I must admit to being appalled at the recent news that 72 colleges have agreed to use Microsoft Windows Live (aka Hotmail) as their main student email service. The only differences are the domains associated with email messages (the service is using the school’s domain) and the lack of advertising. From the article:

This is exactly the same marketing method the cigarette companies used to employ with candy – the idea was that when a child reached smoking age, they would automatically reach for the real version of the brand of candy cigarettes they had enjoyed as a kid. Here we’re missing the medical issues associated with smoking, but I think it’s no less morally dubious, particularly as there are free and open source webmail solutions available that would do the job just as well. I would be interested to learn how much Microsoft are making from this – I sincerely hope they aren’t charging the schools – and what their projected earnings are from these users are once they graduate and the banner ads get switched on.

This raises a wider question of technology support in education. Services like email are now accepted as standard; you’d be amazed to go to a college and find they didn’t give you an address. But what if the colleges don’t really want to have to support these infrastructure elements? Should they be allowed to outsource to a company like Microsoft, who would have their own marketing agenda? Or is branding core educational services a step too far?

The principles of web 2.0 make more sense if you change the order:

“Harnessing Collective Intelligence” is the root principle of Web 2.0, and the others make sense to the extent that you understand how they feed into (and draw from) this one.

Or, to put it another way, and I apologise for sounding like a broken record, the Internet is people.

http://cheese.blartwendo.com/web21-demo.html

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/04/20/more-details-on-aols-myspace-killer/

Sounds like they’re adding an API and all kinds of things. Could be interesting – do they see a threat from Gtalk and Jabber?

I just caught this today via my del.icio.us inbox and O’Reilly Radar in turn: a New York Times editorial from yesterday about the similarities between the English “Free Press” circa 1918, as described by Hilaire Belloc in his book of the same name, and the current state of the blogosphere. The editorial says:

While I think this holds for public blogs like The Daily Kos or Kottke, and I’d argue that sites like Valleywag and Gawker are more like the mainstream media, it’s wrong to draw parallels between blogging and the media in every case. Blogging is simply a technology that allows you to post largely unordered text to a website in primarily chronological order; it’s not an ethos, or a political ideal, or a new type of self-expression. What the perceived parallels with the Free Press do underline is the fact that people have been undergoing these same processes for centuries; having thoughts, noticing things, and writing them down. All that’s changed is the communication method that gets them to us (a not insignificant fact that allows writings by you or I to have the same potential audience as articles in the Times).

For example, although this particular blog post is more or less an editorial, I also use my Elgg blog to make private notes to myself. When I start writing my book in earnest later in the year, I’ll use the tagging feature to link together concepts and allow myself to more easily keep track of ideas for the first draft. I’ll sometimes pass ideas to Dave and Misja that nobody else can see. All of this is blogging, but it’s beginning to look less and less like a media publication.

The other major difference is commenting and trackbacking. The media is largely one-way; a blog, assuming it’s non-private, is usually a conversation. Even socially unaware blogging systems like Blogger and MovableType allow for a deeper learning experience, rather than what is basically just dictation. Corrections can be made, new information fed back to the author, and a more collaborative experience had. Things have moved on, and I would argue that these developments are considerably more free when considered outside the scope of the traditional media paradigm.

Speaking of one-way conversations, if you’re interested you can now subscribe to my blog via email, using the excellent FeedBurner (if you’re not already, click through to my blog page so you’re viewing pages with my template; there’s a link in my sidebar). Anyone with an RSS feed – that’s every Elgg user and most other bloggers besides – can do this, and it seems to work well. Although most of you are clued into the read-write web (if you’ll pardon my jargon), a lot of people aren’t and aren’t really sure about this whole blogging thing, so this might be a useful tool for them.

(Photo credit: Old News, originally uploaded by www.DaveWard.net.)

Eagle-eyed readers from the development mailing list will notice a flaw in my title. The latest Elgg (the one you can now download from Subversion, which will be available to download as Elgg 0.6 at the end of the month) uses a standard database library and can switch to Postgres out of the box; other database engines are possible with a bit of tweaking.

Nevertheless, it’s true that for over a year the Elgg software has been rooted in Apache, PHP and MySQL, and it’s very valid to ask why. A lot of people are using Microsoft IIS, for example, and have solutions written in ASP.NET or Java – languages perceived to be more stable, or less “hacker-ish”, if you will. Java is considered by many to be an enterprise solution, while PHP is not.

Highly customisable and cost effective

Just as our ethos dictates that a user’s account is their personal space, an institution’s installation is their personal community – it needs to meet those exact needs, not the shrinkwrapped average of all users. Therefore, we needed to create something that was highly customisable and cost effective. Education isn’t a market flush with money, and what budget there is often comes from the taxpayer. In all honesty, we’d rather that went to actually educating people; although we envisioned that people would be able to hire a cost effective developer to install the software and make changes for them (which of course they now can as per the standard open source business model), we also wanted them to be able to do it themselves as easily as possible if they had the expertise.

