[Dutch] Ga naar www.koopaladvies.nl

Dit weblog wordt vanaf vandaag (17 december 2007) niet meer onderhouden. Er zijn 177 berichten verschenen in 31 maanden op dit weblog. Maar, ik kan mijn tijd maar één keer besteden. En dat doe ik dan maar op mijn eigen website :-)
Dus, update je feed reader en/of bookmarks naar http://www.koopaladvies.nl.
Bedankt en tot ziens!

[Dutch] We mogen niet zeuren....

Pierre Gorissen wordt goed gelezen. En ook zijn EduKast wordt goed beluisterd. Maar lees ook eens de reactie van Catharina Bethlehem, zelfstandig ondernemer en voorstander van open standaarden. Zie Gezeur over open source software | Kletskous

Pierre Gorrissen bekritiseerd in deze podcast de brief van Jan Stedehouder aan de NMA en de reacties daarop. Pierre slaat in de podcast de plank naar mijn mening behoorlijk mis.

[Dutch] Interessante (gratis) conferentie

Gezien op Livre - Open, Vrij en Duurzaam: Europese onderwijsconferentie in het teken van delen :

In Utrecht vindt op vrijdag 14 december in de bibliotheek van de Universiteit Utrecht (Boothzaal - Campus de Uithof) een Europese conferentie ('Networks, Communities & Learning: Show that you Share!') plaats, georganiseerd door het Bazaar-project en IVLOS, het onderwijsinstituut van de Universiteit Utrecht). Doel van het Bazaar-project, dat tot stand is gekomen met financiële steun van de Europese Unie, is het opzetten van een community rondom open source software in het onderwijs en de ontwikkeling van open content en Open Educational Resources (OERs).

Weet iemand hoe zich dit verhoudt tot het het SELF project?

[slightly off topic] Kuali is being watched...

Adam Cooper in the UK recently blogged about Kuali Student Services System .

A glance at the Technical Architecture Principles is worthwhile, both for what it says as well as what it doesn’t. It is very committed to SOAP web services and service orientation. On this front, I think the student services system effort will be useful even if it fails miserably: a contributor and proving ground for the principles of the eFramework.

I would agree with Adam that some more focus on IMS specifications would be nice. Also check out the comment by John Norman... :-)

IMAP and Gmail

Recently Gmail got a great new feature, namely IMAP support. What else do you want (or need)? IMAP is an advanced email protocol. Basically it means that changes made to Gmail will be synchronised anytime anyplace anydevice.

Vacation

Will be back on Nov 11, 2007. See ya!

What if... this was your last lecture?

This has been picked up already in the blogosphere and on news sites, here, in the New York Times, or here.... But anyway.
The concept of the 'last lecture' is meant for professors to really think about what they would like to tell in their last lecture. A few 'last lectures' already have been given. A really powerful concept, isn't it? Forget all the humbug and daily routines: you have just so little time to deliver your last lecture. It better be good!
Recently, professor Randy Pausch really gave his last lecture. This wasn't just an exercise for him, since he has pancreatic cancer and only has a few months left to live. Just take a look at the video for a few minutes: it is really impressive. The video is brought to us under a Creative Commons license ("The video and transcript will technically be under a "creative commons" license, which will be a legal way of saying that you may use them for non-commercial purposes, so long as you don't alter them, and you give attribution. Please bear with me; figuring out that legal stuff is secondary to my other priorities.")
Update: there is also a great video by Pausch on time management (made in 1998, without Powerpoint....).

[Dutch] Leerling geschorst voor computerkraak?

Door Bloglines blijf ik op de hoogte van het laatste nieuws, ook uit de regio. Zo lees ik in de TC Tubantia dat er is ingebroken op een 'schoolcomputer'.
Het bericht is niet erg helder, vind ik. Maar in ieder geval is de jongen geschorst vanwege zijn daden. Volgens mij had hij goed gebruik gemaakt van 'social engineering'. En hij vond een bestand dat niet op de desbetreffende computer had mogen staan, volgens de systeembeheerder....
Vraagje: Zou de systeembeheerder ook geschorst zijn?
Ik vind dat deze jongen gekoesterd moet worden. Hij toont feilloos de zwaktes aan van de procedures.
Was het niet zo dat computerkrakers een gouden toekomst bij (computer)beveiligingsbedrijven hebben (of hadden)? Of dat de beste dief ook een hele goede rechercheur zou kunnen zijn?

YouTube: just do it!

