Blog Juice for Educational Technology

I’ve got a PowerMac G5 in my office now, so this is great news. MacWorld reports that the Aqua port of OpenOffice is soon to be released. Now Mac users will have little need to run any MS products on their machines.

(click the image for a full screen version available at ericb’s place)

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Kaironews was shut down tonight by our ISP for very excessive use of CPU resources on the server. I believe the problem was caused by spammers and ill-behaved search engines (I found one such instance of the latter).

Since those of us who use the site don’t want this to happen, I’ve

• Temporarily enabled the bad behaviour module. This blocks some spammers at the Drupal level; it may or may not help reduce CPU usage.
• Banned the offending IP range which occupied 11 of the top IP’s in terms of page visits this month at Kairosnews and used .99 GB’s of the 4.7 GB’s used this month. (Sorry Platypus Matt. If that happens to be you using multiple computers at your insitution to see if anyone replied to your posts, you are now effectively blocked at the server level )
• Limited news aggregator and search access to logged in members.
• Enabled Drupal’s caching and throttling mechanism for anonymous users. If you are logged in, it won’t affect you. But if you visit Kairosnews without logging in, you may not see the most recent content as Drupal will pull some pages directly from its cache. This should help as these tools were designed specifically for drupal.org and other popular sites using Drupal to survive a Slashdotting.

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Thanks to Steve Krause for finding blogHelper’s Using WordPress as CMS. Steve notably omitted the counter from blogHelper, 5 Reasons Not to Use WordPress As a CMS. As blogHelper points out,

You’re Pushing It
WordPress was built to be a blog platform first, everything else second. So, everytime you push it to do something else, remember that you’re making it do something it wasn’t meant to do.

I see this all the time. People using WordPress, or more often MT, as a web publishing tool to try to build a website that really needs a full-featured CMS such as Drupal, Joomla, or Plone. Think of MT or WP as a specialized, $20 Lego car model kit. It’s meant to build that car and maybe with a few variations. And perhaps you can squeeze something else out of it. But if you are looking to do more than build that kind of Lego car, you really need the mega tub of Legos or maybe K’nex (depending on the range of things you want to build).

This is a good analogy, too, because many newbies to CMS’s are easily frustrated because they can’t find directions to build exactly what they want. Documentation on the CMS websites is much like the booklet that comes with that giant box of Legos or K’nex. It’ll have a few examples, but the software designers just can’t explain how to build the whole range of websites and their variations (on the other hand, it is very easy to do so with WP or MT). For that, one has to become familiar with the building blocks, learn to use one’s imagination, and look at what others are building with their box of blocks.

So the best advice is to dive into a CMS and begin experimenting. I don’t know about anyone else, but the way I learned to build with Legos was just to sit down and play with them. And like playing with those Legos, there were many times when I have had to tear down a site and begin again until I really got good at working with the pieces.

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Via Slashdot comes this NY Times piece from today, Words of Wisdom vs. Words From Our Sponsor, describing Freeload Press, a company providing free electronic textbooks with advertisements.

I don’t know why this makes me feel queasy, but I wouldn’t mind seeing groups of teachers or a professional organization doing the same–supporting the writing and publishing of ad supported, free textbooks. Maybe its because it wouldn’t be an attempt to turn it into a huge profit making enterprise, but a real effort to provide free textbooks to benefit students and assist with funding teachers to write them.

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After just a couple of weeks at GVSU, I’ve decided that I don’t like Novell Groupwise. Palm Desktop software seems a much more user friendly calendar and contact management program. So since I recently ditched my Treo phone in favor of Motorola V915, I have to find an alternative calendar and contact information. I had high hopes for the Motorola Phone Tools application so I could sync calendar and contact information, but it basically sucks unless you use MS Outlook. The desktop interface is just crappy, so bad that I can’t believe that they sell it. It’s really not worth anything more beyond using it to back up the phone contact list.

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Ars Technica reports that the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has got an official name for their machine, the Children’s Machine 1 (CM1), and is touting new features which include a 1200×900 resolution for the 8″ display. As Nicholas Negroponte explains, it

has higher resolution than 95 percent of the laptop displays on the market today, approximately one-seventh of the power consumption, one-third of the price, sunlight readability, and room-light readability with the backlight off.

Me, I’m a sucker for well designed interfaces, and the eye candy is definitely looking very slick:

(click on the image for a higher resolution screenshot)

See more demo images and the design mockup which is only partially implemented in the current demo screenshots.

Maybe this will give Blackboard and WebCT a wakeup call. Blackboard’s circa mid 90’s button design for menus, the junky looking icon interface for WebCT, the overuse of frames, and general user-unfriendly communication features could certainly use some redesign.

