Today David gives a presentation at Walton Hall, Milton Keynes in an OU seminar series. Entitled Towards ‘Writing’ on and for the Internet it starts with a brief introduction to the Spoken Word project, Spoken Word Services at the SALTIRE Centre and the most general objectives - our ‘pedagogical pluralism’ - of the learning environment we seek to create. (For an earlier exposition on such an environment see Towards a Communications and Information Technology Learning Environment (Donald et al, 2000)). It then concentrates on our presentation layer tools
Spoken Word Services Blog » Tag Archives for tag 'Sakai'
Open Source and the US Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education Report
Open source and open content are ratified by the Spelling Report from the US Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education. More details from Inside Higher Ed. http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/01/commission
Like the European Union, the UK Government and JISC, the US Secretary of Education’s Commission finds strongly in favour of Open Source and Open Content developments ….
‘The commission encourages the creation of incentives to promote the development of open-source and open-content projects at universities and colleges across the United States, enabling the open sharing of educational materials from a variety of institutions, disciplines, and educational perspectives. Such a portal could stimulate innovation, and serve as the leading resource for teaching and learning. New initiatives such as OpenCourseWare, the Open Learning Initiative, the Sakai Project, and the Google Book project hold out the potential of providing universal access both to general knowledge and to higher education.’
The State of Open Source Software
An interesting article has been published on the Inside Higher Education which examines a report
published by IMS about open source software adoption in higher
education. The article states that while interest in open source
software is increasing, “it’s not quite ready for prime time.”
The article also looks at Sakai and other Open Source VLE systems. The report published by IMS found that open source software is being
used on a massive scale by universities. According to the study
results, 57 percent of all American higher education institutions are
using open source software products somewhere within their
infrastructure. 53 percent of all American higher education
institutions use Apache, 51 percent use Linux, 38 percent use MySQL,
and 35 percent use Firefox. Those numbers clearly show that open source
software is widely used by American universities.
Read the full article from Inside Higher Education here.
Read the IMS report entitled “Best Practices in Open Source in Higher Education Study - The State of Open Source Software”
