Chronicle: list of Open Source Initiatives in Higher ed

From Steve:
The September 24th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education is running it's Information Technology column as a special pull out section focusing on Open Source issues in the university IT enviornment. They include a catalog of 18 open source projects - a list that leaves out some of the most interesting areas of development (e.g. blogging, instant messaging, p2p collaboration, etc).

Course Management

+ moodle : http://moodle.org : A software package to help professors build Web sites for their courses. Its developers say Moodle is better suited than other course-management systems to help foster a "social constructionist" style of teaching, which focuses on having students learn actively or teach one another by working in groups. The software's interface is available in 40 languages.

+ Pachyderm : http://www.nmc.org/projects/lo/pachyderm.shtml : A software package designed to help users build flashy online "museum" exhibits or course Web pages. The resulting Web pages can be used within course-management systems like Blackboard or Sakai.

+ Sakai : http://www.sakaiproject.org : A comprehensive software system to help professors build course Web sites. The project is led by four universities: Indiana University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Stanford University. It is supported by a $2.4-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Sakai's leaders have formed a partnership with uPortal, so that programmers for both projects will try to make their software work together seamlessly.


Libraries and Archives

+ DSpace : http://www.dspace.org : Software for setting up digital library collections on the Web. DSpace is used mainly by universities to create "institutional repositories," where research by an institution's faculty members is stored and usually available free to others. Library officials hope such repositories will offer an alternative to traditional scholarly publishing in high-priced journals.

+ E-Prints : http://www.eprints.org : Allows users to create their own online archives of data, called "self archives," to be shared with others.

+ Fedora : http://www.fedora.info : A digital-repository management system developed by Cornell University and the University of Virginia supported by $2.4-million in grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

+ Kepler : http://kepler.cs.odu.edu : A system designed to help build small archives of academic papers or other documents in a way that is easily searchable by library search engines. Developed by Old Dominion University Digital Library Research Group, with a grant from the National Science Foundation.

+ Digital Document Assembly Kit : no URL yet : A tool to create and view electronic books that include images and other rich media. Being developed at the University of Southern California's Institute for the Future of the Book, with a $1.4-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Expected in fall 2005.


Web Portals

+ uPortal : http://www.uportal.org : Software that helps colleges set up customized campus portals, which are Web gateways for students and professors. A typical campus portal gives students a one-stop Web page to access information on their courses, transcripts, financial records, campus announcements, notices of events, and links to other campus resources. A nonprofit organization called the Java Architectures Special Interest Group, known as JA-SIG, which promotes the use of the Java programming language in higher education. The software was developed with a $770,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. uPortal's leaders have formed a partnership with Sakai, and programmers in both projects will try to make their software work together.

+ CampusEAI 'Portlets' : http://www.campuseai.org : A set of modular software plug-ins for campus portal software, called "portlets," which add features to existing campus Web services. The abbreviation in the name stands for Enterprise Application Integration.


Student Portfolios

+ Open Source Portfolio Initiative (E-Portfolio) : http://www.theospi.org : The framework for an institution to offer students or others a tool to build personal portfolios of their work on the Web. It is designed as a way for college students to track and showcase their academic and extracurricular work so that prospective employers and graduate schools can review the candidate's output. Being developed by the University of Minnesota, the University of Delaware, and the R-Smart Group, a Phoenix-based company that offers technical support for users of open-source software.


Productivity Tools

+ Chandler : http://www.osafoundation.org/Chandler_in_higher_ed_TOC_3002_05_13.htm : A personal-information manager that provides and integrates e-mail browsing, calendar, contact management and task management, notes, and instant messages. Being developed by the Open Source Applications Foundation, a nonprofit group developing open-source software that was begun in 2001. The project has won a $1.5-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and $1.25-million from the 25 colleges and universities that are part of the Common Solutions Group, an informal organization supporting technology in higher education.

