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.

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.

Introducing J. Cameron Cooper

“I am pleased to introduce Consortium technology committee member, Cameron Cooper, independent consultant and Plone expert. Cameron knows Connexions software extremely well. He was Connexions System Architect for several years and we are extremely lucky to have his continued participation in the Connexions Consortium technical committee. His expertise was instrumental in the development of strategically important new Connexions features, including the collection composer, the print-on-demand system, and lenses, the post-publication, quality-review system critical in an open publishing repository. His combination of deep knowledge of Plone and Zope, and detailed knowledge of the ways in which Connexions adapts and extends them, makes Cameron a valuable long-term contributor to the Consortium and the Technology Committee. Below, Cameron discusses the big vision frontiers that he sees for Connexions and Rhaptos."
Kathi Fletcher -- Technology Director and Project Manager at Connexions

Hi, J. Cameron Cooper here (jccooper@jcameroncooper.com). I'm the former Systems Architect for Connexions, and still serve on the Connexions Consortium Technical Committee, where I hope my hard-earned knowledge will continue to be of use. I started with Connexions in 2003 to port the system from a plain Zope product to the current Plone architecture. I became System Architect in 2006 when Brent Hendricks, the previous (and excellent) technical lead left. Connexions has grown to a major web application with 10s of thousands of lines of code and over 2 million visitors per month. And I'm very proud to have been (and to continue to be, though less day-to-day) a part of that. I'm occasionally an independent web developer, writer, and trainer and I'm currently running my own company called BottleMark, making custom bottle caps—as well as doing all the web dev for the site.

While working at Connexions, I became a major Plone expert; my book came out in late 2004, and I spoke at Plone conferences in 2003, 2005, and 2006. And that's no accident: Connexions is an extremely ambitious use of Plone, and customizes essentially every subsystem.

As part of the technical committee, the priorities I see for Rhaptos and Connexions are:

1. ensure a scalable and maintainable codebase. Connexions has grown significantly both in usage and in complexity, and the system needs to be able to keep up.
2. transition to a distributed development model. Connexions has been developed by a core group, but now must operate more as an open source project. The committee is exploring various ways of funding development and working with external developers, and this is very important to growing the feature set and usefulness of the software.
3. distribute the content repository. Connexions remains a standalone system, but to support massive content and usage, I forsee a need for the system to live in multiple places.
   

I'm hoping to work for the committee on a pilot project to harness crowdfunding of development, where interested parties provide support through a website like Kickstarter. I am investigating small but useful projects that will take about one week of software development; perhaps "Enhanced Author Profiles". I am interested in other ideas that could be done in about a week—so let me know if you have one.

Introducing Nathan Yergler

"Connexions has been working with Creative Commons from the time both organizations were just visions in their founder's eye. The open, yet clear licenses that Creative Commons fostered to allow sharing and reuse are key to Connexions' mission to be a global repository of high-quality, reusable and adaptable textbooks and educational resources. Nathan, Creative Commons CTO, is our trusted guide on issues of standards, interoperability, and discoverability."
Katherine Fletcher Technology Director and Project Manager for Connexions

I'm Chief Technology Officer at Creative Commons (CC). My responsibilities include managing the team that builds the technical infrastructure behind Creative Commons legal tools. I'm also responsible for looking at ways Creative Commons technology can be applied, and how our experience and expertise with linked open data can be leveraged. Open educational resources are a core application of Creative Commons licenses, as they depend upon license interoperability to scale.

I initially became involved with Connexions through my work at CC. Connexions is one of the great exemplars of a community built around open licensing and re-use. The Creative Commons Attribution license that Connexions' contributors offer their work under reduces ambiguity and removes a friction point for reuse and redistribution. Connexions' support for remixing and reusing content is one of the best, which makes it an extremely interesting platform to be involved with. And as a long time Zope developer, I was further drawn in by the use of Zope and Plone.

I see the Technology Committee as a resource for Connexions and Rhaptos developers to use to help think about ways the already successful platform can be further scaled and improved. As a member of the committee, I hope I can provide perspectives on how other communities are using CC licenses, and how Rhaptos can continue to be an exemplar for encouraging sharing, remix, and reuse.

I'm excited about working on ways to improve search and discovery for Open Education Resources; Connexions' lenses are a great initial implementation of a curatorial system that I think will be central to this. I'm also interested in enabling the discovery of derivatives and transformations of OER across the web.

