Being in the process of trying to OpenSource a local Learning Management System at my university my attention has been drawn to what hinders this in a University organization.
How do you organize this at MIT, and what is done to make things run smoothly with regards to this process...?
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First of all, we have just started this process in the last week so we'll share our results with you as they occur. However, there is a few things we can comment on now.
1. We are trying to make adding new code, templates, and other items easy for the non-UNIX user. Most of our MBA students are PCs and we want them to contribute templates and macros that are not compiled. So we have spent a considerable effort organizing our home page to easily navigate the SourceForge documentation to do this. (check out mitopensource.sourceforge.net)
2. We want software developers to create their own SourceForge projects and administer them and just have us as portal to their area.
3. We want to have a discussion about open intellectual property. MIT has just announced the availability of all their course material on the web. What does this mean - can students really get a free education? What about other types of intellectual property?
We are not sure if we will get a good response to this but we'll let you know.
Tell us more about what you are trying to do --- maybe we can share ideas on how to expand.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
> 1. We are trying to make adding new code,
> templates, and other items easy for the non-
> UNIX user. Most of our MBA students are PCs
> and we want them to contribute templates and
> macros that are not compiled.
In my opinion, one of the biggest shortcomings in the OpenSource milieux is the lack of activity, or even inspiration to such activity, on operating system platforms other than unix-based systems.
By accident I have ended up being the project admin of one of the biggest non-unixbased projects on Sourceforge. The project is named Sherpa and has a rather intricate history. It is not directly related to my (temporary) position here at NTNU. However, the project has gained momentum, and the potential of a ASP (Active Server Pages) Open Source project seems to be present. The openSource concept is platform neutral, and the feedback in emails shows that it is due.
Furthermore:
> 2. We want software developers to create their
> own SourceForge projects and administer them
> and just have us as portal to their area.
This is a class assignement. How high in your organization does this inclination towards OpenSource go? What are the possibilities that bigger software-projects will go OpenSource as a consequence of this initiative? How do you propagate this possibility?
And also:
> Tell us more about what you are trying to
> do --- maybe we can share ideas on how to
> expand.
I have written a master degree thesis attempting to analyze the impact of information - and communications technology (ICT) in the education of geography at the Department of Geography, NTNU (http://www.ntnu.no/welcome/). The complex is approached through the intentions of the Norwegian universities as described in the laws governing the Norwegian universities.
The main focus is on the use of ICT in education at the Department, and its history from around 1996. Important questions are: How will these changes affect the geographical teaching and learning? What are the implications on the student-teacher relationship? What are the effects on the central methodologies in our discipline.
During the years 1998-2001 a learning management system was developed by external funding from The Norwegian Agency for Flexible Learning in Higher Education (SOFF). SOFF is an administrative body under the Norwegian Ministry of Education, Research and Church Affairs, and administers an annual grant determined by The Storting (the Norwegian Parliament). It is also an advisory agency for the Ministry within its field of action.
This system (GPN) is now widely used both at the Dept. of Geography in Trondheim and at Lillehammer College. Daily the system is used of 40-50 individual users, and has a total of 200 users. The system amongst other things avails uploading/downloading of lecturing notes, access to a picture library, and an English/Norwegian glossary on geography. Aspects of this system are reviewed in depth in the afore mentioned thesis. The use of logging mechanisms in the web-based system are explored and key data are used to analyze the students’ use of the system.
NTNU is now in the process of buying an external LMS, and in my view establishing an Open Learning Management System based on the afore mentioned solution would probably be the only way of securing the further life of the developed code. If someone will use it remains to se.
And of course this will not happen if the university approves an OpenSource license on the project CODE. The projects intellectual property (lecturing notes, glossaries and pictures) is a completely different matter.
My personal interest in this is neither fame nor economical. Some of the code is even quite rotten and not very presentable. All this taken aside, it is RUNNING CODE serving a purpose, and as such I would hate it being left somewhere in a drawer.
