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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

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© Roy Johnson 2009


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


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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

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


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

Moodle Teaching Techniques

April 10, 2010 by Roy Johnson

creative effective online learning courses using Moodle

As a course management system, Moodle has more technical features than its commercial rivals, but that’s not the only reason it’s being taken up by schools, universities, and colleges. In the jargon of educationalists, it’s a ‘constructivist’ program. This means that it allows users to learn through building their own experience of learning, possibly in contact with other students. It is student-oriented, rather than teacher-led, and it promotes learning through doing rather than just passive reception. 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 Moodle Teaching Techniques exist – to explain the principles of eLearning design at the same time as offering a guided tour of some Moodle features.

Moodle 1.9 Teaching TechniquesThe first chapter in Rice and Nash’s guide details the variety of strategies people use when learning, and it identifies the tools within Moodle which can be used to include them in an eLearning programme. This is useful at beginners and intermediate levels, when it’s not always easy to understand the difference in purpose of, say, a quiz and a lesson.

The next step – quite logically – is the creation of a structure for a course. It is now a generally accepted fact that courses need to be split into small, easily manageable units – whether these are called topics, modules, units, lessons, or chapters. The recommendation here is to use Moodle’s forum tool for creating these discrete parts. This is quite reasonable – but users will need to make clear to themselves the distinctions between student, group, forum, class, and course which flow from this decision. It is not immediately clear in Moodle what the consequences of making one choice rather than another will be.

The same is true when it comes to allocating permissions. Moodle permits a number of levels of privacy and security, and you will need to consider carefully the benefits and potential disadvantages of allowing students to see, for instance, each other’s work and teacher’s comments upon it. Fortunately, each stage of their recommendations is illustrated with screen shots showing how to effect the required configuarations.

They are quite right to assume that Chat will be an attractive feature for students – particularly youngers ones who have grown up in a world of Messenger and Facebook. But it seems odd to discuss all Chat’s possible uses before any course materials and structure have been shown. Unless you already know how to use Moodle, this book itself would need to be used in conjunction with another – such as Using Moodle or Moodle: E-Learning Course Development.

The issue of assessment is focussed exclusively on the creation of quizzes – which can be a rather complex and often counter-intuitive matter in Moodle. They show how a quiz can be timed, limited, and controlled – but they miss one important feature which could save course designers lots of time. That is the creation of categories for question banks in which the quiz questions can be saved for future re-use. These are, after all, the fundamental and re-usable learning objects which form the basis of a Moodle course.

Next they cover the use of the lesson to promote learning. The course materials should be chunked and their sequence controlled, with a series of checks on undestanding included at each stage. And if you didn’t already appreciate the fact, it’s worth knowing that Moodle records every single student activity on a course – so it’s possible to see how many attempts have been made at a quiz, how long was spent on each page, and how many correct answers have been accumulated. This allows for a lot of revision and fine tuning of the materials between each itteration of the course.

Then they cover features which will probably only be used on courses in further and higher levels of education (and training) – the use of the Wiki feature, the Glossary, the Workshop, and the Choice activity. It’s typical of Moodle’s use of confusing terminology that ‘Choice’ is what most normal people would call a Poll or a Survey.

And at the end comes a chapter which should more logically, but perhaps less inspiringly, come first – course management. You really do need to know how to set up a course so that students can find their way around, see what’s available, and keep track of their learning.

I continue to believe that the definitive guide to using Moodle as a course design and management tool is still to be written. It will be a hefty tome if it ever appears – but in the meantime, users will have to cope with these slimmer (but still expensive) volumes which offer pointers in roughly the right direction.

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© Roy Johnson 2010


William Rice and Susan Smith Nash, Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques, Birmingham: Pakt Publishing, 2010, pp.200, ISBN 1849510067


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Nerds 2.0.1 – A Brief History of the Internet

June 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Internet HistoryTV programmes of interviews with Internet personalities

Robert Cringely’s Triumph of the Nerds won legions of computer-skeptical and computer-naive viewers with its mix of minutiae and hip techniques. Going one step further into the digital maze, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet operates as a sequel of sorts to the surprise docu-hit. Just as its precursor chronicled the rise of empires built on computer software, Nerds 2.0.1 collects interviews from key players in the development of the Internet.

