Mantex

Tutorials, Study Guides & More

  • HOME
  • REVIEWS
  • TUTORIALS
  • HOW-TO
  • CONTACT
>> Home / Technology / Open Sources

Open Sources

open source developments – technology, politics, and eCommerce

open sources - technology, politics, and eCommerce

Content: Copyright and DRM

December 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future

Cory Doctorow is a young Canadian freelance writer and web entrepreneur who lives in London. He’s an editor of Boing-Boing and former director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; he writes science fiction novels, and he gives his work away free of charge – yet makes a living from his writing. How can it be done? That’s one of the things he explains here. Content: Copyright and DRM is a collection of speeches, essays, and articles he has produced in the last few years, proselytising in favour of open source software, against digital rights management (DRM) systems, against censorship, on copyright, and in favour of the free exchange of information, unhindered by state controls or commercial prohibitions.

Content: Copyright and DRMAt their most fervent, his arguments come across like those of a students’ union activist – but he’s brave. He speaks against Digital Rights Management (DRM) to an audience at Microsoft. The reason he’s a successful journalist is that he understands new media technology, and he has a gift for wrapping up his arguments in a vivid and succinct manner:

Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list.

He has a racy and amusing journalistic style. He writes in short, almost epigrammatic statements with a no-holds-barred attitude to any potential opposition.

As Paris Hilton, the Church of Scientology, and the King of Thailand have discovered, taking a piece of [embarrassing] information off the Internet is like getting food colouring out of a swimming pool. Good luck with that.

Some of the items are quite short – quick reprints of web pages from the Guardian technology section – but they are all pertinent to the issues of creativity and new media. Why for example does the best eCommerce site in the world (Amazon) want to control what you do with your Kindle downloads? Doctorow argues that these are short-sighted policies which prevent the spread of information and the creation of new developments.

He’s gung-ho about the business of eBooks and eCommerce. He makes his books available free as downloads on the Internet, confident that this will result in more sales of the printed book. There’s no actual proof that it results in more sales – but he’s happy with the results, and so is his publisher, and the publicity gives him income from other sources, such as journalism and speaking engagements.

Having said that, more than 300,000 copies of his first novel were downloaded for free, resulting in 10,000 printed books sold. As he argues, that’s like thirty people picking up the book and looking at it in a bookstore for every one who made a purchase. But the thirty pickups cost almost nothing, and I think many authors would be very happy with sales of ten thousand.

[It should be remembered that the average full time writer makes approximately £3,000-5,000 a year – and if you look at that in terms of a forty hour week, it’s less than £2.50 per hour.]

The sheer range of his subjects is truly impressive. There’s a chilling insider report from a committee discussing DRM, an essay on a sub-genre of science fiction writing called fanfic, and even a satirical piece calling into question the limitations of meta-data.

He’s at his strongest on the subject of copyright – and that includes the rights of the person who buys the book, the film, or the MP3 music file. The author has the right to be paid for selling it to you, but you have the right to do with it (almost) whatever you wish.

He has any number of interesting things to say about the nature of eBooks – from their apparent problems, their multiple formats, and their malleability, to the issues surrounding copyright. And the encouraging thing is that he writes not just in theory but as a working writer who is exploring the eBook business and what it can do – for both authors and readers.

If you want to know what’s happening at the sharp end of digital publication and new ideas about the relationships between authors and their readers – do yourself a favour and listen to what he has to say. You might not agree with it all, but it will give you plenty to be thinking about.

copyright   Buy the book at Amazon UK

copyright   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2009


Cory Doctorow, Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future, San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2008, pp.213, ISBN: 1892391813


More on eCommerce
More on media
More on publishing
More on technology


Filed Under: e-Commerce, Journalism, Media, Open Sources, Publishing, Theory Tagged With: Business, Copyright, Digital Rights Management, DRM, e-Commerce, Media, Open Sources, Publishing

Hackers and Painters

June 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

software design, open sources, and eCommerce

Paul Graham co-wrote the software for Viaweb, which was bought out by Yahoo for their successful build-it-yourself online stores kit. Hackers and Painters is his reflections on software design, eBusiness, open software, and capitalism today. You might be surprised by the resulting mix. It’s written in an engaging, grab-you-by-the-lapels style, and because he’s studied it, a lot of the argument is conducted via the metaphor of painting. Overall this works, because he is putting the case for craftsmanship, discipline, and originality. He makes an interesting defence of a hacker’s right to disregard copyright – on the grounds that we need to keep their anti-authoritarian attitudes alive to preserve civil liberties, defending a free, strong society.

Hackers and PaintersHis next subject is Web-based software. This is where you don’t buy and install software on your own computer. Instead, it sits on a central server, and you interact with it via a web browser – which might be a mobile phone, a PDA, or a telephone. If necessary of course, you could also use a computer. The central item in what’s billed as ‘Big ideas from the computer age’ is upbeat and inspiring advice for would-be start-ups:

There are only two things you need to know about business: build something users love, and make more than you spend. If you get these two right, you’ll be ahead of most startups. You can figure out the rest as you go.