Introducing Mark Horner

“I am pleased to introduce Consortium technology committee member, Mark Horner of the Shuttleworth Foundation. Mark and the Siyavula Project have been incredible partners with Connexions in education and Open Education Resources (OER). Siyavula has contributed an entire curriculum for K-9th grade and science and math for 10th-12th to Connexions. Siyavula works directly with teachers in South Africa to effectively use Connexions and when they identify critical new features for Connexions, they help to design, fund and develop them. This combination of vision, real world experience, and technical problem solving is what makes Mark so valuable to the Consortium and the Technology Committee. Mark's vision extends to the entire teaching and learning process as you will read below."
Kathi Fletcher -- Technology Director and Project Manager at Connexions

I am the Open and Collaborative Resources Fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation, where I am responsible for a suite of projects aimed at supporting the full teaching value chain through the creation of an enabling environment for communities of practice of educators to thrive.

I ended up in Open Educational Resources by accident, coming from a background in high-energy nuclear physics. During my graduate school years, I co-founded the Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) project in my “spare” time, a project that has successfully used a global network of volunteers, collaborating online, to write free, openly licensed textbooks for Grade 10-12 Physical Science (a mixture of Physics and Chemistry taught in South Africa) and Mathematics. This was to address the fact that many learners in South Africa just didn't have access to textbooks.

The success of FHSST helped me get a job at the Shuttleworth Foundation, originally as a project manager and then later as a Fellow, where I started the Siyavula project. The original vision for Siyavula was to extend the FHSST work to all grades and subjects. The Siyavula project has successfully released a set of English and Afrikaans workbooks for all learning areas for Grades R-9 in an open format under an open copyright license. Siyavula has since extended its role to become the umbrella under which
FHSST, and my other projects, exist.

The Siyavula project partnered with Connexions to house the workbooks and allow educators easy access as well as the opportunity to adapt, enhance and contextualise the materials. In collaboration with Upfront Systems and the Connexions team we've also dabbled in the development of Rhaptos.

Access to these resources online alone won't support teachers delivering the content effectively in the classroom and so, in collaboration with Steve Song, Interconnectedness Fellow and Roché Compaan, Upfront Systems, we have founded OpenPress, a project to deploy a print aggregation service to support teachers and give under-resourced schools access to cost-effective open educational resources through the power of collaborative purchasing. This will allow high quality hard-copy resources to be delivered to schools.

Teachers are also required to do assessment, a crucial piece of the puzzle if learning and material effectiveness is to be gauged and fed back into further improvements of material and teaching process. My most recent project, under the Siyavula banner, is FullMarks, an openly licensed, open-source assessment bank designed to be extremely simple to use and allow educators to rapidly share questions, create tests and analyse learners results.

There are a number of additional projects in the pipeline, most notably the development of a mobile front-end for the Connexions platform which will allow learners with access to a cellular telephone the ability to browse the full Connexions repository without requiring access to an internet connection through a PC. In contrast to developed countries where the mobile focus is on smartphone applications, we are focused on simpler devices to allow the vast majority of South Africans access to the content via their phones. This will ensure that the 85%+ of South Africans with mobile phones can access Connexions in contrast to the 10% of South Africans with internet access via a PC.

I sincerely believe that education is the only route to long-term, sustainable, peaceful and prosperous future for all South Africans. I blog about all of my projects and my fellowship at markhorner.net.

By participating as a member of the Connexions Consortium Technology Committee I hope to support the platform's development and reach into the K-12 (R-12 in SA) sector. Connexions' forward thinking use of XML, homogeneous repository and typesetting capability make it an ideal place to build a critical mass of K-12 content that will benefit a global community of educators.

