The Swedish Version 3.0 of Creative Commons is now avaliable for comments
Version 3.0 of the Swedish CC is an upgrade from version 2.5 and it is now available for comments at http://www.creativecommons.se/drafts/
August 22, 2008
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August 20, 2008
Screencasting: How To Start, Tools and Guidelines
Smashing Magazine have published a useful guide for screencasting.
Some companies have made a living creating a sort of “virtual classroom,” allowing members to learn at their own pace when they have the time using video tutorials. The advantages of the classroom setting stem from a one on one experience and the ability of the instructor to show the ideas and theories rather than simply explain them.
Screencasting, or sharing your virtual desktop via video presentation, has exploded in popularity with the advent of podcasting, and gives you the ability to bring the classroom feel to a media presentation that can be delivered over the Internet. The medium of screencasting is readily available to everyone and with a few tools of the trade you can be ready to produce your own.
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August 19, 2008
68 gratis e-böcker om Linux
Scary Mary tipsar om gratis e-böcker om Linux.
LinuxHaxor listar 68 gratis e-böcker som handlar om Linux. Böckerna är på engelska och många finns på webben i html medan vissa finns i pdf. Perfekt för dig som vill migrera från Windows men även den vane Linuxanvändaren.
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August 15, 2008
Fånga tjuven!
Scary Mary, som är en bra blogg on "datorer & sånt", tipsar idag om ett kul program som jag nästan hade glömt bort. Programmet heter Adeona och kan vara ett bra stöldskyddskomplement för skolor och bärbara datorer där stöldrisken är stor. Det är givetvis ingen idiotsäker lösning, men en kul tillspetsnig av befintligt stöldskydd.
Adeona är ett gratis open source-program som spårar platsen där din laptop befinner sig. Detta program är självklart bra om din bärbara dator blir stulen eller om du råkar tappa bort den. Kopplar tjuven upp sig med din stulna dator får du alltså reda på dess position. Detta beror således på tre olika saker:
1. Att programmet inte avinstalleras
2. Att datorn inte formateras om
3. Att tjuven kopplar upp sig mot internet
För den som vill ha regelbundna tips och nyheter om just Datorer & sånt är Scary Mary en bra blogg att följa!
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August 14, 2008
Announcing the Open Web Foundation
An interesting initiative, I wonder where it will go…
This morning at OSCON, David Recordon announced the creation of the Open Web Foundation. The Open Web Foundation is an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications. Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.
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August 13, 2008
One laptop per child - the budget version(s)
Investing in laptops for all student is an utopia for many educational institutions and schools. The emergence of Netbooks (or ultra portables) is obviously an exciting development that will make it more affordable and by that contribute to increase the computer availability, but it one laptop per student will still be an utopia for many educational institutions. Fortunately there are budget alternatives. These alternatives don’t give every student his/her own laptop, but at least it gives them a portable alternative that let them bring their own documents, desktop, applications and configurations wherever they may go. They only need to find a piece of suitable hardware. Both budget alternatives are based on USB sticks, and I have tried them out during the summer. They both work just fine in most situations that I have encountered so far. It would however be interesting to try them on real students…
Alternative 1: Portable Applications
Portable Applications is the simplest alternative, but it still goes a long way. Portable applications are a (large) set of applications that have been adapted to be install and ran from a USB stick using an application launcher, such as PortableApps. In fact, many applications doesn’t even need the application launcher, but that is another story.
With portable applications on a USB stick, students uses the “host” computer’s operating system, but their own applications and application settings from the USB-stick documents are of course stored there as well. This approach can be used in Mac OSX and Windows, as well as in Linux. I haven’t tested it in Linux yet, but it worked for me in Windows and in OS X. The main reason for not testing in Linux (besides the time shortage) is that the second alternative (below) is a very sophisticated Linux alternative.
Here is an extensive list of portable applications
Alternative 2: Portable Operating System
The second alternative is a bit more sophisticated and the basic idea is that students bring both the operating system (OS) and the applications on their USB stick. It is like having their own laptop, but without the actual laptop:). The main advantage is that students will always be able to work in their own environment, with their own settings, their own desktop, applications etc. In fact, portable OS can even be combined with diskless computers, which makes the computers much easier to administrate. When booting from the USB stick it is exactly the same as booting from the hard drive. The USB stick simply replaces the hard drive. In practice this means that everything that can be done on a ordinary computer can be done when booting from a USB stick – such as logging into and accessing network services, such as printers and file storage.
I have tested to install Ubuntu Linux on a USB stick and it works very well! Linux is the obvious choice here since this is supposed to be a low budget solution. However, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t well match a computer running Windows or OS X in terms of functionality and usability. On the contrary! Linux, and especially Ubuntu, has become a very user friendly and modern OS that is well suited for educational use.
A good guide for installing Ubuntu Linux 8.04 on a USB-stick is available from Pendrivelinux.
There are obviously other interesting solutions for increasing the the access to computers and software for students as well. Two alternatives that I will get back to later on (when I had the time to test them) are a budget solution for thin linux clients built from the university’s old scrap computers, coming from our updated computer labs, and software that runs as services in the web browser (sometimes referred to as Rich Internet Applications or RIA), such as Google Apps, Soho and similar.
