Glass orb with reflection of the landscape in it

Scholarly Research on Virtual Communities

A review of A Typology of Virtual Communities: A Multi-Disciplinary Foundation for Future Research Kim Cavanagh summarises the keypoints of this article, which basically looks at similarities and differences between groups, using 5 main metrics to analyse the groups (purpose, place, platform, population & profit model). There are links to other blogs commenting on the…

Megaconference VI

Megaconference VI:” Megaconference VI, the Worldwide Videoconference over Advanced Networks” A Global Video Conference. Running from 1pm UK time (for 15 hours) there is a comprehensive program of short talks. As they have archived previous years conferences, then hopefully this years will be archived too….

Open Source software and eLearning

Campus-technology have written an overview of how cost patterns might differ between setting up a commercial eLearning environment and an open source one. Among those mentioned in the report are Sakai, and Moodle. For example, they are suggesting that while 8% of the total budget is required for staff development and training for proprietary software,…

Sakai Project

Sakai Project This is a project run by The University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, and the uPortal consortium. Their aims are: A framework that builds on the recently ratified JSR 168 portlet standard and the OKI open service interface definitions to create a services-based, enterprise portal for tool delivery A re-factored set of…

Journal of Educational Technology and Society.

I found this journal through the feed from eLearnopedia. The actual feed pointed to 1 particular article, however, the whole of the current issue looks interesting, as it’s a special issue entitled “Ontologies and the Semantic Web for E-learning[N.B Link to a .pdf – c 5MB. (2004: Vol 7 Issue. 4)]. To whet your appetite,…

Wikis- A Breeze Presentation

Wikis Presentation This is a blog article about a Breeze presentation about Wikis. The presentation itself is worth watching, as it’s got a lot of useful information. However, the reason for starting at the Blog article is because Scott is discussing alternatives to Breeze. Breeze is Macromedia’s newest offering (or one of their newest!), but…

WebCT and Java

Following several reports of a vulnerability with the version of Java that I was using (1.4.2_03), such as the one at DSLReports, I decided to upgrade JRE to 1.4.2_06. Given previous experiences of upgrading JRE, I uninstalled the existing version before installing the new. (JRE isn’t great at uninstalling an earlier version, and having two…

BuddySpace

Enhanced Presence Management for Collaboration, Learning, and Gaming This is a tool that’s been developed at the Open University, based around Jabber, an open source IM client, which is interoperable with most other main clients. This particular client is Java Based, so runs on most machines. It’s the one IM client that the university does…

Tracing the evolution of Social Software

Tracing the evolution of Social Software is a fascinating article, going back to the 1940s & Vannevar Bush’s concept of “Memex” – and then tracing through to todays complex systems. The whole blog (Christoper Allen seems to make infrequent, but in depth posts) focusses on Social Software, Collaboration etc. Well worth a read….