edu.science news

We presented the launch of the edu.sci portal at the FNM-A (Forum Neue Medien Austria) Conference at the WU Vienna (July 1st 2009). We got a lot of interesting feedback and impulses for further tools to integrate.

Interesting were also the keynotes, which support the conclusions we drew from operating elib.at since 2005. While we do focus a lot more on content than the usual project in beta, we did accurately position our project at the border between the closed LMS / repository of an institution and the “free” web. This should allow us to operate as a stepstone in both directions…

Much to do, not enough time.

A lot of work has been completed and we are finally ready to launch the platform and add content. We completed a lot of individual steps:

- Tech: Server Install
- Design: Common Skin for mediawiki and wordpress-blog
- Community Functionality: Blog, User Page, Chat, Voice over IP
- Social Network / Tools: Twitter, Facebook, StuiVZ, Bookmark Tools
- Edu Fuctionality: Quiz, Discussion, Feedback
- Multimedia Fuctionality: Video, Audio, Implementation, TV
- Search for individual edu contents (around 10.000 quality texts from edu.sci projects)
- Recommender: Automatic recommending of “similar content” (wiki plugin programming)
- Testwiki & Testcontent (”courses”)

This should make it possible to finish all relevant steps so the wiki is ready for “real” content in september.

No plan survives contact with reality. Therefore our plan to have live content migrated from the test-wiki by April 2009 has been postponed for about two weeks. The wiki is up and we will try to start migration in May.

But this does not mean that we didn’t get a lot of things done. To distract from our little delay,  here again the milestones of the project:

• We formed a cluster with about 10.000 individual pieces of content, most of them scientific articles, papers and ebooks.
• We redesigned mediawiki (skin and templates) to be more user-friendly and especially - more eye-friendly - although personally we do love the traditional look and feel.
• We got our first extention done on time: Recommender suggests further content for our users (soon across cluster projects). Thx to Flo and Friends.
• We put together a package of extentions to cover all the aspects of Web Learning: Quiz, Video, Audio, Course Design, Workshops, Lectures and more.
• We successfully completed our individual proof-of-concept studies to see what was needed and more important - what works.
• Thanks to all the usual suspects.

But why? We did all of this part-time and because we wanted to. We feel that it is important to connect projects out there - especially those which do NOT have an institutional background.  Some of the best work is done in such projects (as it has been throughout history, just check at the next museum who collected all the art and sacrificed time, love and labor). In the digital age we finally con interconnect these projects in a cluster. Together, the visibility suddenly is much greater - more people can be interested in participating and there is an exchange between the project-partners.  And with good quality and sufficient quantity the use of the cluster is also interesting for institutions, thus closing the circle.

Well, it’s not much, but at least we were just informed that we can read, write, and rightly interpret the formal prerequisites for this year’s MedidaPrix. Thought I would share this, as we cound use the recogntion for promoting our project which is in the grey area between the individual educator/student and the big institutions.

Now we have to pass the double-blind review to get to present our ideas at the GMW in Berlin. Onwards, edu.sci!