Open source software is the best solution for public services, education included. The Open Source Definition is essentially a manifesto for free (as in speech) community-driven software that aims to benefit its users. Loosely speaking, it offers similar freedoms to projects like Wikipedia (as recently discussed by Chris Sessums):

• Freedom to copy
• Freedom to modify
• Freedom to reproduce
• Freedom to redistribute modified versions

In the UK, it was revealed that using open source would halve IT costs in primary schools. Schoolforge lists other important reasons why open source may be beneficial.

If Elgg was open source, not only could it be modified, but people could share their modifications with other people who might find them useful. If users collaborated and shared information, costs would be cut and efficiency increased further, and the software would more closely fit the needs of its users over time. We planned – and implemented – a plugin-orientated software architecture to support this, and this is why we’re being very careful about what features we allow into the core Elgg. It’s much better to have a stable core and a selection of plugins that people can add on than to have a vast core, which becomes unmanageable and inevitably incorporates system overheads, or worse, seventeen different versions of Elgg. If there’s one small, core Elgg with a plugin gallery, updates and bugfixes can happen quickly and all users reap the benefits of the open source community, while allowing for different requirements and features between installations.

A web application doesn’t work by itself. You need the server machine, which will have its own operating system and web server software. You also need a language interpreter to handle the dynamic scripts that power the application. Finally, you need some kind of storage system to handle all the dynamic data that users produce, for which some kind of database server is the most suitable (although not the only solution; we could have written and read XML files, for example). While we were in favour of the open source model, we also wanted to ensure our technologies would work with existing IT infrastructures rather than idealistically advocating a fully open source environment.

There are many solutions for all of these problems. So why did we pick the ones we did?

PHP

The popular scripting language has inauspicious beginnings, having been created for the programmer’s personal resum

Elgg has been added to TechSoup, a site about technology for non-profit organisations, which also hosts the excellent NetSquared.

If those of you who have downloaded and installed Elgg could visit this page and give the software an honest (and anonymous) rating, I’d be much obliged.

PICT3746, originally uploaded by Stuart Yeates.

OSS Watch / JISC is hosting a conference round the corner from me on open source and sustainability. I’m intrigued to hear about which open standards and products they’re backing and how they’re going to promote them within the UK higher education scene.

(Photo credit to Stuart Yeates; I found it on Flickr, which I love. If you’re wondering, that’s Brian Kelly.)

I can’t believe it’s almost Easter again – the weeks and months are flying by. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing; they say that time flies when you’re having fun, but there’s also great enjoyment to be had in slowing things down and watching the minutiae of life; the little things that you don’t notice from day to day, but would miss if they suddenly vanished. Unfortunately time seems unwilling to stop on command, but this is one of the things I really value a diary for; I can look back and realise what I was thinking, what I noticed on any particular day.

I’ve never kept a paper diary, but I have a private blog that I’ve kept up to date for six years. Every so often I’ll dip back in, and at the end of the year I have the entries printed and bound (blog services come and go; I’d rather my memories weren’t lost because a company went under). It’s almost the same as a real diary: although it doesn’t have the doodles and footnotes that you’d have in a real journal, lately embedded Flickr photos have started illustrating a lot of the entries.

I’ve always been online to some extent, and I have plenty of friends who are the same. Previous generations wrote stories and drew pictures on paper; by the age of eight I was writing in WordPerfect and drawing with Corel. When I was fourteen I was uploading computer games I’d written to bulletin board systems, and two years later I had a technology website (not this one, I hasten to point out). This stuff is my bread and butter, but even I’m behind with a lot of technology compared to a lot of the people who are currently K-12 and undergraduate students. I find some of the things they do with their phones and games consoles (which, as I’ve noted before, are now more like subsidised PDAs) incredible.

Last week, very quietly so as to not attract attention, the architecturally redesigned version of Elgg slipped out onto Subversion. Since then there have been a number of updates; the code freeze is very much over, and we’re now at the point where I’d really like people to go and check out the code, test it and report back any bugs they find. This would hugely benefit the Elgg project and allow us to get the next stable version out to you as soon as possible. Installation instructions can be found in the mailing list archive here, and there are some developer and background notes. Please don’t use this code on a production site just yet.

The SVN address is, as always, elgg.net/devel/ – if you were keeping on top of previous updates, you may find that you’ll need to start a fresh repository rather than retrieve updates on the one you have. You’ll need a Subversion client to access the files until we make the release available on Eduforge. If you’re using Windows, TortoiseSVN is pretty good (this is what Dave and I use).

Meanwhile, Curverider’s first conference is beginning to shape out very nicely – we’ll be making announcements soonish about who’s going to be speaking and the arrangements. If you can make it to Edinburgh in September, particularly if you’re going to Alt-C, you’re not going to want to miss this. It promises to be very interesting indeed.