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Some of you interested in document design open source tools might want to check out NewsForge’s Designing a book with LyX. From LyX’s About page:

LyX is an advanced open source document processor running on many Unix and some non-Unix platforms. It is called a “document processor”, because unlike standard word processors, LyX encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents, not their appearance. LyX lets you concentrate on writing, leaving details of visual layout to the software. LyX automates formatting according to predefined rule sets, yielding consistency throughout even the most complex documents. LyX produces high quality, professional output — using LaTeX, an open source, industrial strength typesetting engine, in the background.

LyX has also been ported to Windows and Mac.

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Open Access News notes the start of a new book search service by commercial publishers similar to Google Books. From the article,

Patricia Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers, said LibreDigital Warehouse would be a way to help authors, distributors and independent booksellers market their titles, while allowing publishers to maintain presentation quality and copyright control.

“Publishers, unlike the popular portrayal of them, have been digitizing their content for a very long time,” said Schroeder. “They’re very much ready for this. Obviously, they’re very happy to work with people and with search engines that respect their copyright.”

Yeah, right. I don’t think a warm and fuzzy feeling of working with friends is motivating this. By establishing their own service, publishers may hope to diffuse one of the four fair use factors. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them claim that any book in their service which is also in Google’s might discourage users from accessing their service, ultimately affecting their ability to sell full access and other services. Smart move. Touché to the publishers!

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Apparently, the RIAA will continue to sue you after you are dead.

Larry Scantlebury has been fighting the RIAA in court over his alleged downloading of music files. Despite Scantlebury’s recent death, instead of merely dropping the case, the RIAA have filed for a 60 day respite before continuing with the suit against Scantlebury’s estate because

Plaintiffs do not believe it appropriate to discuss a resolution of the case with the family so close to Mr. Scantlebury’s passing. Plaintiffs therefore request a stay of 60 days to allow the family additional time to grieve.

Hmmm…wouldn’t the smart PR move be just to offer to drop the case? lol

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Grant Robertson’s The RIAA vs. John Doe, a layperson’s guide to filesharing lawsuits is a great read if you ever wanted to learn about the RIAA’s heavy-handed tactics for suing P2P users. Robertson revised Ray Beckerman’s legalese filled How the RIAA Litigation Process Works in order to present a more interesting, accessible overview.

Take a look at some of the comments, too. For instance, Song.mp3 points out how utterly unreliable it is to base a lawsuit on an IP address. How many people are using routers? Most will be configured as firewalls, and the IP points to the router, not the computer. If the router is configured as an open access point, anyone within wireless range could log onto the network and be using it to share files.

All of this got me to wondering. IANAL, but the lawsuit seems to be based on the RIAA’s ability to download the files as proof of copyright infringement. How could they know if anyone else has downloaded any files? (I’d be curious to know if ISP’s are maintaining and suppplying full IP traffic records to the RIAA) Is it copyright infringement to redistribute copyrighted materials to the copyright owner (the RIAA is the legal representative of the copyright owner)? At best can the RIAA only claim that there is attempted copyright infringement? Regardless, it must be impossible to prove that there was any real damage done the copyright owner if the RIAA can only show themselves to have downloaded the file.

Now I’m done. Rant about other idiocy–Blackboard and patents–coming in the near future

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SPARC has announced Author Rights, “an educational initiative to inform faculty across all disciplines about how to use the SPARC Author Addendum to secure their rights as authors of journal articles.” Learn more on the resources page by reading

• the brochure (there is also a pdf of the brochure and a poster)
• the Author Addendum

For those not familiar with the Author Addendum, Peter Suber explains

SPARC’s Author Rights brochure identifies the rights faculty have as copyright holders and encourages them to retain the rights they need to ensure the broadest practical access to their articles. It explains how to use the SPARC Author Addendum and even gives tips on what to do if the publisher rejects the Addendum. It also offers specific language authors can insert in a publisher agreement when their article will be deposited in NIH’s PubMed Central.

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A little bit of ASCII emoticon history. The first smiley was sent back in September of 1982. These days, I wonder if my some of my students even know how to type it out; many GUI chat and other software interfaces provide buttons with the graphical representation to click.

Link courtsey of Digg.

if:book has just posted about a new project: MediaCommons. From a theoretical standpoint, this is an exciting collection of ideas for a new scholarly community, and I wish if:book the best in building and promoting MediaCommons.

From a pragmatic standpoint, however, I would offer the following advice which I also discussed this weekend with the WPA during their yearly conference in regards to revising the existing WPA site and offering new services to members. The “If We Build It, They Will Come” strategy of web community development is laudable, but often doomed to failure. There are many projects around the web which are inspired by great ideas, yet they fail. Installing and configuring a content management system website is the easy part. Creating content for the site and building a community of people who use it is much harder. I feel it is typically better to limit the scope of a project early on and create a smaller community space in which the project can grow, then add more to serve the community’s needs over time (more on this later).

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