MET course weblog

Hi everyone!

Welcome to this week’s presentation on Collaboration Technologies.

Our group has decided to try a different, perhaps more traditional, presentation style using the OSS learning management system called Moodle.  Many of you may be familiar with this platform or have had some working experience.  If not, that’s ok too!

Our website can be found at  ——————  (ETEC 522: Module 8 – Collaborative Technologies).  To begin, you will need to click on “create new account” and follow the prompts.  I have set the enrollment key as ETEC522.

We hope you enjoy our presentation and we look forward to your thoughts and ideas about Collaboration Technologies!

Your Module 8 Presentation Group,

Ian, Sean, Ernie, & Jen

To view our concluding statements and a great summative concept map, please come to the CONCLUSION TAB of our NING website.
Thank you all for participating in the discussion forums this week. There was excellent dialogue generated among class members.

Thanks again.
The Module 7 team.

Hello everyone.  Great work by the module teams for Mods 4, 5, 6 and 7. Very engaging activities and a whole new perspective for most of us on the module themes. Excellent media resources and links have been provided for further use and study by the teams.  Thanks Mods 4-7 teams.

Bring it on Mods 8-11 teams!

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We are now at the halfway point in module team activities.  As instructors, we’re beginning to look at participation levels in the activities from all members of the class.  We realize that there is a lot to do in ETEC 522 and some of you may be taking multiple courses.  However, you may be getting a reminder note in your email from us with respect to participation, and the requirement for such in the overall scheme for the course.  In most cases, you will not receive an email from us because you have been active in most or all modules.

We’re now heading into the home stretch with a few module teams yet to provide us with an activity for their module theme.  Most of you will also be focused on your Assignment 3 pitch.  Please let us know if there is any advice we can provide as we head towards the venture forum, Module 12.

Thank you for your excellent participation so far in our presentation. We appreciate your comments in the Module 7 discussion on One to One Technologies–and thanks Byron for these other pointers.

Make sure you check out under learning models: in the discussion forum re: the question about what your PLE diagram would look like.

Making your own PLE concept map is a fun way to see how we are already customizing our learning using the new web 2.0 tools available. Visit the Learning models main page to see a link to lots of student PLE samples, then feel free to post your PLE diagram at:

http://1to1tech.ning.com/forum/categories/learning-models/listForCategory  Please join in this interactive activity–we can’t wait to see your “BOOtiful” diagrams-Happy Halloween.

First off, thank you Module 7 for this presentation, it’s got me thinking in some new directions.

I was thinking through some of the issues with moving towards a 1:1 ratio, many of which are being discussed in the forums and comments, and looking for inexpensive ways of deploying more computers for students to use. I have better than a 1:1 ratio in my class, but my school at large is nowhere near. Here are two technologies that I’ve found, and I’m hoping that together we can find more.

Linux Terminal Server Project (http://www.ltsp.org/)

Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) is designed to connect multiple low-cost terminals to a powerful server which does all of the processing and storage for all users. The terminals can be old computers or newer thin clients, as long as they have a basic processor, video card, network card, and keyboard and mouse support. They don’t need any drives, as storage is handled by the server. Input by users is sent over the network, the server does the processing, and the results are resent over the network for the terminal to display. Practically, it’s like having your own machine.

The advantage to this is in costs and maintenance. The server is the only machine that needs to be setup and maintained. All of the terminals are interchangeable, and with the drives removed, the most common failures are gone as well. A single quad-core machine acting as a server (about $700) should run about 30 clients at reasonable speed. If the terminals are powerful enough, some processing can be done on them to reduce the load on the server too. Just about any old computer can be a terminal, so the clients can be old inventory or donated machines. Ubuntu includes a LTSP configuration in the install disk, so setting up a basic lab can be done in just a few hours.

The issue with this setup is that it uses Linux. While the OS and applications are free, it may be difficult getting IT to manage the system. If the IT already supports Linux, it should be an easy implementation.

Userful (http://www2.userful.com/)

From what I can tell, Userful behaves similarly to an LTSP environment, but instead of dummy boxes connected by network to the server, a keyboard, mouse, and monitor is connected directly  to the server. It also uses Linux as the OS, so the same implications with software as the LTSP apply.

