Serendipity35

Moodle, the open source course management system, passed the eight year mark in August. (The actual launch date was also the the birthday of Moodle’s lead developer and founder.) Moodle usage now includes 52,000 registered Moodle sites and over 950,000 registered users on moodle.org (see Moodle statistics) with many more users at those sites.

            Moodle.org in August 2004 via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine

One interesting aspect of its growth is the addition of language packs that allow Moodle to be used in many languages. There are 86 language packs for Moodle version 1.x. The latest language pack announcements might send you to Wikipedia. They recently announced a pack for Dzongkha, the official language of Bhutan, South Asia which is spoken by around 600 thousand people.

It's also important that these packs are also open source projects with the language packs being done by volunteer translators who continue to work on versions for Moodle 2.0 and future releases. If you look at the Moodle 2.0 language packs download page you can see some of the progress for each language.

Two of the new languages are Tigrinia and Amharic. Amharic and Tigrinya are languages spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and have around 25 million and 6.7 million speakers respectively.

I started working with Moodle in 2005 when I was at NJIT. We were WebCT users but wanted to see what Moodle and Sakai offered. I focused on Moodle and we piloted a few courses but faculty were hesitant to make the big shift.

A presentation that I posted on Slideshare in 2007 has gotten 26,053 views and has been embedded on 55 other sites (including at The College St-Michel in France!), so there is certainly interest in open source learning management systems. It was a presentation I did at the NJEDge.Net Faculty Best Practices Showcase in March 2007 about NJIT’s pilot program and examining the open source/free aspect of Moodle and the support needed to implement it on a campus. 

I left NJIT in 2008 but the exploration continued and the university moved fully to Moodle last year. I still adjunct a few grad courses at NJIT, so I'm still using Moodle. And my current college is making a determination this year about what LMS to use in the future and Moodle is definitely in the mix.

The Toshiba/National Science Teachers Association ExploraVision Awards Program competition is now in its 19th year. The program addresses many of the concerns addressed by STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) programs across the country.

The ExploraVision program, sponsored by Toshiba and administered by the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), challenges teams of 2-4 students to research scientific principles and current technologies as the basis for designing innovative technologies that could exist in 20 years.

Students on the four first-place ExploraVision winning teams will each receive a $10,000 U.S. Series EE Savings Bond valued at maturity. Students on second-place teams will each receive a $5,000 bond valued at maturity.

Teachers can learn more about ExploraVision and how to use it as a tool in the classroom through a series of Web Seminars at the NSTA Learning Center  starting Wednesday, September 15, 2010.

For more information visit http://www.exploravision.org

EDUCAUSE will have its Member Update as a web event on Tuesday, September 7, 1:00–2:00 p.m. EDT.

Log in on Sept. 7 and you will also hear about plans for October's annual conference and its corresponding virtual event.

Topics will include:

EDUCAUSE 2010 Conference overview
•    Current and upcoming innovations in our professional development events
•    An update on the Core Data Service redesign project
•    Newsworthy items from other EDUCAUSE programs

No registration is required. Prior to the session, run the Acrobat Connect Connection Test on the computer you plan to use for the session to ensure your configuration is compatible with the web conferencing system. They will archive the sessions and make the recordings available online so you have the opportunity to listen and provide feedback beyond the session itself.

A very unpleasant story out of Philadelphia for bloggers. The city wants to crack down on people who are running a business without a license. Sounds reasonable - until I read that this includes little ol' local bloggers who are running ads on their sites.

According to the weekly Philadelphia City Paper, several small-scale bloggers received letters from the city demanding that they get a $300 license to operate a local business.

I don't know about Philly bloggers, but a $300 license would wipe all the "ad revenue" from Serendipity35 for the past five years!

The idea that a blogger with a few Google or Amazon ads is "conducting commercial activity" is stretching it. I actually have listed on my tax form any income from blogging in the past, and that seems to be what triggered the city to find local businesses operating without licenses.

"The IRS is the fastest way to find them, though we have other avenues that we don't advertise," a Philadelphia Department of Revenue representative told CNNMoney.com.

New federal regulations that took effect this summer requiring colleges to take steps to deal with illegal music and movie downloading on campus networks.

I listened to Heidi Wachs, Georgetown University's director of IT policy, talk about it on an episode of Tech Therapy.

It reminded me of the time back in early 2007 when I was bringing NJIT into iTunes U and we needed legal to review our policies on copyright. Like many colleges, there were policies that needed to be there that didn't exist.

It's hard to fall back on protections like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) when you haven't done any of the work that affords you that protection.

The firestorm of fines and publicity about students downloading files illegally seems to died down the past year, but the consequences still exist - and many schools are still very unprepared.

Copyright infringement is the act of exercising, without permission or legal authority, one or more of the exclusive rights granted to the copyright owner under section 106 of the Copyright Act (Title 17 of the United States Code). These rights include the right to reproduce or distribute a copyrighted work. In the file-sharing context, downloading or uploading substantial parts of a copyrighted work without authority constitutes an infringement.
For more information, please see the Web site of the U.S. Copyright Office at www.copyright.gov, especially their FAQ's at www.copyright.gov/help/faq.

• Tech Therapy on iTunes


• More in The Chronicle


• Resources from Educause

Just sending those of you who read this blog but don't follow me or other education tech types on places like Twitter or Facebook to an article on The Chronicle site.

They call it "College 2.0: Teachers Without Technology Strike Back" but I'm not sure I would consider this to be in the College 2.0 category or how much of a "strike back" movement we have going in education, but... you decide.

It points to several teachers trying a no-tech approach including a University of West Florida teacher who banned laptops, cellphones, and such in his summer class in English literature and found that "The students seemed more involved in the discussion than when I allowed them to go online."

The Chronicle had earlier run a related (on the other side) piece on "Reaching the Last Technology Holdouts at the Front of the Classroom."