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New Elgg release dates

October 21, 2008 in Elgg, open source, Social Networking, Technology, Uncategorized | 1 comment

Tentative release dates have revealed for Elgg versions 1.1 and 1.5. Version 1.1 has a target date of November 3, 2008. Version 1.5 is due next February. Bear in mind these time frames are not set in stone.

Pete Harris, the Elgg dev team’s designer, has released a number of great themes requiring Elgg version 1.09. Currently, this version is only available in Elgg’s SVN repository. Users that reported they didn’t have the expertise to obtain the files via Subversion, were advised by Pete that the target release date is November 3. Those willing to learn how to use SVN can go to my blog post Elgg and Subversion.

The current Trunk of Elgg is labeled 1.09. Today brought another round of updates, while not major, requiring another database upgrade. The Elgg team is obviously focusing on this as each of the last three times I updated my Elgg files I have had to update the database.

Ben Werdmuller announced the roadmap for the Elgg 1.5 release with a list of new features. Some of these features appear to address concerns about performance and scalability including views and location caching along with the abiltiy to create multiple sites with sub-sites.

Others appear to be appearance and customization related. More themes and a basic mobile view are planned. Also mentioned were a selection of canvas layouts and improved front page layout.

User enhancements include simple media embedding into text fields. While this is currently possible through some extended tinymce plugins, they work outside the core Elgg files system.

I am sure the team will continually work to enhance database performance and usability. They have mentioned a query object allowing deeper database work and a drillable site-wide stream making it easier to hone in on what you are looking for. The metastring garbage collection will delete lingering database remnants.

Some new administrative tools are planned. They plan to further develop a submenu system with better grouping. A construction tool for form based plugins is also in the works.

Finally, we will be able to delete groups. A long awaited upgrade path from Elgg Classic will be developed, and there will be enhancements to OpenDD.

While we all look forward to these milestones, we must bear in mind that not all goes as planned. It is better to be a little later and more bug free!

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Commercialization of Web 2.0 in Education

October 5, 2008 in open source, Technology | No comments

Commercial interests have insinuated themselves into schools in many ways over the past several years: news programs aimed at students with advertising, sweetheart soft drink deals offering kickbacks to school districts. The list is endless. The newest manifestation of this trend is the offer of free web 2.0 tools for students and educators by a number of companies including Google.

Commercial interests have a profit motive in offering these “free” services to schools–otherwise they wouldn’t do so. If they do not charge for these services, how to they plan to finance or monetize these services? There are a number of ways.

First, there is advertising. Many of these free sites include advertising on their pages targeting the demographic of the typical reader. Worse yet, sometimes it includes advertising that is inappropriate for the educational setting. You have no control over what appears. To their credit, some sites offer advertising free access. That means, however, that they must be finding other ways to make it profitable.

Marketers highly value any information regarding the behaviors and patterns of school age children.  Aggregated data on Internet usage of children this age is extremely valuable and where better to find this data than our schools? By directing students to use these commercial tools, we are delivering a treasure trove of data to these companies. Brand loyalties also begin to form at these ages.This is why Coke and Pepsi were so willing to offer schools lucrative kickbacks for offering only their brands in school vending machines before there was a backlash.

Additionally, many Internet services have in the past started as free only to change to for pay models down the line once one has grown accustomed to the service. Those of us who have been on the Internet a long time has seen numerous such instances.

Another peril is data ownership. What many users to not realize is that hidden deep in the text of many Terms of Service is language which passes ownership of the content from the user to the company. Others simply have users unknowingly relinquish their materials to the public domain. Releasing content to the public domain can be a good thing, but individuals should understand that they are doing so.

Many Web 2.0 evangelists tout these tools on the websites, in their books, and at conferences. Cash strapped schools and teachers latch onto them without a second thought. In essence, much of the Web 2.0 movement is telling students to march lock stepped into the hands of these commercial interests. We are teaching acquiescence to big business.

I believe it is one thing to mention these tools to students and examining the terms of service while they do so. What I have seen however, is teachers blithely instructing students to register accounts on Blogger, or some other web service as a matter of fulfilling course requirements. I don’t think that we have the right to do this.

