Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

My colleague John Bratlien recently wrote a summary on wiki comparisons. With his permission, I am posting the comparison result here and hoping it will help those of you who have demands to deploy your own wiki servers. Our IT infrastructure (mainly PHP/MYSQL applications) limits the pool of candidates selected for the comparison:

Overview and Objective:
Arts ISIT requires a fully featured and user friendly wiki solution to support our faculty in their teaching. The wiki interface should be intuitive so that a lay person can use it without more than just a basic introduction. In addition, we want a wiki solution that is low maintenance (easy to install, configure, support and upgrade).

Comparison:
The following matrix is a comparison of some key features offered by well documented, widely deployed, leading open source wikis. The focus is on PHP based wikis with the exception MoinMoin.

Notes:
* via plugin
** some of these wikis have experimental and beta versions of WYSIWYG editors, not production ready

Summary:
Ideally our requirements, WYSIWYG editor, easy inclusion of multimedia and intuitive management of content and users, are supported out of the box. Features that are part of the core are more likely to be robust than features added through plugins, as well plugins require additional work for separate installation and configuration. Of these wikis,
MoinMoin comes closest to meeting our usability requirements and does so primarily using core functionality. The PHP based wikis do not offer a workable WYSIWYG editor, however, of the bunch, TikiWiki offers the best pseudo WYSIWYG editor.
Regardless, lack of a WYSIWYG editor continues to scare off most users and therefore wikis lacking one should be eliminated from contention.

With regard to support and documentation, all of these wikis are adequate as all have highly active user communities and are well supported (as open source projects go).

Other Systems to consider:
There are PHP based wikis with fully featured WYSIWYG editors such as telepark.wiki and Triki-Wiki. However, telepark.wiki is not free; it costs 149 Euros to purchase. Triki-Wiki, on the other hand, is free and looks very promising but it is developed and maintained by only one individual, not a community. In addition, it is not widely adopted which makes it a riskier option as it lacks the support and documentation of a widely adopted wiki.

We have updated the user interface of the Pachyderm to VUE conversion tool. Now it is much simpler to get started. You don't need to choose the Pachyderm server, nor pick out the presentation KEY, just copy and paste the entire Pachyderm Presentation URL and the tool will do the rest. It should work on all Pachyderm servers out there. Enjoy the tool!

This afternoon, my co-worker Liang implemented a new feature for the Pachyderm-VUE converter tool. Now you can double click on each of the node once you open up the concept map in VUE and it will take you to the individual Pachyderm screen. There was a little "reverse engineering" there, but it worked. One step closer to the "deep crawling" version.

Thanks to Lou Zweier, we realized there are multiple Pachyderm servers out there now. Therefore, we implemented a drop down menu on the first step screen. Pachyderm.org server is set as the default server. Please email us for additional servers you want us to include in the converter!

Related to our Educause 2007 workshop, we successfully launched a new learning tool today, Pachyderm to VUE converter. This simple web application converts a Pachyderm presentation package into a .vue file, which then can be viewed in the open source concept map tool-VUE developed by Tufts University.

Remember the Pachyderm presentation I was working on a few days ago? So, this is what the Pachyderm Presentation looks like

And this is what the concept map of the Pachyderm presentation looks like:

How to get from the Pachyderm presentation to VUE? Really simple. Go to the tool page, copy and paste the presentation ID to the first screen of the tool and just follow the 3 easy steps, you will have a .vue file ready for download. Download it and then open it in VUE, you will have your concept map of the exact Pachyderm presentation you tried to convert in front of your eyes.

What’s next? We are working on version 2 of this tool which will “deep crawl” the Pachyderm packages and provide you a true concept map of each individual screens and lay out all of the assets used on that screen.

Why do we need this? Well, Pachyderm authoring is quite object oriented and random. When you have a Pachyderm presentation constructed in multiple screens (15+ in the Arts Metaverse one), it’s really easy to get lost in the process. And note this is only from a designer’s point of view. We realized that many students don’t even get the chance to see the entire presentation simply because they are lost between the screens:

Not to mention the tedious authoring process of each individual screen:

Therefore, we created this tool to help you visualize the Pachyderm package in a concept mapping tool, for now.

What’s possible in the future? Well, if we can ever get there, we will do a reverse authoring feature where utilize the newest functionalities from VUE 2.0 which allows you “swap” assets and media inside of VUE! Of course, this is a big IF at the moment. Maybe someone from the Pachyderm community can help to contribute towards the idea.

There is an interesting trend we learned from the development of this new tool. In the early days, learners drove us to convert linear, static, and purely text-based learning resources into rich media components. Over the years, you see more and more rich media based learning resources are being built and published online. Then the learners are demanding for a clear way to browse through these resources (very often in a traditional linear way). We have just taken a baby step to help Pachyderm users to take a grasp of outlining the media rich contents generated by this fascinating tool.

This is an open source application developed by the First Nations Studies Program at the University of British Columbia which synchronizes the video/audio file with transcripts. You can also "virtually cut" the video clip into "sessions" and easily explore through the entire archive. Every "session" is well defined in the meta-data perspective thus users can easily search through the video collection. The search function will allow the user to locate a particular section of the video and watch the "virtually cut" version on the fly. Check out the demo video archives produced with the tool:
(click on the "open IVT" button on the left hand side)

Get the tool here.

From Felix Turner, a true 3D image tilting effect in Flash with functions of dynamically drawing flickr images. Quite fancy. It uses Away3D, a branch of Papervision, an open source Flash 3D engine. These creative Flash developments really motivate me to get back to Flash coding. I need to squeeze some time out for actionscript 3!

