Mike Malloch's SuprGlu : recent blogging, bookmarking and images

As noted in the past week by Graham Attwell and others, Riina Vuorikari of Flosse Posse has organised a petition against software patents:

I am deeply concerned by the current European Commission plans on industrial property. The development of the Community Patent and European Patent Litigation Agreement, in combination with the London protocol, could lead to the EU-wide introduction of software patents. I believe that this could jeopardise developments in the field of technology enhanced learning by inhibiting innovation among European e-learning developers and practitioners.

Here are two examples of pending European Patent Office patents on e-Learning solutions that would clearly impact on current and future e-learning development:

Testing learned material in schools

Use a computer for testing pupils. The main claim covers the basic procedure, the others just specify useful things to be done. The “technical contributions” consists in the teaching that a computer can be used to do these things more efficiently. There are ongoing activities in schools and universities all around Europe that potentially could violate such patent and may have to be cancelled. As an example most open source LMS have this kind of functionality.

Language learning by comparing one’s pronunciation to that of a teacher

This covers all digital language learning systems that allow a user to compare his pronunciation of a selected piece of text to the right pronunciation. This patent is a good example of how concepts that is considered “common knowledge” suddenly becomes patented and restricted for use in the digital world. As a byproduct, the claim also seems to include the learning function of voice recognition systems like ViaVoice.

I wish I had time to do more than say "right on!". It's too easy to assume that someone else will stop the lunacy of software patents, but the fact that the EU is considering them so seriously is alarming evidence that they could become a major obstacle to the improvement of educational technology. Please go to Flosse Possee and sign the petition

I wrote the other day about progress towards microformats and structured-blogging support in knotes:

Steve has the Event microformat type working in a test installation now. Another few days should see tests within our main knotes production version. Other special types should be coming thick and fast after that, some of them for very special uses such as within learners' eportfolios, some of more general use. Exciting developments!

More progress to report. The editing interfaces and scripts have matured - for instance objectless-editing is now possible (so that users can safely and swiftly invoke the editor formlets and then change their minds) and Steve has a generic macro-based way to creating the formlets. New formats are also supported in his tests: hreview, and our own google-video-clip format (we have clients who are putting workplace-learning video clips into google-video and we want to make it easy to embed the information and players for these in our own content).

This development strand is especially important for our planned e-portfolio work, and for anyone wanting to make it easy to add special kinds of structured content in their weblogs. Watch this space for more progress reports.

In a post on Monday I noted that it now seems to "just work" when you copy and paste knotes content within a Plone site.

We moved a number of blogs and a few indexFolders full of blogs (and nested folders full of blogs, etc), and merged three blogs into one. All of this "just worked" using copy and paste TTP (through-the-Plone interface). We encountered and repaired two small issues.

Yesterday we had another fast-action-request to move a year-old knotes weblog from one portal to another. You cannot use TTP copying and pasting between portals (note that by TTP or CMF-wise copying/pasting we mean through the Plone interface - by going into folder_contents view on enclosing folders while in ordinary website view). To copy content between portals it is necessary to go into the ZMI (Zope Management Interface) view and either use ZMI copying and pasting or export and re-import the weblog. We had run into problems with these advanced actions before, and have not tested them in a long time, but thought we'd give it a go.

It just worked. Exporting to a .zexp file from one portal and importing that into another worked fine. Caveats: the weblog was small and had no comments, just blog entries; and we made sure that there were corresponding users in the target portal and imported with the 'save existing ownership information' option.

This is good news for busy site administrators. It means that you should be able to let uysers create weblogs wherever they like, safe in the knowledge that you can move them later, even onto different servers and portals. We are eager to have some help testing advanced admin actions like this - please let us know if you can help.

I've mentioned a few times recently that we're working towards using microformats / structured-blogging to allow users to represent special kinds of content within their knotes weblog entries. There are many reasons for taking this route: it allows users to see content-creation as more homogeneous and spontaneous; it represents special content structure in interoperable machine-readable formats; it allows us to generalise the notion of special content types from the point of view of knotes' own interfaces and leave the details to special-type plugins...

The first few special structurings we'll be looking at are: event, google-video clip and embedded RSS, after which we'll be looking at variants on review. See my earlier post in elearning2.0 for a sketch of the merits of embedding live RSS to augment a blog entry (eg as reference list or background-resource links ). See this post in the work-related learning blog for an illustration of embedding google-video content in blog content. Event as a structured-blogging type should be pretty obvious: roughly, it takes the place of the Plone 'Event' content type allowing users to denote upcoming events in an ad-hoc but machine-readable way so that they integrate with portal calendar and can be aggregated into iCal syndication.

Events as microformats embedded in the blog content have the additional advantage that 3rd party harvesters can discover the event-wise information directly from the rendered html / rdf of the blog entry.

