Steve Lee :: Feeds

Getting off to a good start, part 2

So, you're about to start a new job as leader or manager of educational ICT. Just over a year ago we published a list of things you could do in order to make an effective start. This tied in with a series about making a good impression, by Alison Skymes.

Here's the second instalment of a new two-parter on the same theme, with 22 suggestions. There are 12 new suggestions today; the first 10 were published here.

This article is available only to subscribers to the Practical ICT eJournal. Click the link to find out more about this high-value, low-cost, subscription.

Pictures across the curriculum: portrait of an artist

In this series I'm looking at how well-chosen digital photos can be used in different areas of the curriculum. In the first one, I looked at the problem of litter. This one, however, is about a much more pleasant subject: a local artist.

I visited a beach in Suffolk recently, and came across someone painting the landscape. It was a great occasion to have my camera with me!

So who was it? Read on to find out, and to consider some possible curriculum links.

Getting off to a good start

So, you're about to start a new job as leader or manager of educational ICT. Just over a year ago we published a list of things you could do in order to make an effective start. This tied in with a series about making a good impression, by Alison Skymes.

Here's a new two-parter on the same theme, with 21 suggestions. There are ten new suggestions today; the next eleven will follow in two days' time.

Chopping and changing

My apologies for some rapid changes in the appearance of this website. Here's a quick list of what I've been doing, and why.

Video Pathways

I was recently invited to an event at Nottingham University.

Known as "the sandpit", it was an opportunity to look at developments in Web 2.0 technology being undertaken by the Learning Science Research Institute.

I was quite taken with one application in particular, Video Pathways.

Here is a description and explanation of what it does, and how it might be used in schools.

Updated information about the work I've been doing, what people have said about it, the Practical ICT eJournal subscription and the design of this website

I've been spending part of the weekend updating parts of the website that are to do with my work, and what people think of my work, the Practical ICT subscription, and thinking about the design of the website.

I have also set up a survey to obtain feedback.

Read more about all this...

Special team meetings: 29 ideas

It's a very good idea to occasionally depart from the standard team meeting format and put on a "special". This helps to keep interest high, and enables various goals to be achieved, including staff professional development. They can also help the team to maintain its "edginess" and dynamism.

In this article we look at 29 suggestions which have been found to be very useful indeed.

Practical ICT August 2008 now out

I've just published the final issue of Practical ICT for this school year, together with an index for the whole year.

I started the publication for leaders and managers of educational ICT, and so far (touch wood) the feedback has been very positive from the people who have subscribed. They say it's saved them time, and given some some useful ideas.

I also feel quite pleased about the fact that, as we charge people for subscribing, we pay people who contribute. I worked with the UK's Society of Authors to ensure that the contract between us and the contributor was OK, and the result was a contract that the Society of Authors described as very author-friendly.

Anyway, here is a brief run-down of the articles that appear in this issue, and a link to the index I mentioned, which covers over 60 articles.

Pictures across the curriculum: Litter Britain

In this series I'm looking at how well-chosen digital photos can be used in different areas of the curriculum. In this article, the focus is on Environmental Studies, bringing in aspects of health and safety, Media Studies and others.

Looked at from a distance, or even close up, much of Britain's countryside is still as beautiful as it is green. But look even closer, and it soon becomes apparent that what the rambler needs is not just a waterproof, a thermos, and a box of sandwiches, but a broom, a bin liner and a pair of disposable gloves.....

Don't ban the spam

I've just read that an astonishing 29% of respondents to a survey said that they have bought products from spammers.

Doesn't this mean that schools need to rethink their antispam policies?

Maximising the success of individual team members: 10 key actions for success

The success of the individual is partly dependent on the environment. What can the ICT leader do to maximise the success of each member of the team?

This article looks at 10 actions that can help to ensure the success of each individual of the team, and therefore greatly enhance the prospects of success for the whole team.

After all, any team is only as good as its weakest member, ultimately.

This article is available only to subscribers to the Practical ICT eJournal. Click the link to find out more about this high-value, low-cost, subscription.

APIs and data formats

Now that Elgg 1.0 is finally out of the door, I think it is time to talk a little bit about about some of the more advanced features - namely APIs and data formats!

Elgg 1.0 provides a number of ways at getting at your data, including a number of natively supported data formats; including OpenDD (of course), JSON, PHP, and of course RSS.

If you're putting together a mashup, you can use these views very simply. You may have noticed when you're looking at a page with a list of items on it, that there are buttons in the top left which link to either a RSS or an OpenDD view.

Now when you click on one of those you'll see your data presented in an entirely different way. Now one of the fun things you can do is change that by altering the "view" parameter, for example "view=json" to get a JSON view.

