ICTlogy

See if I can make a list of things that MIT is carrying out in the field of “sharing his knowledge” and “applicable to e-learning for development”. Some copy-paste from institutional sites, some comments by myself, some by Octeto:

Intellectual Commons
MIT makes materials freely available to strengthen overall university commons.

• Commiting to integrating educational-technology deeply into on-campus education
• Creating major, shared campus-wide educational resources
  It includes OKI, OCW, DSpace and .LRN

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Open Knowledge Iniciative (OKI)

It is a collaboration among leading universities and specification and standards organizations to support innovative learning technology in higher education.
The result is an open and extensible architecture that specifies how the components of an educational software environment communicate with each other and with other enterprise systems. OKI provides a modular development platform for building both traditional and innovative applications while leveraging existing and future infrastructure technologies.

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OpenCourseWare (OCW)

Is a large-scale, Web-based initiative to provide free, worldwide access to educational materials for virtually all MIT courses.

OCW is not a course or distance learning, but it is courseware.

Rather than substitute for the experience of being a student at the Institute, OCW will provide students, faculty, and other interested parties throughout the world free and valuable educational materials.

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DSpace

A durable electronic archive for 10,000 MIT research papers and other publications per year. DSpace is a groundbreaking digital library system to capture, store, index, preserve, and redistribute the intellectual output of a university’s research faculty in digital formats.
Developed jointly by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard (HP), DSpace is now freely available to research institutions world-wide as an open source system that can be customized and extended.

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.LRN

Is open source software and a development kit for supporting innovation in collaborative education and learning and research communities. Originally developed at MIT as part of the Intellectual Commons, .LRN is now backed by a worldwide consortium of educational institutions, non-profit organizations, industry partners, and open source developers. .LRN capabilities include course management, online communities, learning management, and content management applications.
In other words:

• A fully open source eLearning platform
• A portal framework and integrated application suite to support course management and online communities
• A set of best practices in online learning shared in the form of source code

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Caddie.NET

It serves as the hub application for information exchange. It provides online news, event and course information, along with interactive discussion forums and students contact information. In a nutshell, everything needed to maintain and run the fast-growing course site.

As I understand it: .LRN manages the course learning environment (contents, interaction, etc.) and Caddie.NET manages the course site or information environment (information, news, etc.)

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Very nice work at XPLANA by Rob Reynolds.

19 open source course management systems analyzed and rated according to 6 parameters.

My two cents: I’ve written down all the information and put it in a table, so you can catch it at a glance.

S: Scalability
O: Openness
A: Administration
I: Implementation
F: Functionality
E: Effectiveness
TT: Total

(*) CHEF: Top system in terms of Scalability and Development Flexibility
(**) Moodle: Top system in terms of Pedagogical Flexibility

On Thursday 15th April I’m speaking at the First International Congress about E-Learning and social inclusion

My communication will be 30 minutes long within the framework of Thursday afternoon (15.45-17.15) session II: Problem solving methodology for e-learning. Ain’t no complete communications programme yet: promise to publish at once when noticed.

Though I’m still thinking on what I exactly want to say, my mental scheme is as follows:

The online volunteer: knowledge manager and transmitter

Theoretical Framework

• Taxonomny of the online volunteer
• The potential virtual volunteer as the eternal excluded from cooperation for development: a “market” to discover
• The virtual volunteer en his knowledge centered role: store, organize, create and transfer knowledge

Practical case: e-Learning for e-Inclusion

A three pieces puzzle:

• Content and didactic materials
• e-Learning platform
• Syllabus, coordination and teaching

Main characteristics of online volunteering centered e-learning projects:

• The e-volunteer as the knowledge transmitter, without time nor space boundaries
• South-south cooperation: the e-volunteer placed at the target social framework
• Economic sustainability: online volunteering costs, replication opportunities, multiplier effects of the model

Can I set up a project like this?

• The experience of the Campus for Peace
• Free content: GNU licenses, Creative Commons, MIT OpenCourseWare and Learning Objects repositories
• Free e-learning platforms: Moodle, Claroline, MIT Caddie.net, other F/OSS supports
• Virtual volunteers: Onlinevolunteers.org, others.

[Via SIT and Bonnie Bracey @ DigitalDivide discussion list]

It looks like MIT has released a F/OSS content management system (CMS). According to them, it also looks like a learning management system (LMS):

Developed to be highly scalable across institutions and countries, it can support an unlimited number of courses and students. The CADDIE Collaborative Architectures for a Distributed Instructional Environment is designed to take advantage of the wide range of collaboration technology available on today’s highly calable Web Platforms, including messenger, voice over IP and real time and streaming video.

It’s a pity I haven’t been able to enter its demo site, ’cause Bonnie says that “the software, which can be downloaded free, allows users to build various portals for the different aspects of a distance-education program. Portals can be built, for example, for registration, course management, or online testing.”

We’ll wait and see.

So far, OpenCourseWare and Caddie.net CourseServer seem to me quite a nice pair.

Here come my impressions on Expoelearning Europe 2004.

First I have to say is that I only attended Thursday F/OSS sessions. I was not there on Wednesday and there will not be any Congress at all today because of the terrorist attacks in Madrid.

With no order, nor preference:

• I was happy to meet there some people I found really interesting: Jordi Vila, Eneko Arriaga and Albert Calvet, all of them from cv&aconsulting. I hope we meet again: they had ideas I shared about free software, LSMs and free software based LMSs. Their expertise in Moodle is something I’d like them to share with me in other circumstances: more time, more face-to-face, etc.
• eLearning Workshops. I had included the site in my links, but I think it’s worth mentioning again. A good place about e-learning in general
• “e-learning: business is in the learning, not in the e” by Jordi Vila. I loved this one: couldn’t agree more
• MIT .LRN. I had not heard about this, had I? As it was released on April 23th, 2003, I guess I had not. But I’ll keep an eye on it from now on, bet on it! Btw: .LRN is MIT’s free software LMS. A good companion for OpenCourseWare
• F/OSS maintenance: “you don’t pay a lawyer for the Laws, but for his expert knowledge” by Carlos Moreno, Hispalinux Education Coordinator. Software as a service, not a product. Another concept I share.
• Claroline: I did not like it. Too simple. Easy to handle, easy to support, but yet too simple. Hope the Dokeos affaire gets clear [via Octeto]
• Moodle: I liked it. And I really loved its plannification and content manager and content/evaluation authoring tools. Simple, direct but powerful.
• By the way, I did not know that people behind Octeto where the Moodle translators to Spanish :)

Although I expected a little bit more from the Congress, I feel it was worth it being there.

Since last Google pagerank update this page has reached pagerank 5, which has quite amazed me:

• I don’t have lots of visits – actually, I have few visits
• I don’t think I’m being linked by more than a couple of friends and a bunch of web spiders

So, how did I get to pagerank 5!?

The only reasons I find are:

• There’s not really many people around blogging on ICT4D such as e-learning, e-volunteering, intranets and knowledge management, an so.
• I try and not write about plenty of things but just the previous subjects – there’s some exceptions, as this post ;)
• I’ve been (luckily) spotted at the Development Gateway, a site with a quite high pagerank (8)

Now that I’m using PowerPhlogger to manage my site visits/logs I see funny things such as being listed #2 in Google searching the string “kinds of freedom”, which should be coped by GNU/Linux pages.

I like to see people bumping into my page searching for “opensource ware” or “opensource lms” but it’s more surprising to find me through “mit opencourse”. The most surprising yet came last Wednesday: somebody got here through “opencourseware berklee”: fun, Berklee itself did not appear in none of the 40 results listed by Google.

So, what’s going on out there with Google? :O