Steve has the Event microformat type working in a test installation now. Another few days should see tests within our main knotes production version. Other special types should be coming thick and fast after that, some of them for very special uses such as within learners' eportfolios, some of more general use. Exciting developments!

I've been meaning for weeks to repair a little glitch in firefox for windows. For some reason the webdings font is not applied to the internal navigation convenience links - togglers for the sidebars, next/prev/top for the entries. I thought I'd be saving some traffic by using one-character 'icons' for these, but soon realised why I'd avoided webdings for all those years...

I have real images to replace the webdings with, and will be making this repair along with a few planned stylesheet improvements as soon as I get a chance - within days.

We still have much work to do in documenting the features and tricks of managing and customising knotes for site-admin folks. There's also a lot of work remaining to be done in making end-user capable skinning interfaces for knotes blogs. But let's not forget that, being based on Zope, Plone, ZPT, python etc, knotes is already pretty easy to adapt and customise for those with some ZMI skills.

By way of illustration: yesterday morning one of our regular end-user advocates got in touch to complain that the external links in this NGRF weblog entry were not opening in a new window. Sigh. We'd more-or-less forgotten that this was an outstanding feature-request - being web-standards types, we personally hate the idea of targetting external links into new windows and feel it is the user's choice. But we know that it is an important feature for a lot of site managers; in fact we've been through several iterations improving the spoecial handling of external links in the main site content of the NGRF.

We had a good javascript solution in hand, but needed to get that javascript code into the NGRF blogs, and have an onload handler added in those blogs, without stepping on the default behaviour of knotes blogs in other sites. So we made the following simple changes:

• In the product, we added a dtml-var include near the end of the blog_utilities.js.file, to test for the existence of a site-custom javascript file and include it if it exists (the name of that file is knotes_blog_utilities_extras.js).
• We added a custom version of that file in the NGRF portal skins / custom folder, and added the javascript code and onload-handler addition there

Since a little bit of CSS was also required by our external-links-handling solution, we added that rule to a site-wide custom css.dtml file which is included if present in the main screen css for knotes weblogs. Note that the knotes screen css includes both a site-wide custom and a blog-specific custom css file if present:

• knotes_weblog_weblogCustom.css.dtml
• knotes_weblog_sitewideCustom.css.dtml

All in all it went very quickly, with the change to the product being the time-consuming step. We'll add a similar customisation hook to blog_forum.js.dtml, and will have a close look at the customisation hooks architecture when time allows. We welcome feedback from site managers and developers about how best to add hooks to make it easy for them to meet the needs of their users.

By the way, you may want to check out the little javascript solution - it is a big improvement on the default plone link-scanner because it offers the user extra information and an option to over-ride the behaviour ( a rollover that shows the destination content type and a checkbox for 'open in new window' ). So users can opt out of the new-window behaviour for particular content types (for instance, pdf files may download to their disk in their browser's settings), and the visitor at least can see that the link will open in a new window if they do not untick the checkbox. We'll happily share the javascript code snippet if anyone wants it (about 7K of js).

Apologies for not having posted for a long time here. We've been totally nose-to-grindstone in software development work on knotes, the weblogging and discussion product for Plone which we've been working on since late 2004. And at last the hard work has paid off --- knotes is available in version 0.8 BETA now, and it seems to be popular with end-users; it is certainly much improved in usability. It is very feature-rich, and supports a number of key web2.0-ish standards. It is the weblogging system under the hood of this blog, for instance.

We've completed pushing recent improvements into knotes on sourceforge. To indicate that we feel the product is almost at the "it just works" stage, we've incremented it's version number to 0.8 BETA. Please feel free to try installing knotes in your own Zope/Plone set-up. We still have documentation and end-user help to write, and still need to provide an issue-tracking system

I don't have time to go into the merits of knotes here and now, but readers of this blog might like to check it out as a possible platform upon which to base experimental work in edu-blogging, learning activities, goal- and resource-centred discussion, "portfolios" and "personal learning environments". We'll be exploring a number of such experimental variations on the them of blogging ourselves, and will be concentrating next-generation knotes work on web2.0 integration - microformats, social bookmarking integration, "glu" like personal dashboards, etc etc...

I'm now hoping to get the time to get started on a few of the articles I've been itching to write about architectural, ed-tech and ed-tech-politics issues. Mind you, we do have a lot of project-management work to finish in the next 30 days, and we are also planning to have a first pass at extending knotes for personal-devekopment-profiling by mid-April, and there are still glitches to fix and documentation to write, so please excuse me if there's another extended silence here :o)

One of the big advantages of developing knotes as a product within Plone / Content-Management Framework (CMF) / Zope is that it enables very powerful site-admin actions, including implementations of the copy and paste metaphors extended over large chunks of content. It turned out to be quite a lot of work ensuring that the metaphor would be sustained for objects and transactions as complicated as knotes requires, but we've done and tested that work as we went along.

