Technology can be used for both good and evil…
To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery – NYTimes.com.
Archive for the 'Educational Technology' Category
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We chose Linux as the platform for Sakai. The main reason was cost — no licenses for the server OS and the availability of low cost server hardware. We opted for CentOS 5 as the flavour of Linux. It is basically Red Hat Enterprise and has proven to be robust in the past.
CentOS is easy to install. I began with a virtual machine running in VMWare Fusion on my iMac. This allowed me to walk through the install process as a dry run, test out tools and steps, and to roll back if anything broke.
I opted for a 64-bit build of CentOS, so that we could take advantage of large amounts of memory later on if needed.
After installing CentOS using the GUI, the next step was to prepare the system for installing Sakai from source.
To install Sakai 2.5.x from source, we need several things (with caveats):
- Java JDK/JRE 5.0 Update 18 (Java 6 will NOT work)
- Apache Tomcat 5.5.26 or greater (Tomcat 6 is NOT compatible with Sakai)
- Maven 2.0.6 or better (for building Sakai source code)
- MySQL 4.1 or 5.0.x
Out of the box, CentOS has both Java 1.4 and Java 6 installed. Java JDK/JRE 5.0 needs to be downloaded from Sun and installed (Note that Sun Microsystems is withdrawing Java 5.0 as of September 2009, so if you want it, download and archive a copy now).
Installing a new version of Java involved unpacking the distribution in a local directory (e.g. /opt or /usr/local) and the using the “alternatives –install” command to make the system aware of the version and to select it as the default Java version. Use “java -version” to confirm that the correct java version is selected.
Next: Installing Tomcat 5.5
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The next few posts will chronicle the process of creating a fresh install of the Sakai portal/course management system and then importing content from an existing installation.
The organization that I went through this process for had a Sakai instance that had been installed by a vendor/consultant as a binary distribution. We relied on the vendor for troubleshooting, upgrades and tool/portlet installations. We decided a few months back to develop the expertise “in-house” to install, configure and upgrade Sakai so that we would no longer be reliant on a vendor.
We wanted to go through the entire process of installing Sakai from source in order to learn how to do it, and to allow us to add tools using source code later on.
Sakai is not that difficult to install on its own, but there are a number of issues that arose during the process that I felt it was important to document.
Stay tuned!
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A student of mine recommended a great Flash video tool called video.Maru. It’s a component which allows a developer to create customized video players without any knowledge of ActionScript.
All you have to do is create MovieClips on the stage with the correct names. I am experimenting with it now and will post some more impressions here as I go along.
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Tags: videomaru, flash, video, 2008, tools
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The final full day at NECC was a full one. The day began with a bus tour of the Atlanta area. Did you know that Elton John lives for part of the year in Atlanta? We toured through the downtown area of Atlanta and drove through one of the more upscale neighbourhoods, admiring stately homes.
The bus stopped at the Atlanta Cyclorama, which is a huge panoramic painting depicting one of the key battles of the American Civil War. Afterwards, the tour continued on to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth house, as well as the church where he was a minister. Both of this sites are now historical monuments.
The afternoon was devoted to presenting LEARN’s Virtual School project at an afternoon poster session entitled “Learning Environments.” We spoke to interesting people from all over the place. There was a woman from Perth, Australia who expressed some interest in what we were doing. We spent quite a bit of time speaking with a colleague from New Brunswick about their Virtual High School project. It will be interesting to follow up with them and compare notes as we move forward.
The evening was spent attending a reception at CNN Center hosted by Apple Canada. After some lively conversation with Canadian colleagues and Apple representatives, we enjoyed a fascinating tour of the CNN facilities.
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Wow! Every once in a while you attend a workshop that really makes a difference – or at least rises above the usual standard of conference workshops. Dr. Alice Christie is this year’s bomb. This was by far the most effective, impressive education workshop that I have attended in a long time.The workshop focused on GPS technology and the practice of geocaching. Geocaching is a kind of treasure/scavenger hunt that uses the GPS as the primary tool for finding the hidden treasure or “cache”.Dr. Christie put the participants of her workshop in teams of 4-5 people and gave us all the task of finding several destinations, or “waypoints” in Atlanta’s Centennial Park using a GPS accompanied by a clue. The key to completing the activity was to function as a team, share responsibilities and collaborate to solve all of the clues.After completing the exercise, we reflected on the activity and performed another activity that situated the GPS “game” in contructivist learning principles.If you are interested in GPS or geocaching (or educational technology in general), visit Dr. Christie’s excellent website at http://www.alicechristie.org/.More links tomorrow! Report from NECC – June 25, 2007
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Presenter: Dr. Yvonne Marie Andrés
Dr. Andrés is the founder of the Global Schoolnet, a home to many learning resources on the web.Dr. Andrés began by touring her site, the Global Schoolnet, showcasing a Project Registry for PBL.