+ LionShare : http://lionshare.its.psu.edu/main : A peer-to-peer file-sharing network that allows organizing and searching of academic information within groups. From the Pennsylvania State University, with a $1.1-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.


Administrative Tools

+ Kualu : http://www.kuali.org : A financial-information system for colleges designed to help an institution manage accounting, billing, e-commerce, budgeting, and other campus functions. Expected in 2006.


Security

+ Shibboleth : http://shibboleth.internet2.edu : Provides "authentication" for Web sites, the mechanism that asks users for an ID and password and allows only authorized users to gain access to the sites.

+ Pubcookie : http://www.pubcookie.org : Creates a common authentication system for different Web-server platforms. Being developed by the University of Washington, with support from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Wisconsin, as well as an Internet2 grant.

+ Signet : http://middleware.internet2.edu/signet : Works with authentication software to help determine how much information on a Web site each registered user should have access to. From Stanford University and the National Science Foundation's National Middleware Initiative.


Scientific Computing

+ Globus : http://www.globus.org : Provides technologies needed to build computational grids that allow software to integrate instruments, displays, and computational and informational resources. Argonne National Laboratory's Mathematics and Computer Science Division, the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, the University of Chicago's Distributed Systems Laboratory, the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and the Swedish Center for Parallel Computers.

http://chronicle.com
Section: Information Technology
Volume 51, Issue 5, Page B5
http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i05/05b00501.htm (subscription required)

Blog: virtual humanities lab at brown,

From an annoncement on HUMANIST:
The Virtual Humanities Lab at Brown University plans to develop existing and new digital resources into an experimental model for collaborative scholarship and pedagogy.

They are encoding Boccaccio's Esposizioni sulla Commedia di
Dante and portions of Giovanni Villani's Croniche. They are also
beginning work on a new interface, which will provide tools that will
allow scholars to annotate texts online, suggest variant encodings,
and of course participate in discussion using natural languages as
well as code.

Weblog at:
http://brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/vhl/.

Vika Zafrin

wysiwyg xml editor

bitflux
http://bitfluxeditor.org/

LMS: sakai

Learning Management System (LMS), open source

http://www.sakaiproject.org/

MRAM memory and history

Every move you make could be stored on a PLR
Kevin Maney
USA Today
Posted 9/7/2004 8:51 PM; Updated 9/8/2004 12:03 AM
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kevinmaney/2004-09-07-plr_x.htm

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Over the years, a number of tech prognosticators
have said that someday many of us will own a device that might be
called a personal life recorder, or PLR.

(goes on to describe new MRAM--Magnetic RAM--chip - more storage, very small)

Going forward, MRAM could open similar possibilities, in time perhaps
giving rise to personal life recorders. Of course, PLRs will create a
whole new set of problems. Like, how would you search all that data to
find the conversation that proves you asked your spouse if it was OK if
your mother came to stay for a month?

Could a lawyer subpoena your PLR? What if Kobe Bryant had one that
night in the hotel room?

I'm worried about what it might do to our minds. Human brains enhance
and put a spin on memories the second they are stored. I might find out
that none of my goals in hockey look anywhere near as exciting as I
recall. That could precipitate some kind of major personality disorder,
couldn't it?

Kelso, feminism technology SF

Shaky (early 90s feminism) but some interesting ideas

The Silver Metal Imagination:
Blueprints for Changing Technology in Women's SF
by Sylvia Kelso

http://www.sff.net/people/eluki/litcrit.htm

tripathi: internet social aspects

Arun Tripathi, overlong but good resource

Community in the Digital Age
Social scientists and philosophers argue the meaning of our evolving online lives.
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/book_reviews/v5i28_tripathi-barney.html

Educause: blogs, wikis, other 2004 teaching/learning

TOC : Educause Review, September / October 2004
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm045.asp

Educational Blogging
Stephen Downes
The process of blogging - of reading onlin, engaging a
community, and reflecting on it - is a process of bringing
life into learning.
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0450.asp