It’s a combination of technological theory, eBusiness strategy, and tips for would-be software developers. But because he’s anti-authoritarian, a supporter of open source software, and all in favour of free enterprise, don’t imagine he’s a traditional radical. One of his essays is an argument in favour not only of individual wealth, but encouraging differences in wealth.

There are two interesting essays on the evolution of programming languages. Non-technical readers don’t need to worry, because they are written in a lively, jargon-free style that’s easy to understand.

Despite my reservations on his economic policies, he shot up in my estimation when he put his cards on the table regarding the academic world:

In any academic field, there are topics that are ok to work on and others that aren’t. Unfortunately the distinction between acceptable and forbidden topics is usually based on how intellectual the work sounds when described in research papers, rather than how important it is for getting good results. The extreme case is probably literature; people studying literature rarely say anything that would be of the slightest use to those producing it.

There is a whole policy review, a major reinvestigation of ‘lit crit’, and a great deal of intellectual soul-searching to be done on the strength of that one observation alone.

At the heart of the book, there’s also an argument in favour of the Lisp programming language. It’s what he used to write his successful venture at Viaweb.

This is a lively and thought-provoking collection of studies which comes from somebody who has both done the programming first hand, and thought a lot about the social consequences of it.

© Roy Johnson 2010

Hackers and Painters   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Hackers and Painters   Buy the book at Amazon US


Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2010, pp.272, ISBN: 1449389554


More on eCommerce
More on media
More on publishing
More on technology


Filed Under: e-Commerce, Open Sources, Theory Tagged With: Computers, Hackers and Painters, Open Sources, Technology

Intellectual Property and Open Source

July 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a practical guide to protecting code

The Open Source movement makes software available free for people to use or even to pass on to others. This flies in the face of normal commercial practice, where people jealously guard their intellectual property rights. Traditional laws support these rights – so when new open source projects come into being, often as a result of work done collectively, it can be difficult to disentangle issues of ownership and control. This is equally true for the written word as well as for digital code.

Intellectual Property and Open SourceVan Lindberg’s new book is an amazingly thorough guide to the whole business. He explains the legal niceties without resorting to too much jargon, and supplies practical support materials in the form of sample licences and agreements. The first part of the book has eight chapters giving an introduction to intellectual property law, then the second part is six chapters offering an intellectual property handbook for developers, particularly those working in the field of open sources.

He warns that it’s a book of general principles, not specific advice, for the very good reason that cases of copyright, patents, and intellectual property rights are very case specific. Nevertheless, he does discuss lots of instructive individual cases, and I imagine that anybody with a need to know in this complex field of legislation will find what he has to say both instructive and chastening.

He explains the law on copyright, patents, and inventions by comparing it to computer programming, which it turns out to resemble remarkably closely. One new ruling (or code) is bolted on to that which already exists, and the whole statute grows by a process of accretion.

As a layman, it’s interesting to learn that you cannot patent an idea – no matter how original an invention it might be. You can only patent the proof that it can actually be realised and turned into something useful. And even the term ‘useful’ is coded – as his example of a patent dust cover for dogs illustrates. It can be used – even though the idea itself is quite barmy.

On Open Sources he explains that software is free as in ‘free speech’, not ‘free beer’ – but this distinction will mean little to everyday users who are happy to download a program that works well without having to pay for it.

The picture becomes clearer when he explains the success of various Open Source projects – FireFox, Linux, Apache – many of which have formed the basis for successful business ventures. The software itself is free to use and distribute, but companies have legitimately made money from offering services in support of its use.

He’s very good at explaining the complexities of rights developed whilst you are in somebody else’s employment. In brief, you’ve very little chance of succeeding, and he even includes some tragic cases of people who have lost lawsuits on works patented before and after they have been in somebody else’s employ. If there’s a barely-hidden message here, it’s ‘stay away from legal contests’.

As a rule, employees should assume that any intellectual output they produce whilst employed will be considered proprietary information and subject to the company’s proprietary information agreement (PIA). It doesn’t matter if the invention is in a completely different area of technology, or completely unconnected with your work; it still may be covered.

Even if you wish to make your work available free to the public, there are a number of different licenses to choose from, offering a sliding scale of ownership and control – such as public domain, open source, and reciprocal. The general advice he gives is not to attempt writing your own.

One thing is for certain. It’s potentially a very complex area both technically and legally. The law works on a basis of precedence, and you can bet that if a legal tangle emerges, it will be judged on similar occurrences in the past, even though your technology might be brand new.

