Archive for February 11th, 2008

Elgg 1.0 – “a social application engine that can power all kinds of different sites and applications”

February 11th, 2008 by Graham Attwell

It is a great pleasure to report what seems to be very good news from elgg. These two extracts form recent posts on the Elgg news blog.

“When Ben Werdmuller stood up at the Elgg Jam 2007, he announced an advanced version of Elgg – version 1.0 – that would come with no features, and allow you to pick and choose exactly which functionality you required on your social web application.  Later the same year, Curverider began talking about Project Searunner, an API-based back-end for the easy creation of distributed web applications.  Today we are pleased to announce that they are the same thing. ”

“From the beginning,

Elgg 1.0 won’t ship with any end-user features; you can think of it as a social application engine that can power all kinds of different sites and applications. In fact, there are three major ways you can use the new Elgg core:

* As a web application in a box, as it always has been.

* As a collection of back-end PHP libraries.

* As a back-end API that you can use as the building blocks of any socially-aware networked application in any language.

With this in mind, who are we to tell you what features you need? The original Elgg codebase came with profiles, a blog, a file repository, communities and an RSS aggregator. On many of the communities we’ve built, forums or microblogging has been much more popular than blogging (it depends on the audience, but a lot of people don’t enjoy writing mini-essays on a regular basis). What if you want to use those instead? Or you want to use it as the engine for a company intranet, or an online game, or a virtual learning environment?

By taking out the features and letting you pick and choose exactly what you want, Elgg becomes a much more powerful system. The plugin system, incoming and outgoing APIs, data import/export and documentation are the major features, as well as user handling and social networking logic. Everything else is optional. In fact, we intend to release the core to download before any extra features are even developed.

On the web as a whole, this reflects how applications have evolved. The era of the all-encompassing, unfocused social network has come and gone; Elgg allows you to build systems that are specific to a particular market or audience, with exactly the features you need.”

If you are worried about maintaining all the features from the ‘old’ Elgg, Ben says that will now be maintained by Misja Hoebe as Elgg Classic.

Posted in Open Source, Social Software, Wales Wide Web | No Comments »

From 19thC Merthyr Tydfil to the internet – the fight for public spaces

February 11th, 2008 by Graham Attwell

methyr

I recently greatly enjoyed reading an essay by my stepdaughter, Arddun Arwyn. Not quite sure what the title was but the essay was about ” the late Victorian civic project” to civilise the streets of Methyr Tydfil, then a fast growing iron town in industrialising South Wales and seen by contempory middle class observers as a den of lawlessness and immorality.

Arddun cites Croll who bases his analysis of the civic project in Merthyr on Michel Foucault’s theory that power is “dispersed through a range of complex social networks” and is not held by one dominant group in society.

Reading the essay, I got drawn into thinking about the parallels between attitudes towards the social networks of the streets of Merthyr and open social networks. In both cases attempts to control the open spaces are based on providing walled gardens and on promoting new ideas of private property. Anyway here are a couple of extracts from the essay – hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

“In the late Victorian era it is evident that there was a distinctive shift the meanings of ‘public’ and ‘private’ space and the activities deemed to be acceptable in these spaces. If we refer to court records from Merthyr in the latter part of the century we can see evidence that demonstrates this. A boy came before the courts for playing bat and ball in a Merthyr street, his mother in his defence explained that she herself had played in that street as a child and that there was no other places for children to play. Despite this the boy was fined two shillings for his misdemeanour. Similarly emigrants from rural areas of Wales were learned in the new codes of ‘private’ and ‘public’, which became so important in this era. A William Evans was caught playing quoits in a field belonging to the Dowlais Iron Company and was fined 5 shillings for causing ‘wilful damage’ to the company’s land. Evans explained to the court “‘he came from Cardiganshire, where they were allowed to play were they liked, and having only been in Dowlais for a week, he did not know he was doing any harm.’” Another case which underlines this point is that of two men who were discovered drunk and about to engage in a prize-fight, they walked free as the encounter took place on a privately owned field rather than in a ‘public’ space.

This shift in how the use of ‘public’ space was perceived had a profound effect on the most ‘public’ of spaces, the street.

Andy Croll argues that although the streets were the most ‘public’ and therefore ‘freest’ area of towns “the freedom that defined public space was heavily regulated, through codes and which distinguish between ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ behaviour”3 It became the battle of the ‘public’ to reclaim and regulate what they deemed to be ‘public’ space.4 Codes of street etiquette were in place to ensure that Victorian streets were an area of movement, silence and safety. This would prove problematic if we consider the function of the street to some members of the ‘public’. Martin Daunton’s work into working class areas has concluded that, when working class areas were re-built from courts and allies to open streets the usage of the street by these members of the public reflected their “boisterous and vibrant culture’ which had before been enacted in a ‘private’ area of the enclosed court. Andrew Davies, similarly argues that the street was an integral part of working class sociability.”

