Paul's Web Space 2.1

Open Source Makes a Splash at NECC

(This is a longer, unedited version of a my blog post "Open Source on the Agenda," which appeared earlier this month on Education Week's Digital Education blog.)

Open source technology displayed a growing presence at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) 2009. The Open Source Lab held popular sessions throughout the conference, while the Open Source Playground showcased various technologies and organizations – serving as a mini exhibit floor for the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement. Nearby, NECC Unplugged held free-form sessions, and the Bloggers Café was a hub of spontaneous creativity. While still dwarfed by the exhibition floor downstairs, these features attracted sell-out audiences and an increasingly large and passionate fan base among NECC attendees.

Presentations and handouts touted numerous open source alternatives to traditional software, the best collected in a handout listing the Top 10 Free and Open Source Software in Education. Two speakers stood out among the many presenters who may be familiar to Digital Education readers:

• Steve Hargadon of Elluminate, CoSN, and Classroom 2.0, and organizer of open source and EduBloggerCon events at NECC 2009, presented tirelessly on educational applications for open source software, social networks, and Web 2.0.
  
• Award-winning Georgia educator and entrepreneur Vicki Davis gave presentations on educational use of wikis and social bookmarking groups, among other topics.

Ubuntu Linux was represented in both the Lab and the Playground, with a clustered distribution running 60 thin client workstations setup by Revolution Linux. Revolution’s Educational Services Director, Benoit St-Andre, led a session on avoiding common pitfalls of open source software deployments. He later told me of much larger thin client deployments they have carried out in school districts of up to 10,000 workstations and 40,000 students (which save both hardware and power costs). Local Ubuntu users group volunteers also highlighted for me custom distributions; such as the Netbook Remix (designed for small screens) and Edubuntu, which is targeted specifically at education users. The Wikipedia article on Ubuntu contains much more detail on the history and versions of this breakthrough version of Linux.

Curriki was well represented at NECC as well. Blogger and evangelist Anna Batchelder gave an NECC Unplugged talk on open education resources, covering Curriki and other offerings such as MIT OpenCourseWare, FreeReading, Connexions, and OER Commons — the latter can be searched directly from our Teacher Magazine home page. Executive Director Dr. Barbara “Bobbi” Kurshan touted the value and cost savings Curriki makes possible at a breakfast meeting that also featured Chicago Public Schools technology administrators outlining how open source infrastructure helped them leverage E-Rate funds to enjoy $1 million per year in network operations cost savings.

The other major “exhibitor” at the Open Source Playground was One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and its operating software, the affiliated Sugar Learning Platform. The OLPC project experienced a rocky start, featuring a slower-than-expected adoption and a very public split between the hardware and software projects, but has made strides recently in Latin America. I spoke with the exhibit’s organizer, Mike Lee, manager of the DC-based OLPC Learning Club and a director of the team that operates AARP.org. Mike told me about OLPCorps Africa, an effort to spread 100 teams of volunteers across the continent to deploy at least 100 laptops per team; blog aggregator Planet OLPC provides news updates on this and related efforts. While the OLPC project isn’t officially directed at the United States, there are volunteer projects in cities such as Birmingham, Alabama, and Chicago featuring significant deployments, and local high school students are involved in Mike’s Sugar Labs DC project team as well. One Laptop Per Child really represents a disruptive technology in the truest sense — essentially inspiring from scratch the creation of an entirely new category of computers, known as netbooks, that is becoming increasingly popular and influential.

Labels: edtech, education, edweek, necc09, open source, technology

   Link: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2009/07/open_source_on_the_agenda.html

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Speaking at Online Marketing Summit Thursday

I’m speaking at the Online Marketing Summit this Thursday, May 14, at the Key Bridge Marriott in Arlington, Virginia (Metro: Rosslyn). I'll be talking about online community/social media strategy and ROI, as well as touching on general web strategy for media organizations.

I'm appearing on the Big Brands, Big Plans Panel, along with some really sharp people — from the likes of AARP, Smartbrief, and the National Defense University. Other speakers throughout the day hail from BusinessOnine, Clearspring, Google, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), Kodak, ReturnPath, and SilverPop. Check out the complete agenda for the DC tour stop.

The Online Marketing Summit Regional Whistle Stop Tour also marks the introduction of the Online Marketing Certification Program, which is offered by OMS sister organization the Online Marketing Institute. I'm hoping to earn my certification shortly.

This year they are employing several social media outreach avenues for the first time, starting with the Online Marketing for Marketers blog that was rolled out in the wake of last year's tour. I have written a few posts, and plan to add one about this week's panel today or tomorrow.

They also have presence on numerous social media platforms:

• Facebook group
• Twitter profile
• YouTube channel

and there will likely be even more. It will be interesting to watch this collection of organizations and projects continue to develop over coming months and years.

Labels: conference, marketing, oms, socialmedia

   Link: http://www.onlinemarketingsummit.com/

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The Future of News & the Knight Commission

I've been working on this post for a couple months, and it keeps getting longer and longer, so here goes - the Future of News:

In February, Walter Isaacson kicked off a flurry of commentary on the state of the news business with a provocative article in Time Magazine – How to Save Your Newspaper – which asserts that news media must start to charge for content to survive, and that micropayments a-la Apple's iTunes store offer significant promise. That month I saw David Bollier speak about his book Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own. As he discussed the sharing economy of the Internet, he spent some time looking at the difficulties that the news business is having dealing with these new realities. Bollier also mentioned micropayments as a possible tool, but was more excited by a public model for funding that wouldn't threaten journalistic independence, but rather could be modeled on the early days of newspaper home delivery, which was subsidized by the Post Office.