Going Nomadic: Mobile Learning in Higher Education
Bryan Alexander
How are wireless, mobile technologies and their emergent
trends, such as swarms, affecting the learning environment,
pedagogy, and campus life?
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0451.asp

Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not
Brian Lamb
The needs met by “wikis”—documents posted online for
open editing by all—are simply not being satisfied by present
IT strategies and tools
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0452.asp

Game-Based Learning: How to Delight and Instruct in the 21st Century
Joel Foreman
To learn more about videogames in academe, the author spoke
with five leading-edge thinkers in the field: James Paul Gee, J. C.
Herz, Randy Hinrichs, Marc Prensky, and Ben Sawyer.
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0454.asp

Wait, there's more ! A special Web Bonus !


InsurgenceEmergenceConvergence: How to Fold Soup
Did Steve Martin, in his 1979 short story "How to Fold
Soup", offer suggestions on how to deal with multimedia.
Enjoy!
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0453.asp

Intersections: adopting/supporting new technologies,

Three separate strands of conversations have intersected in interesting
ways this week: the post "learn...teach...learn...repeat" and Chris R's
response to the Classroom Support thread, along with a discussion
happening on a CIT list. The first has to do with use and promotion of
blogs and the second with faculty reaction (resistance) to new
technologies. The last has to do with how students are reacting to the
new requirement to register their computers via NetReg and the
challenges in integrating them with UVMs network.

In all cases, though, the common theme is how new technologies are
adopted. As Chris M. points out, when every new tech toy is overhyped,
how can one even determine, much less decide to adopt, what will be
useful? Chris R. points out, and rightly so, that technologies can have
a positive impact on teaching and learning, so why should there be such
a resistance to their adoption. The CIT discussion parallels that plight
by bemoaning the lack of interest or amount of confusion among new and
returning students to their computers, and their seeming unwillingness
to do what's needed to provide a safe, virus-free environment for all at
UVM.

For those of us who spend our time at that intersection between new
technologies and hesitant users, this can be a tricky place. Should we
try out every new technology or wait until it has proved itself? Should
we demand that anyone who uses a computer on campus exhibit a particular
level of literacy or should we just "do it for them"? And of course the
age old question: does support mean we'll fix what's broken. Or, to
frame it in terms of the fish/fishing parable, does support mean we'll
feed you fish, teach you to fish, or take you out in fish-filled waters
and throw you off the boat, assured that you'll come up with something.

But I digress. To bring the focus in a bit: blogs. A couple years ago
when I first encountered blogs my reaction was "nice, but I'll wait and
see." Now I think that was wrong. Yes, to invoke the over-used McLuhan
idea, new technologies are not usually going to be much of a departure
from those preceeding them. As such, they may not look like enough of a
leap to get excited about. But it behooves those of us in that
intersection to explore and test not only the new technology as it is,
but the new technology as it might be. In this case, not "what do
current blogs look like, or do" but "what might the blog model lead to
and how can we shape it to be useful."

Unfortunately, though a university environment might seem to be the
perfect place for such experimentation, the fact remains that such
experimentation, with its obvious potential for many failures and
dead-ends, will often be at odds with the need to spend effort fixing
what's already in place. That is, fixing the plumbing leaks often
pre-empts exploring new possibilities.

In the realm of technology, where managing expectations and
communicating possibilities seem to be so difficult, the ability to
successfully adopt and promote a new idea is especially challenging. We
think we know what might be a great idea (using blogs, making sure all
computers have up to date virus software, etc.) but the time to
implement those good ideas is competing with other needs (get ready for
class, navigate conflicting media systems in classrooms, and do your
homework/do your research).

