Finally got around to writing up the list of open source or free design and development applications that are used in New Zealand schools. Thanks to members of the MLE list for providing this list.

http://www.core-ed.org/lab/os-design-dev-tools

The Open University’s SocialLearn paltform is trucking along. They seem to be replicating a lot of things that are available already in elgg. I am sure they had good reasons to start from scratch though. It will be interesting to see if they release the platform open source, or if it will only be a cloud service – and if the second what the eligibility for access will be. They have a walk through video available which gives a good idea of where they are heading with the platform.

Have just upgraded to WordPress 3. For starters the upgrade process is streets ahead of what it used to be – I used to dread upgrading our WordPress MU site, as it generally involved reading a long list of steps to take depending on which version you were moving from – now it is just an “Upgrade Automatically” button – nice

Working a treat on my single Tek4L blog, so now just need to do a test upgrade on the main CORE blog MU installation.

Diaspora could be worth keeping an eye on. With all the fuss around privacy on the likes of FaceBook they may just be hitting it at the right time. After recently undertaking a major review of open source social network platforms I was amazed at how few ‘real’ options there were to choose from, so there is definately an opening there for these keen and eager young men. They will just need to make sure they get past the facinating encryption algorithms and APIs and give it an interface that your average FaceBook user can cope with.

I am currently having a play with Alfresco Share as a possible option for an online collaboration tool for our teams. There is a nice feature in the site blog function that enables the posting of blog entries to both the team collaboration area and to an external blog. We have talked about the need for this sort of functionality in the past, so teams can maintain a blog which may be mostly for internal consumption, but with the ability to push some of the posts out to an external facing blog. It is great to see this feature implemented.

This entry was created on Alfresco Share running on my laptop, and was also pushed out to my external blog.

After an initial play around I am impressed with Alfresco and keen to have a detailed look at its document management features.

Great quote for all sorts of projects, not just application development:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

John Gall

If you want a bit of light relief check out the youtube video that an enligthened member of our lms review committee had made in order to generate some student interest in the review process.

I have just started installing an early release of the Mahara eportfolio system that is being developed with funding from the New Zealand Ministry of Education. The specs for it look really good, and it is being put together by a very compentent development team from Catalyst, so I am hopeful that it will live up to expectations. I just need to get my test server rebuilt with a newer version of php to cope with the json functions that they are using to implement the user interface, and hopefully next week I will be able to give some feedback on first impressions.

http://learnonline.wordpress.com/2007/02/08/flexible-learning-in-new-zealand

Some good thoughts here from Leigh. It is this type of thinking that is needed to really turn tertiary education on its head and bring it into the 21st century. The one thing I would add, and unfortunately destroy Leigh’s business model in doing so, is that we also need to seriously question the relevance of traditional assessment and accreditation models.