The thin client solution with Linux can be set up at no cost – provided that you have the right knowledge. The RIA solution can be combined with other solutions, such as thin Linux clients or ultra portable laptops.
Too be continued…
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August 11, 2008
There is always something to learn at smashingmagazine.com…
Today Steven D. has listed the Top Ten Web Typography Sins. I have to confess that I commit several of them myself on a regular basis 
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August 9, 2008
50 Photoshop tutorials
A couple of years ago I taught several Photoshop courses for teachers. One of the main difficulties when teaching Photoshop was to ”invent” training material, exercises and assignments of good qualities. This was very time consuming and took a lot of imagination and patient (which I don’t have:). Anyway, my Photoshop days are over, but for all of you that are still struggling Smashing Magazine has just published an article where they present ”50 Photoshop Tutorials For Sky and Space Effects”. The article also contains several links to other Photoshop tutorials and most of them seem to be very useful.
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August 8, 2008
Blogging from Open Office
By the way, my last post (Are you looking for Open Source alternatives?) was posted directly from Open Office 3.0 Beta for Mac using the Sun Weblog Publisher 1.1.0 extension - as was this post. It seems to work pretty well, and even though it has only a few features it is practical to blog directly from office. Open Office 3.0 will soon be released and it is already both stable and relatively fast (compared to 2.0), which is promising.
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Are you looking for Open Source alternatives?
Are you looking for Open Source alternatives to commercial software? Recently InfoWorld published a Special Report: 2008Best of Open Source Software Awards. This is a good place to start exploring since you are able to find some of the best Open Source softwares categorized by application area.
InfoWorld’s annual BOSSIES recognize the best free and open source software the world has to offer to businesses, IT professionals, and productive individuals who rely on computers to get work done. The 2008 BOSSIE winners include 60 products in eight categories covering business and productivity applications, development tools, middleware, networking, security, and storage. Credit goes to Mario Apicella, James R. Borck, Victor R. Garza, Rick Grehan, Mike Heck, Martin Heller, and the rest of the InfoWorld Test Center for these selections. The breadth and quality of free software offerings is in fact overwhelming, and many of our choices were difficult. Please let us know what we missed.
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Lärare ska aldrig acceptera dålig teknik
I samband med att min avhandling (Modularization of the Learning Architecture: Supporting Learning Theories by Learning Technologies) publicerades blev jag intervjuad av Skolporten.com. De har nu publicerat intervjun under rubriken "Lärare ska aldrig acceptera dålig teknik".
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August 7, 2008
DECOM 2008: An Open Consultation Workshop on Building Digital Educational Content Marketplaces
DECOM 2008 is organised in partnership by the European Learning Industry Group (ELIG) and its member, Giunti Labs, the leading European provider of online and mobile learning content management solutions. It will be held on 23rd of October, in Sestri Levante, North West Italy. The invited delegates will be able to improve their understanding of new generation learning content production, management, sharing and distribution models which will empower the Educational Publishing Industry in this new millennium.
More at http://www.decom2008.com/
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August 6, 2008
Changed my blog tagline
I have change the tagline for frepa.blog. It used to say my blog is about "eLearning and Learning Technology", but it is now changed to be about "Technology Enhanced Learning and Learning Technology". The reason for this is that Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) can be regarded to be a more general name that includes all kinds of learning using technology - as well as eLearning. If you are interested in a more indept diskussion on the subject I recommend you to read my thesis, Modularization of the Learning Architecture: Supporting Learning Theories by Learning Technologies, where I discuss some central concepts (including TEL and Learning Technology) in the introduction. I might as well live as i learn…:)
Anyway, I will probably come back to this topic in the future.
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Blogging in swenglish
I get a lot of comments from readers about that I alternate between blogging in Swedish and in English. Most comments are from non-swedish speaking people that want me to write as much as possible in english, but I also get comments from swdish readers who doesn’t like to read english. It is not like I have a policy or so, but I try to write things that may be of general interest in english, and things that are of most interest for swedish readers (or based on articles in swedish) in Swedish. I have tried to find a good solution (a plugin) for managing multiple language blogging in my WordPress system, but so far I have failed to find a satisfactory solution. Currently I am tagging my posts in either "english" or "swedish", but this is far from being a good solution. I am just about to try a plugin called "Gengo", but I am uncertain if it will actually solve my problem or just add additional workload…
If you have tips about how to solve this problem, please give them to me!
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August 5, 2008
Sharing Vocabularies on the Web via SKOS
On 21 July 2008 an event "Sharing Vocabularies on the Web via SKOS", was held in the UK. It is now possible to take part of the presentations and recordings from that event. Some of them seem to be really interesting. In fact, the phenomenon Simple Knowledge Organization System is interesting.
This event, the third in ISKO UK’s KOnnecting KOmmunities series, was an opportunity to learn more about SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System), the up-and-coming standard for publishing controlled vocabularies on the Web.
The topic proved to be enormously popular. There were 94 people present coming from government, publishing and broadcasting agencies, public service organisations, commercial companies and academia. Reassuringly many practitioners were present including subject matter experts, librarians, information architects, software developers etc.
We were fortunate in having speakers from the forefront of SKOS development and implementation who were able to draw a general picture of the role of knowledge organization systems in the Semantic Web development but also guide us through the intricate details of what it means to express controlled vocabularies in such a way so that they their semantics can be exploited in information integration and discovery.
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