So what do we do? A couple ideas:
1) Continue to experiment. Don't ask for a technology to be proven
before trying it out. Try it. (Yes, I've started blogging...)
2) Don't expect adoption without determing need. Find a way to
communicate that need. People have to believe a technology will fill
their needs before they'll use precious time experimenting with it. For
example, how many people didn't see a need for WebCT before Shirley
showed them some of her uses for it?
3) Hope and pray that the administration will continue to let us
experiment to the extent that we have, even though they don't provide a
heck of a lot of support for what could be some really neat ideas

more...??

unicode numbers Mac

Mac OS X:
Working with an XML document containing numeric character entities and want to know what they represent? Display any Unicode character your system fonts can display by entering its numeric value, and display characters that are plus or minus any offset you want by doing addition or subtraction

Go to "View - Display Format - Unicode" from the menu.
If you had a numeric value in the previous display, it will be replaced by the equivalent Unicode character. You can display different characters by hitting the Clear button and then entering a new value. (The display will update each time you enter a numeral, since the calculator has no way of knowing whether you're going to enter a 2-digit, 3-digit, 4-digit or whatever value.) You can do Unicode math by hitting the + or - button and entering a value; the display will update to the appropriate offset from the character in the display.

This works for hexadecimal, too, if you start out with the hex
calculator.

(Thanks, David Sewell, for the tip.)

TEI Projects

From David Sewell:

The University of Virginia Press has released our first online TEI-based publication, THE DOLLEY MADISON DIGITAL EDITION, in the first of two installments comprising all of Dolley Madison's extant correspondence through June 1836. You're invited to take a look:
http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/dmde
For access to interior pages, click on "Login" and use the username
"TEI", password "orgName" (case-sensitive); this will be valid for a
couple of weeks.
All of the documents in this edition were coded in the Model Editions Partnership (MEP) variant of TEI, with introductory and supporting material in standard TEI for the most part. URLs ending in ".xqy" point to XQuery scripts that do the dynamic (or in a few cases static) HTML page generation, with underlying XML data stored in the Mark Logic Content Interaction Server database. The underlying data and code is not accessible via the reading interface, but for an idea of what the underpinnings look like, here is a walk-through based on a prepublication state of the documentary XML and the XQuery code:

http://www.ei.virginia.edu/Unlinked/DolleyDemo/

Swish-e, searching XML/TEI

http://swish-e.org/

Swish-e is an open source indexer/search engine. It excels at indexing
(X)HTML files, but indexes plain text and XML files almost as easily.
It comes with C, PHP, and Perl API's, and it runs under (over?) Unix as
well as Window's operating systems.

I am/will be using swish-e as the underlying indexer for searches
against TEI documents. Specifically, I have been marking sets of
literature up in TEI. I then convert the sets into a number of formats
such as plain text, XHTML, PDF, various Palm flavors, etc. I then use
swish-e to index the XHTML because swish-e does makes it easy to pull
out the meta tags of HTML head elements and make them field searchable
as well as the body of the text being free-text searchable. I could
have almost as easily indexed the raw TEI files, then then I have to
deal with transforming the XML before it gets to the browser. ("I know.
There are many ways to do that."). See:

http://infomotions.com/alex2/

I have also been fiddling with Plucene, a Perl port of Lucene, a
Java-based indexer/search engine library:

http://search.cpan.org/dist/Plucene/

Unlike swish-e, Lucene/Plucene are libraries. Swish-e is a
indexer/search engine binary as well as a library.

OAI-PMH Powerpoint slides: Gerry McKiernan

_Open Content and Access for Digital Scholarship_

"The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
(OAI-PMH) provides an application-independent
interoperability framework based on metadata harvesting. There are two
classes of participants in the OAI-PMH
framework: Data Providers and Service Providers. Data Providers
administer systems that support the OAI-PMH
as a means of exposing metadata from digital collections or
repositories; while Service Providers use metadata harvested
via the OAI-PMH as a basis for building value-added services. In this
presentation we will profile several major OAI-PMH Data
and Service Providers, and describe and discuss their innovative
content, features, and functionalities."


