Ning is no longer free….

I hope your district hasn’t focused on staff development tied to free services.

That being said I could help but enjoy a web conferencing tool that I recently “discovered”. DIMDIM is a great little free online tool that I found while searching for an Eluminate Alternative. I started with the open source VM appliance, but it is crap.

I should state that for the record, it isn’t really open source in any meaningful way. The community has been neglected and there has been no forward progress for almost a year.

However, their free online service is great if you are in a position of needing to conduct small, 20 or less attendees, web conferences. It is super easy to upload your PPT slides and/or PDFs. There is a great little interactive whiteboard and the ability to share your screen. There is a web share, but it doesn’t seem to work with any of the authenticated websites that I need for my trainings.

Unfortunately, the recording ability doesn’t seem to apply to the whiteboard or PowerPoint (this seems very odd) so it is pretty much useless (Edit: It actually records PPT slides and screencasts fairly well). To be honest I’m not sure if that is a result of using the free version or just a product limitation.

Below are a couple of screenshots.

So what the heck is a “cloud”? For the most part it is a return to centralized computing using the web browser as the application of choice. The using the cloud allows you to provide software as a Service (SaaS). This is a great article on the cloud.

Ultimately, schools have not systematically embraced the “cloud” or Web 2.0 because they have very little control over the tools that are offered. Even Google Apps for Education, arguably the best “cloud” application currently available to schools, has some Terms of Use language that makes some teachers and/or administrators flinch. The need for control, whether necessary or not, has held back innovation in schools for too long. This guide will help lay out a path to creating your own “cloud”.

So let’s start with some basics:

• Virtualization
  Server that supports virtualization. At this point you can pretty much use PC, Mac, or Linux depending on personal preference. This will allow you to tinker more, and the resulting virtualized application is highly portable.

  Here are some of the virtualization products I’ve used:

  • Virtual Box by Sun Microsystems
  • VMware by VMware
• Linux
  Basically, this is a package that lets you easily install an Apache web server with all of the necessary technologies (PHP and MySQL) very quickly. Each one is a bit different depending on the host OS but they all do the same thing. I suggest that for the first time you use a Linux distro with a GUI. This allows you to start experimenting with Linux while still having a comfortable GUI from which to work. In particular, I’ve found both Ubuntu and OpenSUSE to be very user friendly and both have a wide base of support.
• Web Apps
  For an average school or classroom the following give you a great starting point:
  • Moodle (Course Management System)
  • WordPressMU / BuddyPress (Blog/Social Networking)
  • Elgg (Social Networking)
  • EyeOS (Web-based operating system)
  • Mindtouch Core (Wiki)
• LDAP via Active Directory/Open Directory
  LDAP allows you to more efficiently control your user-base on these systems. Most school districts already a have one of these systems in place so it is just a matter of setting up the correct permissions and your users, faculty and students, can log in using their usual info.
• Server Hardware
  To begin with you can run any of these applications via laptop or desktop. My original setup was on a Macbook with a Core 2 Duo and 2 GB of RAM. For production, you want something a little more substantial but we’ll address that when we get there.
• Dedicated IP Address and DNS Record
  Most of these applications require that you use a dedicated/static IP address. This just means that your server’s IP address will not change over time. It is also important that your server has a domain name. This can be done via DNS, which will most likely require the help of your IT department or to begin with a modification to your servers HOSTS file.

Above, is the outline of what the next few posts will be about. We’re going to look at setting up a linux webserver inside of Virtual Box, then we are going to install our first web application, and then we’ll look at how to use Apache Virtual servers to host multiple web applications.

The end result will be cloud services for your organization with a focus on utilizing current open-source technologies.

The first is, “What Lawsuits?” Can anybody actually find a lawsuit related to blogging or the use of wikis? I couldn’t upon a 5 minute Google search. All I could find is a student suing their old principal for discipline related to cyberbullying on Facebook. It seems like every reference to a pending lawsuit had to do with social networking…interesting.

It would seem to me that the bigger problem is two-fold. First, in most cases schools have a ineffective or outdated policies for dealing with students/staff use of the web. Second, there is a major generational gap between how adults and teens/kids view the use of the Internet and what constitutes public.