There are some performance advantages to this setup. Since each monitor/desktop has direct access to a video card, video performance is improved. Also, since a server is limited to about 10 user desktops, each user could have a larger slice of the processing power.  The company claims that it costs about $70 per user in hardware costs in addition to the server. Here’s my own cost estimate for a brand new lab of 30 machines. You would need 30 modules ($2100), 3 servers ($2100), 15 video cards ($900), 30 keyboards, mice, and monitors ($6000), which comes to $11100. I imagine that many schools would be able to scrounge the keyboards, mice and monitors, and that would reduce the cost significantly, to just over $5000.

If you know of other options, I’d love to see more solutions for schools looking to expand their computer offerings.

Following up on the OSS Module activity by Group 6, I wanted to note that OpenOffice has posted its version 3.2beta today.

Apparently this version corrects many of the formatting issues with document interoperability that have been the barrier to entry for many, including me.

The blog post about the OO 3.2beta is here:

OpenOffice 3.2beta

I’m currently downloading this version to see whether it addresses my issues.  I would love to walk the “open” talk completely, but document formatting is an issue.  Let’s hope it’s good news.

Please view the article (link below): 
Is your school ready for one to one computing?

Handhelds, laptops, tablet PCs…Which is best for your school? Guest columnist Elizabeth Sky-McIlvain offers a simple rubric for administrators, teachers, and parents to use when evaluating their school’s readiness for one-to-one computing. Print this rubric and share it with your entire school community.

Education World ® Technology Center: One-to-One Computing.

Join in the discussion at our Module 7 NING site:

Sorry for my delayed post, I was in Bali, Indonesia for the last week and although I brought my laptop, I had very few opportunities for internet access, connecting (and a slow connection at that) when I was in the main city of Kuta.

First of all, great work Group 6! I really enjoyed learning about OSS. Since I was in Indonesia, I decided to focus on this country’s use of OSS.

 OSS is starting to becoming popular in Indonesia with more Indonesian people using this free software. The government is looking towards the development of OSS as a way to reduce the billions of dollars being spent on software from foreign vendors and as a major prevention against piracy. The biggest difficulties are that Internet access is limited (only the big cities, some universities don’t have internet), the high cost of computers and the language used in the software.

 The Open Source Contributors Group (OSCG) was founded is maintained by people at the Informatics Engineering Department, Institut Teknologi Bandung, Indonesia http://www.itb.ac.id/en/. Anyone can contribute in this open source software development and technology enhancement group by contributing his/her works, ideas, opinions, and/or suggestions.

 The following are some of the institutes’ students early projects: (see this report for more information)  

gx-admin

This is a generic web-based interface for UNIX system administration using any browser that supports tables and forms. gx-admin was designed to be generic and able to configure any kinds of UNIX text-based system files. The configuration for this application itself is on a text file that enables users to add as many configurations as possible. gx-admin consists of a simple web server and a number of CGI programs which directly update system files. The web server and all CGI programs are written in Perl version 5, and only use the standard perl modules.

Pegasus

An indexing web robot that can be used to index some defined urls, a range of IP addresses, or even the whole web. Pegasus can be executed with a web browser (for an interactive interface) or straightly from the shell with valid arguments. It will send a request for a HTML page, parse the HTML page, save some significant information and then follow all the links in that page and repeat the process ‘recursively’. Pegasus will store the information on a database with PostgreSQL as its Database Management System. The database can be used for various purposes, such as search engine’s database for a website, or a private database which can be used to search information offline. Pegasus was written in Perl version 5.

 RTSimula

This is a suite of programs that simulate the behavior of railroad hardware model. The simulator is truly real-time and intended to be used for the course of Real-time Programming. RTSimula currently consists of three different programs: the simulator – runs on Real-time Linux – doing the simulation by calculating some parameters provided by users, a monitor – runs on X-Window – drawing crude visualization of the trains and railways, and a simple controller program. The whole suite of programs (and the documentations) were written using OSS: Linux, Real-time Linux, and GTK+. All programs were written using C language.

 Unicorn

This is a subject guide that has a search engine for its main facility. The search engine was developed to search information on a database as a result from Pegasus’ indexing process. Unicorn uses various techniques to search through the database, such as simple search, exact phrase search, and a wildcard search. Users can also define the options for the search process, including the search sequence and a time range of the last-modified date from a page in the database. Unicorn was written in Perl version 5.

Finally, here is a short video (not in english) that is used to campaign for Indonesia to go open source. 

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