OpenSource is not a easily communicated concept to the university bureaucracy. I guess this pretty much gives you a background on my question in the beginning of this thread.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
>In my opinion, one of the biggest shortcomings in the OpenSource milieux is the lack of >activity, or even inspiration to such activity,on operating system platforms other than >unix-based systems.
Yes, we expect this to be a problem here as well. For example, we find the CVS interface very difficult to deal with for PC users. UNIX users are used to the command line interface but we have had to distill the information a bit. I am also trying to get the WinCVS working but haven't been able to yet...I'm using CygWin and the command line interface and that is how I'm instructing our users to work.
We expect that some users will just upload templates and macros - not compilable source code so they won't have to deal with CVS.
>This is a class assignement. How high in your organization does this inclination towards >OpenSource go? What are the possibilities of this initiative? How do you propagate this >possibility?
We plan to continue this after the class has ended (it is a class about managing virtual teams and on-line communities). So right now it is just us. Our vision is that we would eventually move off SourceForge and onto MIT servers. We want to try to capture the code and other items of work that are in theses and research labs and make them more available. Most thesis work gets buried somewhere never to be seen again.
Right now we have asked to have the URL posted on the main MIT web site. That would be great! And we will see what interest that shows.
But theoretically, we think that since all work is "open" in a university that having an Open Source area should be a natural. However, non UNIX users, and most of the Business School (The Sloan School at MIT) are non UNIX users - at least for the work they do at Sloan. So we are struggling with this problem and hopefully we will get some submissions from them.
MIT has just announced OpenCourseWare - see our project's home page for more information on this - there's a link. This initiative should make all of MIT course materials available on the Web. So I think MIT the institution and the administration is ready for this. They certainly can't object to the philosophy!
However, will they give us support and server space? Not sure yet...
>OpenSource is not a easily communicated concept to the university bureaucracy.
As I said before, I'm surprised to hear this. After all isn't all intellectual property open at Universities? I'm probably naive...
Interesting project and thanks for the explanation. You should definitely look at the links on MIT's initiative.
I have taken other completely on-line courses at another university. Some of them were very good and I learned a lot. It remains to be seen whether you can get a full education this way -
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Thanks! I'll take a look at all of these - I really apprciate this since I'm new at SourceForge.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Anonymous
-
2001-05-11
>After all isn't all intellectual property open at Universities?
Oh no, certainly not. Many Universities make much of their income from commercial exploitation of their intellectual property. And sometimes it isn't open, in order to enable them to keep a strong market position. Certainly the owner of the IP - the university - can often put restrictions on the creator of the IP - the faculty member/programmer - as to what they may do with the IP and to whom (or at least how soon) they can reveal it. Universities may be charities or not-for-profits but that doesn't mean their motives in each and every transaction are philanthropic or even guided by principles of academic openness.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
>>After all isn't all intellectual property
>>open at Universities?
>
>Oh no, certainly not. Many Universities make
>much of their income from commercial
>exploitation of their intellectual property
So here it is then, two extremes of the university culture.
Published scientific work is more or less free, unless it is done for an external body. Everybody may use and do further research based on official scientific findings.
Research is obviously within the domain of universities. But what about development? There is a diffuse line between development and research. Having written a master degree thesis (research work) based on my development work (a Learning Management System) I have learnt that there indeed exists overlapping factors of research and development.
The problem is that an inexperienced university would not know how to handle the fruits of development. I guess this more often than seldom leeds to a restrictive attitude towards the result of developing. This is however not always a wise strategy.
The lack of such experience is, in my view, a restraining factor at my university. This is not to say that my university, NTNU the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, is doing a bad job, but it certainly could do with a steeper learning curve on these matters. This probably also goes for other universities.
Btw. Did anyone remember to patent the practice of patenting? If not I'm signing for patenting patenting right now :-)
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Being in the process of trying to OpenSource a local Learning Management System at my university my attention has been drawn to what hinders this in a University organization.
