I have been approached by several friends in China asking me about smalltalk and Squeak. Due to my limited knowledge in the language, I pointed them to the Squeak Chinese community site on Google Code. There are a couple of well-translated learning materials to assist the beginners to learn about Squeak. Many thanks to the volunteers who initiated the page.
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!
Open Source for Education in Europe 2005 is taking place at Open University of the Netherlands today and tomorrow. As the name indicates, this conference focus on open source developments in the elearning communities. The topics cover learning with Open Source, Open standards for e-learning, sustainability strategies and open content, issues and implications. My friend Brent Simpson is in the conference to demostrate on using eXe. For those of you who are in the conference, I highly recommend this workshop. For more information on the eXe project, refer to this post.
Wikipedia ranked #1 in montly traffic compare to other knowledge database websites with 12.8 million visitors in September 2005. Leading by 9 million vistors over Yahoo Education whom is the second place in the ranking of the same genre.
It's amazing how well wikis are being used in the education field for collaborative knowledge building. Attended Colleen Carmean's seminar yesterday on "Designing for a Difference". She showed a perfect example on how efficient has wiki been used for a campus wide ISIT initiative at the University of Arizona.
The data was taken from iresearch.com.cn
OOPS stands for "Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System". This is a huge "Course Translation" project. Open Courseware is not a strange term for Chinese. The China Open Resources for Education (CORE) who has been looking into MIT's Open Courseware for a while. Recently, a large consortium funded by a Taiwanese creative foundation (fantacy.org.tw) has initiated a project which will translate many foreign open coursewares such as MIT's Open Courseware and courses from public health department of Johns Hopkins University into Chinese. This will allow many Chinese academics to be exposed to the first class learning content around the world. This organization now has over 1500 Chinese volunteers to do the translation, publication and web development. This will be the world largest course translation project. There are currently 55 courses completed translation, 305 courses partially online, 920 courses in progress. Over 6000-8000 learners browse the web site each day which sums up to over 120 thousands visitors per month.
Simplified Chinese version (mainland Chinese, Singapore):
www.cocw.net</code>
Traditional Chinese Version (Taiwan region and HK): www.twocw.net</code> Did you know you can get $500 US dollars for every bug you find on Firefox?! The Mozilla Foundation is committed to this promise so seriously that they made a public offer to a German bug hunter $2,500 US dollars for the five vulnerabilities he discovered. This once again reflect the bright future of the open source community. In contrast, the software giant-Microsoft only relies on a team of beta-testers who tests the programs without being rewarded at all other than a price reduction or bonuses for the program they are testing.
I truly believe the current product oriented business model will soon be replaced by service oriented business model in the software industry. This may also help the software providers to fight against the increasing piracy issues.
Google launched an open source development community - code.google six months ago. Chris DiBona, director of the Google open source iniatives mentioned recently that Google is going to increase the exposure of this community and use it as a two-way portal connecting the community and the open source developers. Many developers in Google are coming from an open source development background, and Google needs to keep a healthy relationship with the open source community in order to compete with the giant corperates like Microsoft and Yahoo. Here are some descriptions of the community from Google:
What is code.google.com?
Code.google.com is our site for external developers interested in Google-related development. It’s where we’ll publish free source code and lists of our API services.Who are the people behind code.google.com?
A lot of people worked together to both prepare source code for release and prepare code.google.com for launch and ongoing maintenance. We really care about free and open source software (F/OSS) at Google, and this site is one aspect of that affection.
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