Fashionably hip in its visual feel, the film begins by amassing data on the net’s crowning, collaborative irony: conceived in the Pentagon during the counterculture’s smokiest high point by members–dare it be said–of the military industrial complex, the Net developed on the axis of university research networks and Deadhead (as in the Grateful Dead) electronic bulletin boards.

Much of the rest has become history, but Internet and computer industry pundit Robert X. Cringley makes the narrative a jumping, attractive embrace of being a nerd. Interviews with Bill Gates, Mark Andreesen, and Steve Case make these three hours (three tapes slipcased in a nice box) fly by.

This video series is an excellent addition to the material available on computer history. It moves at a fast pace and provides interviews with many of the key people in the industry. It does not cover every aspect of computer history, but it does fill in some gaps that other references missed. I encourage anyone interested in computer history to add this video series to their library. Excellent footage, nicely put together.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Robert X Cringley, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet, VHS Video (3 tapes) ASIN: 6305128235


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Netbooks – The Missing Manual

October 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

small, portable, light, and cheap

I bought my first netbook just after the first Asus EeePCs were launched. At that time they were in short supply. Now the shops are full of them. You’re spoilt for choice. But what’s the difference between a netbook and a notebook (you might ask)? Well, netbooks are smaller, cheaper, and many of them use open source software such as Linux operating systems and the Open Office suite which does away with the need for (expensive) Microsoft programs.

Netbooks The Missing ManualThey are also designed to be low on power consumption, and they don’t come with floppy or CD drives: you use USB ports instead. They have automatic Internet connection, and assume that you’ll be emailing, downloading software, and maybe even storing your work on the Web.

But one thing’s for certain: they won’t come with any user manual. That’s why this best-selling series from O’Reilly exists – to plug the gap left by equipment manufacturers who can’t keep up with support for their own product development.

Because netbooks have been such a huge success, versions using Windows have rapidly appeared, to cater for people who don’t want to tangle with new software. Fortunately, Jude Biersdorf’s book takes both Windows and Linux versions of netbooks into account. She shows you how to choose a netbook that will deliver what you require, then how to set it up using either of the most popular operating systems.

Even experienced computer users may not be comfortable in dealing with all these novelties all at once. She’s quite right – you’ve got to consider any shortcomings against the big advantages these devices offer. The keyboard might be a bit cramped, but the whole thing weighs just three pounds! Mine fits comfortably in my overcoat pocket.

If you’re new to Linux (she uses the popular Ubuntu version) there are full instructions on finding your way around. It’s very simple, because everything is based on big, clickable icons. The fact is that, even though open source software is completely free, it looks very much like Windows and Apple Mac when viewed on screen. All these interfaces are eventually starting to look the same.

She then deals with connecting peripherals. Your netbook won’t even have a mouse – so there are full instructions, and tips for downloading the latest drivers and software.

That’s where netbooks are really good : they update themselves all the time, and two clicks takes you to the latest version of whatever you want.

There’s a section on connecting to the Internet. You might not even need this. Mine recognised my home broadband as soon as I switched it on, and it’s never been a problem since.

But just in case you’re a first time user, she shows you how to set up an email account, how to make it secure, and how to navigate the web using a browser – Firefox and Google Chrome are recommended.

When it comes to standard use of computer software, most users will require a word-processor, spreadsheet, PowerPoint-type presentation – and so on – which are collectively called an office suite. She shows you how to deal with the stripped down version of the Microsoft Office Suite – which costs between $100and $150. I don’t know why she bothered, because she then goes on to deal with Open Office and Google Docs – both of which are free. You can even store your information on line with Google, which is a cost-free form of back-up.

[Why are all these services free? Because storage space price is plummeting, and these companies want you as a potential customer on their books.]

If you haven’t already got one, she shows you how to set up an email address and make full use of your browser to download extra tools – with the emphasis very much on free I was glad to note.

She also covers all the instant messaging software options and the social networking services, free phone calls, and picture-sharing. In fact there’s a whole section on how to edit and enhance your pictures – plus the same thing for MP3 and other sound files.

