The Spoken Word Project

Progress report on the Frontier open source release.

Progress report on the release of Frontier as open source release. We need to look at our Frontier sites (bring server to H241). And think about this as an alternative to MT. Which lincence will suit best?

Are we running a Fedora site (current software) on one of our machines to get familiarity?

More on Audio blogs

Apparently Adam has found the perfect audioblogging software for his Mac. It hooks into the flow of bits to the speakers and turns that flow into an MP3

says Dave Winer This could be very useful for RSS audio feeds and communications teacher to student? Perhaps eventuall in Project Pad... Could we look at it?

Nortel Is Selling Manufacturing Operations

Deeply troubled Nortel Networks hopes to raise about $500 million and create long-term savings as it deals with accounting investigations in the U.S. and Canada. [New York Times: Business]

Perhaps this explains some things....

Weblog Relocation!

The Spoken Word Weblog has found a new home at GCU. Please redirect your web browsers and update your bookmarks with the following URL:

Spoken Word Weblog @ GCU

Many Thanks

Aidan

Weblogg-ed - Using Weblogs and RSS in Education : Video

Weblogg-ed - Using Weblogs and RSS in Education : Video

At this years NECC conference Intel presented a movie about blogging in education. It featured Will Richardson and a few of his students at Hunterdon High School in Flemington New Jersey.

Hunterdon gives a Manila powered blog to some of its students to help them hone their writing skills. Students are encourages to write in their blogs, and solicit feedback from their teachers, peers, and volunteer mentors.

I think this short movie could be a great way to evangelise the use of blogs in education settings. In less than 2 minutes this movie describes bloggings benifits far better than I generally can in 1 hour of conversation.

Adam Curry Audio Blogs

From Adam Curry: could we listen to this and follow it up? Try it out? Know about it?

I just wrote a script to cut down on publishing time on the daily Source Code shows. Now when I'm done recording I drop the finished file into a special folder on my desktop, this triggers an applescript that does the following:

Change name to dailySourceCode+today's date. Add id3 tags. Upload to server. Create a blog post via metaWeblog api to Radio UserLand. Delete desktop file. Tell me if it worked.

Amazing all the steps I used to make to publish the show! This script will work with OSX and any weblog software that understands the metaWeblog api

Here is a sample of his blog....

Press Releases

Press Releases

Blackboard has launched a learning objecty repository...

Shibboleth Issues

We should try to raise the awareness in Caledonaian of the significance of Shibboleth. The "Notes of the Town Meeting held on Friday 6 February 2004 at 28 Portland Place, London to initiate JISC Circular 1/04: 'Call for Projects in Core Middleware' " include the following:

1.1 Authentication and authorisation activity is important for JISC and in particular for the JISC Committee for the Information Environment (JCIE) and the JISC Committee for the Support of Research (JCSR).  From a JCSR perspective emphasis on the Grid and e-Science means that issues of authentication and authorisation are important and the committee is keen to see the work of the information environment (Athens) and the work of the Grid (Globus etc) harmonised.   

1.2 Athens is recognised as being an extremely successful service but it is also acknowledged that there will need to be a successor to Athens which will be wider than its current UK focus – hence this call and the parallel activity of the development of a production Shibboleth service. 

1.3 It is also useful to look at the European context.  The Trans European Research and Education Networking Association (TERENA) and the National Research and Education Networks (NRENS) are very interested in the area of authentication and authorisation – although most countries have focussed on single national AAA initiatives.  The PAPI system (http://papi.rediris.es/) is similar to Shibboleth but we have not opted for this because international take-up is limited and it is less well equipped to handle small scale collaborative activities. 

1.4 The Shibboleth initiative began in 2002 and is facilitated by Internet 2 (http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/).  It arose out of the need for Internet2 institutions to be able to collaborate with each other – and in a way which is scalable and which would not be possible via conventional means. It would be appropriate for the UK to adopt Shibboleth because it could therefore be used in an international context.  

We should also speak to Bologna about this and include it in our regular agenda.

Fedora makes this direction desirable:

Upcoming versions of the software will add important functionality, such as Shibboleth-based authentication, fine-grained policy enforcement, workflow support, enhanced preservation features, and performance enhancements to support extremely large repositories.

ITV switches to Linux

The Guardian reported that ITV has begun the process of switching many of it systems to Linux.

It would seem that they have migrated some of their older Unix servers to Linux and are also testing out Linux on the desktop.

Open Source CMS

While investigating open source content management sytems Ross Little pointed me in the direction of http://www.opensourcecms.com. This is an excellent site which compares various open source cms and allows you to try them out without having to download and install them.