rather to use the concept to illustrate the concept. For example, here I am aggregating content about PLE in my own PLE, for this blog is as much about me sharing with myslef as it is about me sharing with others. If that makes any sense. Blame it on the lovely glass of red wine I just had.

Note that the video may have a different license from this blog post.

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Disqus is disappointing - some web 2.0 is web 1.5 Tweet
763 days ago

I was excited recently when I came across a product called Disqus, which sells itself as follows:

This would be so cool, or so I thought, so I went about implementing a filter for it in Chisimba. At first it looked great. But then I realised something was not right. Replies to comments were not visible in the page on which the reply was posted.

Everything worked exactly as expected and as advertised, except  for this problem that replies made in the page did not work. The replies were stored correctly, but could only be viewed if the blog post is opened via the permalink for it. This can never be senisble behviour.

I reported this to the disqus support, and got mail after mail from them with 1-2 sentences which clearly showed that they had not read my email. Over a number of weeks, I got several of those kinds of responses, but nothing that indicated any intelligent consideration of my problem. Without any explanation of why their very instructions did not work, I got a final email from one of them last week saying

Duh! Replies are not supposed to work correctly!!! I cannot be the only one who thinks it is just strange to require the first comment to be opened in a separate window, something nobody would know about, in order to post or view a reply. That means that there is a gap in the market for a discussion engine that actually works. Any takers? Sounds like a good project against which to raise venture capital.

Meanwhile, I have disabled the Disqus plugin (or will have tonight when I FTP up the code with it disabled), and do not recommend anyone to waste their time on trying to implement something that is designed not to work.

 

 

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Education 3.0: How the coevolution of technology and society will change higher education Tweet
764 days ago

This presentation on Education 3.0: How the coevolution of technology and society will change higher education over the next decade is from a talk I gave at Wits on Aug 4th, 2008.

It was a talk about how the technology-society evolution is affecting education, it was NOT about eLearning.

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From the wilds of Virginia Tweet
773 days ago

Our flight from Washington DC to Johannesburg was cancelled due to a technical problem on the airplane. Such are the joys of air travel, its better to be stuck in the wilds of Reston, Virginia than to be falling out of the sky. OSCON was an awesome success, 3000 ubergeeks in one location, and 6 people from UWC among them. Much of what went on there is well represented in the blogosphere and places like YouTube. Given that we left our hotel in Portland at 4:30 this morning, and its now 8:45 PM, I will just post some things I gleaned from Tim O'Rielly's twitter stream.

I have been following Tim's Twitter stream for a couple of months, although he tweets a bit too much, he usually has some good gems. Today he provided linkst to two really interesting things to read and watch. One was a video recorded at OSCON in which Alex Martelli, a well-published Python developer and Google's Uber Tech Lead, shares his fairly strong convictions about code reviewing. Watch it here

or go to the O'Rielly page.

The other was an article by Michael Neilsen entitled The Future of Science: Building a better collective memory. It has a good explanation of why scientists do not really venture very far in to the world of social networking and online collaboration.

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AVOIR talk at OSCON Tweet
776 days ago

Here are my presentation slides from OSCON. Unfortunately, something went wrong with my IPOD and I did not get the sound captured.

You can download this presentation in various formats, as well as give it live if you want to on our Chameleon project server.

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OSCON2008 official photos Tweet
776 days ago

Here are some of the photos from the official OSCON photo contest group. Note that the photos have their own licenses that may differ from that of this page.

We are here, and have a Chisimba exhibition booth (booth 818).

 

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Photos from OSCON2008 Tweet
777 days ago

Here are some of my pictures from OSCON2008.

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The value of being in AVOIR Tweet
778 days ago

This morning I received an email from one of the AVOIR board members that raised the issue that his university could not see the value in collaboration. Participation in the network seems to be implicitly assumed to be "wasted funds with no direct returns." This struck me as if I was hit by a hammer, because to me the value of collaboration, though often implicit, is completely obvious. If value of collaboration is null, then how do so many companies generate wealth out of people networks? 

I received this email just before the start of a workshop at OSCON08 called Particiate08, which is sponsored by Microsoft Open Source. We start with a case study of a community-based T-shirt business, which is similar to "open source" in some aspects of how it builds on community. The business is called Threadless (http://www.threadless.com/), which produces millions of T-shirts. Designers submit designs, they get community ranked, and get $2500 if their design is used. The task is to decide whether this community driven business should open to sales to a major clothing chain. It is necessary to consider the community in all decisions, and there is a high degree of involvement in the community. They use blogging and other social networking techniques to consult the community, and this gives them agility. What Threadless do is aggregate deisgns from the community, and prodice T-shirts out of a tiny fraction of the aggregated designs.

What is interesting is that the Threadless community who submit designs have a probability of winning of 0.006, which is not enough on its own to explain participation. Thus, even in a commercial operation such as this, participation in the community must have emergent value beyond the probability of scoring a winning design. But these are individuals, not institutions. With individuals, there is a direct biological basis - a behavioural chemistry - between participation in communities and our sense of well being and perhaps even a direct relationship to the release of pleasure inducing chemicals in the brain, in much the same way as learning stimulates the brain to produce chemicals that generate a pleasurable sensation. Institutions do not have this experience, and when the decision making power lies with people who are not inherently networkers, the individual value does not result in opening up the intellectual processes that lead to the other kinds of implicit value being made obvious. Perhaps thats why the value of collaboration is completely obvious to people who participate in it, but is often argued against by people who do not.

