::fibreculture:: Re: WebCT, Open Source and Beyond

[Peter Morse]

This is a very interesting discussion: I've been pushing the use of  
FOSS within my dept. for a number of years now - mainly because we're  
cash-strapped, but also as a legitimate alternative to proprietary  
software - the price is right, the standards are open (more often,  
anyway) and the politics are appealing. This includes software such  
as Audacity (with all its limitations), the Gimp (instead of  
photoshop), Blender and Wings3D (3D modelling apps), and I've been  
looking into FOSS game engines such as Crystal Space and Irrlicht,  
though haven't specifically used them yet - they'd be great for  
postgrad VR projects (currently we're using the Torque game engine).  
All of these apps have certain limitations as a consequence of being  
non-commercial/non-proprietary - however, it is interesting how  
students embrace and work around this once they are aware of what it  
means - as I think they are receptive to the change from a seller/ 
consumer or corporation/client model to something that offers the  
possibility of a participatory community (eg. as a programmer,  
content developer or simply as a kind of beta-tester) - and this is  
fundamental to the development and spread of FOSS.

As mentioned in previous posts - an interesting consequence of this  
is a sort of testing of the permeability of institutional boundaries  
- where does the institution end and public space begin?  For  
instance, I'm running some postgrad programs and courseware  
development environments in wikis (using MediaWiki) - which is  
extremely useful. We've developed a digital repository and lecture  
presentation system in Zope and Plone - and I'm very interested in  
FOSS cms/lms's like Moodle and Drupal etc. All these things do  
particular things very well, and other things not so well. It is an  
interesting position to be in: to have a wide variety of FOSS systems  
up and running, just when Unimelb is migrating from webraft (its  
internally-developed cms) to Blackboard.

We have quite a number of sessional staff where I work - and an  
interesting issue for them revolves around content development and  
delivery of material via institutional cms's. The problem here is  
that sessional staff may well develop content that can be delivered  
via the cms, but what happens after/when they leave? Is it their  
right to take that with them or does it remain as a legacy or  
institutional memory of sorts? It is clear that one is employed by an  
institution as a producer of IP and that this is shared between the  
employee and the institution, but there is some question in my mind  
as to what happens to content once it is "locked" within an  
institution-wide cms/lms. It is far easier, in some respects, to run  
your own server and take that with you when you go! After all - it  
can be your box, with your content, arranged in the way you see best.  
A sessional/part-time staff member may want to host material on their  
own website or in their own cms, such that they can easily move from  
institution to institution. Fair enough. Presumably there are also  
implications for the IP of student-developed work in this permeable  
domain. It's a complex argument - for a number of years I tried to  
get students using blogs via blogger - but the issue struck me that  
this is - arguably - a very thin point in the membrane that defines  
the university/institutional boundary. What exactly is happening with  
IP when you use Blogger (as opposed to running your own install of eg  
Wordpress, somewhere)? I would suspect that the reason Google bought  
Blogger is that it offers an extraordinary opportunity for data- 
mining the zeitgeist! (an old-fashioned concept I know...but still).  
In this sense one can regard intellectual output by students/staff/ 
institutions in these spaces as targets for commercial data-mining  
(but then, I suppose anything publicly available potentially is.)

Perhaps pertinent to this discussion are initiatives such as: OKI 
(open knowledge initiative: http://www.okiproject.org/),OCW (http:// 
ocw.mit.edu/index.html) or CGEMS (http://cgems.inesc.pt/). I'd be  
interested to hear people's thoughts on these.

cheers

Peter