Introducing Minh Do

“Next in our series of introductions of the members of the Connexions Consortium Technology Committee, I am delighted to introduce Minh Do, the director of a team that was one of the first to embrace Connexions and Enterprise Rhaptos internationally. The Vietnam Foundation has been working with Connexions and running Rhaptos in Vietnam since 2006 and they have been pioneers in the areas of internationalization, proxy caching, language support in PDF generation, customization, training and local support for Rhaptos. Their vision for a 21^st century education in Vietnam is inspiring and their commitment unwavering. Minh and his team have been trusted advisors in the development of Enterprise Rhaptos and they have been key beta testers for new features in the software, offering their time on short notice and helping ensure quality."
Kathi Fletcher -- Technology Director and Project Manager at Connexions

I am Minh Do and I am the Vietnam Open Education Resources (VOER) Program Director at the Vietnam Foundation (VNF). My background is in eLearning, open course ware, and information technology. Before joining the VNF, I was the Vietnam Open Course Ware Program Manager for the Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF). And prior to that, I was the Deputy Director of the Center for e-Learning and Online Testing Technology at the Information Technology Institute (ITI) at the Vietnam National University in Hanoi (VNU Hanoi). There, I coordinated the "in-country training course," for the second phase of the "Vietnam Information Technology Training Project" hosted by JICA Japan and VNU Hanoi.

My involvement with Connexions began in June 2006 at the CNX training workshop at VNU Hanoi. I met Hung Tran from the VEF technical team and Rich Baraniuk, Sidney Burrus, and Chuck Bearden from the CNX team. I was impressed by the software features and the LEGO idea and kept in touch from that time on.

My e-Learning center collaborated with the VEF team to increase the Open Coursware (OCW) activities in Vietnam by installing a version of Rhaptos in Vietnam and training users how to use Rhaptos to create and share their knowledge. We volunteered to translate the Rhaptos interface into Vietnamese and I myself went around the country with Hung Tran to set up the caching servers to prepare for the launching of the VOCW Program. Day by day, I got more and more deeply involved in VOCW. Finally, I decided to fully join the VEF team and lead the program with Hung Tran.

The transition from VOCW to VOER is quite a long story, but now, let’s talk about where VOER is heading with its “3 development legs” model (Technology, Content, and Community):

• Technology Development: Having an innovative, reliable, and inexpensive platform plays a vital role for any OER project. Thanks to the release of Enterprise Rhaptos (ER) from Connexions, we were able to deploy a robust software platform for VOER with a major data center located in Hanoi. The VOER website is now available for free public access from the Internet. We are also cooperating with an open source development company named NextG Solutions. NextG specializes in Zope/Plone solutions and will test and customize ER, and develop more functions for ER as the community needs. A support center named Connexcent (Asia-Pacific Connexions Support Center) was established under the umbrella of the VNF in order to provide best practices and support services to the regional community in particular and the global community in general.

• Content Development: Besides the technology, content is the heart of VOER. To provide the seed content for the project, we aimed to collect teaching materials from various sources and make them available on the VOER website. Connexions Rhaptos makes the usage of textbooks more effective by dividing a textbook into independent parts, or modules, and allowing combination of modules from different textbooks to create a new one. In the first year of VOER, we plan to publish 20,000 modules on Rhaptos. The first source of available textbooks is a library of 1000 textbooks from MOET (Ministry of Education and Training). Other sources include universities, companies, and research institutions. After just a few months working with these organizations, we have around 10,000 modules available in VOER.

• Community Development: The last leg makes the project sustainable. We are in the process of building the community for VOER by cooperating with our partners in technology development and content production, providing training to students and faculty members on using and sharing content, and sharing information about VOER with the public. At the moment we have established the Alliance for Vietnam Open Learning Technologies (VOLT); VOLT has early members from important entities in Vietnam such as FPT (the largest technology company in the country), the Institute of Sociology (the leading research on sociology in the country), the Online Management Training Company, the Center for Promotion of Advancement of Society (a non-profit organization, belonging to the Vietnam Union of Science and Technology Associations) and the Hanoi Obstetrics And Gynecology Hospital (the leading and first-of-its-kind hospital in Reproductive Health Care in Hanoi). Members of this community are now using customized versions of Enterprise Rhaptos to create and share knowledge both internally and externally. In addition, we have won participation commitments from major universities in Vietnam such as the University of Danang, the University of Education, and the Vietnam National University in Hanoi and HoChiMinh City.

Based on my experience with VOER, as a Connexions Consortium Technology Committee member, I really want to help accelerate all the “3 development legs” activities for both Connexions and Rhaptos. The software needs to be more user-friendly, more flexible to customize, as well as able to handle large amounts of uploading and sharing. The community needs expansion beyond individuals to organizations like universities or institutes, because the number of users will determine the success of CNX. Besides that, content on different Rhaptos instances should be linked together to help people use modules and collections more flexibly and easily. As I am focusing on the development of Enterprise Rhaptos, I hope our technology team will be instrumental in the very near future in designing and implementing a way to link all the needed modules from any Rhaptos repository into collections.

