Apply for Google Summer of Code Projects

Starting today, students can apply for Google Summer of Code projects. Connexions has been selected as a participating organization and we have 2 projects students can apply for. The deadline for applications is Friday, April 8. Get your application in today!

Connexions Accepted into Google Summer of Code 2011

We are proud to announce that Connexions has been selected as a participant in the Google Summer of Code (GS0C) 2011. We will be looking for some great upperclassmen or grad students to help us complete our two GSoC projects. Our projects involve using Google Docs as an editor for Connexions and enhancing our author profiles. Students can review GSoC projects and apply at the Google Summer of Code site. Thanks to all that had a hand in Connexions being selected.

Consortium Technology Committee -- Working on focus and plan for the year

The Connexions Consortium has a technology committee charged with the technical direction, planning, and development of the Rhaptos software that powers Connexions and Enterprise Rhaptos.

The committee met just before Connexions Conference 2011 in February to start putting together a development plan for the next year. To start the process, we had everyone around the room suggest things that are strategically important for Connexions and Rhaptos. After a bit of discussion and consolidation we ended up with 11 focus areas and then had people “pitch” them to the group, explaining who they would benefit and how they would help achieve the Connexions/Rhaptos mission. The committee then voted on our top three focus areas. These focus areas are by no means exclusive or exhaustive. They just give the committee concrete goals to work on as a group. The following three areas had the most energy and we will be following up with each.

1. Strengthening the Development Community, with an emphasis on upgrading to Plone 4 to expand the base of developers available.
2. Creating APIs -- In order for members and others to build things that are not tightly integrated into Rhaptos, we need to have well defined APIs (application programming interfaces).
3. Authoring: Authors and educators need easier authoring tools in order to share their OER (open education resources).

Do you have specific suggestions, additions, comments? Do you want to participate more actively with the committee? Please comment here, or email cnx at cnx.org with your feedback.

First Weekly Plone 4 Sprint A Success

We put a call out to the Rhaptos developer community for help with migrating Connexions to Plone 4 and the response has been tremendous. We held the first of the weekly all day Sprints yesterday. The Connexions development team worked with developers in South Africa, the UK and the USA to get Connexions on Plone 4. We had multiple check-ins to our version control and made progress on

• Account Creation
• Login
• Search
• Workspaces
• Unicode Problems
• Content Rendering

We also ended up with some great documentation on how to get our Plone 4 devset running on Ubuntu. Huge thanks to all that participated. We will be holding the sprint every Wednesday until May 18. Join us!

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.