Now is the time that school districts should update their AUP policies. Most important is that these policies are updated with a group of students, teachers, parents, and administrators. Each group looks at Web 2.0 applications through a different lens and it is a chance to set expectations for their use by all interested parties. Having a defined set of policies related to these technologies makes it much easier to handle the occasional problem that may come up from their use.

Now is also time to do some work to bridge the generational gap. It is important that educators using these tools understand how they are preceived by youth. Of course this is a two way street and using these tools is also a great time for educators to share important information about why privacy is important, the permanacy of the web, and the web is not as anonymous as you may think.

Finally, I think that teachers, administrators, and school IT departments need to look at the “free” Web 2.0 applications and decide why do we actually want this tool? What is the pedagogy driving instruction with these tools?

Part two of this issue is whether or not you need to use public Web 2.0 apps at all. There are some many incredibly easy to setup and use open source Web apps out there today. Any IT director worth a dime can have these systems up and running in no time. Most importantly these tools can almost always be tied to a directory server which makes user management a snap.

Using these tools a district can host it’s own social networking (Elgg or Buddypress), wikis (Deki Wiki), and blogs (WordPress or Moveable Type). Educators get the advantage of these powerful tools, while administrators and IT directors get to have the control they need. Give you students some training wheels before they set off on the information superhighway.

Basically, it comes down to the basic issue of control and accountability. In a K-12 school environment you have to have both and the only way to do this is keep you Web 2.0 services in house.

It turns out that getting the LDAP authentication working with Elgg was very easy.

All you need to do is look in the “home/auth/ldap” folder, where you will find “lib.php”. This file gives you basic directions on setting up LDAP authentication. I followed the following steps:

1. Copy lines 18-43 of “home/auth/ldap/lib.php” and paste them below line 10 in “home/config.php”.
2. Next you need to clean up the code by removing all of the asterisks. There are also several places where semicolons are missing, so put them at the end of line where they are missing. When your done it should look something like this:
   

   // Authentication set to LDAP
   $CFG->auth = ‘ldap’;

   // LDAP Authentication parameters
   // LDAP host
   $CFG->ldap_host = ‘your.domain.com’;
   // LDAP port
   $CFG->ldap_port = 389;
   // Base DN – can be string or array of string for multiple DNs
   $CFG->ldap_basedn = ‘cn=users,dc=your,dc=domain,dc=com’;
   // Protocol version
   $CFG->ldap_protocol_version = ’3′;
   // Filter for username, common are cn, uid or sAMAccountName
   $CFG->ldap_filter_attr = ‘uid’;
   // Search attibutes: associative array with the key being the attribute
   // description, and the value being the actual LDAP attribute. firstname
   //lastname and mail are used to create the elgg user profile. The
   //example below works for ActiveDirectory.
   $CFG->ldap_search_attr = array(‘firstname’ => ‘givenName’,
   ‘lastname’ => ‘sn’,
   ‘mail’ => ‘mail’);
   // Create user, relies on the givenname, sn, and email attributes for now
   $CFG->ldap_user_create = true;
   // Fallback option, try internal authentication if everything fails
   $CFG->ldap_internal_fallback = true;

3. Use your domain information instead of “your.domain.com” and make appropriate adjustments to “$CFG->ldap_search_attr” if you are using non-standard LDAP attributes.
4. Als0, you will need to use a couple of additional lines of code if you require a password to bind to your directory. These are found in the “home/auth/ldap/lib.php” file.
5. It should now work!

Now the only thing that is bugging me is that default name is your surname. But that should be easy enough to fix. This was done on a xServe G4 running OS X Server 10.4.9, running entrophy php 5.2.4.

I’m almost done with the implementation phase of my master’s program and look forward to getting back to some of the newer things I’ve been toying with at school.

I’d like to get a program start which takes advantage of Elgg to create a school social networking/blog/portfolio system. It was incredible simple to get the installation running and the portfolio piece (by Nathan Garrett) installed. Also, it looks as though the LDAP authentication piece should be easy to implement.

My only real complaint is that standard registration requires an email address. Unfortunately, there are just to many institutions, at the K-12 level, who are worried about students accessing email. It would be nice if the LDAP authentication removed the need for an email.

I’ll be sharing my discovers about Elgg as the project develops.

Apple was managed to stupid-proof a convergence of wiki, blog, and  web-based calendar. While none of these services are new,  the manner in which they are pulled together and centrally controlled by OS X Server will open these tools up to a wider audience.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, it is worth a look.