So one of the challenges we face in AVOIR is how to create value for both individuals and institutions. The issue raised by the AVOIR board member was that the institution was not seeing the value of collaboration, of participating in a network, out of which it could gain benefit. This contrasts with a business which has figured out how to make use of community partipation as the core of their business model. The case study showed the emergent value of collaboration in communty, and that it could in fact be monetized.

Within AVOIR, many of our partners get it, and understand the value to their institution of participating in the network. One of the keys is to understand what challenges we are up against as higher education institutions in Africa. On this Continent, we do not have the critical mass in any area of human endeavour in any single institution to be able succeed in the globalized world of higher education without collaboration. There is simply not enough money in Africa to build critical mass without first growing the economy, but to address the challenges of Africa, we need more critical mass than we have in any single institution or even in any single country. Without collaboration, in another 50 yeras, Africa will be in the same or worse situation it is in now. Thats why AVOIR is important, not just for the software or even the capacity building.

AVOIR is important because we are creating a model for collaboration and it is a more of a grassroots kind of collaboration, not a massive structural collaboration. The massive structural collaborations tend to eat money with a very high burn rate, and deliver little of value. Indeed, structural approaches may not really be collaboration at all. With massive amounts of money, any form of organized activity can be sustained, but with AVOIR we must create a kind of non-structural collaboration that has minimal overhead.

Sure, we are making fantastic software in Africa as a result of having AVOIR, which is pretty amazing. But more importantly is the process of non-structural collaboration within which value is an emergent property. But not everyone is mature enough to benefit from community, and we need to understand that they may leave the community - or even be encouraged to leave, but welcome them back with open arms as they mature.

The issue of AVOIR as a metaphor for the lack of critical mass is the subject of my talk at OSCON, which happens on Wednesday.

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Pictures from our visit to Open Source Lab at OSU Tweet
779 days ago

Just before OSCON2008, six of use went to Oregon State University to visit the Open Source Lab. Present were Derek Keats, Madiny Darries, Anver Natha, Ernie Smart, Paul Scott and David Wafula. Here are some pictures from Flickr that are tagged with this visit.

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My talks at OSCON Tweet
779 days ago

My talk, panel and our exhibit are listed below:

Changing Education... Open Content, Open Hardware, Open Curricula
07/23/2008 10:45am - 11:30am PDT Room: Portland 252

Creating & Supporting Free Software in Africa: the African Virtual Open Initiatives & Resources (AVOIR) experience
07/23/2008  1:45pm -  2:30pm PDT Room: D137

Our Chisimba exhibit is at booth 818.

Hope to see you there.

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African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) Tweet
787 days ago

I often get asked what is AVOIR, so here is a brief explanation, which is taken from our new booklet that is inserted with the marketing CD that contains presentations, talks, source code and documentation. It is also included here as an excuse to test out the AVOIR map in Google Maps, which uses Chisimba's simple map module to display the map. 

African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) builds capacity in software engineering in Africa using Free Software (Open Source) as the vehicle. A partnership of 13 African Universities in an alliance that includes partners in North America, Europe, and Kabul, Afghanistan, AVOIR is a network with a node in each member institution. Each node participates in the development, deployment and support of software, seeks business and partnership opportunities that lead to sustainability, implements software in support of their institutional requirements, participates actively in communication and collaboration activities, and helps to market the network, and its products and services. AVOIR has created the Chisimba framework and applications based on it, and will be offering a masters in Free and Open Source Software starting in early 2009. AVOIR has been made possible thanks to grants from the IDRC, USAID, Sun Microsystems, Department of Science and Technology (South Africa), and InWent/GTZ as well as the efforts of the participating institutions.

[SIMPLEMAP_LOCAL]gen13Srv30Nme10_9655_1215945939[/SIMPLEMAP_LOCAL]

 Key:

AVOIR core members

AVOIR supporting partners

AVOIR implementation partners

AVOIR research and development partners

You can watch a video of my Google talk about AVOIR  below.

 

There are some pics of recent AVOIR activity available in the AVOIR group on Flickr

 

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The digital Common Heritage principle Tweet
787 days ago

I was just looking at some reporting from Beijing on the television, and it showed the hotel where I stayed in 1996, when I met Arvid Pardo, the father of the Law of the Sea process. Then, I came to my study and I was looking back for something in my blog on the Digital Freedom Exposition site, when i found a post I made in which I referred to my conversation with Pardo in Beijing. Its funny how memories trigger one another and seem to come in clusters. So, here is the post from the Digital Freedom Expo site. I tried to find a a picture of Pardo, so I Googled and found one on a Japanese site. The text was all in Japanese, but when I looked at the picture, i realised it was one I made for a talk I gave at the Pacem in Maribus conference in Cape Town in 2001. I love the common heritage!