All sorts of additional complications arise because of the special nature of software development. Does the author of a ‘patch] (a small-scale solution to a problem) have copyright over it when it is added to a big project? Can you combine two open source programs and claim copyright over the result? What about reverse engineering?

I would have welcomed a glossary and a webliography, but it’s to O’Reilly’s credit that they publish books like this – because although it might have a fairly limited readership, it raises lots of important issues and simultaneously makes available the information for dealing with them.

© Roy Johnson 2008

Intellectual Property and Open Source   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Intellectual Property and Open Source   Buy the book at Amazon US


Van Lindberg, Intellectual Property and Open Source, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2008, pp, 371, ISBN: 0596517963


More on eCommerce
More on media
More on publishing
More on technology


Filed Under: e-Commerce, Media, Open Sources Tagged With: Copyright, e-Commerce, Intellectual property, IPR, Open Sources, Publishing

Moodle E-Learning Course Development

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

complete guide to e-learning using Moodle

I went to a Moodle training course recently, and the universal cry there was for training manuals or guidance books which would talk you through the program and its features. This new software package is sweeping the world of further and higher education. Just in case you didn’t know, Moodle is an Open Source (that is, free) course management system (CMS). Or if you prefer, a virtual learning environment (VLE) into which tutors can upload their course materials.

Moodle: E-Learning Course Development It’s a sophisticated and complex program which offers all sorts of features to please teachers and students alike. Interactive exercises; journals; email and chat; Wikis; forums; and surveys – all in addition to the basic learning materials, which can be uploaded in any file format. Moodle is built on what’s called a ‘social constructivist’ model.

That is, students are encouraged to build their own learning experiences by engaging with teaching materials, interactive exercises, tutors, and fellow students.

Moodle organises everything for you – from individual student enrolments to databases of complete course results. Students can store drafts of their work, see their quiz results, build learning diaries, or participate in joint project-building. Tutors can set time limits for tests,

First off the block in guidance manuals there was Jason Cole’s book Using Moodle which gave a description of the system. Now comes William Rice’s guide to building courses. The difference between the two is that Rice gets further under the bonnet and shows you the workings of Moodle. More importantly, he tells you in advance what the consequences of your choices will be.

Moodle is so modularised and flexible that you can arrange your course contents however you wish (well, almost). But your choices (which can be made very easily) can also have hidden knock-on effects.

The Moodle interface can also be changed at a single click to work in any one of a number of languages. It offers you the opportunity to add course materials in any format – and to edit your pages and turn them into web pages without having to learn HTML coding.

And if you want to be really adventurous in terms of pedagogy, you can have students assessing their own and other students’ work, voting on the relevance of discussion contributions, and collectively building course-related glossaries and encyclopedias (using a Wiki).

William Rice makes course design clear by breaking down the process into separate elements – for instance, showing the difference between static pages (text and Web pages) and interactive pages (quizzes, journals, and assignments). Most importantly, he explains the advantages and limitations of each.

For the technically minded, there’s an entire chapter on how Moodle is installed and configured to suit your needs. On the other hand, if you want to practice or ‘try before you download’, there’s an excellent demonstration version of Moodle at demo.moodle.org. I actually read the book and had the demo open on screen at the same time, to check each feature for real. But you don’t have to go that far: there are screenshots illustrating every item.

There is extensive coverage of the quizzes, lessons, assignments, and other pedagogic tools available, and a chapter which introduces all the add-ons and plug-in modules which are available for free download. The only thing which struck me as odd was a chapter about welcoming students and making your starting page friendly – which puzzlingly came near the end of the book.

I’m working on a Moodle-based project at the moment, and can vouch for the comprehensiveness of Moodle’s own online documentation – but I imagine most course designers (like me) will feel more confident with a printed manual to hand. This is the one I would suggest you go for.

Moodle E-Learning Course Development   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Moodle E-Learning Course Development   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2006


William H. Rice, Moodle: E-Learning Course Development, Packt Publishing: Birmingham, 2006, pp.236, ISBN: 1904811299


More on online learning
More on technology
More on digital media
More on web design
More on computers


Filed Under: CMS, Online Learning, Open Sources Tagged With: CMS, eLearning, Moodle, Moodle: E-Learning Courses, Online learning, Open Sources, Rapid eLearning

Moodle English Teacher Cookbook

October 1, 2010 by Roy Johnson

80 effective recipes for creating online learning materials

Moodle has now established itself as the de facto standard eLearning software tool in further and higher education. It’s an open source program (which means it’s free) and it also acts as a virtual learning environment (VLE) which makes expensive alternatives such as Blackboard redundant. If anybody tells you it’s an easy software program to use, they’re lying. Most people will need all the help they can get, even if they are putting some ready-made course materials into Moodle’s default templates. That’s why books such as this Moodle English Teacher Cookbook guide to course creation exist – to explain the principles of eLearning design at the same time as offering a guided tour of some Moodle features.