How do you organize this at MIT, and what is done to make things run smoothly with regards to this process...?
First of all, we have just started this process in the last week so we'll share our results with you as they occur. However, there is a few things we can comment on now.
1. We are trying to make adding new code, templates, and other items easy for the non-UNIX user. Most of our MBA students are PCs and we want them to contribute templates and macros that are not compiled. So we have spent a considerable effort organizing our home page to easily navigate the SourceForge documentation to do this. (check out mitopensource.sourceforge.net)
2. We want software developers to create their own SourceForge projects and administer them and just have us as portal to their area.
3. We want to have a discussion about open intellectual property. MIT has just announced the availability of all their course material on the web. What does this mean - can students really get a free education? What about other types of intellectual property?
We are not sure if we will get a good response to this but we'll let you know.
Tell us more about what you are trying to do --- maybe we can share ideas on how to expand.
Important:
> 1. We are trying to make adding new code,
> templates, and other items easy for the non-
> UNIX user. Most of our MBA students are PCs
> and we want them to contribute templates and
> macros that are not compiled.
In my opinion, one of the biggest shortcomings in the OpenSource milieux is the lack of activity, or even inspiration to such activity, on operating system platforms other than unix-based systems.
By accident I have ended up being the project admin of one of the biggest non-unixbased projects on Sourceforge. The project is named Sherpa and has a rather intricate history. It is not directly related to my (temporary) position here at NTNU. However, the project has gained momentum, and the potential of a ASP (Active Server Pages) Open Source project seems to be present. The openSource concept is platform neutral, and the feedback in emails shows that it is due.
Furthermore:
> 2. We want software developers to create their
> own SourceForge projects and administer them
> and just have us as portal to their area.
This is a class assignement. How high in your organization does this inclination towards OpenSource go? What are the possibilities that bigger software-projects will go OpenSource as a consequence of this initiative? How do you propagate this possibility?
And also:
> Tell us more about what you are trying to
> do --- maybe we can share ideas on how to
> expand.
I have written a master degree thesis attempting to analyze the impact of information - and communications technology (ICT) in the education of geography at the Department of Geography, NTNU (http://www.ntnu.no/welcome/). The complex is approached through the intentions of the Norwegian universities as described in the laws governing the Norwegian universities.
The main focus is on the use of ICT in education at the Department, and its history from around 1996. Important questions are: How will these changes affect the geographical teaching and learning? What are the implications on the student-teacher relationship? What are the effects on the central methodologies in our discipline.
During the years 1998-2001 a learning management system was developed by external funding from The Norwegian Agency for Flexible Learning in Higher Education (SOFF). SOFF is an administrative body under the Norwegian Ministry of Education, Research and Church Affairs, and administers an annual grant determined by The Storting (the Norwegian Parliament). It is also an advisory agency for the Ministry within its field of action.
This system (GPN) is now widely used both at the Dept. of Geography in Trondheim and at Lillehammer College. Daily the system is used of 40-50 individual users, and has a total of 200 users. The system amongst other things avails uploading/downloading of lecturing notes, access to a picture library, and an English/Norwegian glossary on geography. Aspects of this system are reviewed in depth in the afore mentioned thesis. The use of logging mechanisms in the web-based system are explored and key data are used to analyze the students’ use of the system.
NTNU is now in the process of buying an external LMS, and in my view establishing an Open Learning Management System based on the afore mentioned solution would probably be the only way of securing the further life of the developed code. If someone will use it remains to se.
And of course this will not happen if the university approves an OpenSource license on the project CODE. The projects intellectual property (lecturing notes, glossaries and pictures) is a completely different matter.
My personal interest in this is neither fame nor economical. Some of the code is even quite rotten and not very presentable. All this taken aside, it is RUNNING CODE serving a purpose, and as such I would hate it being left somewhere in a drawer.
OpenSource is not a easily communicated concept to the university bureaucracy. I guess this pretty much gives you a background on my question in the beginning of this thread.
