Over the last few months, I’ve received a few emails about how to get involved in the project. Toward that end, we set up a Mediawiki instance at http://wiki.openacademic.org. The wiki is pretty barren now, but we will be fleshing it out with more details on our roadmap, and our ideas all steps of the development process.

Since we brought the site live, one of the challenges we have faced is balancing the time necessary to do the work with the time necessary to let people know about the work. It’s an ongoing challenge, and we hope the wiki will help alleviate some of that inherent tension.

We are looking for people who want to get involved — people who are using these tools in the classroom, and developers who are writing code that supports a focused integration between these tools, and folks who are just plain interested. If you match any of those definitions, or even if you don’t, come on down.

And, it is OpenID enabled.

I’ve been wanting to find the time to write this post for a while, but different things (aka work, life) kept getting in the way.

For those who are interested in getting started in putting the different pieces of OpenAcademic together, here are some of the building blocks.

A Moodle 1.6 OpenID consumer:

This code was written by , with the install tested by Kevin and us.

The code is available here:

We have not tested this code in a shared hosting environment, but we have tested it in a few different LAMP stacks. For those of you who are comfortable working in a Linux environment, the install is pretty straightforward. The one main obstacle we encountered was with miscompiled gmp libraries, and we documented the fix for this in the ReadMe.txt that comes with the download. For the generally curious, you can find out more about gmp here.

A Mediawiki OpenID consumer:

This code was written by Evan Prodromou, with some patches by Jonathan Daugherty. IE, these guys did all the work, and deserve all the credit

The code, and a description, is available here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OpenID

This install was also pretty straightforward, and, on our servers, also required that we recompile the gmp libraries. The readme for the Mediawiki code contains excellent instructions.

Educational Use:

There are a few nice things about these OpenID consumers, but my favorite feature is the trust routes. Both consumers allow the site admin to set domains that are fully trusted, partially trusted, and completely blocked.

A member authenticating from a fully trusted domain gains access without needing to verify an email address. A member of a partially trusted domain can gain access, but, the first time they join the site they need to verify some basic information. Subsequent logins are then streamlined. And, at the risk of stating the obvious, people attempting to gain access from blocked domains will never be able to gain access.

In an educational context, this means that an organization can set up an incrementally walled garden. People from selected schools can be granted access to specific shared resources (and denied access to others). People from other organizations can be granted access to selected resources, but only after their credentials are checked and verified. And, uninvited guests won’t be able to gain access. In this context, OpenID provides the means to open up a learning environment between schools without requiring multiple passwords, and without opening the entire system to the entire internet. When combining the flexibility of OpenID with the flexible access control of different applications, one has a broad range of options for supporting online collaboration while protecting student privacy. An organization can set these tools up to be as open or as closed as they prefer.

Next steps:

Now, I just wish I knew some bryght folks who were working on a Drupal-based OpenID server and consumer. That would be very nice indeed.

Some interesting thoughts about media literacy, google bombing, and white supremacism in a conversation started by Tom Hoffman and moved along by Will Richardson.

So, let’s get some of the important stuff out of the way:

Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.



Martin Luther King Jr.
I love the smell of in the morning. These legitimate links to sites on MLK will gain an incremental boost in page rank, thus pushing the crap at martinlutherking (dot) org further down in the rankings. While I don’t particularly agree with artificially gaming systems, I disagree more with racist propaganda. So, Googlebombs away.

On a seemingly unrelated note, in several other places I’ve seen hue and cry about the need to teach MySpace to students. On the sites where people actually take the time to explain what they mean by this, they usually equate “teaching MySpace” with teaching students how to protect their personal information online.

I shudder when I read these posts because I wonder if these people are really serious, or if they are cynically using the popularity of MySpace as a search term to buoy their own pagerank, and, by extension, their perceived credibility.

To me, online security and Google bombing both fall under the umbrella of media literacy. As the whole lonelygirl15 show demonstrated (and I’m intentionally not linking to any sources about this; if you need background, just google “lonelygirl15”), Identity is now content. MySpace, and YouTube, and blogs, and podcasts, and [fill in the blank with another web 2.0 buzzword] blur the lines between content creators and content consumers, but make no mistake about it: content is being consumed, and professional content creators (we can just call them salesmen or advertisers) are infiltrating “amateur” spaces in increasingly sophisticated efforts to work an angle and make a buck.

Credibility can now be gamed. Popularity can now be gamed. People actually spend time trying to figure out how to . I don’t point this out to criticize the internet, merely to demonstrate that the same issues that exist in Meatspace exist online. There is nothing wrong with making money. Even I try and do it on occasion. But, whether one is online or offline, ethical lapses abound. As educators and learners, our responsibility remains unchanged: how do we help our students and peers analyze the information they consume?

As Tom Hoffman points out in another post, this isn’t new ground. As a species, we have made use of critical thinking in past generations. But, as the tools for gaming credibility change, we need to teach our students how to look behind the curtain.

And this points to a frequently-overlooked value of blogging. Many people see blogging as the act of finding an audience, and denigrate blogging that occurs within a walled garden, or within a course that isn’t accessible to the entire internet. These folks miss the point. Blogging can be about finding an audience, but it also provides an accessible medium for finding a voice. In the process of learning how to structure an argument, one also learns how to spot strengths and weaknesses in the arguments one encounters. Through learning the technical aspects of writing well, one can learn the critical and analytical skills needed to navigate the internet safely.

Oh, and one other thing. Critical thinking works pretty well offline, too.

A quick note to let you know that things are moving along very well and we will have more for people to see and check out shortly. SSO is now working between the apps, searching between apps is developing nicely as is a common theme. The Dev community will be up and running over the next week or so and we are exploring a couple of potential partnerships.

More to come shortly!