Moodle English Teacher CookbookEnglish Teacher’s Cookbook is aimed at classroom teachers of English for comprehension, writing skills, and composition – but in fact the techniques it demonstrates would be applicable in any humanities subject. Unlike many other guidance manuals it doesn’t bother explaining all of Moodle’s features, but instead plunges immediately into constructing modules of learning using a variety of supplementary programs such as Hot Potatoes and Microsoft Word, and Open Office

Silvina Hillar starts out with simple exercises, such as ‘matching sentences’ (which is actually a misnomer and should be ‘matching sentence parts) then creating learning journals, discussing responses in a forum, comparing notes, and constructing story boards.

I was a surprised that there was so little on the pedagogy behind the task, but her entire focus is on showing how to get it done in Moodle – or Let’s Moodle it! as she keeps repeating. This means lots of screenshots showing you what to enter into each dialogue box, and which menu options to choose. If you’re not experienced in using Moodle, you will find these very helpful.

Many of the stages of course creation involve entering small items of information into a data base using forms. There is quite a conceptual gap between the data entry process and what eventually appears on screen as the final result to a user. You should expect to find this quite arduous at first, but then straightforward once you’ve done it a few times.

There are lots of different types of quizzes possible – missing words, multiple choice questions, matching words, or matching pictures to text – and you can also shuffle questions so that no two people see them in the same order (which I can assure you helps to minimize copying by students using adjacent screens).

Moodle has a lot of different learning activities (the quiz, lesson, survey, journal, wiki, forum) and it’s as well to know exactly what each one does, as well as the differences between them. The strength of Hillar’s approach is that she demonstrates how to use each of these options, and what the dialogue boxes look like on screen as you fill them with choices and information. The only weakness is that she doesn’t always show what the finished learning object will look like when accessed by the learner.

Another weakness of her approach is that many of the projects require outcomes to be read, assessed, and marked manually by a teacher. This not only fails to take advantage of the interactivities and the record-keeping features within Moodle, but gives the teacher an extra task for which many of them will not thank you.

However, to offset this, there’s plenty on embedding interactive materials from elsewhere – which is the quickest way to build course modules. Sources include other web sites, video from YouTube and Vimeo, and animated quizzes and games from what2learn.com. Almost all the third-party software she uses is open source or free to use.

Pedagogically, the examples are designed to provide a wide range of activities encouraging students to write – something that many of them (especially teenagers) are notoriously reluctant to do. There’s very little in here that couldn’t be done in a traditional manner with photocopied handouts – but the important feature of Moodle if you can incorporate it into your own learning modules is that it’s also a mechanism for marking and storing the results of student’s work.

Later chapters deal with discussing fictional characters, sentence and paragraph construction, and (keeping matters as fashionable and smack up to date as possible) how to integrate social media such as Twitter and FaceBook into Moodle courses. There’s also an entire chapter dealing with mind maps and tree diagrams – something I have never found convincing as a mechanism for learning, but which I know many people find reassuring.

I have been critical of some Moodle guides in the past. That’s because most of them are not much more than an explanation of Moodle features, but no suggestions about how they might be used to create dynamic eLearning courses, exploiting the interactivity that Moodle offers. This book is far more useful, because it approaches these issues the other way round. It starts with the premise of online learning design, then shows how it can be done using Moodle.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010


Silvina P. Hillar, Moodle English Teacher’s Cookbook, Birmingham: Pakt Publishing, 2010, pp.207, ISBN: 1849510881


More on online learning
More on technology
More on digital media
More on web design
More on computers


Filed Under: Online Learning, Open Sources Tagged With: eLearning, Moodle, Moodle 1.9 English Teacher's Cookbook, Online learning, Open Sources, Teaching

Moodle for Language Teaching

November 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

online language-learning activities using Moodle

I have been critical of some of these Moodle guides in the past. That’s because most of them are not much more than an explanation of Moodle’s individual features, but no suggestions about how they might be used to create dynamic eLearning courses, exploiting the interactivity that Moodle offers. Moodle for Language Teaching is far more useful, because it approaches these issues the other way round. It starts with the premise of online learning design, then shows how it can be done using Moodle.

Moodle 1.9 for Language TeachingJeff Stanford very sensibly begins by explaining the structure of a course in Moodle, and how its parts relate to each other. It’s important if you haven’t used Moodle before to understand the difference between course content and the extras that can be attached via blocks and add-on modules. [You also need to get used to the names of all these features.] All this will help you to conceptualise your course design, and it explains clever supplements such as Mobile Quiz which allows the downloading of quiz questions onto mobile phones.

Stanford also explains how to choose all the important settings for a course – the various permissions, users, course timetable, and what will be shown to students in the way of grades, results, and feedback. All of these options are amazingly detailed and customisable from within Moodle – so long as you know your way around the various settings.

