ICTlogy

Yet another Linux distribution for educational purposes, now by the Community of Madrid Government.

Linex, Lliurex, MAX… what’s next?
The first time I heard of it (Linex) I was excited. Now, I’m concerned: why not find synergies and save energies and enhance the previous distributions instead of making brand new ones? I wonder it’s because every single politician must profit the “return of investment” of his own political actions. Sad, so sad. They’re just blowing up the most basic principles of free software and the internet commons: collaboration.

No details in MAX Web Site, so don’t know if they joined efforts with the other mentioned projects. Any one knows?

[thanks to Yolanda Franco for the point :) ]

The Centre d’Educació i Noves Tecnologies of the de la Universitat Jaume I (UJI, Castelló, Spain) has released a report on how to choose a F/OSS e-learning environment.

It’s based on pedagogic flexibility, usability and technological flexibility.

They’ve found three main tendencies:

• Environments focusing on content management: i.e. ATutor
• Environments centered in communication: i.e. Moodle
• Environments to foster networking: i.e. .LRN

Finally, they chose Moodle for it best fitted UJI’s needs. By the way, this means that UJI will collaborate in Moodle’s development, which is good news and quite a commitment :)

The report is in Spanish and Catalan.

OpensourceCMS is a

site […] created to give you the opportunity to “try out” some of the best open source and free php/mysql based software systems in the world. You can log in as the administrator to any site [t]here, thus allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs.

Each system is deleted and reinstalled every two hours. This allows you to be the administrator of any system here without fear of messing anything up.

These systems include Portals, Blogs, e-Commerce, Groupware, Forums, e-Learning and others. In the e-Learning section there’s an installation for Moodle, Claroline and Segue.

I think the most important added value of the site, other than gathering a lot of sowftare existing around, is having it installed and giving you a try in what we’d call a “production environtment” or a “test environment” or a “demo environment”… call it whatever you want (you can call it Al ;)

Great idea.

[thank you César]

I should have posted this before, but I had not realized – until now – that the project was targeted towards education.

Lliurex is the Valencia (Spain) Administration project to introduce F/OSS based ICT in the educational system of the Valencian Comunity. Quite similar to Linex in Extremadura (Spain).

Maybe the main difference is that the later had its origins in cheapening hardware and software – they later shifted to a more political point of view – and Lliurex has born to bring ICT to education, following the path and hints of its predecessor.

• More info at Ociocritico
• More info at Octeto

Thanks Luz for the hint :)

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

Simple but nice article at TechSoup about Open Source Content Management Systems.

Quote:

“In this article we’ll focus on how Open Source and CMS combine in powerful solutions for Web site creation and maintenance. We’ll also take a closer at a small and simple CMS called Pagetool that was designed with nonprofits in mind.”