FLOSSE Posse

Back
with a very good feeling from the NL, where the first Open source for
Education in Europe conference took place.

I got my hands full of little goodies to bring home. I picked up a few TheOpenCDs to
bring home for Christmas, a Kubuntu
installation Cd, and brochures produced by OSS Watch, which is a Free
and
Open Source advisory service for UK higher and further education. Some
good advisory policies have been produced by OSS Watch, such as Developing
University Policies That Engage with Open Source Software, and Policy
on Open Source Software for JISC Projects and Services.  You
can find Stuart
Yeates paper on this, I guess slides will be available later on the
conference site.

Other interesting things that I had a chance to see:

• Of course, check out Stephen
  Downes’ presentation about his vision
  that he calls Metauniversity (he also called it Metaversity, I think
  combining meta-level and diversity). Open Learning
  and the Metauniversity , PPT Slides 
  and the MP3
  Audio.

  Mr. Downes talked about a concept for an information architecture, that
  could comply with the vision of M.Feldstein 
  “we need a system that is
  optimeised toward slotting in new pieces as they become available, not
  as an after-though or an add-on, but as a fundamental characteristic of
  the system…”. Neat, many good concepts, maybe this will work as a roudmap to inspire people to see further than tomorrow.

• My talk about Anticipating
  Round 2 of the EU Software patents battle took
  place on the second day.  Maybe one third of the audience was aware about the issue,
  so I had been asked to be pretty introductory about what software
  patents are, what is the current legislation in EU, and speculating how
  software patents could potentially
  hinder ICT in education. Slides will be available at the conference
  site later. I made a great impression (?) on the audience by stripping my
  jacket and showing off my "No Software Patents-Power to the Parliament"
  tee-shirt You can view a picture of that and the other pictures from the conference at vermario’s gallery.
• tOSSad project was also interesting. It’s yet another EU-founded
  project and the acronym stands for Towards Open source Software,
  Adoption and Dissemination. That is what the project is about, really.
  Check the site.
• About the presentations in workshops, I must say that I didn’t
  follow many. However, some are worth checking out, like this one: Using
  IMAP to Build a Virtual Learning Environment. It’s good that
  people think out of the box!
• To get an overview about what some Educational authorities and
  Ministries of Education are doing in Europe to promote the use of FOSS,
  you can find a paper
  by Karl Sarnow and me.

There were tons of other good stuff too, but you have to check it out
for yourselves on the programme.
Everything is available under Creative Commons and the conference used
this nifty Open Conference Systems
to make papers available online.

In general I got the impression that the conference audience was half
programmers and other half  was comprised of people who have
interest in using FOSS in education. Quite a fruitful mix, and I hope
some other stuff will come out of this. At least the continuation for
the conference would be great!

Other than that a variety of things were recommended such as an award for the best open source educational
software, this would raise awareness and by submitting products
to the award, the community would also create a good state-of-the-art repertory.
Also, a Yearbook idea was
discussed listing most interesting FOSS in education projects in
different fields and areas.

The preemptive position paper against
EU software patents idea got good reception at the conference.
We had a workshop about how to get going and many good ideas were
discussed. The timeline to get the arguments ready is by Dec 15, and at
the new year we will start campaigning about getting signatures,
spreading the word, etc. The minutes will be available also soon, watch
this space!

Some other people have posted on their blogs about the conference,

• Coverage of the conference by Josie Fraser (one http://fraser.typepad.com/edtechuk/2005/11/sound_bites_fro.html,
  two http://fraser.typepad.com/edtechuk/2005/11/stephen_downes_.html), 
• Graham Attwell

  http://www.knownet.com/writing/weblogs/Graham_Attwell,

• Tom Hoffman http://tuttlesvc.teacherhosting.com/blog/blosxom.cgi/personal/holland.html, 
• Vermario http://www.vermario.com/blog/?p=112,
• Brent Simpson http://blog.cfdl.auckland.ac.nz/archives/brent/000153.html, 
• Stuart Yeateshttp://connect.educause.edu/blog/stuartyeates/open_source_in_education_conference/1583

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/eusoftpat" rel="tag">softpat</a>
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I attended as an assisting organizer a conference entitled “eLearning & Corporate Competence”
at Kalastajatorppa, a Hilton hotel in Helsinki. Attendees included
high-profile people from the sector of eLearning in Finland, both
providers and customers. I was asked by Juha-Matti Arola from KONE corporation to work on the interactivity part of the conference, especially the learning buffet event.

Juha-Matti
was also interested in possibilities of corporate blogging and for that
purpose we created a blog for him. During the conference event we
posted over 10 posts, one being a podcast, right from the event. In
learning buffet we had George Siemens and Stephen Downes throwing a co-presentation about the changing nature of online learning. We used Skype for audio, S5 for slides, Dorgem for webcam, CGI::IRC for
chat (modified to receive mobile text messages) and some other
tools to carry out a very interactive and self-organizing event. Our
blog software, audio editing software, servers and everything else was
also Open Source. Next time I might try Gizmo project for audio, which relies more on open standards.

We also had teleconferences carried out with Centra where people like Jay Cross
gave presentations but my purpose was to show that all this technology
is already available for everyone who wants to be a prosumer, a creator
or a creative remixer in the networked world. The technology is cheap
(often no-cost and/or Open Source) and available for all. The
technology is able to achieve the exactly same capabilities and even
more than commercial alternatives. Online collaboration is already here
and not anymore a luxury of those who have the resources.

You can read all our blog reportages including presentations from
people like Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Jay Cross, Pirjo Ståhle,
Esko Kilpi, Bo Harald and others at Juha-Matti Arola’s blog.

I had a positive feeling at the conference. It seems a lot of people
think that platforms for online learning are dead. The approach to
design a business process for online learning, in which the learning is
only carried out in a separate learning environment and not embedded in
the work practices themselves is faulty. Information system-driven
business process thinking is dropping dramatically. Informal learning
also received a lot of attention and there was a lot of discussion how
we could support informal learning inside and outside organizations.
Our blogging effort and working as creators instead of consumers at the
conference was a living example of informal learning.

Another good thing is that many companies have moved from
technology-driven approach to competence-driven approach.
Technology is a very small part of their offering, the work always
starts from analyzing the needs, capabilities and people before
implementing any technology.

I also had a few good conversations why learning objects are dead as
well. Open Content, Open Source, consumers as creators, social software
and Web 2.0 also became familiar to people who attended the conference.