You can export individual items of data (that you have access to) in different ways by visiting the "export" url. For example, to export GUID 1 (which will almost certainly be the first site you set up) visit:

http://mysite.com/export/opendd/1/

Of course, if you replace "opendd" with "json" or "php" you can see this data presented in an entirely different way. Additionally, you can also add support for other formats, as I discussed in a previous article.

On top of that, there is an API system where plugin writers can export a function as public. These functions can then be called via a rest-like api (discussed in more detail here).

You can then select how you want to then see that data - whether its PHP, XML or JSON etc.

So, in a nutshell, Elgg has some quite powerful tools for quickly and easily creating some pretty funky mashups. Have fun!

Blog Day 2008

Information about an initiative intended to help you find new, and different, blogs to read.

What it is, how to get involved and whether it's worth bothering with.

Elgg is designed for social networking

Elgg 1.0 has officially left the building. As we've already announced, it comes in two flavours: a full version with lots of features pre-installed, and a core designed for you to build your own social networking application on top of.

The archive for the full version is 1.43Mb - small enough to fit on a floppy disk, if anyone still used them. The core-only archive weighs in at less than 700k. Elgg is fully-featured and extremely powerful both to run as a stand-alone social network and as a basis for programming on top of. So why is it so small?

Elgg was founded in 2004, and - as is common with open source projects - we slowly released software with version numbers from 0.1 through to 0.9 over a period of three years. This was an evolution of the same codebase, and as we came up with new ideas and learned new lessons, we churned the code back into the core. We could have continued to do the same, but the feature list and what we wanted to do was so different by the end of last year that we made a brave decision: we rewrote from scratch.

Because of that, we could incorporate everything that was important to Elgg - granular access permissions, cross-site tagging, an emphasis on personal ownership - while adding an extremely consistent API layer, an internal event system unmatched in any web application, and extra functionality that we think is necessary to power the next generation of social applications, right into the core. While many applications take a simple beginning and try and duct tape social networking and next-gen features over the top, we started again. And as a result, Elgg is fast, flexible, extensible and ready to power the next evolution of social technology. It's not just the most popular open source social networking platform; we believe it's the best.

There's been a lot of talk about open source social networking recently, and a lot of you are doubtless wondering what makes Elgg different. The answer is this: Elgg has been designed, from the first line of code to the last, to be a flexible social network. It's not an organic evolution or a grass-roots development; it's architecture, and we're extremely proud of it.

At its heart is user control. Over the next few years, the explosion in niche social networks, and otherwise socially-enabled websites, will lead to new technologies that will allow you to federate your connections all over the Internet. This presents new opportunities for exciting new applications, but as I recently discussed with Demo.com, it also opens new opportunities for your data to be abused. Therefore, you need to control exactly what is released, and to whom. That's the core principle in Elgg.

We're very proud to have released Elgg 1.0, but this is only the beginning. Watch this space.

Elgg v1.0 has left the building

We are pleased to announce that Elgg v1.0 has now left the building and is available to download in two flavours, the core engine and the full Elgg package.

The core engine is for those wishing to build up their own network from the beginning, whereas the full Elgg package is the core Elgg engine plus the following plugins pre-loaded: blogs, files, pages, bookmarks, messageboard, status, TinyMCE and private messages.

For more information you can check out the new elgg.org website, and if you are keen to get involved, join one of the two mailing lists. There is a mailing list for developers to talk tech and another one for Elgg users. There is also a demo installation available.

We would like to extend a big thank you to all of those Elgg users who helped us to test this latest version of Elgg over the past few months, we appreciate it.

The iPod Blazer

A major UK retail store has brought out an "ipod blazer" as part of its "Back to School" range. Amongst other things, the new jacket enables the earphone wires to be concealed under the lapels.

"An error of judgement", exclaims one of the teaching unions.

So what are the issues here?

Wish You Were Here

As you may have worked out, I decided to take a short break.

Here is a quick summary of what I did, and a preview of what's coming up.

Summary of Elgg 1

With the release of the long awaited Elgg 1 platform now imminent I just thought I'd take the opportunity to go over a few of the things that make this version so cool.

A lot of these things I and my colleagues have covered before in previous blog posts, but I thought I'd give a brief summary of just a few of them.

First of all, this is possibly one of the best looking versions of Elgg ever. A lot of this is due to the efforts of our resident design guru Pete Harris, who has done a fantastic job in making the graphics and the user experience top notch.

There has also been a lot of work done under the hood...

There's the views system which easily lets you skin Elgg and completely change its look and feel. For example we have the default view, which is the one you see when you log into a site (and can be extended and changed by installed plugins). This could just as easily be a mobile view for display on mobile devices.