Received an email notice from Brent Simpson today, the long waited eXe version 1.00 is launched! A great milestone for this amazing learning tool! Kudos to all the eXe developers! Here is a youtube video from Brent on the tool:

D'Arcy created this nice screen cast on how to use the great XML publishing tool from New Zealand - eXe for ePortfolio authoring. The newest release of eXe is 0.23 and it works on both Windows and MacOS X. You can also download some nice plugins from the download page. Such as:

# Java Applet iDevice - adds an iDevice for importing Java applets into eXe content.
# SCORM Quiz iDevice - adds an iDevice for utilising the quizzing functionality with SCORM.
# Flash Movie iDevice - requires some knowledge of Flash and related technologies.
# Moodle Discussion Forum iDevice

Found an interesting learning tool - World Average Life Expectancy Calculator Tool on Google Tool site today. It is done in Flash and shows you different nation's average life expectancy over the last 30 years (data up to 2004). Here are a few things you might want to pay attention to:

- All dots in charts are color coded according to geographical regions world wide: North/South America, Europe, Arabic, Africa, and Asia Pacific. Selecting the colors (simply move your mouse over the geographical regions) on the mini world map will make all the dots (countries) in the region blink for easier visual.

- The timeline bar at the bottom allows you to slide the time back and forth between the year 1975 to 2004. You can see the change of a nation's life expectancy vs income per capita on a yearly basis.

- Select the specific country you are looking for on the right hand side, simply check mark the boxes beside the country names.

- There are a few drop down menus in this tool, the one on the left hand side, allows you to change the indicators of the data (regions, income groups, military budget...)

- Notice the size of the dots also changes, which indicates the population growth I believe. Select the Map tag on the top to see the countries in a larger world map and slide the years to see the population changes. You can use the low right hand corner slider bar to emphasize on the population changes (increase the diameter of the dots).

- The zoom function allows one to zoom into a particular region or zoom out. Very handy when you want to view a particular group of data and analyze them.

- Select a country (or multiple, by clicking on the dots), then slide the timeline, you will see a line drown to display the changes of the selected data group.

My limited knowledge allows me to appreciate the tool from various of angles:

-Life expectancy and political instability: you can easily see a country's expectancy drops if there was a war or major political instability. The dots moves rapidly up and down (eg. South Africa, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Namibia)

- Economical Growth: associated with political changes or natural resources. (eg. China, Russian Federation, Equatorial Guinea)

-Population growth (eg. China, India)

- Internet Users per 1000 people: note how the color of China changed from yellow to orange-red in just 3 years between 2000 to 2004

Anyway, it's not just a simple world average life expectancy calculator. It's a tool that got a huge potential to collect, display, analyze world wide statistics for education purposes. Maybe that's why Google includs it in its collection of tools. Try it out yourself!

World Life Expectancy Calculator Tool

From Brent:

Version 0.15 of the eXe project has been released and includes the following changes:

- the ability to add a background image and/or a title to the Web Page export
- improved seamist style
- Slovenian wiki url to wiki iDevice
- Added Zulu translation
- Numerous bug fixes

Great work Brent's group has done. I recommend this to all educators who look for a platform independent solution in content publishing.

A community blog for Learning Tools is launched after over 1 month of private postings. The learning tools are a collection of web based applications created at the Instructional Support, Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia. From the community blog, you will learn the most recent development information and updates on the tools. You may also use the comments to let the developers know what do you think about the tools. All tools are under GPL and are open source. The source code and installation packages are being released on a regular basis. Go check it out!

Adobe has released a new update to Flash Player 8.0.24.0. Adobe recommends all users of Flash player to update due to a vulnerability has been found that attached to SWF files which may lead to take control of a user's system. So goto the Flash Player download center and update your systems.

From Brent's Blog, eXe version 0.10 is released today. This release is a remarkable milestone of the project. The current version uses TinyMCE as a rich text editor which has some great WYSIWYG features. eXe 0.10 comes with multiple language interfaces such as English, German, Chinese, Greek and Spanish. There is also an experimental Cloze iDevice as well as the External Web Site idevice. There is yet more exciting improvements coming in the following months.

Here is a wiki on iDevice.

blogchina.com adopted an existing technology (niu.la) and pushed out a new social bookmarking service. From the service, Chinese bloggers will be able to collect, organize, sort and exchange blog based information much more efficiently. It will accelerate the collaboration between the bloggers on the blogchina network. For those of you who have not used social book mark services, check out del.icio.us - a social bookmarks manager created by Joshua Schachter back in 2003. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others. The current users of del.icio.us have exceeded 500,000.

I wanted to blog this innovative project for a while now. Ever since Brent Simpson (University of Auckland) visited UBC in January and introduced us the project, I have paid a close attention to it. Brent has released the first copy of eXe program on Jan 10th. I downloaded a copy and tried it out; the result seems to be pretty impressive. It works exactly the way Brent described it when he was in Vancouver. Here is my understanding of how the current version works: once you download the setup file, it will install a local web server on port 8081. The server comes with a web based WYSIWYG interface and a XML node based file management system. It enables the content experts to author web content without connecting to a CMS or becoming proficient in HTML or XML markup language. The content generated using eXe can be then ported to any LMS in standard XML based format. The application is developed in Python, a very realiable programming language.

When you use the tool, you may notice there are pre-defined behaviors and topic names assigned to each nodes in the application like objectives, case studies, preknowledge activies, reading activities etc. However the CSS section does not seem to be completed yet. Click HERE to goto the eXe download page, and navigate around to learn more about the project.