All of his explanations are offered in a direct ‘Here’s how to do it’ manner, with screenshots showing you what to expect and copious lists of free software to help you achieve what you’re looking for. But be warned! Take anything new one step at a time, and don’t expect to create a richly interactive multimedia course in just a few days. Or – if you are new to Moodle – even a few weeks.

He explains how to create quizzes – and here’s an extra tip from someone who did this the hard way. You should learn how to categorise and store your quiz questions groups, so that you can re-use them in different combinations. This will save you the laborious effort of re-keying questions and their multiple possible answers.

The book understandably uses language learning as its pedagogic objective, but in fact almost all of the features of Moodle discussed could be used for creating courses in other subjects. For instance the glossary building activity to create lists of key terms and a ‘word a day’ feature; the Chat module, which acts in the same way as other Instant Messaging systems; or the ‘Hot Potatoes’ quiz-making module.

It’s assumed that the second language being taught is English, so this makes both the ideas and the examples useful for teachers of English, communication skills, or other language-oriented courses.

Many of the stages of course creation involve entering small items of information into a data base using forms. There is quite a conceptual gap between the data entry process and what appears on screen as the final result to a user. You should expect to find this quite arduous at first, but then straightforward once you’ve done it a few times.

There are lots of different types of quizzes possible – missing words, multiple choice questions, matching words, or matching pictures to text – and you can also shuffle questions so that no two people see them in the same order (which I can assure you helps to minimize copying by students using adjacent screens).

For a language course he naturally explains the use of audio and video files to enhance learning. There’s a free add-on module called NanoGong which can be used in conjunction with a quiz to produce vocabulary, pronunciation, intonation, and word stress exercises. You can also make short podcasts or add dictation exercises to which students reply in writing.

There are any number of opportunities to allow students to interact with each other, compare notes, see each other’s blog entries, rate discussion contributions, swap messages via email and the forum, and comment on each other’s work. But here’s another tip from hard won experience. Before you design a course, make sure how much time the tutor (even if that is you) can spend monitoring all this activity and participation in group work. Many institutions see online learning as a way of saving the expense of tutor time, rather than enhancing the student’s learning experience.

Writing activities are relatively straightforward. Students enter text and save their efforts as a journal, a blog, their profile, or as an assignment. You’ll be lucky if they do just one of these. But they do like feedback on any work submitted – so the book quite rightly ends with a section explaining the huge variety of assessment and grading systems that are available in Moodle.

In fact there is so much guidance and support available that it won’t all fit in this (fairly long) book. So two additional chapters have been placed on the publisher’s web site. These cover making your Moodle course materials look nice on screen, and preparing your students to use Moodle.

I’ve a feeling that the publishers Packt have learned from feedback on their earlier Moodle guides, and have wisely gone down the road of putting the designer’s needs first. Their formula works well here, and this guide for me is a better manual for designing courses than all the others currently available. We’ve been designing customized Moodle courses at www.texman.net for the last few years now, and having a guide like this at the outset would have flattened what at times was a painfully steep learning curve.

Moodle for Language Teaching   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Moodle for Language Teaching   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2009


Jeff Stanford, Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching, Birmingham: Packt, 2009, pp.505, ISBN: 1847196241


More on online learning
More on technology
More on digital media
More on web design
More on computers


Filed Under: CMS, Online Learning, Open Sources Tagged With: Course design, Education, Moodle, Online learning, Open Sources, VLE

Moodle Teaching Techniques

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

creative ways to use Moodle for online learning courses

William H. Rice is something of a Moodle specialist. This is a follow up to his recent Moodle: E-Learning Course Development in which he seeks to explain the finer points of Moodle’s dizzying array of features and how they can be used to construct ever more sophisticated models of online teaching and learning. Moodle Teaching Techniques looks at the current and the future versions of Moodle. For instance, many tutors want to control the sequence of the student’s progress through a course, so that they need to understand one topic before they pass on to the next.

Moodle Teaching TechniquesThis is called ‘activity locking’, which is not available in the currently popular Moodle 1.8 version, but will be by the time version 2.0 appears. This is a good way of future-proofing the book’s relevance. All the strategies are explained in a perfectly straightforward manner, and illustrated with screenshots from the relevant control panels within Moodle. Those people who are familiar with its interface will have no difficulty in finding their way around.

The central feature of Moodle’s interactivity is the quiz option – and fortunately this is explored in some detail, showing how tutors can give graded levels of feedback on answers. I can tell you from first hand experience that all this is hard work – thinking up questions, correct solutions, and responses to all possible answers – but it does give students something more interactive than just reading flat text on a screen.

It’s certainly true that Moodle gives tutors and administrators an amazing amount of control over what appears and what takes place on a course. Postings to a discussion forum can be rated for their relevance, ordered by priority, and monitored for the participation level. These features are particularly useful for students engaged with online college degree programs where there is less face-to-face contact with other students as well as tutors.