In the National Guidance Research Forum (NGRF), we have been using knotes in anger for over a year now. In the process of exploring the uses that site managers and end-users can make of weblogging and discussion, there was a proliferation of weblogs over time (one of the other "advantages" of CMF is that it is very very simple for users to create new weblogs - maybe too simple :o).

In advance of a major symposium Friday, and following on from the big improvements we've recently made to usability, we were asked to rapidly re-organise the main weblogs in the NGRF. See the NGRF group discussions area for the end-result: there are now just 3 weblogs in the main public area. We moved a number of blogs and a few indexFolders full of blogs (and nested folders full of blogs, etc), and merged three blogs into one. All of this "just worked" using copy and paste TTP (through-the-Plone interface). We encountered and repaired two small issues.

This involved hundreds of blog entry and discussion objects, and worked very smoothly and quickly. We're not sure what would happen if tens of thousands were involved, but even at that scale it should "just work".

Last week, we completed pushing the recent improvements to knotes into the CVS version and tarballs at the knotes sourceforge area. We've been intensively testing in our own user communities as well as in a variety of test installations. It seems to just work, and end-users seem to just get how to use it, so we feel we're approaching a really useful product. To reflect this, we've incremented the version number to 0.8 BETA. Well done and many thanks to Steve and to our beta testers!

Still to-do are the writing of better admin documentation and end-user help, and the provision of developer forums, issue-tracking, etc. We're attending to those requirements as quickly as other work allows.

We are confident now that other Plone admin folks should be able to install knotes easily and make good use of it to add dynamism, discussion and user-expression to Plone sites. Please do try it out and let us know of any issues you encounter.

We're also confident that knotes with Plone provides a rich and flexible platform for experimental projects looking into variations on the theme of blogging - into uses in learning and community building where the basic behaviours and building blocks of blogging need to be enhanced or contextusalised. That's why we built it, and we're already starting to make progress with some ideas of out own that make use of knotes 'plus'.

If you are an educational researcher or community developer, please get in touch with us and share your ideas; we may be able to help. We're particularly keen to explore lightweight services-oriented approaches in the "web2.0" style - adding microformats, integrating with social bookmarking, etc. We are also eager to enhance the profile-building and user-glu aspects of the knotes member-profile, and to explore the use of knotes + Plone for e-portfolios and personal learning environments.

The version of knotes in CVS at sourceforge has been up-to-date for the past day. Steve will be trying from now on to keep the CVS version in synch with bug-fixes and key feature-completions in our production version.

Knotes no longer has dependencies on other products except for ZAAttachment Attributes. We're working on eliminating that dependency as well.

Thanks to those of you who have been waiting for this :o)

Within a couple hours, we'll have our production version of knotes in shape and suitable for deployment on other peoples' zope/plone installations. Huzzah!, phew!, and none-too-soon! :o)

We now have to carefully merge our production version with the CVS at the knotes sourceforge area, and make a new tarball to put in our own downloads areas, based on that CVS version. We expect it to take the rest of this week, given other demands on our time - though we can hope for speedier progress.

Once we have a stable and highly-usable release on sourecforge, we'll concentrate on improving documentation, and on providing issue-tracking etc - we'll make an open blog-forum for developers to post queries and share ideas as well

Of course we'll also have to do some writing at our own product pages :o) I'd also very much like to get some time to do justice to the knotes.net site, which is an utter mess now. I want to use knotes.net as a text-case for a plone sitelet theme / customisation-policy, comprised transparently and attractively of just a blog or two and a few simple downloads/content areas (inspired by particletree.com).

I'll post a note here when we've upgraded the CVS version of knotes.

We're great fans of the Creative Commons system for denoting open content licensing. In educational settings especially, the simplicity of CC licensing can cut through a lot of silly obstacles to sharing.

We've now made it very easy to add Creative Commons licensing to knotes weblog content. There are new links in the Manage sidebar for managing a CC license (you need manage role on a weblog to see that sidebar).

If no license has yet been chosen, you see a link to "Add Creative Commons License". Clicking that takes you into a form delivered by the developer API at Creative Commons, which guides you through the choice. Click 'proceed' when done there to have the CC API contact knotes with the information about your license. The license you have chosen will then be rendered into all knotes views, both as machine-readable RDF and human-readable badge and link to the deed (see the screenshot for an example)

Embedding the RDF - "properly" adding the license to your content - is vital to having the legal import of your choice of deed made "ert". For instance, google will note the embedded RDF and thus will include hits to your content when people search specifically for creative-commons deeded content in google's advanced search.

If you have already applied a CC license, the "Add Creative Commons License" link in the Manage sidebar is replaced by links to change or retract the license.

We hope this helps users to express their intentions to share content. Please let us know of any other features that would help in smoothing the sharing of content, especially in institutional settings.