Great to see so many people attending the TafeFrontiers conference on the 19th August in Melbourne - the Flexi-Learning capital of Oz ;->

Plenty of buzz - Kaye Schofield had people going with her idea that innovation needs to be built into the system - and that Flexible Learning is the way into a "new business model" for the VET sector in Australia; while Lynne Spender talked about a policy vacuum - and the "democratisation of creativity" - she reckons we need a 'central database' for all the 'learning objects'.

Sometimes i feel like i'm on the wrong channel - it makes sense at the time, then i get home and read my notes. Lynne showed us a video of a twelve year old boy at school raving about how he was being taught all these wonderful new technologies - using multimedia to design front-end displays for his back-end database, all for project about who knows what. Ms Spender assured us that this boy was the future of the VET system - i'm not so sure we'll see him in the VET sector - (Fred and i looked at each other and agreed it was far more likely he'll be running his own web design company at age fifteen, and doing a post-graduate degree in his spare time while lecturing at the TAFE). The boy who said, "uh, they tried to teach us the keyboard, but i didn't quite get it" - now he's headed for the VET sector!

Started reading the "Cathedral and the Bazaar", a very interesting history of hacking and the origins of the open source movement, by Eric Raymond - you can find it online (eg at "First Monday"), but i'm reading the hard copy (mm, books are so great!). It occurs to me that on every model available, the open source collaborative development one included, i'm doing everything wrong on this project - too solitary, need to find more 'co-developers'. "Release early, release often, and listen to your customers" he says. Well, we've re-launched "English at the Beach" - way before it's ready, but maybe we need to tell our customers?

Enjoy your flexibility, readers!

wow! Anyone who thought Linux was difficult should head for one of the computer swap meets in Melbourne! or to a web site in Germany ..

.. because i needed to take a look at Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (remember the 'LAMP' acronym of acronyms?), i wanted to install Linux on a machine and see how it all worked. Well i've tried Red Hat, and Mandrake - both of which take hours to install, just like Windows. Of course there were problems like installing any operating system - it's not for the 'uninitiated' usually. Then i met a man at a 'swap meet' in Ivanhoe, who was selling a CD he called "Knoppix" for the sum of $25.

Knoppix is a fully operational, Open Source operating system - based in GNU/Linux - with office suite, web browsers, email client, word processors, graphic editors, sound players and recording programs, fully configured menu systems - and web server, very attractive themes, and so on ..

The thing is - this operating system runs direct from the CD !! It takes about 4 minutes to boot, and it runs very smoothly. The system takes a look at the hardware, finds the drivers, and goes!

But, is it easy to find your way around? Well, to be honest, some aspects of the desktop environment made me think that Windows is getting left behind.

Happy exploring to you all .. comments page coming soon.

oh look .. and $25 was too much .. here's a site in Australia where you can order the CD for $9 - but hey, the CD i bought had all sorts of tailoring for what i needed.

The Age reports today that the Australian Democrats are about to launch a bill requiring all Government Agencies to use Open Source instead of proprietary software. Wonder if this will get anywhere? Democrats say they are already using Open Source for all their online services - not so difficult given that Apache is the world's number one server.

A development worth watching, given the "face-off" between Microsoft and Linux - @ C|Net News - 'Linux, Microsoft face off in India', and the huge MS giveaway in India last year - 'India: Microsoft Giveaway Drowns Out Open-Source Software Movement', reported in 'CorpWatch'. Gates is paraphrased in the CorpWatch article - "Windows was already being sold for a low price and Microsoft was willing to ''dramatically lower'' its price for socially relevant projects, Gates said".

Interestingly, the president of India this year advocated "broader adoption of open-source software", and the government of Munich has just migrated 14,000 computers over to Linux. >More details at C|Net>

Perhaps if the Government legislates in favour of Open Source (unlikely!!), departments may suddenly find they get better deals on MS licenses? - But maybe we in the ACE sector shouldn't complain - at least in Victoria, we get very friendly licensed deals on MS products! - brokered by the ACFE department i believe.

Those interested in voice-over-ip, or internet voice chat, might be interested to read an article in Wired, showing how 'instant messenging' has become popular in Iraq, thanks to the comparative cost of phone calls & internet cafe time. That's in areas where they have phones or net cafes.

For anyone interested in browsers, evolt.org is a great repository of everything browser-related. It contains an archive of every web browser ever invented, a long history of the "browser wars", and .. amongst the archived articles is one article about bulletin boards coded in PHP/SQL.

In reviewing five forums (three of which are open-source), the reviewer refers to "phpbb", and "phorum" - two currently popular bulletin board systems. I agree with the reviewer that PHPBB looks great - it's definitely one i'd like to trial on our sites.

Now i'm sure there must be a Special Interest Group looking into Open Source, at the LearnScope Flexible Learning Community, but can i find it? No. Oh dear .. Can i find how to get into the special interest group section of the site? Hm, better look again ..