However, some features are explored to the point of Utopianism – such as the ability of tutors to conduct chat sessions with students in a foreign language, with all the keyboard allocations used to type in foreign characters.

It’s good to know that Moodle has these features, but the basics of course construction still need to be explained and promoted – such as how to get more graphics, video, sound, and general animation and interaction into a typical course. Ninety-nine out of every hundred online tutors will still be having problems getting their students to the keyboard and keeping them there.

And some of the suggestions are workarounds bordering on the perverse – such as creating forums and allocating to them single students for what seems no more than what would be possible in a private email exchange. It’s possible, and it’s ingenious – but any tutor who has the time to do this ought to be making better use of it.

His suggestions for using Moodle’s lesson and Wiki features are much more realistic, as well as his assessment of the relative advantages and disadvantages of the forum, blog and journal features. He finishes by showing how the block elements of a Moodle course can be re-arranged on the page – something I think might have been more usefully placed at the start of the book.

So on the whole I think that whilst all Moodle-using course designers will want to get their hands on this well-timed publication – the definitive guide to designing online learning experiences is still to be written.

© Roy Johnson 2007

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US


William H. Rice IV, Moodle Teaching Techniques, Birmingham UK: Pakt, 2007, pp.172, ISBN: 184719284X


More on online learning
More on technology
More on digital media
More on web design
More on computers


Filed Under: Online Learning, Open Sources Tagged With: CMS, eLearning, Moodle, Moodle Teaching Techniques, Online learning, Open Sources, Rapid eLearning

Open Source Research

September 5, 2010 by Roy Johnson

why tax-funded research should be in the public domain

Open Source Research offers a new challenge to higher education. In the UK a traditional academic teaching post carried three requirements – teaching, research, and administration. Time and energy were normally allocated to these activities in either equal parts, or at least in that order of precedence. Good teachers gave lectures, conducted seminars and tutorials, looked after their allocation of students, and participated (however reluctantly) in departmental committees and faculty boards. That was in the past.

With the introduction of the (Labour) government’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) all that changed. The emphasis of job descriptions morphed entirely into measurable research and tangible outcomes. We know the result: staff transferred as much teaching as possible onto poorly-paid and inexperienced part-time teachers – usually post-graduate students hoping the experience would give them some advantage in the greasy-pole process of seeking tenure.

Open Source ResearchIt is now not uncommon to hear of staff packing any remaining teaching commitments into one term (or semester) – giving them two-thirds of a year free to do as they wish. At professorial level it’s even worse. At my former university a well-known academic with an international reputation on a six-figure salary taught for two hours once a fortnight, refused to make his email address or his telephone number available to anyone, and lived outside the UK, jetting in for his celebrity seminars every two weeks and returning home the same day.

Nice work if you can get it – all at taxpayers’ expense. The only down side to this system so far at the academics are concerned is that they are under an obligation to write articles and books and get them published. Failure to do so usually means being punished with a heavier teaching load or even worse, with extra departmental duties.

So the system, if it is working properly, means that academic staff members investigate some self-chosen topic of interest in their discipline. They then write articles that are published in academic journals, and any book-length studies are produced by academic or commercial publishing houses. They are given the time to do this work, there is even a system of sabbatical leave (a term, semester, or year off work) and they are paid salaries throughout.

Notwithstanding the nature of such employment codes, the economics of this system warrant further scrutiny. In the case of academic journals it would appear that no money actually changes hands. Academics publish their work with no payment. They do so with the incentive of professional kudos and points added to their RAE ratings. But in fact the publisher charges university and college libraries an enormous amount for subscription to the journal. This is true even in the digital age when more and more publications fail to find their way into print. The recorded number of people who actually read these scholarly articles is truly microscopic. Figures between one and five readers per article are quite common. So the system is expensive and inefficient.

Towards Electronic JournalsIn the case of academic and commercial book publishers the system is a little more murky, but similar principles apply. Most in-house university presses are heavily subsidised, even if they claim to be economically independent of their parent-host. [They commonly do not have to factor in the cost of office and storage space, and maybe not even staff salaries.] Nevertheless, they produce worthy, non-popular works which are sold to an audience of college and university libraries at a huge cost.

Here is a case in point. I have recently reviewed a very good publication of this kind (many are far from good) – a collection of essays on literature and cultural history which retails at the handsome figure of one hundred and twenty pounds. That is more than twenty times the price of a popular classic, and way beyond the book-purchasing budget of most normal human beings.

The authors of this compilation may not be too worried about this state of affairs. They have their academic salaries, they will have received a small sum (or maybe even nothing) for their chapters. Their reward comes from enhanced academic status or an invitation to speak at a conference, the costs of which will be paid by their employer.

