FSOSS: Web 2.0, eLearning, and Open Source

Web 2.0, eLearning, and Open Source by Kevin Pitts, eLearning Faculty Advisor - Seneca College and James Humphreys, eLearning Faculty Advisor - Seneca College

The evolving “Web” (some have referred to the next generation of web use as Web 2.0) brings with it a need to rethink the wants and needs of the individual, and how that individual collaborates and shares with the communities to which he or she belongs. In this presentation we’ll look at the implications of Web 2.0 on elearning, speculate on the design and development of open source tools and services to meet the elearning needs of Web 2.0 users, and demonstrate some early innovations that may take hold as we move forward in the elearning web space.

This was another great session, also the one closest to my heart as a librarian as it was about the intersectin between education and technology and how the web can be a platform for education directly, not just as an adjunct to another delivery method. Great stuff.

The presenters began by defining Web 2.0, something that they did very quickly given that the audience was generally quite tech-savvy. They note that W2 is all about dynamic social networking and that it fits well with contstructivist pedagogy. They propose a kind of emergent elearning model, noting that in the past elearning has mostly been about course management software (CMS) or course web pages. This new model would include things in addition to CMSes such as blogs, wikis and virtual environments. This is symptomatic of an shift in the use of technology in education from the administrative side to the academic side. The tech begins to be used as an extra to a course, like a blog or wiki or a social network, feeding the long tail of niche markets in knowledge.

This is where FOSS comes in handy. With the merging of a lot of the proprietary systems companies, like Blackboard & WebCT, there's a lot of opportunity for FOSS products to get in the door, as they become part of the review process as product decisions are made. The niche markets in educational needs, the long tail, can be well served by FOSS products as they move out of the backoffice apps like operating systems to mainstream elearning applications. They mentioned there is a kind of "sweet spot" in FOSS products where the combine a specific niche and product maturity. Some examples are Moodle and Sakai for CMSes.

Some future directions? The most fascinating one was a promotional video they showed of a college that's established a campus in the Second Life virtual world, demonstrating that people are actually teaching in a game-like vitual world. Next they talked about the Seneca social networking product ELGS which uses a "friends" metaphor to provide blogs & wikis. This lead to a discussion of the CLEA environment, short for Create/learn/explore/activities.

To sum up, FOSS operatings systems seem to be at the tipping point leading to greater acceptance; we are entering the "teaching and learning" era of elearning systems which leads to a more distributed and democratized learning experience, making institutional/technological cultures more open, surrendering some of the need for ownership & control.

(TOC of my FSOSS posts, FSOSS agenda, video recordings of sessions)

(There were 3 presenters, not two like in the agenda. Unfortunately, I don't have the third name, anyone else have it so I can include it.)

FSOSS Keynote: The selling of Linux and Open Source : Do we suck at this or what?

The selling of Linux and Open Source : Do we suck at this or what? by
Marcel Gagné, Author of "Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!" and Linux Journal Columnist

If Linux desktops and Open Source solutions are the answers, then we might just be doing a terrible job at getting the message out. By anybody's count, the 'year of the Linux desktop' has come and gone a few times now. Arguably, the open source community has a better product, but it's impact in the marketplace is uninspiring. Marcel will explore the techniques we've used to sell Linux (including FOSS), analyzing what works and what doesn't. He'll present some outlandish ideas for improving our image and, hopefully, making a bigger splash.

Marcel Gagné's keynote was clearly the highlight of the conference for me. Almost a therapy session for the FOSS community, it was basically about how to spread the word about the good things that are going on out there. The talk certainly had a lot of resonance for me, as I think self-promotion is something libraries and librarians could do a much better job of on campus and in academia as a whole these days. Gagné used a lot of humour to make his points; he was by far the best speaker of the day. A lot more people like him would go a long way to making the problem he highlights go away.

Gagné started by mentioning that every year for the past 5 or 6 someone has declared it "The Year if the Linux Desktop" and that Linux would finally make the breakthrough into mainstream computing. Well, every year, it doesn't quite happen that way. And Gagné wants to know why. The first problem he sees is that FOSS proponents are always apologizing for the shortcomings of the products. On the other hand, Microsoft and those guys never apologise for the shortcomings of their products. perhaps FOSS advocates should also adopt the same damn-the-torpedoes attitude.

But how to do it? Adopt the same strategies as professional marketers (and sellers, too; he makes a distinction between marketing and selling). Use the tried and true marketing strategies to market what is definately a superior product. First of all, the Product: emphasize Linux, the poster child of free software. Next, Price: he makes sure to note that FOSS isn't really totally free and we need to reassure business and others that we understand the costs of support, training and the like. Place: how to we distribute FOSS? Online, stores, magazines, install fests. And finally, Promotion: two things need to be done here. First, FOSS advocates need to educate the public and second, they need to understand the market.

He points to one of the main things holding FOSS and that's fear. Fear of Microsoft taking over any market, fear of being sued, fear of dumb laws like DMCA, fear of the unkown and, mostly, FUD -- a general fear, uncertainty and doubt that prevents businesses and comsumers from taking the plunge.

What have some successes been so far? Gagné mentions the famous Firefox ad in the NYT, the Ubuntu billboard and the IBM prodigy commercials, the Red Hat truth happens ads; real attempts to mobilize & inform the public. Has it helped? Server side, there's 20% growth for FOSS; desktop has been very disappointing.

What is to be done? Gagné says we need to do market research, to find out what potential customers really want, like www.betterdesktop.org. If you or I could put up a billboard in downtown Toronto, what would it say? We need a Linux & FSOSS marketing board like commodities do in Canada, such as wheat or dairy products. We need more crazy ideas. And most of all, we need to just stop talking to each other about how our marketing efforts suck and just get out and start talking to potential customers, developers and evangelists.

