Hi Simon, Posting from Samoa on a flaky internet connection @ the hotel.
Again -- huge apology for the delay in getting back to you on the NREN and other great ideas. I've just had too much on my plate with my move back to NZ, speaking committments, getting the OER Foundation established etc. Samoa will be by last international mission for COL and after 1 May 2009, I'll be working full time on WikiEducator and OER Foundation projects :-). You're absolutely right: 1) We need to promote and support ways in which open education can collaborate with the NRENs --- From the NZ perspective, I'm already thinking about how we might facilitate a national WE hub on KAREN (the NZ NREN initiative) -- lots of issues to think about. How do we sync national WE hubs with the international site, who pays, etc? So any thoughts and ideas you have on moving this forward are most welcome :-) 2) Real time comms will move the OER agenda forward by an order of magnitude -- no doubt about this. How do we make this happen? I'd welcome funding proposal development in moving this agenda forward. As an open education advocate --- I have no issue where OER content is hosted. We need to improve interoperability between OER projects to facilitate remixing on a planetary scale. We've started some technical discussions with Connexions to figure out interoperability between Connexions and Mediawiki installations. Jim Tittsler has started playing with a script to that converted http://cnx.org/content/m13764/latest/ into http://wikieducator.org/User:JimTittsler/Sandbox/Cnx on WikiEducator. As Jim say's: "It's fragile. It doesn't do tables, italics, bold, or math markup. Or probably lots of other things. But it is a start." I'm pursuing funding options to get this code developed. You'll be pleased to know that WE develop all funding proposals as free content openly and transparently on the wiki. I'm going to be working on a funding proposal to get some of this functionality funded in the first 2 weeks in April -- watch this space :-). As you know -- we have a strong history of collaboration with Mediawiki developers. Erik is a member of our Community Council and we benefit tremendously from the experiences of WMF in hosting large wiki projects. We're committed to open source software and we will continue to collaborate with the FLOSS community in achieving the vision of open education. I'm very excited about our future collaboration with Athabasca University for our Phase 2 hosting --- Apart from being Canada's premier online university -- AU have demonstrated a strong commitment to open education on multiple fronts -- they share our vision and are natural partners for the evolution of our project. That said -- I would love to have better engagement and interaction with the NRENs --- I'm pretty sure that we'll get this right over time. Simon -- when I get back to NZ -- lets arrange a time to skype. Lets see how we can make the future happen! Cheers Wayne -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] on behalf of simonfj Sent: Sun 3/22/2009 5:30 PM To: WikiEducator Subject: [WikiEducator] Re: Performance slow? > That said --- our traffic rankings and corresponding demands on the > server have increased considerably over the last month or so. I see WE > achieved a 78K traffic rank on Alexa yesterday --- all good from a > growth perspective but does allude to the need for getting our Phase 2 > hosting implemented. We've made good progress on this front in that > Athabasca University -- That's interesting to hear wayne. I'm, just going through CANARIE's list to see if Athabasca is connected. http://www.canarie.ca/members/index.html Doesn't seem to be a member which is disappointing. Still, they have a lot of nice relationships, and connections, like this. http://www2.athabascau.ca/aboutau/news/news_item.php?id=437 Can I just mention this strategic plan as it's pretty much what the NREN's are thinking. https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/display/I2SP/2008+INTERNET2+STRATEGIC+PLANNING;jse,ssionid=22FC5C66A54E9733B38A4DDBB301C449 Sooner or later we need to see the gap between the (National centric) network builders and domain/tool centric content producers bridged. Or, to put it differently, get the info networks and (real time) comms network to align (in supporting a group's sessions). In brief, help this kind of group interoperate in many domains. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communication_Projects_Group If you read Deke Kassabian's comment at the Internet2 strategic planning wiki about "bootstrapping their own Instant Messaging and Presence services. The PIC working group is uniquely positioned to coordinate,............(and the rest of this para)" , you'll get some idea of the Real Time Communication services which could help similar groups on (say) on Wikipedia and Wikieducator to communicate a lot better, and perhaps coordinate/share their productions. The byproduct is that we might ensure better connectivity between the I AND CT of global groups (like we 9). Eric and Brion have more experience here than most domain managers as the wikipedia network is quite (globally) extensive. They'll know there are too many variables to ensure an identical user experience across the internet. (NB Technically I am a baby). But WE's Phase II and III strategies apply to most others in the OE space, and no one is likely to want to see their domain integrated with another, even through many are simply duplications, so we'll need to think laterally (literally). The common need = developing Real time comms which can be shared between similar groups in different domains. I think we could get some funding based on this. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
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