(photo by Area with only some street names)

I have been volunteering with the Haiti Ushahididi effort doing mapping of SMS and Twitter messages for help.  I also worked at Crisis Camp Boston on Saturday.  I'll write more about all of these but I think the most compelling thing I learned is:

Having your street name on a map on the internet can save your life.

Open Street Maps has been getting better and better for Haiti. On Saturday while the hackers were upstairs hacking Haitian volunteers were downstairs working to help identify street and place names to make the maps better.

There are places in the world without many computers or computer literate people, but I think there are very few places that haven't sent some of their young people into the cities where there are computers. If we could crowd source a large number of people making sure their parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles and extended family. all had street and place names on the map we could add a lot of coverage.

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(photo by Kasaa)

We were recently tasked with an Elgg project that requires forum discussions to behave like mailing lists.  There's already a community contributed plugin that does something similar but doesn't quite meet the client's required specifications, notably with regards to permissions.

During the initial design, the client mentioned that we should think about reusability since the system might require other functionality that makes use of incoming emails in the future.  So instead of just coding a plugin that will take care of discussions via email I decided to write a plugin that can handle incoming emails in a generic way and then trigger plugin hooks.  The different plugins will then be responsible for implementation on how to handle the incoming email.

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We added a new post_status method to Moodle's mnet enrol library that allows us to push updates from Moodle to ELGG. Once we had this function enabled we modifed a few of the Moodle features to call this function to update the eportfolio. These included course enrollment , successful completion of a questionnaire, earning a certificate, and posting to a forum. A simple function call for each action is all that is needed. To find the correct place in the code, I noticed add_to_log was called with similar information for the different actions so I added the code for Elgg posting in the same places. Since the users are already authenticating using MNE, we can match the corresponding user on Elgg so that the status goes to the correct student's River.

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(photo by World Map)

At the risk of revealing my age, there was a time when I had hoped there was a website that could map the world. A site that could tell me where to find what on the globe and show me how to get there.

Obviously a site like that would take an enormous investment and effort to build and I'm glad, thrilled even, to see companies like Google take on that challenge when they released Google Maps  to the public in 2005.

What's even more exciting is that Google makes this data available thru an application programming interface (API) to web developers like you and me.

So in what cases can Google Maps or an equivalent service help your website ? 

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(photo by Oliver Widder)

At Solution Grove we are always experimenting with new ways to interweave web applications. We previously have created a Facebook API suport package for OpenACS that allows supporting Facebook applications with an OpenACS backend server. I am now working on Facebook Connect support which will allow users of an OpenACS site to publish entries such as status updated and photos to their Facebook page from an OpenACS application.

The first application will be a simple blog that will allow the user an option of publishing the blog or a summary to their Facebook page.

The next development will be a general "Share" button to allow any OpenACS content to put shared with Facebook users. 

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(photo by oooh.oooh)

We recently posted about our project that implements Single Sign-On between Moodle and Elgg using Moodle Network (MNET). We wrote an Elgg plugin that extends the mnet-lib PHP library as part of this implementation.  This early version of the plugin allows Elgg to function as an Identity Provider (IdP)  so that its users can SSO to moodle.  The current implementation assumes that ELGG is the authorative system. It doesn't have the capability to act as Service Provider.  We expect to be doing a great deal more work to extend this plugin in its early stages so stay tuned!

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The year 2009 marked the global outbreak of a new strain of H1N1 influenza virus, otherwise referred to as "swine flu".  Classes and even work were disrupted in some schools and offices.  A not-so-recent article quoted the U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, in August 24, 2009, "Schools and colleges should be ready with hard-copy packets and online lessons to keep learning going even if swine flu sickens large numbers of students this year."

Technology like MEL can be a big help in preparing and coping during this time.  It can keep lessons on-going through online teaching.  Teachers and students may also communicate virtually.

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