She worked her way through a “speed-dating” version of several online collaborative tools.
- Dropshots.com allows teachers/students to upload videos to a public space using a drag and drop interface.
- YackPack.com is an online audio collaborative space (still in Beta) that uses a neat visual Flash interface.
- Google for Educators – An educationally-oriented version of Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets applications.
- PhotoShow.com is a way for teachers/students to create animated musical slideshows through e-mail, the web or from other media.
- Simplestar.com – adds functionality and special effects to Photoshow (above)
In general this was a very useful workshop. If there was a downside, it was that it wasn’t quite as engaging as it could’ve been. The Internet connection was spotty throughout the workshop, and so it was difficult for us to experience some of the sites that Dr. Andrés was showing us. Three hours is also a VERY long time to spend at a computer in one shot. Nonetheless, the tools that were demonstrated were interesting, and I look forward to investigating them further.
UPDATE! Additional resources from the workshop
- Backflip.com is a social bookmarking site, somewhat similar to del.icio.us.
- Bravenet.com is a hosting service for web sites as well as a variety of online tools such as maps, polls, calendars, etc.
- Digitaldivide.net – an online community with collaborative tools with a goal to bridging the digital divide.
- Elluminate – One of the main synchronous platforms.
- MyWay – Free e-mail with no add, similar in look and feel to MyYahoo!
- Skype – The ubiquitous VOIP tool.
- Think.com – Collaboration tools for students and schools developed and sponsored by Oracle.
- Twitter – This is an online brainstorming, information sharing site. Entries can be posted on the web or through text messaging. Dr. Andrés has written an article about Twitter at http://www.districtadministration.com/pulse/
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The crush of people entering the Exhibit Hall at the Georgia World Congress Center this morning was almost frightening. The escalators could not accommodate the sheer numbers of people descending from the street level to the Exhibition Hall. I managed to avoid the melee by finding a side staircase and negotiating my way to the right place.The Exhibit Hall itself was like many high tech trade shows that I have been to in the past, except bigger. All the major players are here: Apple, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Houghton-Mifflin, Pearson, Thomson Interactive and the list goes on…I was able to make connections with a few select companies. For someone like me from a Canadian organization, there is a fair amount of filtering to do. Many of the services and programs that are being pitched here are geared heavily for a U.S. curriculum and for the NETS. Even school administrative tools are not necessarily applicable to our situation in Québec. There were some interesting finds:
- Discovery is launching an online content management tool called “OnePlace”, which is a single sign-on “portal” to a variety of content both local and remote. The beauty of the system (which is worth investigating) is that all of the content, whether local or remote is searchable. The OnePlace system is integrated into services like unitedstreaming.com.
More later!
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Today was our first day at the NECC site. We registered and toured the Georgia World Congress Center to get our bearings and decide where the best places to hang out were.The scale of NECC is massive, yet it operates like a well-oiled machine. Shuttle buses ferry the thousands of attendees from their hotels to the conference site. The sheer number of people is a site to see.After getting a feel for the place, the LEARN “delegation” (consisting of myself and Director of Operations, Patrick Bérubé) attended a special reception for international attendees entitled, “Putting the ‘I’ in ISTE”. We hooked up with a couple of other colleagues from Canada and met some other people from as far afield as Australia and Singapore.Tonight, NECC delegates got a special treat: A private tour of the brand new Georgia Aquarium, billed as the largest aquarium in the United States (if not the the world). The skills of the organizers was apparent as they managed to get what appeard to be a couple of thousand conference participants into the aquarium and fed without incident or complaint. The aquarium is beautiful and highlighted by two very large tanks containing a “pod” of beluga whales and tropical fish (including several species of shark and stingray) respectively.Back at the hotel, it’s time to wind down and to start thinking about tomorrow’s activities. The day starts early with an orientation, followed by a few hours exploring the massive Exhibition Hall and then two consecutive hands-on workshops in the afternoon. More updates tomorrow!