“The presence of a vibrant street culture as described by Martin Daunton, was a direct challenge to aspirations of movement, silence and safety ascribed to Victorian thoroughfares by those wishing to ‘civilise’ the streets. Another means of regulating behaviour and ensuring the aforementioned values were sustained was the trend by municipal governments and prominent members of society to provide areas were ‘rational’ recreation could be practised. If we consider Swansea as an example they is much evidence that demonstrates this shift in policy. In the years prior to 1870 municipal governments were reluctant to support schemes that would cost the ratepayers to initiate, however after 1870 the business community experienced a period of prosperity, which obligated municipal governments to provide a wider range of social services for inhabitants. The initiatives undertaken were usually in the form of parks and public libraries. “The Open Spaces Movement” endeavoured, under the leadership of William Thomas, to provide parks and playgrounds in areas of the town were there were “no facilities other than the streets and gutters in which to play.” Similarly the establishment of libraries and other such cultural centres i.e. art galleries, museums, was regarded as an important means of providing ‘rational’ recreation for the working man. The Public Libraries Act of 1866 and the work of campaigners paved the way for the establishment of Swansea’s public library and reading rooms in 1869. We see similar initiatives being completed in Merthyr under the patronage of the Ironmasters.”

Posted in Culture, Wales Wide Web | No Comments »

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    From a Jisc press release:

    Over 14,000 items of archived TV footage from 17 European countries are now available via the EUscreen online portal for teaching, research and general interest.

    EUscreen – the result of a collaboration between 36 partners across Europe – provides a rich insight into Europe’s television heritage with content dating from the 1920s to the present day.

    The portal includes rare footage and commentary on key events in history, including a 1962 interview with Martin Luther King about racial discrimination in the US.

    John Ellis, Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway and principal investigator on the EUscreen project, said: “This is a valuable resource for anyone interested in social history or indeed TV history, as it brings together tens of thousands of clips from across Europe. The portal is available to anyone (not only academics) and it is very easy to get absorbed and spend hours browsing all of the footage.”

    The expansive footage has also proved popular as a learning aid for foreign language students, with clips available in 14 languages.

    By the end of September 2012, there will be around 30,000 items of digital content freely available on the portal as the European providers continue to add carefully selected material.

    Explore the EUscreen footage

    Open online seminar

    Jisc are hosting an open, online seminar on ‘Making Assessment Count (MAC)’ on Friday 3rd Feb – 1-2pm. The presenters are Professor Peter Chatterton (Daedalus e-World Ltd) and Professor Gunter Saunders (University of Westminster).

    The mailing for the seminar says” “The objective of Making Assessment Count is primarily to help students engage more closely with the assessment process, either at the stage where they are addressing an assignment or at the stage when they receive feedback on a completed assignment. In addition an underlying theme of MAC is to use technology to help connect student reflections on their assessment with their tutors. To facilitate the reflection aspect of MAC a web based tool called e-Reflect is often used. This tool enables the authoring of self-review questionnaires by tutors for students. On completion of an e-Reflect questionnaire a report is generated for the student containing responses that are linked to the options the student selected on the questionnaire.”

    You can find out more ans sign up for the seminar at  http://jiscmac.eventbrite.co.uk/

    EC-TEL 2012

    The EC-TEL 2012: Seventh European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning 21st Century Learning for 21st Century Skills takes place on 18-21 September 2012 at Saarbrücken in Germany.

    The focus for the conference includes:

    - How can schools prepare young people for the technology-rich workplace of the future?
    - How can we use technology to promote informal and independent learning outside traditional educational settings?
    - How can we use next generation social and mobile technologies to promote informal and responsive learning?

    The deadline for proposals is April 2.

    Visitors and Residents

    David White (University of Oxford) and Dr. Lynn Silipigni Connaway (OCLC) have been attracting quite a stir with their JISC-funded work on Visitors and Residents: What Motivates Engagement with the Digital Information Environment?, being undertaken as part of the Developing Digital Literacies programme webinar series.

    Slides, audio and a recording of the Blackboard Collaborate session where they presented some of the findings of their work can be found at http://bit.ly/jiscdiglitvr.

    ECER 2010

    The keynotes, videos, radio shows and interviews from the ECER 2010 Conference in Helsinki:

    On the ECER 2010 website.

    Taccle handbook for teachers order form

    Here you find the Taccle handbook for teachers order form.

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