For more information on Arvid Pardo, see the Wikipedia article.

 

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YouTube has become useless Tweet
788 days ago

For a long time I have used YouTube to upload and share videos on my blog and elsewhere. Lately, however, videos have been seemingly disappearing. I say seemingly because often the videos are actually still there even though YouTube claims they are not under certain unpredictable and unknown circumstances. The message you get is "We're sorry, this video is no longer available.".

Googling for this gives lots of blog entries, discussion forum entries, and the official YouTube explanation. It seems that a lot of people are experiencing this phenomenon, but YouTube is not offering much help in solving it. Many people posting say something like "Either the user took down the video (or made it private) or more likely it violated copyright and youtube took it down."

YouTube's official help centre response is consistent with this: "You may receive this error message if the video uploader has removed their video, disabled its embed option, or if the video's been removed for violating our Terms of Use."  But if this is the case, it would seem logical that YouTube would also remove the video from its database. Instead you see the full interface as above, with all the data for the video, but the video is missing. I cannot believe that the programmers at YouTube are not smart enough to figure out that this is bad for business. Something else must be going on, and if YoutTube wants to remain the premier site for video sharing, it needs to get serious about finding out what and helping its customers.

I recently set up a site with a little tutorial on blogging. I used a really nice video called "Blogs in plain English" which from the UWC campus worked perfectly well. When I came home, I got that "We're sorry, this video is no longer available" message when I tried to open the video. So I removed it, and tried to find another way to introduce blogging on my demo eLearning site.

However, I got distracted by life, and never saved the page. When I was back on campus, I set out to fix the problem, only to find that the video was there. At home, I still could not watch it. Asking for help from some online friends, three could see it, and four could not. There was no logical connection between who could see it and who could not, except that those who could not see it were - like me - on the SAIX backbone in South Africa. But then, so was one of the people who could see it.

Googling some more, I found all sorts of people posting various solutions, none of which seemed satisfactory. Some of them were:

• Remove Firefox and install Internet Exploiter
• Remove Internet Exploiter and install Firefox
• Remove browser X and install Flock
• Remove Flock and install browser X
• Change your cache settings
• Change your firewall settings
• Speak to your systems administrator
• etc.

None of these 'solutions' help when you want to have a video on an eLearning site that people have a reasonable probability of being able to access. So, it looks like I will be forced to upload my own videos somewhere besides YouTube, and that I cannot reliably take advantage of some of the great videos on YouTube to teach people interesting concepts. Sigh...so much for Web 2.0.

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OSCON panel, talk and exhibition Tweet
791 days ago

In case anyone will be at OSCON in Portland this year, I will be participating in a panel and giving a talk in the Emerging Topics session.  The panel is organized by Danese Cooper:

In addition, I will be giving a talk in the Emerging Topics session as follows:

 

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Wordle in the worldle are weele Tweet
791 days ago

Paul Scott just posted a cool app to his blog on the ICS site. It is called Wordle, and it was created by Jonathan Feinberg at IBM research. He describes it as a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. Here is one I created from my del.icio.us tags (left), my blog on this site (middle) and the text for KEWL3 brochure (right). 

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Contemplating breaking the law, maybe, not sure Tweet
793 days ago

Strange old world we live in. Over a non-trivial number of years I have authored around 80 research papers in peer-reviewed journals. Lately, I have taken to only publishing in open access journals that allow me to use a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. This has been great, and a lot more people have read and given feedback on those articles than on the articles I published in printed, proprietary journals.

As a scientist, previously, I never gave much thought to the impact of the system of academic publication in which I participated. Lately, however, I have come to take easy access for granted.

But today, I wanted to go back and access some older work, such as 

so that I could use them in an evaluation exercise.

 

Our library has subscription to various databases, but tracking down individual journals in it is a nightmare. Its easy to find the title, but not so easy to find the version that you can access. Imagine my surprise when, despite spending a fortune on this access, logging in via EZproxy, and following the link only to be told that I had to BUY the article before I could download it. What exactly have we bought already? Hm..and its my article to which I do not have access.

So, it is easier to drive into the University, get the paper copy of the journal (to which I used to subscribe), scan the article and make my own PDF. Unless they have a PhD in modern copywrong law, even the gods probably don't know if I am breaking the law or not, but I will be damned if I am going to buy my own article to have an electronic version of it when I have paid for a subscription to the journal that it is in, and so has my library, and my library has paid for access to the journal via an online system.

Vive open access, vive! Pamberi ne open access, pamberi!

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Vint Cerf on how freedom created the Internet Tweet
797 days ago

I am too tied up with other things to put much effort into blogging this week, so let me recycle an old one from the Digital Freedom Exposition site.

I wanted someone who had a profound impact on global innovation, yet whose impact had been achieved through a deep respect for what I am calling digital freedom. Vint Cerf, who co-created the protocol on which the Internet runs, and who is now Vice President and Chief Internet Evangalist at Google, was a natural. Watch his video and you will see why. Thankfully, he was willing to do it if we could get a professional film crew to record him, which they did in Washington DC. Sometimes the stars do align!

Here is an approximate rendition of the transcript.

 

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