Commercial book publishers operate virtually the same system. A very small advance payment on future possible sales will be acceptable for an author whose wages are anyway being paid. If the book sells, the publisher profits far more than the author (who is not primarily motivated by sales income); and if it doesn’t sell, it goes into the slush pile of remaindered titles along with all the many other unsold books. The author can still add this publication to the departmental RAE submission and go on to write more books that don’t sell.

There are two things fundamentally wrong with this state of affairs. One is that public funding is being used and abused, the other is that the whole system of research, its publication and its consumption could be conducted far more efficiently (and at almost zero cost) by using the resources of the Internet.

It is now more than ten years since Steven Harnad published his Subversive Proposal that the results of academic research should be made available via a process of digital ‘self-archiving’ in the form of Web pages. He even thought through the process of peer approval, comments and corrections so that the final product was just as rigorously inspected as a traditional journal article. His main objective at the time was to overcome the terribly laborious process of academic print publishing that can result in delays of up to two years before an article sees light of day. But in fact the same arguments can be made to suggest that research funded by taxpayers money should automatically be put into the public domain. After all, if the public has paid for it, the results should be available to everybody.

Nobody would lose from such a system, and all interested parties would stand to gain in some way. The academic staff member writes a paper and publishes research findings onto a web site – maybe one established by the host university. The content of the paper goes through any peer appraisal and revision process, and then is put into immediate circulation and made available to the public – far more quickly than its print equivalent. The university keeps the public kudos of a ‘contribution to knowledge’; the author is likely to have far more readers and more feedback; and the public has access to work that it has paid for.

Of course there may be special cases. Some science departments have financial partnerships with commercial and industrial companies which involve copyright, patents, and intellectual property rights issues. This is another example of taxpayers subsidising commercial interests, but these might reasonably be excluded from such schemes. But the vast majority of research is carried out in subjects with little or no commercial value at all. It lies unread, unloved, and ignored, buried far out of sight in departmental archives and library vaults.

Doctorow - Content - book jacketThere isn’t even any reason why those with a saleable product shouldn’t publish in print as well as digitally. If an article of a book-length study proves popular in its Web space, that is a compelling endorsement so far as print publishers are concerned. And the arguments regarding free online access versus for sale in print are now well known. Making something available free on line enhances the chance of people buying the same thing in printed format, especially in minority interest and specialist subjects.

So – just as any information gathered by a government should be made available free of charge to the public (population statistics, government spending figures, Ordnance Survey maps) the results of research conducted in publicly-funded universities should be available to the people who pay for it through their taxes. In fact whilst they’re at it, I can’t think of any reason why universities shouldn’t publish their course syllabuses and teaching materials as well – can you?

© Roy Johnson 2010


More on digital media
More on technology
More on theory
More on publishing


Filed Under: Media, Open Sources, Publishing Tagged With: Academic writing, Education, Open Source Research, Open Sources, Publishing

Open Sources

June 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

policy essays by the free software movement pioneers

O’Reilly publications have decided to throw their weight behind the Open Source movement. This timely compilation of essays written by its leaders reveal why it came into being, how it works, why they think it will succeed, and where it is going – particularly in its fight against Microsoft. Open Source is a form of collaborative software development in which programmers give their time and expertise freely.

Open Sources They create programs which are written and de-bugged without any concern for commercial gain. Then they give away the code for anyone to use. As you can guess, this is just about the complete antithesis of Microsoft and its business strategy, which has recently been judged as a near-monopoly unfairly exploiting its power. The competing Open Source-Microsoft philosophies are now locked in a battle for the future.

All this is all quite recent. In April 1998 O’Reilly invited software developers to the first Freeware Summit, where participants agreed to work together to increase acceptance and use of open-source software. Since then, the influence of this movement has grown steadily – especially with the increasing popularity of Linux, a very stable and efficient operating system which threatens the dominance of Windows.

One of the things I liked most about this collection is the variety of approaches the auithors adopt to their proselytizing, plus the fact that new concepts are made accessible to the non-specialist reader. Eric S. Raymond, one of the founding fathers (whose collected essays, The Cathedral and the Bazaar have just appeared) explains the origins of the movement in his ‘Brief History of Hackerdom’.

Richard Stallman writes on the history of free software and its supporters. Robert Young, the CEO of RedHat, explains how they are able to successfully market Linux, the free software [it’s because they offer a good backup service]. Bruce Perens offers a definition of Open Sources – which is more complex than you might think. The collection ends with a transcript of the 1992 Tannenbaum-Torvalds debate in which Linus Torvald defends his new Linux operating system and his concept of free software in the COMP.OS.MINIX newsgroup. It is refreshing to encounter the modesty of this pioneer and be reminded of the limits under which he was working:

‘Linux has very much been a hobby (but a serious one: the best type) for me: I get no money for it, and it’s not even part of my studies in the university. I’ve done it all on my own time, and on my own machine [a 386PC].’

