Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

Today at 4:00 PM EST, over 60 avatars gathered on the Sun's island in Secondlife, cuing up to get a "ticket" for the first experimentation of the Wonderland Project by Sun's Microsystems. The event was organized by the MediaGrid which is a computational grid platform that promotes 3D virtual learning environment. The event had a slow start, mainly due to the registration process. However, many of the crowds managed to download the newest edition of Wonderland and got onto the platform. The system seems to be stable and here are some screen shots from the event:

Everyone cued up in Second Life, getting ready for Wonderland...

Picture taken from The Princess of Yaximixche's 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.

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.

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.

Sun Microsystems Inc donated its StarOffice code to the open source development community five years ago and that's when OpenOffice.org project was initiated. There have been over 50 million downloads since the project started. The development team just announced the release of version 2.0 which has been considered as a "significant milestone for the productivity software market".

There is an increasing intention of using open source products in government and educational facilities. The State of Massachusetts has chosen to move to the OpenDocument format as the standard for all office documents by January 2007. Government of India has released over 7 million OpenOffice source CDs in different native languages. Local government of Auvegne, France has passed 64 thousands of OpenOffice CDs to the students of the region.

Here at art Faculty of Arts, UBC, we have installed Open Office (Star Office) on all lab terminals (over 120 computers) for several years. Download a copy today to compare it against Microsoft Office Suite yourself, if the result is satisfying, why pay hundreds of dollars to type your daily document?

You can also use BitTorrent to download or order a CD from the website.

I wanted to write about BitFlux several months ago. I first heard this tool from a New Zealand friend - Brent Simpson. BitFlux is a browser (currently mozilla only) based WYSIWYG XML Editor. I know I know, there are lots of WYSIWYG editors out there. But what's worth to mention about BitFlux is that it allows editors to instantly edit any web pages at its EXACT look and feel. It is the really "What You See Is What You Get" editor. Here is how it works: you goto a website using a FireFox, and press "F7" to invoke BitFlux editor, then you will see all of the texts, links and images being outlined by dashed boxes. You can simply click on the boxes and change edit the components (type new text, change images, edit the links etc...).

The application is written in JavaScript and uses XML, XSLT, and CSS for rendering. It is usable with any XML document and features tables, lists, images, special chars, clipboard, undo/redo, and easy customization. I strongly recommend you try it out yourself and I guarantee you will be amazed of its functionality!

http://bitfluxeditor.org/

BitFlux Screen Capture

According to a new source-code analysis from Coverity, MySQL has very little bugs according to the software bug standards. There were total of 97 bugs found over hundreds and thousands lines of codes. According to Coverity, normally you find one bug per 1000 lines of source code. For MySQL, there was an average of one bug per 4000 lines of source code, which is four times better than is typical with commercial software. According to Zack Urlocker, vice president of marketing for MySQL, open source developers seems to produce cleaner and better structured codes than commercial software developments. This is simply because the codes will be seen by other programmers.

At free of cost, a stable open source database seems to be the best solution in the e-Learning industry. At Arts ISIT, we use MySQL and PHP for many instructional developments such as the learning tools and mixed-mode course developments. We are happy about the stability of these open source server technologies.