UC Berkeley is one of the most innovative universities in the world, in my opinion. They don't debate endlessly, but they just move forward in deploying the newest technologies. They have their own channel on iTunes, and most recently they have launched on YouTube.
Check out their press release from last week, titled Campus launches YouTube channel : "BERKELEY – Further expanding public access to its intellectual riches through the most popular Web destinations, the University of California, Berkeley, announced today (Wednesday, Oct. 3) that it is making entire course lectures and special events available, free of charge, on YouTube."

Waarom ik bezwaar maak tegen SURFgroepen

Om preciezer te zijn: waarom ik denk dat SURFgroepen best leuk is, maar ook risicovol is. Enkele redenen die ik de lezer niet wil onthouden:
1/ Zouden we blij moeten zijn met een monocultuur, waarin we allemaal SURFgroepen gaan gebruiken (omdat het bijvoorbeeld 'gratis' is)?
2/ Beseffen we ons dat SURFgroepen een aantal garanties niet geeft? Zoals daar bijvoorbeeld is: geen backup. De officiële tekst (bron): "There is no back-up facility that supports restoring individual documents in SURFgroepen (SURFgroups). The SURFgroepen environment is an environment for group communication; it is not a backup facility. Ensure that you save a copy of all important documents on your own system"
3/ Het geheel werkt eigenlijk alleen goed op een computer met Windows als besturingssysteem, Internet Explorer als browser, en een recente MS Office versie. Voorbeeld van een support-melding op de site zelf: webconferencing werkt niet op Macintosh of Linux.
4/ Hoe voldoet SURFgroepen (of beter gezegd het onderliggende MS Sharepoint en aanverwanten) aan de (open) standaarden waar we toch allemaal naar proberen te streven? Ik denk niet zo goed....
5/ Denk eens na over de combinatie van 1, 3 en 4: ik denk dan "vendor lockin". Of toch niet?
Dit is een reactie op een bericht van Pierre Gorissen, die weer reageerde op mijn eerdere bericht over SURFgroepen en de redelijke agressieve manier (vind ik) waarop hiervoor reclame wordt gemaakt.

Help NIET mee aan de SURFgroepen campagne

[this is in Dutch] SURFnet is wel erg druk om SURFgroepen te promoten.... Onlangs werd een oproep geplaatst om mee te helpen om SURFgroepen beter bekend te maken (bron).
Ik zou de collega's in het land willen oproepen om NIET mee te doen aan deze campagne!
Wil je weten waarom ik deze oproep plaats? Omdat ik vind dat SURFnet hiermee nogal inbreuk maakt op wat er gaande is in onze instellingen, waar we net met veel moeite een Electronische Leeromgeving hebben geïntroduceerd.

Blackboard 'loses' the 1st round

Recently some news came out in the Blackboard patent case. As Chris Coppola writes
Desire2Learn wins round one against Blackboard patent: "Congratulations to D2L (=Desire2Learn) in an important victory against Blackboard and their bogus patent. Apparently the judge ruled that the 1st claim (and all dependent claims 2-35) are invalid."
Source: weblog Desire2Learn.

Seven things: neat resources on ed tech

John Martin has a weblog, that i regularly visit. It is called Edventures in Technolgy (great name). One of his recent posts is on the The Educause 7 Things You Should Series : "(..) I find looking at the timeline of releases interesting from an anthropological perspective as it illustrates where the edtech interest was focused over the past two years that these briefs have been published."
You will find condensed information on (for example) the use of RSS, Twitter, YouTube, Blogs, Podcasting or Screencasting within educational settings. Handy indeed!

Gather my thoughts and experiences...

I came across the JOLT - Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. And then I read this:
"The June 2008 issue of JOLT will be a special issue, centered on the topic of next generation learning/course management systems (L/CMS). (..) new technologies present diverse ideas and opportunities for engaged e-learning (..)."
A theme that is mentioned for this special issue is "Open source vs commercial environments". Well, I sure could write about that. The proposal deadline is Feb 29, 2008.

DSpace gets a foundation too

HP and MIT Create Non-profit Organization to Support Growing Community of DSpace Users
HP (NYSE:HPQ) and the MIT Libraries today announced the formation of the DSpace Foundation, a non-profit organization that will provide support to the growing community of institutions that use DSpace, an open source software solution for accessing, managing and preserving scholarly works in a digital archive.

Standards: a lot of useful information from JISC!

The JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), based in the UK, has a great Standards Catalogue. The information has been collated by UKOLN (Brian Kelly). This kind of resource is, for me, very valuable. Otherwise I would have been surfing the net endlessly.
The information is not restricted to purely 'open' standards, which (at this moment in time, that is) is understandable. The information is also not restricted to e-learning standards, but also standards in the field of text editing or images. Sometimes you need to be a little pragmatic. All standards are documented in the same way (based on a template). What is very nice that there are headings like "Risk Asessment" and "Take-up Elsewhere" for every entry. The approach of JISC with regard to standards is also explained.
I found a wiki, which is the working area, where 'everyone' can edit. And there is a website, that holds more permanent (and pertinent?) information. Go find out for yourself what you think!
Some standards that you will find explained:

1. Binary text documents, such as DOC, RTF, ODF, or PDF
2. Image standards: for example SVG, TIFF or PNG
3. Examples of multimedia standards: ACC, MP3, ASF
4. Metadata: DIDL, RDF, RSS
5. E-learning standards: Learning Design, Content Packaging, IMS Enterprise, QTI
   

Have you read this thoroughly?

Going into the summer I just want to point my readers (who are you, anyway!) to a very interesting article that I recently reread.
It is a very good interview of Christina Smart (JISC) with Patrick Masson. Patrick Masson is the former Director of Technology for the SUNY Learning Network. He talks extensively, and very honestly (!), about what happened when they tried to implement a Service Oriented Architecture at the State University of New York, an institution with 64 campuses, 30,000 faculty and 414,000 students.
I will leave you with some quotes from this interview, that you read as a sort of summary. About what the original vision was: "(..) we decided to move away from tool development – because that was already happening in lots of different places, the SLN 2.0 strategy was about providing a framework for those tools to plug in to. (..) We also wanted to take on a versionless approach with our development. (..) This would allow us to introduce new features incrementally. "
The SLN (SUNY Learning Network) 2.0 strategy went wrong because of this vision of moving away from tools and products. Read this: "(..) the administration didn’t like the SLN 2.0 strategy because it couldn't be easily communicated as an “out-of-the-box” solution, you had to understand then educate the users about new concepts like SOA, loose-coupling, data hubs, service buses and message brokers. We ran into the “Build vs. Buy” argument and fears over open source. We lost our support from senior management."
So, senior management was key here, as always :-). Read this last quote: "(..)At the high level people still don’t get it. How many senior managers in charge of technology on campus have a technical background? They might be procurement officers that are put in place to control the costs of technology and find single solution systems for the lowest price. Or maybe they are faculty and they are now responsible for e-learning and IT – how many information technologists are now Chief Information Officers? Not many. And where does the CIO fit in the overall management of a campus? Fundamentally there is a conflict between where we (the developers) are and where the decision makers are."
As I said: highly recommended reading! Patrick also has some things to say about creative students and teacher who already have abandoned, to a certain extent, the central LMS of their institution because it just doesn't do what they want!

Why opensource will prevail (?)

Stephen Downes has a very interesting take on all those open API's that are available in today's world. Check out his article, titled Six Basic Truths of Free APIs, where he references George Siemens also.

This is the summary: "You seem to get a lot more functionality coding on top of Google search or Google maps. And yes, a lot of people are coding for, say, the Google API instead of creating open source applications. But as the article notes, if you live this way, you live only with the blessings of the company that created the API - and as we've seen, even with Google, such companies can be very self-serving (whither the Atom API?) and fickle."

{Dutch} Rising star: Teletop BV

Gisteren al verklapt bij TV Oost (zonder dat de genomineerden het wisten), maar nu is het officieel: Teletop BV is genomineerd voor de Rising Star Verkiezing Twente. Op 27 juni weten we meer!

Jongens: hiermee alvast gefeliciteerd!

{Dutch} Vlaanderen loopt voorop?

Op de Edusite is deze week een verhaal verschenen met als titel Open source elo groot in Vlaamse hoger onderwijs . Het artikel begint met de bewering dat het in Nederland maar niet wil lukken:
"Open source software heeft in het Vlaamse hoger onderwijs een steviger voet aan de grond dan in Nederland. Aanjager is de Universiteit Gent, dat als eerste universiteit de elektronische leeromgeving Dokeos in gebruik nam."
Ik heb een korte reactie geschreven, die ik hier zal herhalen:
De sceptische ondertoon over de situatie in Nederland, is mij iets te kort door de bocht. Je zult je verbazen over het aantal serieuze gebruikers (of testers) van Sakai en Moodle in Nederland.
Kijk maar eens wie er allemaal naar de Sakai SIG NL bijeenkomsten komen en zijn gekomen. Een indrukwekkend lijstje (hopelijk vergeet ik niets): UvA, UT, EUR, UU, HS Leiden, Hotelschool Den Haag, ISS, TU/e en Saxion Hogescholen.
Meer informatie over Sakai in Nederland vindt je op http://elearning.surf.nl/sakai