There’s also plenty on security, maintenance, upgrading, troubleshooting, and a really handy selection of online resources. So if your’re planning to buy or use a netbook, or if you want a user-manual to keep handy – this one will do the trick very nicely.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2009


J.D.Biersdorfer, Netbooks: the missing manual. Sebastopol (CA) O’Reilly, 2009, pp.320, ISBN 0596802234


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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


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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

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


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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


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

OpenOffice Writer

July 23, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The free alternative word-processor to Microsoft Word

OpenOffice is one of the big success stories of the Open Source Software movement – along with programs such as Linux and Apache. Open Source seeks to design software by voluntary collaboration, then makes it freely available for anyone to use . Writer is the word-processing package part of OpenOffice and, not to put too fine a point on the matter, it’s a free alternative to the costly and ponderous Microsoft Word.

OpenOffice WriterBecause the software comes free of charge however, there is no printed manual, so the ever-enterprising publishers O’Reilly have produced one as part of their Community Press series. The book comes complete with a CD-ROM containing the whole of the OpenOffice.org suite which you can freely install on as many machines as you wish. The full suite of programs includes packages for spreadsheets (Calc) presentations (Impress) and drawings (Draw) as well as file conversion facilities.

Jean Hollis Weber’s guide starts by showing you how to set up the interface to suit your style of working and your own personal preferences. This includes features such as page appearance, font options, multiple undo, spellchecking, custom dictionaries, and auto-correction.

Basically, Writer works in a very similar manner to Word, but it is more customisable, less intrusive, and less bossy. You don’t get the impression that it’s trying to take over the world, as you do with Word. And even if in the end you decide you don’t like it, you haven’t lost a penny, because it’s free.

She covers working with templates and shows you how to apply styles. For people working on long documents there are tutorials on tables of contents, indexes, bibliographies, footnotes and endnotes, and cross referencing.

Writer and other Open Source software offers an ideal solution for people who cannot afford Microsoft prices, but who wish to undertake professional quality work. This is why it is being taken up so rapidly in poorer countries and even some hard-pressed local governments in the West. (As a result of this incidentally, Microsoft have started to do secret cut-price deals with some big customers in order to keep their share of the market.)

Since most of her potential readers are likely to be migrating from Word, she ends her tour through the program with a useful series of comparison tables. These explain the small differences in how common commands and actions are performed in Word and Writer respectively.

If you need the reassurance of a manual, plus the convenience of a whole suite of programs on one ready-to-hand CD, this is a bargain. It’s sort of a version of O’Reilly’s ‘Missing Manual’ series.

© Roy Johnson 2004

artie shaw Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Jean Hollis Weber, OpenOffice.org Writer, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2004, pp.213, ISBN: 0596008260


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Filed Under: Open Sources Tagged With: Open Sources, Software, Word-processing, Writing skills

Optimizing Windows

June 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

advice on improving power, performance, and efficiency

This guidance manual is far more comprehensive than its title suggests. Although the main focus is Windows, it deals with optimizing all operating systems, plus offering tips on speeding up the boot process, freeing up memory, disk partitioning, and generally squeezing the best performance out of your system. David Farquhar’s approach is reassuring and friendly, and he provides commonsense reasons for each of the changes he recommends.

Optimizing Windows He starts with simple suggestions for freeing up disk space by deleting temporary files, obsolete programs, desktop icons, and all those fonts you never actually use. He’s keen on disk defragmentation, and points out that when Windows says it’s not necessary, that’s because its definition of 0% or 1% are so wide. He also recommends disk partitioning, and for each improvement he explains how to use a resident Windows tools utility if there’s one available, a commercial utility if it’s not, or a share/freeware program for which he gives the URL.

For instance, he describes a clean-up and optimization procedure using three of the utility programs he recommends – Norton Utilities, Fix It 99, and Nuts and Bolts 98. Then the same for a couple of uninstallers.

He also covers upgrading from Win95 to Win98, though so rigorous is his search for maximizing performance that much of his advice is focussed on what not to accept during customized setup. He ends with advice on hardware upgrades – memory, hard drives, video cards, even motherboards.

You can ignore the gaming and multimedia in the title. This is for anyone who wants to make sure their computer is running as well as it should. And it’s not just for optimizing and tweaking: it will teach you about the Windows operating system, as well as the underlying architecture of the PC.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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David L. Farquhar, Optimizing Windows for Games, Graphics, and Multimedia, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2000, pp.278 ISBN: 1565926773


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Filed Under: Computers Tagged With: Computers, Optimization, Optimizing Windows, Technology, Windows

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