Please visit the links below to see more about what we are doing.

• The Vietnam Foundation: www.vnfoundation.org
• The Vietnam Open Educational Resources Program website: www.voer.edu.vn

Introducing Roché Compaan

“I am pleased to introduce technology committee member, Roché Compaan of Upfront Systems. Roché's expertise in software development and Plone and Zope technologies has been invaluable, and Upfront Systems has rapidly become expert in Connexions/Rhaptos development. Over the past year and a half, Upfront built several new lens features used by Siyavula, a proxy-cache to speed up access in South Africa, the new Connexions rating system, and the new Express Edit feature that helps authors quickly check out content for editing and helps readers derive a copy to adapt. Roché's performance expertise and advice led to a configuration change that halved the time authoring tasks consume. We are very lucky to have his involvement in the Consortium and Technology Committee."
Kathi Fletcher -- Technology Director and Project Manager at Connexions

In 1998 I co-founded a software development company called Upfront Systems located in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Very early on I felt myself drawn to the open source movement and thought that this was a very healthy an productive protest against the establishment. I didn't think it was crazy to build a business on open source principles, but my partners did and since 2000 I have been the sole owner of the company.

Around 2001, a colleague of mine encouraged me to look at Zope. It was a web framework that was years ahead of its time. It was a significant departure from the then common cgi style web apps and it boasted an object database, a multi-threaded web server and publisher that could traverse and publish objects. I have been involved with Zope and the community around it ever since, and saw Plone grow up to become one of the major content management systems in the world. Upfront Systems was the first Zope solution provider in South Africa and we contributed a Zope and Plone training course to the community early on. We used this same course to train developers at Computer Associates in New York when they had a brief flirt with Plone in 2004.

About 3 years ago I met Mark Horner, the Open and Collaborative Resources Fellow in the Shuttleworth Foundation. As part of his Siyavula project, Mark was looking for a platform to use for the publication of a whole curriculum of workbooks bought from a private school in South Africa. Connexions caught his eye, mainly because it did a darn good job at producing printed books by using Latex for typesetting. Mark is a Latex junky. So when Latex junky and Plone pundit met, no other framework stood a chance. Admittedly the patience and charm of the Connexions team had a lot to do with the choice to go with Connexions as a platform. Over the past few years we've undertaken numerous 20 hour trips to Houston to scope and plan the development of extensions to Connexions. The extensions helped us present content in a way that is a familiar to South African teachers, while ensuring that the features that we develop are generally useful to other Connexions users.

We were the first external development team that worked on features that would be released on cnx.org itself. It shouldn't come as a surprise that this wasn't smooth sailing in the beginning. But I believe this is exactly what Connexions needed - a remote development team that can help surface development practices and knowledge that were mostly held by members of the Connexions team and not visible to the outside world.

As a committee member I would like to focus on growing the Rhaptos developer community. As a long time member of the Plone community I will naturally look there to recruit developers. At the upcoming Plone Conference in Bristol I will lead a sprint where we will start the migration of Rhaptos to Plone 4.0. Rhaptos is still running on Plone 2.5 and moving it forward to the lastest Plone version would make developing for it significantly more attractive for existing Plone developers.

Looking forward to see you all at the Plone Conference in Bristol!

Introducing the Connexions Consortium Technology Committee Members

Over the next few weeks, the Connexions Consortium Technology Committee members will be introducing themselves on this blog to the wider developer community. The Connexions Consortium is a group of organizations and individuals, including the world's foremost leaders in education, who work together to advance open source educational technology and open access educational content.

The technology committee is responsible for the technical aspects of the Connexions Consortium. Among other things, the technology committee is responsible for the technical development, implementation, and maintenance responsibilities that occur on the Connexions platform. The committee reviews and makes recommendations to the Board about the technical affairs and policies of the Connexions Consortium.

We are lucky to have a really outstanding and committed group of eight individuals on the technology committee. They participate in conference calls together about every 6 weeks, and they provide expert input to Connexions, the Connexions Consortium, and Connexions and Rhaptos partners. I look forward to introducing them to you.