Bollier referred to a recent article by Eric Alterman in the Nation "Save the News, Not the Newspapers," the writing of NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen, and the local citizen journalism project Spot.Us. The concept of micropayments also came up in an interesting Yi-Tan conference call I listened to that week on the Future of News — featuring Mitch Ratcliffe, Dan Gillmor, and Liza Boyd, whose blog is also titled The Future of News. Spot.Us founder David Cohn also stopped by for part of the call.

These were followed by the March release of the annual report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, State of the News Media 2009. It outlines economic trends that are rapidly worsening for traditional news media, while the adoption of online news offered by both traditional news operations as well as a growing variety of alternative sources continues to accelerate. This offers both challenges and opportunities for traditional journalistic entities to move as quickly as possible to migrate to the web and embrace new possibilities offered by interactive multimedia and participatory interfaces.

Later that month came two eye-opening pieces. Clay Shirky wrote "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable," which pretty much shredded the business-as-usual, digital version of what we were doing before solutions tried by newspapers to date. Dan Conover on the blog Xark wrote 2020 vision: What's next for news, which contained numerous provocative ideas for what's in store for journalism over the next several years. Along the same lines this month, CPSR colleague Andy Oram blogged about how we might obtain the important contributions we receive from journalism – expertise, diversity, and debate – without relying on the institutions that provide it today. A fascinating (and long) article in Vanity Fair details how the current publisher of the New York Times has made several strategic blunders recently, and thus the Times finds itself in more financial trouble than it might — in spite of publishing one of the best newspapers, with one of the best web sites, in the world.

At the April meeting of the Newspaper Association of America in San Diego, AP Chairman Dean Singleton declared war on news aggregators and search engines. Responses were fast and furious, from the likes of Jeff Jarvis and Danny Sullivan. Taking the side of the newspapers, Michael Moran wrote No Such Thing as Free News in the Nation. I saw a Tweet from Jay Rosen at the conference, asking what readers thought of a proposal that Google favor articles of "real newspapers" in search results. I say newspapers should liberally link to each other to boost their SEO, rather than Google favoring any content over any other.

Given the level of the crisis in the newspaper industry, and various proposals for government policy to assist newspapers, it was inevitable that Congress would get involved, first with House hearings in April, then with Senate hearings this week. Forbes has a nice summary of six proposals offered to the Senate explaining how they might save the newspaper business.

In my previous post, I explained how the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy seeks comment through today on the draft introduction to its report. I'm an informal adviser to the commission staff, and in my comments I say that I like a lot of what they see as possibilities for new funding models (public and/or nonprofit) and organizational structures, but there is too little about embracing alternatives to traditional journalism, about enabling citizens to take advantage of access to tools and data transparency, and of new forms of civic discourse springing up, enabled by new technologies. I believe that we need to figure out ways to help some version of the existing journalistic enterprise survive and adapt, but also encourage the development of these alternatives — only by pursuing both tracks to we hope to deliver the most information possible to enable communities to effectively govern themselves and prosper into the future.

Labels: community, democracy, future, journalism

   Link: http://future-of-news.blogspot.com/

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Knight Commission Invites Public Input on Community Information Needs

(I'm part of an informal advisory committee helping the staff of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy by providing ideas and feedback, and spreading the word about this public input period. I'll be blogging about this report and the future of news in general later this week, but please check out the draft introduction and provide your input as well. -PH)

What information do Americans need to accomplish the personal goals and to be effective citizens in our democracy? How are they getting their news and information? And what would they do to improve the quality of news and information available to them?

The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy (www.knightcomm.org) has been conducting the first major study in the digital age to identify the information needs of communities in a democracy, assess how and whether those needs are being met, and recommend steps to improve the fulfillment of those needs.

Now the Commission, in partnership with PBS Engage, is seeking public input from citizens across the nation from Tuesday April 21 – Friday May 8, 2009 at www.pbs.org/publicinput. The site offers an interactive experience and includes a preliminary draft of the introduction to the Commission’s report, survey questions for the public to answer, highlight videos from some of the public forums and meetings held by the Commission, blogs about the Commission’s work, and a forum for citizens to express their thoughts and opinions.

During the public input period, Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, and Co-Chair of the Commission, will answer citizens’ questions about the Commission’s work via Google Moderator, which enables participants to both submit and vote on questions they think should be answered

The Commission’s upcoming final report will include recommendations for achieving the news and information environment that democratic communities need in order to thrive. The Commission launched in June 2008 with an aggressive agenda to assess the information needs of citizens from a variety of different types of communities in order to make concrete recommendations to public policy makers about improving local information flow. The free flow of news and information in communities is essential to effective democracy. With the digital age transforming media worldwide, reducing traditional journalism in a number of communities, the Commission is focused on how Americans will get the news and information they need to make informed decisions for themselves and for their communities.

Over the past year the Commission held seven public forums and meetings in communities across the nation and heard from more than 100 speakers, including community organizers, educators, journalists from old and new media, labor leaders, technology engineers and strategists, entrepreneurs, futurists, public officials, policy analysts, economic consultants and community foundation representatives. The Commission has also received significant input from an informal advisory network of journalists, academics, and people involved in policy and community work.

The Knight Commission, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, operates out of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program in Washington, D.C. It includes seventeen respected representatives of journalism, communities and public policy with diverse perspectives, including Co-Chairs Mayer and Theodore B. Olson, Partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and former U.S. Solicitor General, and ex-officio members Alberto Ibargüen and Walter Isaacson, presidents respectively of Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute. The Commission’s executive director is Peter Shane, a law professor at The Ohio State University, who is advised by a committee of journalists, policymakers and academic experts from a variety of fields. For more information on the Knight Commission, visit www.knightcomm.org.

A project of the Aspen Institute and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Labels: community, democracy, journalism, open government, politics

   Link: http://www.pbs.org/publicinput

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