Tag: opensource

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Bookmarked How France Adopts An Open Source-Based Education Strategy – Free of Big Tech by Pernille Tranberg.

Kauffmann said that France has never officially embraced big tech in schools, which makes the project easier, and that the public generally is skeptic towards monopolies and the abuse of private data. The country is thus undergoing a cultural shift in the digital education sector, promoting the use of free, open, and interoperable code, data, and content, referred to as “digital commons”. This approach encompasses not only free licenses but also community involvement and governance.

How France Adopts An Open Source-Based Education Strategy – Free of Big Tech · Dataetisk Tænkehandletank

Found via a boost from @FourthWorld@mastodon.online might be an exciting move from France. Back in 2014-15 when I was working with Ian Stuart on the Glow Scotland reboot, we talked a lot about OpenSource and, AFAIR, talked to someone who came over from Paris to show us an open source solution they were using there at the time.

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I just saw What is Digital Literacy? A guest blog from Andy McLaughlin, University of Aberdeen – DigiLearn and a pointer to the discussion on LinkedIn.

But what do we do there – if we go open source or other methods are we giving our young people the skills to enter the workplace .

Ian Gibson

Ian and John, I’d love to hear your take on the idea that Big Tech’s “efficiency agenda” has been the biggest hindrance to digital skill development.

Andy McLaughlin

There is a lot of interesting ideas popping up in the conversation. I joined in, although I don’t really have a clear idea as to where I stand. Quite quickly I reached LinkedIn’s maximum character limit, so though I’d post here and link in there, POSSE style. Here are the rather ragged thoughts I wanted to post:

Of course in Scotland we have access to an Open Source product in the form of WordPress 😉 But I doubt there is much awareness of Open Source generally among my colleagues. As a primary teacher, I need to get my head round hundreds of experiences and outcomes, leaving little time for the reading, never mind the thinking needed in this area.

Open Source is involved in many work places. Some even owned by ‘Big Tech’. Unfortunately Open Source and open technologies (RSS for example) do not have an army of paid and unpaid evangelists in the same way as ‘Big Tech’.

I am not suggesting we should abandon Big Tech, but we should be able to think about the implication

I recently quoted this:

warning parents that although they think they are giving their children access to the internet, they are really giving the internet access to their children.

BBC World Service – The Documentary Podcast, Assignment: Ireland’s phone-free town

Could we replace parents by educators, children by pupils and internet by ‘Big Tech’.

Not sure I fully grok Big Tech’s “efficiency agenda” but to my mind it might be jumping into using tech too far from the base metal? Just a few (20) years ago, I’d start teaching pupils some basic text editing, a wee bit about the difference between bitmap and vector image software before moving on to more complex tools. I think I’d rather see a pupil ‘misusing’ powerPoint or Keynote to make their own creative images than cycling through possibilities in a more sophisticated tool.

I am also open to the idea that a bit of friction in your toolkit might mean to spending a bit more time thinking.

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31314

I’ve not blogged much about work recently, but this story is a good one if somewhat tangled.

We are working, in the Glow blogs team, on the next release. This is mainly to address any problems with the upgrade to WordPress 4.0.1 that came out in January.

My work includes: watching reports come through the help desk; passing on problems that come directly to me (twitter, email and phone) through to the RM. I do a wee bit of tyre kicking and talking to the test team on the way.

On Tuesday I got a mail from a teacher, to the effect that the link to My Sites from the Local Authority home pages didn’t work. Talking to Grant, one of the test team, I found out he was chasing the same problem. We kicked it around a bit and found that if a new users creates a blog on their LA before accessing My Sites, the link did not work, it leads to a list of blogs that the user has a role on.

This is not a show stopper as the user can click on any of the blogs and then the My Site link in the Admin Bar as a work around.

While testing this out we noticed that although the Admin Bar is visible on any Glow blog in your Local Authority, the My Sites link on it leads to the same error (with a list of your sites page).

Thinking these were linked I raised a call to the RM help desk. This got passed through to the team at Automattic. They have quickly fixed the first issue and recorded the fix in our system (JIRA) for following development. The code will be in the next release, hopefully in two or three weeks.

