Feb

26

A level playing field for open source software

Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment

The government’s support for open source software, as outlined yesterday at http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/123372/090224opensource.pdf, is to be welcomed. Given that most UK education takes place in the public sector, it is to be hoped that this support from central government will be reflected in greater confidence at school and local authority level to adopt, specify and develop open source solutions, making possible the re-use and sharing of software, and perhaps ultimately content, amongst schools and LAs. Read more

Feb

11

Laconi.ca

Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Given the increasing interest in Twitter amongst educators, and indeed the general population, it’s hardly surprising that a number of teachers are starting to explore ways of using this in class, with ideas including collaborative storytelling, gathering feedback, home-school links, e-penpals and word games (see, eg Tom Barrett’s colaborative presentation). The sort of personal learning network which we see people developing through Twitter in their professional lives is certainly something which many students would undoubtedbly benefit from, although, as with much social networking technology, there are challenges here for purposing micro-blogging towards educational rather than social ends, as well as the obvious e-safety issues associated with children’s participation in the open web.

Laconi.ca is an open source, web-server based implementation of a micro-blogging platform. It offers one possibility for experimenting with, and, I’d hope, making the most of the opportunities which microblogging opens up, in way which it is relatively easy for schools or local authorites to monitor and control. By using open standards, such as RSS and XMPP, Laconi.ca allows a degree of integration with other open source platforms like Moodle, Elgg, Drupal and Jabber ‘out of the box’, and through its support of Twitter’s API also allows users to access it through a large number of supported Twitter clients. Hosting it on a school’s webserver would further facilitate single sign on with Moodle et al, well with a little technical php/sql work for the time being.

You can try laconi.ca out from a user’s perspective at http://identi.ca/ , or download the latest version to install on a webserver of your own from http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/Laconica_0.7.1

Feb

3

Moodle and Open Source Security

Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

There was a story in Friday’s TES about a number of schools’ Moodle installations being compromised, resulting in some fairly graphic pornography ending up on these school’s learning platforms. Whilst I’m not sure of the exact details of this particular exploit, this could so easily have been avoided, in this case by just keeping the software up to date.

The security of open source applications is a complex but interesting area. Security is an issue which open source projects have to take seriously, for the sake of the project’s and the developers’ reputation if nothing else. Eric S Raymond’s seminal ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar‘, includes Linus’s Law: that ‘given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow’, and thus, by exposing the source code to the scrutiny of large, technically literate user and developer communities, the chance of any security loop-hole being spotted is far greater than if access to the source code is limited to just the developer team itself. In the crucial area of cryptography, it’s been held since the 19th century that, in essence, the only secure algorithms are open algorithms (Kerchoff’s Principle) – it’s easy enough to write an encryption routine that you yourself couldn’t break (I remember doing this myself at the age of 13), far harder to write one which will pass the scrutiny of a world-wide community of crypto experts. Read more