Entries by brent simpson

The eXe team is now using blogger to post news and information about the development of eXe. Our new blog can be found at http://exelearning.blogspot.com and contains posts about new releases and our nightly builds as well as How-Tos on aspects of authoring with eXe.

The eXe team is now frequently on IRC @ irc.freenode.net #exe where we can answer support questions from users and help developers who might be interested in the eXe code. For information on how to get onto IRC please see: Chat with Developers on our wiki. We have also installed a web interface to IRC which you can access here: http://exelearning.org/cgi-bin/irc.cgi

Please remember that we're located in New Zealand and more often than not while you're wide awake, we're fast asleep. Here's the current time in Auckland: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=22

Version 0.13 of the eLearning XHTML editor project is now available and includes the following changes:

• Image Magnifier iDevice
• Gallery iDevice - Interface improvements
• Cloze iDevice - New features
• Reading Activity - Feedback buttons
• Editor - Character map button, Font Size

The Image Magnifier iDevice was created by Bruce Webster Interact
& Multimedia Developer for the Christchurch College of Education,
New Zealand. It allows an author to upload an image which is then
loaded into a flash 'player'. The resultant flash object allows the
user to magnify parts of the image and, depending on the original image
size, zoom in for greater detail. Other modifications include the
addition of a character map button for the TinyMCE editor, and the
ability to set font sizes through the editor. Many small interface
improvements have been made to to the eXe interface itself and to the
styles for export.

You can download version 0.13 @ Eduforge

or visit our main site @ http://exelearning.org/

Have spent a couple of days at e-Fest in Wellington.  Some
notes on the keynotes and speakers I attended can be found on my
work blog @ : http://blog.cfdl.auckland.ac.nz/brent/
. Interest in eXe is high and we're hoping to make an early
release in the coming months. 

The Mozilla Foundation, in collaboration with Novell and IBM, has
announced the formation of a project to implement the W3C's XForms
1.0 Recommendation in Mozilla. XForms is the W3C's XML-based Web
forms technology. It offers many more features than standard HTML
forms, including support for input validation and integration with
Web services.



Mozilla Press Release here:

http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-2004-08-10.html



Post and Discussion on MozillaZine, here:
http://www.mozillazine.org/

Syllabus magazine has interviewed the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s
vice president for research in information technology about his
vision for learning management systems and related technologies.
Nice overview of the Sakai and OKI projects and the future of Open
Source systems for education.



Of particular note to the eXe project are his thoughts on the lack
of good content editors for LMS' "...there’s still much that can
be done to improve usability in particular, especially to make it
easier to publish or create new material. It still takes too much
expertise to create attractive materials from the notes, images,
and programs that faculty use to teach a course..." and "... I
think we need authoring tools that lower the effort threshold
dramatically for faculty to take digitized materials and create
something esthetically pleasing as well as effective for their
teaching purposes. There are tools, but we have to make sure that
they are going to be compatible with all of the other pieces that
we’re putting together based on standards."



read full
article

Syllabus asked the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s vice president
for research in information technology about his vision for
learning management systems and related technologies. Nice overview
of the Sakai and OKI projects and the future of Open Source systems
for education. The Sakai project partners have truly understood the
power of utilizing the open source development model for
collaboration amongst institutions in America to create something
greater than the sum of its parts. 

Learning
Management Systems: Are We There Yet?

The majority of web based applications will be either written in
the ASP (Microsoft and IIS) or PHP (Open Source and Apache)
languages, while a minority will attempt either Java or Perl. This
article provides a nice summation of the Pros and Cons of using
either PHP or ASP.NET. Also note that Oracle is incorporating PHP
into it's products.



http://otn.oracle.com/pub/articles/hull_asp.html

The Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME) has
published online it's special edition on the Educational Semantic Web.
The issue features nine papers by invited, internationally renowned
authors who have previously written about the effect of technology
on education, learning and scholarship.

Putting the medium to good use this special issue also contains
reactions to the articles written by some of the world's foremost
educational practitioners with acknowledged leadership and
competence in building educational systems based on the use of new
technologies. These 'reactions' take the form of discussions
associated with each paper and readers are invited to comment on
the articles and the responses.

JIME Special Issue:
The Educational Semantic Web