(photo by marcelgermain)

We have an open source product for museum class registration we developed for the Museum of Science so I followed a link to an article on What Does Openness Mean To The Museum Community?  What I found was a very clear discussion of different forms of openness:

• Open Standards
• Open Source
• Open Content
• Open Services
• Open Culture

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LAMS - The Learning Activity Management System is one of the open source eLearning systms we support.  They recently met with One Laptop per Child people (OLCP).  LAMS learner runs fine on the XO laptop (pictures here) and they are developing a version to go on the servers that will be at each school.

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(photo by 2-3-98 Conference)

2-3-98 Conference: An Open Discussion on Technology in Education will address Open Source in Higher Education, and include a second day Moodle Moot. I'll be attending the conference June 19 & 20, 2008 as SUNY Delhi. SUNY Delhi is  using Moodle for their unversity LMS.

One of our clients, Stephen Wilmarth, from the Center for 21st. Century Skills will be giving a presentation on how they are using Moodle to conect high school students in CT and in China!

This should be a good opportunity to both learn more about Moodle, spread the word on LAMS and ELGG integrated with Moodle in an amazing setting. According to the web site: "Delhi, NY is nestled in the Catskill Mountains in a land of wooded hills and fertile green valleys with streams, covered bridges, well-tended dairy farms and beautiful vistas. Join us in a great setting for a great conference!"

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Mark Aufflick, a friend in the OpenACS community, just launched a new openACS based e-commerce site for environmentally friendly fashion.  Love Threads, Rethead the Planet

Nice site design and nice clothes. Good work, Mark!

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Google Summer of Code pays college students to spend their summers writing open source code.

This summer has 3 projects that are related to OpenACS.

A Business Rule Management System based on the high-level object oriented scripting language XOTcl
Student: Franz Wirl
Mentor: Gustaf NeumannVienna
University of Economics and Business Administration

Business Rule Engines (BRE) are gaining popularity in complex situations where a high degree of flexibility and declarative problem formulation are important.  In particular, BREs enable the use of declarative programming---"What to do" rather than "How to do it"---which will allow people with limited or no traditional programming experience develop web-based applications.

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(photo by Elgg Social Networking)

The highlight of Chapter 1 of Elgg Social Neworking is a concise features list - What can Elgg Do?

• Blogging
• File repositories for individauls and communities
• Podcast support
• Full access controls
• Supports tagging
• User Profiles
• Full RSS support
• RSS aggregator
• Create Communities
• Collaborative community blogs
• Create friends' networks
• Import content
• Publish to blog
• Thorough pricacy controls
• Multilingual
• Branding/Customization
• OpenID
• Import/export friends with FOAF

In addition to introducting the features, Chapter 1 covers the basics of social networking as a foundation for understanding Elgg. However, this is probably not how most of our educational users come to Elgg. My observation of educational users is that Elgg's first role is as a simple ePortfolio, then to support blogging for reflection. 

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