There are alternatives. Free and open source software alternatives exist for almost every web 2.0 tool. While they must be hosted on a server, such can be done very inexpensively on existing school infrastructure, or by renting servers or space on servers for little money. Last year, our school ran several such tools on rented server space for about $10 a month. I believe that we as schools and educators have a moral imperative to move in this direction. I discussed this in an earlier post as well.

Many of my previous posts have centered on open source Web 2.0 tools and their deployment in education. Future blog posts will continue to seek out the tools as an alternative to the commercialization of Web 2.0 in education.

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Elgg 1.0 Test Installation Updated

August 8, 2008 in open source, Social Networking, Technology | No comments

Elgg developers recently rolled out a new test installation of Elgg 1.0 with the new Friends features. Yesterday, they added the Groups. Between these features much has been added to controls over access to content.

Now friends includes the ability to create collections of friends from your list of friends. This allows you incredible flexibility in configuring access to any specific content that a user may create. These collections of friends then appear on the access control options when creating new content. For example, I created a collection of friends called “Elgg Developers” consists of Ben, Dave, and Pete. Now when I set access to a file I uploaded, for example, my access options include not only private, logged in users, and public, but also “Elgg Developers” or any other collection that I may have created.

Groups can also be created easily. Once created, a group has it’s own “Profile” page along with a forum and the option of creating additional pages for the group. Membership can be controlled just like access to a given file upload.

It looks like the features are coming together quickly now as we approach the August 18 release date. I see a robust, top-notch, open source, social network platform coming soon! I will post more details including screen shots shortly!

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Elgg 1.0 Release Date

August 1, 2008 in open source, Social Networking, Technology | No comments

Elgg just posted an August 18 release date for Elgg 1.0. Elgg core developers have been beleaguered by requests for releases and release dates for several days. I know some of the developers that have worked with Elgg in the past have had the code about a week and are making progress squashing bugs. Hopefully this will help clear the air.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

There are also indications that some new features will appear when they update their test site in the near future. Core developer Ben Werdmuller stated that the site would soon feature groups and friends collections with an upcoming upgrade. Currently on the test installations users can set access to their content to:

  • Public
  • Logged in users
  • Private

This upgrade will give users the ability to add various friends collections and groups to these options giving incredible flexibility with access control. Once we see these features, we should have much more insight into the workings of Elgg 1.0. Here’s a link to what Ben says about access control.

I’ll have screenshots and an overview of the features as possible.

The Elgg Blog is also a great source of information about this upcoming release.

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Open Source Server-Side Word Processor: The Missing App

July 30, 2008 in open source, Technology | No comments

How many times have we heard the excuses and problems? My printer is out of ink. I couldn’t find my flash drive. The software at home/school are not compatible. All are common problems sharing work between home and school, and word processing is probably the bulk of work that is ferried between the two. Wouldn’t it be great to have a server based word processor that allowed students to work from anywhere with the Internet, plus allow them to save their files to the server?

Some would ask what about Google Docs? Yes, it meets the bill in many ways. It is server based and allows users to save to Google’s servers, and even share their work with other individuals. The problems with Google Docs are two fold–the terms of service and data ownership. To sign up for a Google account one needs to be of legal age to enter into a contract with Google. Furthermore, I don’t think it would be legal for a child under 13 to use Google Docs in the United States because of CIPA. The other concern is that the students’ data and personal information would reside on Google’s servers. If we tell students to use Google or almost any other hosted web application, we are telling them to hand over their data, usage patterns, browsing habits, etc. It is one thing to decide to do that as an adult, and quite another to tell our students to do so.

Adobe’s Buzzword is another option. The hosted variant has the same problems faced with Google Docs. There is a browser based alternative that can be embedded in a website as a widget. Students could use that without entering into an agreement with Adobe, but there is no way to save the document to a server. It must be saved to a local drive. That being said, it offers a great array of formats including test, rtf, pdf, open office, and Word.

Another product, AjaxWord, looked good until I discovered that it only worked with Internet Explorer 5 and 6. Their website was inactive when I began to look into the product and at this writing is not available. Drilling down deeper with a SourceForge Search, I found nothing but abandoned projects.

I’m a bit puzzled by the lack of development in this area. I certainly would be an important application for school and other settings. Hopefully, a reader can point me to something that I have missed. Perhaps in the future Google will release the code for Google Docs. In any case, I will continue search for this potentially “killer” app.

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