We have provided RSS and OpenDD views which you'll see links for if you look a list of objects.

There's the database schema which we have mentioned before. We have taken a very abstract view, so now everything is an entity with metadata and relationships between them... those of you familiar with the OpenDD schema will notice some familiarity. This is not an accident.

There is also the concept in Elgg 1 that pretty much everything is a plugin, and therefore we have made plugins stupidly easy to write. A lot of the stuff that every plugin has to do is taken care of by the framework. There are ways to list objects, a notification system, XML-RPC, import/export out of the box, a robust internationalisation system, API and even views designed for data import (which have protection against various forms of attack).

In Elgg there are a whole bunch of things that all come together and mean that plugin writers only need to worry about the thing their plugin needs to do.

There is a comprehensive admin panel which plugins can extend. Plugins can be individually enabled and disabled, and can have administrator and user configurable settings. There's a framework for displaying widgets on pages which plugins can hook into.

As well as all the framework stuff that make development easier, the actual system is pretty fully featured. You have blogs, forums, messaging, bookmaking, a river of events (which again plugins can easily hook into), and an admin system log.

All this stuff and more come together to make a very easy to use and full featured social networking platform.

Give it a try!

Elgg at SXSW

South by Southwest is one of the most exciting festivals and conferences in the world. Every year, thousands of people converge on Austin, Texas to celebrate film, music and the interactive arts. It's where services like Twitter became famous, and Silicon Valley meets digital literates from all over the world.

Because this is a different sort of conference, submitted panels need to be voted on by potential attendees. The panels that people most want to see will get programmed; the others are free to come back and try again next year.

This year, we've submitted a panel about what we're calling the social cloud.

From the site: Social networks are walled gardens. Even if you can see content, you can't add people as friends from other networks, or keep track of their content in open, generic ways beyond RSS. Or can you? We'll give you tools to connect your site or application to the social cloud today.

This isn't cloud as in proprietary cloud computing of the sort rightly critcised by the likes of Tim O'Reilly. We're talking about a global, decentralised web of social connections that operates through open standards and generic APIs, much like the World Wide Web itself. We see this happening partially through the Open Data Definition, and we'll be explaining how to make it work in practice, not at some arbitrary point in the future, but now.

With people like Kevin Marks - one of the people behind OpenSocial - talking about contributing in the comments, it promises to be an interesting hour. All we ask is that if you'd like to see it, please head over to the panel page on the SXSW site and vote. We'd love to see you there.

Help us test Elgg

Some of you have expressed interest in participating in the Elgg 1.0 development process. Here are a couple of ways you can join in and help us test the software.

If you're a less technical user, we'd like to invite you to come into our test community. This is now open for registration, so all you need to do is visit test.elgg.org and sign up for an account. We'd love to hear your feedback, and you'll find an Elgg Feedback group there for the purpose. (Please note that we'll be blanking the database from time to time.)

If you're a developer, we're pleased to announce that our source code repository is now public. Point your Subversion client at the following repositories:

• Core Elgg: https://code.elgg.org/elgg/
• Elgg plugins: https://code.elgg.org/extensions/

Please note that this is not an end user release, and development is still ongoing. The intention is to bring developers in to help us test the platform.

To this end, we've also set up a development mailing list, which you can access over here. There is also an evolving set of documentation.

We hope you enjoy getting into Elgg, and again, please let us know what you think. Thanks!

Still around -- just! Reflections on my diploma work

At this time of year, my body, having spent decades (it feels like centuries sometimes!) being regulated by education timetables, tells me it's time to take a break.

Well, I haven't done so, as such, although I have been being kind to myself by not even attempting to update this website every day.

I regard this as a long-term investment (especially bearing in mind Keynes' dictum that in the long run we're all dead).

But I have not been idle. Apart from quite a bit of writing, I've been working for a Local Authority exploring resources that might be used for teaching the Diploma from the start of September.

Here are my thoughts and findings so far.

It's official: Elgg is the best social networking platform

We're pleased to announce that Elgg has been featured as the best open source social networking platform in InfoWorld's 2008 Best Of Open Source Awards. Elgg joins WordPress, which won for best blogging platform, Firefox, which won for best web browser, and MySQL, which was featured as the best database system.

From the article:

While Elgg lets corporations, governments, and schools quickly establish blogs, the system's collaborative features encourage building communities of users with shared interests. Other Elgg fine points include podcast support, file repositories, user profiles, an RSS aggregator, and branding features. Significantly, the software integrates with other IT systems and provides OpenID authentication.

We're pleased to do all that and more with Elgg 1.0, due for release on August 18th.