Academic Computing Blog

opensourceCMS.com was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to “try out” some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be the administrator of any site here, allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs.

The administrator username and password is given for every system and each system is deleted and re-installed every two hours. This allows you to to add and delete content, change the way things look, basically be the admin of any system here without fear of breaking anything.

Why some systems are here and others are not? Below are the main system requirements.

1. Root access to the server is not required for installation.

2. The system must be php/mysql based.

3. opensourceCMS is not just for “open source” systems.

4. We may not know of the system.

5. Some systems we couldn’t get installed.

In a posting to School-IT describing the number of computers in use at his school Tommy Walz wrote:

“Of course, far more important that quantities or ratios, is their appropriate use.”

An article came across in the news this morning …

“Internet dominates campus life, but little use is for academics

“When the rent on his East Lansing, Mich., apartment is due, Mark Herberholz logs onto an Internet poker site for a few hands. He says the income from his winnings helps to pay the bills and pass the time.

“The Michigan State senior says he spends about four hours a day playing computer games, instant messaging with friends and surfing the Internet.

“But he spends only about six hours a week on the computer doing his homework.”

The article then goes on to explore how computing basically defines student’s social life … computers are more useful as acommunication tool …. students use them that way, but the school curriculum doesn’t …

Source: Maryanne George, Knight Ridder News Service, The South End Newspaper (Wayne Univeristy), Apr/21/2005, http://www.southend.wayne.edu/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1322

“Extreme System Administration”, a riff on a book called “Extreme Programming”, immediately suggests the pairing “Extreme Teaching / Extreme Learning.” Since the points it makes are true in both domains, I’ve left it untranslated …

[1] Learning from Programmers

“I know, it sounds like a horrible thought. Most sysadmins I know look upon programmers as anathema. The world of system administration is different, you might say?

“Programmers have to work together in teams. They have to communicate effectively with each other to do so. They collaborate on a common code base. While they make extensive use of tools that help them, they ultimately cannot avoid the necessity of interacting to solve problems, one human to another. Sysadmins sometimes miss this point. ”

Andrew Cowie, Extreme System Administration, OnLAMP, March 31, 2005.
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/03/31/extreme_admin.html

As university libraries move toward digitizing their entire collections, digital rights management (DRM) is a key issue that requires planning input from library officials, IT specialists, faculty, students, and even members of the general public, writes Society for College and University Planning communications director Terry Calhoun. Just a few years ago, university librarians and other officials worried over student and faculty preference of the Internet over print resources; now, instead of fighting the trend toward Internet search, leading schools are seeking out ways to open up their print holdings.

For example, the University of Michigan has signed a deal with Google to digitize its entire collection of more than 7 million volumes in order to make those print resources more available and easier to use; the project will take six years, and the first digitized resources will not come online for approximately 18 months. University of Michigan associate university librarian John Wilkin says an entirely new DRM approach is needed to deal with intellectual property issues when the entire collection is made available over the Internet. Though Wilkin is uncertain about what that DRM schema will eventually look like, he says the near- and mid-term solution is a “digital rights matrix” that clarifies access and use privileges for different users; for its service, Google plans to provide complete access to texts out of copyright while providing short quotes and citations for materials still under copyright.

Other universities are taking a more conservative approach to digitization, such as Harvard University’s project to digitize only 18th century works. An effective DRM solution for university libraries will require input from various departments and disciplines, and be free of excessive technological baggage. Calhoun suggests that rather than “management of rights,” DRM for digitized university collections should be “digital management of rights.”

From: Terry Calhoun. The Challenge of the Decade, Campus Technology, April 2005.

Blip: ACM TechNews, Volume 7, Issue 775: Wednesday, April 6, 2005

Click Here to View Full Article
http://www.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=10699

University of Southampton researchers posit that the Semantic Web could potentially bring the Web closer to Vanevar Bush’s vision of the mime, a machine that stores all digital information and that can support knowledge construction by supporting a person’s assembly of associative connections between documents. The mSpace platform facilitates such knowledge building with Semantic Web technologies, and the authors suggest that the platform can support interaction mechanisms upon which the mime is founded.

An mSpace offers a method for managing high-dimensional spaces on a two-dimensional space, which supports a number of manipulations–sorting, swapping, addition, and subtraction. “These manipulations mean that the person can construct a representation of a space, and Bush-like pull in associations on demand, which support their interests,” explain the researchers.

They say the mSpace model’s most innovative quality is its ability to fold spatial representations of multiple types of associated information into one context that can be manipulated to effect information-space explorations determined by users. The mSpace software framework consists of three core elements–a client, a model, and a data storage layer: It is the client’s function to query the domain space, represent the results in the interface, and supply the proper manipulations for the domain; the model’s job is to define the domain’s available dimensions and their relationships; and the storage layer facilitates quick returns on complex queries on the data space.

Deployment of a lightweight mSpace application has yielded insights on how mSpace can be implemented as a more generic spaces browser, with the ultimate goal being the development of mSpace as a generic Semantic Web browser. “The contribution of our framework approach is to provide a practical platform for hypertext exploration that takes advantage of Semantic Web protocols which let us support in the wild of the Web, Bush’s sense of the way the human mind works, through human-made association,” the authors conclude.

The Evolving mSpace Platform: Leveraging the Semantic Web on the Trail of the Memex
MC Schraefel, Daniel Smith, Alisdair Owens, University of Southampton (ECS), April 3, 2005

Click Here to View Full Article
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10710/

According to an informal survey conducted recently by NSTA, 92 percent of teachers who participated said they use online resources to supplement their science teaching. Respondents identified core content information and interactive simulations as the two most frequently used resources. But two-thirds of respondents said they had difficulty finding resources online, and 49 percent said they needed additional help integrating web resources effectively in their classroom.

Those who did not use online resources cited a lack of time to search for them and the inability to find high-quality online materials as major barriers to their use of the web. And 72 percent of the teachers polled expressed concern about students’ potential exposure to inappropriate web-based resources while online.

Robert Brumfield, Assistant Editor, SciGuides help bring web into instruction, eSchool News April 4, 2005. http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryts.cfm?ArticleID=5612