The REVISED and CORRECTED presentation has been self-archived at:

[ http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/OpenContent.ppt

XML Publication tool (TEI) - Anastasia

SourceForge.net: Project Info - Anastasia

Women Writers Project Encoding Guide

Women Writers Project Encoding Guide
(TEI, XML, markup)

Greek XML resources

June 2004
From John Walsh
http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/lib/xml/entities/ISOgrk1Unicode.ent
http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/lib/xml/entities/TEIgrkUnicode.ent

From David Sewell
It looks like the W3C is providing some off-the-shelf XLST 2.0
stylesheets to do this precise job for SGML standard entities and
others. See http://www.w3.org/2003/entities/
especially
http://www.w3.org/2003/entities/iso8879doc/overview.html
(where the stylesheets are linked to "XSLT 2 draft character map".)
Of course this won't do much good unless you have an XLST processor that handles the draft 2.0 spec, like the latest version of Saxon.

U. Washington, TabletPC, Classroom Presenter

UW Classroom Presenter 1.9.8 -
http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/dl/presenter/

"Classroom Presenter is a distributed presentation system for the Tablet PC. As a distributed system, the synchronized versions of the presentation are shared across multiple machines. The Tablet PC is used as the presentation device because of the high quality ink that it provides. A basic goal of Classroom Presenter is to provide an integration of computer generated slides and ink in a manner that allows instructors flexibility in delivery and interaction with the audience. Classroom Presenter has been used in a range of scenarios including distance education and in-class instruction. In the distance scenarios the instructor has lectured from a Tablet PC which was connected to computer in the remote room which displayed the slides and writing. In the in-class usage, the instructor uses a tablet pc which is connected to another machine which is driving the data projector. In the future, we will develop greater facilities for interacting with student devices in the classroom." (Source: University of Washington)

9s NINES: 19th cent. scholarship site

9s NINES 9s
"~ nineteenth-century scholarship ~
Over the past ten years a growing body of digital scholarly work has been undertaken, much of it put online, nearly all of it executed without peer review processes, none of it integrated (except by hyperlinking). NINES is a project to found a publishing environment for integrated, peer-reviewed online scholarship centered in nineteenth-century studies, British and American.

~ and a scholarly collective ~
NINES believes it is clearly in the interest of scholars to coordinate our work. We know that the migration of scholarship from paper-based to digital platforms and networks, already underway, will only grow apace. Scholars and educators must act on our own behalf if we are to help shape the form and result of this migration. To that end, NINES is promoting the means and a way for excellent work in digital scholarship to be produced, vetted, (eventually) published, and recognized by the discipline."

Delivering Classics Resources with TEI-XML

Cover Pages: Delivering Classics Resources with TEI-XML, Open Source, and Creative Commons Licenses.: "Delivering Classics Resources with TEI-XML, Open Source, and Creative Commons Licenses."

U of Washington ContentDM collection

Here's their example of a ContentDM collection
http://content.lib.washington.edu/index.html

UltraXML 3.3

UltraXML looks promising as a WYSIWYG XML editor
http://www.webxsystems.com/Registration.htm

EDUCAUSE REVIEW of WIKIS

You know when Educause has reviewd something it's well established, not new anymore...
EDUCAUSE REVIEW | September/October 2004,�Volume 39, Number 5

Example of wiki-based collaborative writing project

Matt Bowen's (Matt Kirschenbaum's student) wiki writing project.

FrontPage - writehere.net

Digital Medievalist

Lisa Spangenberg

IT: Instructional Technology

"As much as I am personally fond of things geeky and digital, quite often I see technology in instruction being used simply because it's there, rather than because it's a better way, or because the technology enhances student learning. I also see a lot of silliness in terms of technology and instruction, where a particular technology is forced on end users and faculty because some manager or administrative person thinks it's cool, or will draw fame and fortune to his career, rather than because it's effective or appropriate. Frequently faculty who would like to use technology are bewildered by the jargon and by the unfortunate arrogance of the technical experts they must work with, who, for all their technical expertise are, not surprisingly, sometimes woefully ignorant about pedagogy, and have no interest or understanding of the humanities."