Tag Archives: Mahara

Sharing the love

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Love Sharing Creative Commons symbol

Love Sharing Creative Commons

PLANE is operating as much as possible under Creative Commons Licensing – with the aim to give back to the community as much as possible. While the below will be gobbledegook to anyone but a techie, we just wanted to let you know all the different ways we’re sharing the love – and recently our developers have been contributing code updates back to a number of open source platforms:

 

 

Mahara

  • We have been tracking the latest Mahara code and have identified several bugs in the grouping and messaging functionality, these have been fixed and made available to the community.

Saml

  • Main Single Sign On component of plan.  Sevaral bugs in the Drupal, Moodle and Mahara implementations have been fixed and submitted upstream.

Drupal

  • Voting API Community Module: (for the Shareclub project) Patches we submitted back to community, still pending integration.
  • Badgeville Module: We have created a badgeville Module for drupal, this is currently in the community sandbox awaiting review before making it’s way to wider community.
  • Opensim: We are creating a module for account creation and sso logins. This is still in progress however an initial version is available in the Drupal community sandbox.

Moodle

  • Grid Course Format Contribute Module. Bugs in the moodle 2.1 version fixed by catalyst and submitted back to community.
On a side note, all credit to artist Sanneb who created the Love Sharing symbol we’ve used above, and released it to be used freely under Creative Commons Share Alike license. Blogging is many times prettier thanks to artists like her :)

PLANE technologies

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PLANE is moving very fast on many fronts. Today we would like to share some of the technologies we will be using for PLANE. They are mentioned here in the order they might be encountered on the PLANE site, not necessarily in the order of importance.

Drupal logo
When an educator visits PLANE, they will land on the PLANE home page. This will be served by an open source Content Management System (CMS) called Drupal. This will be personalised and customisable by the educator.

 

Moodle logo
Courses and experiences will be undertaken and created in an open source Learning Management System (LMS) Moodle. Moodle is a very popular and growing Learning Management System.

 

Mahara logo
Educators will upload evidence of their progress, and maintain a portfolio in their open source eportfolio Mahara. Mahara integrates very nicely with Moodle. 

 

Badgeville logo

 
There will be an element of gamification which is using game like mechanics to keep educators engaged and to help make the PLANE journey more enjoyable. The gamification platform we have chosen is provided by Badgeville which offer this as a Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) option.

 

OpenSim logo
Our virtual worlds will be developed using an open Source Virtual world server called OpenSim. OpenSim is a popular virtual world server within educational communities. OpenSim runs on a server and a player will connect using a virtual world viewer.
Imprudence logo
The virtual worlds will be viewed using an open Source Virtual world viewer called Imprudence. A virtual world viewer is a desktop application that is used to visit virtual worlds. The viewer can be used to connect to other virtual worlds such as Second Life and JokaydiaGrid

 

To join PLANE, you will connect using one of the following authentication systems. Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo!, Google or Microsoft Live. We are investigating whether we can integrate the virtual world viewer with this login system. This is quite a technical challenge and is still under investigation.

There are of course a lot more technologies that are required to implement an innovative and ambitious project such as PLANE. These will be presented in future posts as they become more integrated into the PLANE journey.

Please feel free to comment or ask questions on our technology choices. We are very excited as PLANE is taxiing towards the runway and the planejourney is approaching rapidly.