So these are rather like the crusading documents of a new movement. They might sometimes read as rather idealistic, but they also contain hard-headed facts from the worlds of big business, software engineering, and even jurispudence. They see these issuess as a matter of moral, philosophical choice, even though the medium is technological. As Chris DiBona argues in his scene-setting introduction:

Industry has produced some marvellous innovations: Ethernet, the mouse, and the Graohical User Interface (GUI) all came out of Xerox PARC. But there is an ominous side to the computer industry as well. No one outside of Redmond [Microsoft headquarters] really thinks that it is a good idea for Microsoft to dictate, to the extent that they do, what a computer desktop should look like or have on it.

© Roy Johnson 2005

Open Sources   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Open Sources   Buy the book at Amazon US


Chris DiBona et al, Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, Sebastapol, CA: O’Reilly, pp.272, ISBN: 15659258237


More on eCommerce
More on media
More on publishing
More on technology


Filed Under: e-Commerce, Open Sources Tagged With: e-Commerce, Open Sources, OSS, Technology

Open Sources 2.0

June 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

essays and reports from the free software movement

When we reviewed Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution six years ago, the movement for free software was only just gathering momentum – and O’Reilly were publishing a collection of essays which were essentially explaining its key concepts. Now this second collection is symbolically twice as big, and reporting on a worldwide uptake.

Open Sources 2.0The first part of the book deals with the technical and business aspects of open sources. There’s a report on the development of Mozilla.org, which produced the Firefox browser and Thunderbird email program, and an account of working on Samba, which acts as a ‘glue’ between the separate worlds of Unix and Windows. All of these Open Source programs are available at SourceForge.net – 100.000 projects and one million registered developers.

The amazing thing is that some people are able to develop business models using open source software. They do this by offering services which provide consultancy and support to users of open source. Michael Olson even describes a dual license system whereby the software is provided free to one set of users, and is sold at a charge to another. This essay also includes a very useful explanation of copyright law and warrantees.

The first half of the book deals with these conundrums and apparent contradictions introduced into the world of software and IT. What happens when people decide to make their software freely available to download at no charge to the end user?

There’s a very enjoyable chapter by Russ Nelson on developing his own small business enterprise dealing with open source. This will be music to the ears of anyone who would like to make a living writing and selling software and their related services.

There are fully detailed surveys of the development of open source software in Europe, India, and even China. In Europe there is a growing pattern of local and regional government adopting OSS for both political and financial reasons. In India takeup of OSS is slower because of rampant piracy of proprietary software. Piracy exists in China too, but the potential for growth in country which actually manufactures a lot of the world’s digital hardware is so great that OSS support companies are moving in to be part of the booming economy.

The second part of the book looks ‘beyond’ open sources as a technology to the philosophy of what’s at its base – collaborative forms of working. These chapters examine new business models, such as Amazon for instance which operates using open source software, but also invites collaborative input from its customers and even its competitors. Other examples include open source legal researching and even biology.

There’s a very interesting contribution from Larry Sanger on the history of the Wikipedia project – the open source encyclopedia of which he was a co-founder. Some of the problems raised in keeping Wikipedia free of vandals is answered in a similar account of the rise and rise of Slashdot.org (“News for nerds. Stuff that matters”) the socio-technological news site which permits submissions and comments in an open source sort of way. It has developed a form of hands-off self-monitoring system which welds people together into a community.

This book is as important and impressive as its predecessor. It offers updates on practical examples of the social and technological innovations of the late twentieth century and gives us a glimpse of what might become working models for what lies ahead in the twenty-first.

© Roy Johnson 2005

Open Sources 2.0   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Open Sources 2.0   Buy the book at Amazon US


Chris DiBona et al, Open Sources 2.0, Sebastopol: CA, O’Reilly, 2005, pp.445, ISBN: 0596008023


More on eCommerce
More on media
More on publishing
More on technology


Filed Under: e-Commerce, Open Sources Tagged With: e-Commerce, Open Sources, Open Sources 2.0, OSS, Technology

  • 1
  • 2
  • Next Page »

Reviews

  • Arts
  • Biography
  • Creative Writing
  • Design
  • e-Commerce
  • Journalism
  • Language
  • Lifestyle
  • Literature
  • Media
  • Publishing
  • Study skills
  • Technology
  • Theory
  • Typography
  • Web design
  • Writing Skills

Get in touch

info@mantex.co.uk

Content © Mantex 2016
  • About Us
  • Advertising
  • Clients
  • Contact
  • FAQ
  • Links
  • Services
  • Reviews
  • Sitemap
  • T & C’s
  • Testimonials
  • Privacy

Copyright © 2025 · Mantex

Copyright © 2025 · News Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in