As all of my devoted Facebook friends already know, I bought slippers on Zappos this weekend and facebook added it to my “newsfeed”.  You can go to a zillion blogs for rants about the privacy implications and I don't disagree, although if I channel my inner teenager and think about the attention economy it seems sort of cool that all my friends know about my oh so warm new slippers.

Putting on my learning technology geek hat instead, I wondered how this idea could help teachers keep track of what content their students were using on the web.  In .LRN, as well as other LMS systems, teachers can load in content from a course pack, IMS, SCRORM package, etc., and make it available to their class. They can then review reports of  students, pages viewed, time on page, scores in exercises, etc.  However, more and more content is out on the web, not in a course package.  The National Science Foundations (NSF) National Science Digital Library (NSDL) project is just one example of the many.

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What to do when faced with a 40+ page RFP that has been clearly written with proprietary vendors in mind?  Have other open source vendors faced this? Usually, we are just too busy to play a very time consuming lottery ticket.  Is there education we can do for procurement people that will make it easier for them to find an open source solution that might be a significantly better deal?

I have found one excellent blog post on the web: http://service-architecture.blogspot.com/2006/07/when-open-source-meets-procurement.html

I recently had to decline to bid on a project that was trying to confederate a large number of state schools that could quite likely save a significant amount of money by using open source.  Here is an excerpt from the letter I wrote declining to bid:

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We're very pleased to announce that Ajax File Storage UI turns 1.0 BETA and is now available from OpenACS CVS on HEAD.

What's New ? 

This release is a rewrite of the javascript code to use ExtJS 2.0. Additional changes include :

• autocomplete when adding/editing tags
• accordion layout for the panel navigation
• use of famfam silk icons from http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
• various bug fixes and general code cleanup

New to AjaxFS UI ?

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We have been interested in Open Courseware and other open leanring resources for a long time now. Dave Bauer and Caroline Meeks attended the Open Education Conference in 2006 and we were inspired.

Time and again research in education show that people learn better when they work together, and as we work with OpenACS, the obvious place to help would be to build communities around open lear(ning materials, but it seemed tricky to build a critical mass of users to make the community successful. Ideally users would form their own groups and help each other take advantage of these resources.

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