At this point we asked about the second bug, we were told that is was in WordPress core and the team had not only reported it but proposed an initial fix. It is worth pointing out that this was put into the WordPress tracking system at quarter to eleven on Thursday night:

#31314 (My Sites admin bar link broken when on blogs you have no role on) – WordPress Trac

You can see from the linked page, that the ticked was closed at 6:29 on Friday morning. The fix and some improvements are currently attracting the attention and input from three other developers who are completely unconnected from Glow.

So What?

The people that helped with this one included:

  • The teacher who reported the problem
  • The Testers contracted to the Scottish Government
  • The RM Help Desk who are the first point of contact for Glow fault
  • The Developers from Automattic working for Glow
  • WordPress developers who have nothing to do with and likely no knowledge of Glow

Which quite a complex system, but it seems to be working. Most of these people are on the hook and doing their job, but I wonder if a bug in a commercial system would be fixed so quickly? We don’t have the bug fixed in our system but it looks good for being sorted out in a subsequent upgrade.

For me this was pretty exciting. It feels pretty good for those of us who think that Open Source and Openness in general is a good idea in Education.

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Open Source Edition of LiveCode by RunRev Ltd — Kickstarter

Reinventing HyperCard for the 21st Century. A free open source app creation platform for non-programmers and programmers alike.

I just backed this project on Kickstarter. It aims to take LiveCode open source. LiveCode is a x-platform clone of the old macheads favourite HyperCard.

HyperCard is the application that turned me into someone who disliked computers and regarded then an improved Banda machine (Banda, HyperCard, really showing my age) into an enthusiast. Folk with less tolerant spouses should step away from the likes of LiveCode.

I am not a current user of LiveCode, although I bough a license a year or so ago. I tend to use the mac only SuperCard. At one time I even made some educational shareware with HyperCard and then SuperCard. Didn’t make much money but had a lot of fun. Over the years I’ve knocked up tools to do various fun things (from Animating Gifs to logging kids onto glow), but the real strength of LiveCode may be in coding for pupils. RunRev, the company that produce LiveCode think so too:

We believe that computational thinking and programming is a key form of digital literacy and that enabling a new generation to write interactive software is critically important in today’s economy.

LiveCode is used in hundreds of schools around the world to teach programming in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) classes. It is uniquely suited for students in the 13 to 18 age groups. Every school that has used LiveCode for more than a year has seen a doubling of uptake in advanced computer science classes for boys and girls as well as an increase in exam pass rates!

I would imagine that the easy entry to programming that LiveCode provides (going on my HyperCard and Supercard experience here) would help get pupils that would not normally be interested in programming started while providing a accelerated development path for the code friendly ones.

Anyway I thought it worth a punt. RunRev are based in Edinburgh so a local company.

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I just posted some news to the scotedublogs aggregation blog but it looks like there might be a wee problem with wordpress.com:

So I am going to post it here too and Andrew might be best staying with self hosting after all;-)

I posted about the new feature

has added, a Stats page. This looks as if it might be useful analysing what goes on in the SEB world. The first thing I noticed was the post dinner peak you can also see the dip at the weekend, when I do most of my blogging.


has also added a ScotEduBlogs Wiki to the ScotEduBlogs site.

I was also going to post about the mockup for the ScotEduBlogs.org.uk site which I’ve just updated.

Since we have had no entries over at scotedublogs » ScotEduBlogs Logo I made the logo myself. Please let me know what you think about the design here or join in the discussion at the scotedublogs development group.

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SEB Logo

Over at the ScotEduBlogs news: index site

and

have be working flat out. You can keep read Pete: ScotEduBlogs and Robert’s post and comments to keep up or cut over to scotedublogs_devel | Google Groups to watch or join the development.

I am trying to work on the design as I can’t contribute code. Feel free to join in with anything, but especially:

The ScotEduBlogs Logo competition

We need a logo, preferably 790 pixels by 180 or so. It should reflect Scotland, blogging and sharing/ Open source software.

I am not sure about the judging process, probably a poll on the wiki.

First prize: fame, and the right to stick a open source license on you logo;-)

You can also join in with suggestions as to how this project should look, perform, features you would like to see, Robert and Pete are not only open to suggestions they seem to add them faster than I can think ’em up.

If you are a ScotsEduBlogger you should also go over to the site and check to see if you are listed. If not add yourself, if you are check your tags and edit them to your preference.

Please blog about the project so that as many SEBloggers can join in the process.