>In my opinion, one of the biggest shortcomings in the OpenSource milieux is the lack of >activity, or even inspiration to such activity,on operating system platforms other than >unix-based systems.
Yes, we expect this to be a problem here as well. For example, we find the CVS interface very difficult to deal with for PC users. UNIX users are used to the command line interface but we have had to distill the information a bit. I am also trying to get the WinCVS working but haven't been able to yet...I'm using CygWin and the command line interface and that is how I'm instructing our users to work.
We expect that some users will just upload templates and macros - not compilable source code so they won't have to deal with CVS.
>This is a class assignement. How high in your organization does this inclination towards >OpenSource go? What are the possibilities of this initiative? How do you propagate this >possibility?
We plan to continue this after the class has ended (it is a class about managing virtual teams and on-line communities). So right now it is just us. Our vision is that we would eventually move off SourceForge and onto MIT servers. We want to try to capture the code and other items of work that are in theses and research labs and make them more available. Most thesis work gets buried somewhere never to be seen again.
Right now we have asked to have the URL posted on the main MIT web site. That would be great! And we will see what interest that shows.
But theoretically, we think that since all work is "open" in a university that having an Open Source area should be a natural. However, non UNIX users, and most of the Business School (The Sloan School at MIT) are non UNIX users - at least for the work they do at Sloan. So we are struggling with this problem and hopefully we will get some submissions from them.
MIT has just announced OpenCourseWare - see our project's home page for more information on this - there's a link. This initiative should make all of MIT course materials available on the Web. So I think MIT the institution and the administration is ready for this. They certainly can't object to the philosophy!
However, will they give us support and server space? Not sure yet...
>OpenSource is not a easily communicated concept to the university bureaucracy.
As I said before, I'm surprised to hear this. After all isn't all intellectual property open at Universities? I'm probably naive...
Interesting project and thanks for the explanation. You should definitely look at the links on MIT's initiative.
I have taken other completely on-line courses at another university. Some of them were very good and I learned a lot. It remains to be seen whether you can get a full education this way -
> I am also trying to get the WinCVS working
> but haven't been able to yet...
At sourceforge a tool has been made to solve this problem:
http://sfsetup.sourceforge.net/
WinCvs integrates nicely with external diff-programs. One of them is:
http://winmerge.sourceforge.net/
An other one is Araxis Merge:
http://www.araxis.com/merge/download.html
Thanks! I'll take a look at all of these - I really apprciate this since I'm new at SourceForge.
>After all isn't all intellectual property open at Universities?
Oh no, certainly not. Many Universities make much of their income from commercial exploitation of their intellectual property. And sometimes it isn't open, in order to enable them to keep a strong market position. Certainly the owner of the IP - the university - can often put restrictions on the creator of the IP - the faculty member/programmer - as to what they may do with the IP and to whom (or at least how soon) they can reveal it. Universities may be charities or not-for-profits but that doesn't mean their motives in each and every transaction are philanthropic or even guided by principles of academic openness.
>>After all isn't all intellectual property
>>open at Universities?
>
>Oh no, certainly not. Many Universities make
>much of their income from commercial
>exploitation of their intellectual property
So here it is then, two extremes of the university culture.
Published scientific work is more or less free, unless it is done for an external body. Everybody may use and do further research based on official scientific findings.
Research is obviously within the domain of universities. But what about development? There is a diffuse line between development and research. Having written a master degree thesis (research work) based on my development work (a Learning Management System) I have learnt that there indeed exists overlapping factors of research and development.
The problem is that an inexperienced university would not know how to handle the fruits of development. I guess this more often than seldom leeds to a restrictive attitude towards the result of developing. This is however not always a wise strategy.
The lack of such experience is, in my view, a restraining factor at my university. This is not to say that my university, NTNU the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, is doing a bad job, but it certainly could do with a steeper learning curve on these matters. This probably also goes for other universities.
Btw. Did anyone remember to patent the practice of patenting? If not I'm signing for patenting patenting right now :-)