(Update: TOC of my FSOSS posts, FSOSS agenda, video recordings of sessions)

(Update: fixed some accent problems on the é)

FSOSS: Curious George and the $100 Million Supercomputer

Curious George and the $100 Million Supercomputer by Phil Schwan

For the last four years I helped build storage systems for the largest government, corporate, and academic clusters in the world. This morning we'll do a whirlwind tour of some of the corner cases nobody talks about: not just how to store petabytes of data and transfer tens of gigabytes per second (that part is easy?), but our struggles with Linux kernel disasters, physicists who think they're software developers, POSIX-induced migraines, and debugging a 10,000-node state machine on hardware nobody else has from the wrong side of a classified network.

The most gloriously techie of all the sessions I attended, so much so that quite a bit of the hard-core unix/linux stuff was a bit beyond me. In any event, it was still very interesting. Schwan co-founded Lustre, a company that does file systems for super huge cluster computing systems. The talk was about the challenges of creating these highly parallel cluster systems.

The aim of the Lustre project he discussed was to create a petabyte storage system that was also very fast, supporting 10GB/sec transfer rates. Some of the other goals of the system were to be able to support the largest supercomputer systems, be one of the top 500 cluster computing sites, to use the POSIX Semantics file system and to have a 100% recovery rate.

There were a couple of uncomfortable lessons from this effort: don't bother writing your own operating systems for a project like this, as it will only cause a lot of delays. The api interface to the Linux kernal is far too unstable
to use for a high-profile project (in particular, this part was very techy). One good thing they learned: using POSIX as a file system was a good choice as it made the whole cluster behave like one machine.

The next part of the talk was called, "Software Sucks," basically about the perils of very large software projects. A bit naive about such things they learned many lessons (perhaps they should have read the Fred Brooks' book above...or perhaps any book on software engineering?). First of all, the software industry is a disaster, allowing error rates no other industry would tolerate. Typical comparason: if bridges or planes failed at the same rate as software? The did discover the Personal Software Process methodology which saved their bacon, but I suspect virtually any methodology would have done the same.

(Update: TOC of my FSOSS posts, FSOSS agenda, video recordings of sessions)

FSOSS Keynote: You Should Be Giving This Keynote

You Should Be Giving This Keynote by Mike Shaver, Co-founder, Mozilla Project

In addition to the too-good-to-be-true economics created by the upsurge in software released under increasingly liberal licenses, open development practices and "loosely coupled" projects are demonstrating the power inherent in large and diverse communities. Mike will convince you, through examples, analogies and speaking really, really quickly that the ability to capture even "trivial" contributions from all directions will be more important to the success of modern open source projects than version control, usability guidelines, review processes, licensing, marketing or a really awesome T-shirt design. You will be tested on this material.

This was a very good keynote, a great way to start off the conference. Shaver started by emphasizing the importance of project management in any software development endeavor, namechecking Fred Brooks' classic The Mythical Man Month, especially the human skills needed by software developers and their managers. He then went on to discuss the overall theme of his keynote, that small is beautiful. Small in the sense that FOSS projects can survive and thrive on a lot of little contributions from a lot of different people and that small can be a good way to get started. In fact, Shaver says that we should beware people that jump into a project with grand, world-changing ideas as they care often undoable in FOSS projects. Starting small means people with only limited interest or limited skill levels can jump in and make a contribution right away. The danger of small can be that you risk loss of knowledge and continuity when the one advocate/developer of an idea or feature drifts away.

About small, to make it work you have to make it easy for interested people to go from consumers of a product to producers of that same product, find ways to draw people in. Similarly, you also need to make it easy for people to get out too, so that they don't risk burning out. People should be able to make their contribution and withdraw, if that's what they want. Small also needs a culture of testing, to make sure that "small" contributions don't cause the whole system to fail. You also need to make your needs clear on a project, possibly via a public wish list, so people know immediately if they're interested in contributing. Related to this is managing expectations, almost an anti-wishlist so people know what you don't want ie. out-of-scope, clearly for a later version.

Finally, Shaver made a plea for everyone to contribute to FOSS projects, that everyone has some X-Factor, something that they're really good at, that they can contribute. The kinds of competencies he mentioned include: writing skills, math, single-mindedness & focus, artistic ability, reading, listening (ie. tech support, bug finding).

(Update: TOC of my FSOSS posts, FSOSS agenda, video recordings of sessions)

Free Software and Open Source Symposium

I spent last Friday at the Free Software and Open Source Symposium held at the Seneca@York campus. It was a fascinating day of presentations that I'm very glad I attended. It was the 5th annual symposium, which was interesting since I somehow managed to miss the first four, even though they were held just a stone's throw from my office!

Overall, a very stimulating conference with lots of ideas for the free & open source software (FOSS) community. The entire agenda is here, recordings of all the sessions are here. Some of the sessions I missed but am looking forward to catching the videos for:

• One Laptop Per Child Project by Chris Blizzard
  
• Pure Data: An Open Source Programming Language for Artists by Dafydd Hughes
  
• Little "s" Semantic: Exploring Metadata About the Web by Nathan Yergler
  
• Keynote: Monkeys, Desktops and Dictionaries: The Mechanics of the Revolution by Nat Friedman

In any case, the next bunch of posts will include the abstracts and some impressions from a few of the sessions I attended.

Update: Here's links to the rest of my posts:

• Web 2.0, eLearning, and Open Source
  
• The selling of Linux and Open Source : Do we suck at this or what?
  
• Curious George and the $100 Million Supercomputer
  
• You Should Be Giving This Keynote