Introducing Ted Creighton

“I am pleased to introduce Consortium technology committee member, Ted Creighton, professor and NCPEA publications director. Ted brings a valuable community and educator focus to the technology committee, always looking at technical features through the eyes of end users"
Kathi Fletcher -- Technology Director and Project Manager at Connexions

Ted is currently the Director of the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration (NCPEA) Publications and the NCPEA Connexions Project. He is also a former Executive Director of NCPEA, and is currently a professor of educational leadership at Virginia Tech. Ted was instrumental in partnering with Rice Connexions as NCPEA began to publish CNX modules in 2006. The purpose in their alliance with Connexions was to establish their “knowledge base” in an Open Education Resource portal with free access to their colleagues across the globe. The CNX modules have always been peer-reviewed, and collected in the NCPEA Connexions Lens, and now they are also published in the International Journal of Educational Leadership Preparation (IJELP), the official publication of the NCPEA Connexions Project and available at: http://www.ncpeapublications.org.

New Release of Connexions for Android

Today, we released version 1.3.1 of Connexions for Android. It has a small, but important change. It is now using the new mobile web version of Connexions to view content. Previously, the app was forcing our regular web page view into a column to display on small devices. It was usable, but you had to adjust each page to center it, etc. The mobile version looks great on all the devices it has been tested on. Many thanks to Roche Compaan and Mark Horner for making the mobile version possible.

As always, the code is open source and is in our repository. You can download the app directly from Connexions or from the Android Market. If you try the app and find it useful, please leave a comment in the Android Market.

Code Sprint Bug Fixes Released

Today we released corrections for 10 bugs. The 10 bugs were fixed by volunteers at the Code Sprint held last week as part of the Connexions Conference. The Code Sprint brought together over 25 volunteers from 10 organizations to work on new designs, documentation, upgrading to Plone 4, bug fixes and new editor ideas. These tickets were fixed by both veteran and beginning developers. The best part of testing and releasing the bug fixes was that we found no defects in the Sprint code. You can see the details of the tickets on our release page. Thanks to all that participated in the Sprint. You don't have to wait for a Sprint to help with coding or documentation at Connexions. If you are interested, contact us at techsupport@cnx.org.

More information about the upcoming Connexions sprint

We can’t wait to see you Thursday, February 10th at the Connexions/Rhaptos sprint, following the 3rd annual Connexions conference. We will have work for Connexions enthusiasts whether you are a brand new developer, an experienced Connexions developer, a user experience expert, a content project manager, or an author aspiring to improve the Connexions workflow and documentation.

Location and time: The Sprint will begin at 9am on Thursday, February 10th and meet at Rice University in Duncan Hall in room 3076. The room is on the third floor in the same area as the conference. See the following for a campus map, http://conference.cnx.org/travel.shtml) Come by between 8:30 and 9 for some bagels and coffee.

Sprint Topics: We will be sprinting on at least the following topics and we will have a time at the beginning for others to advertise additional topics.

• Bugs (code): For developers new to Connexions and Rhaptos, we will have a set of bugs to work on and we will have experienced developers to help. Ed Woodward, Connexions Development Manager will coordinate the Code Bugs sprint.
• Bugs (usability and documentation): For user experience designers, students, and non-developers, we have a set of bugs that present usability design challenges and documentation tasks.
• Authoring editors (code and usability): There are two editor prototypes, a specification for creating an offline HTML->CNXML editor, and a design to add an image and media uploader to the current web editor. Developers, user experience professionals and students, and authors will all be useful in this sprint.
• Plone 4 Migration: (code) At the Plone conference in Bristol last year, consortium member, Roché Compaan, led a sprint to upgrade the Connexions plone infrastructure to Plone 4. We will continue the work from that sprint.
• Topics you bring: Moodle integration, perhaps? Others?
  

For developers: We will be using VirtualBox to install Connexions/Rhaptos images for development. Connexions and Rhaptos code base currently use a Debian Linux and some of the tools use system level libraries. The easiest way for new developers to get involved is to install the software on a virtual machine. We recommend that all developers install VirtualBox and for the sprint we will be providing machine with all of the system dependencies and with the Rhaptos code.

Instructions for installing VirtualBox and downloading the Rhatpos images can be found here: https://trac.rhaptos.org/trac/rhaptos/wiki/HoustonSprintDocumentation. We recommend that you install VirtualBox before arriving at the Sprint if you have time to do so. The Connexions images are made to go version 4 or higher. Details about installing VirtualBox are given in the documentation link above.

Online and remote participation: We will use the twitter hash tag, #cnxsprint to match the conference twitter hash, #cnxconf. We will also have a developer chat room open. To connect to our chat room during the conference

1. Have an existing jabber id (a gmail address works too)
2. Using a standalone jabber app (ie Pidgin, Adium) "Join an existing group chat"
3. Enter "sprint" for the name and "chat.cnx.org" for the server and join

Version 1.3 of Connexions for Android Released

We have released an update to Connexions for Android. The details are on the Connexions blog. If you have an Android device, give it a try. If you find it useful, leave a comment on the Android Market.

Connexions Makes the Switch to MathJax

Today, we updated Connexions to use MathJax to display MathML. MathJax is a JavaScript library that can render MathML across all browsers. This is allowing us make several improvements:

• Support Math display and module editing in Chrome and Safari.
• Remove the requirement of the MathPlayer plugin for Internet Explorer.
• Remove all of the warning messages regarding math not rendering correctly in certain browsers.
  

MathJax has a nice feature that opens a "zoom box" when users click on math. You can see an example in the screenshot with this post. The switch to MathJax also included an upgrade to our content MathML to presentation MathML conversion stylesheet. We are now using the latest from the W3C along with some improvements of our own.

Along with the MathJax change, we have fixed several defects. Two of the defects are worth mentioning.

• Adobe based ebook readers (Original B&N Nook, Entourage Edge, etc.) will now render math correctly. We embedded the needed math fonts in our EPUBs.
• We removed original authors from the author role on derived copies. This was a big source of confusion for authors. The original authors are still listed when a derived copy is published, they are just not included in the author role of the derived copy.

You can see the full list of corrected defects in our release notes. Please let us know what you think of the new math either in the comments or at cnx@cnx.org.