sudo slapconfig -setldapconfig -ssl on -sslcert /etc/certificate/<your certificate>.crt -sslkey /etc/certificate/<your certificate>.key -ssldomain <server domain>

If there’s a way to do this through the GUI I couldn’t find it. Hope this helps somebody else out there.

I’ve been working on creating a variety of portfolio systems for K-12 students using WordpressMU. Blogs are kinda of a natural fit for both structured and unstructured portfolios. It required a few hacks to the core files which I’d like to convert into a plugin, if I only had the time.

I’ve gotten really fired up to start looking at using various webbooks eee PC 900 or HP 2133 for student use. These little gadgets are cheap and could easily fill the need of teachers who just need students to be able to read and write on the web.

Hopefully, I’ll be talking more about this in the coming months!

Our Vail Instructional Curriculum Calendar Initiative (VICCI) has taken off. We have all of the calendars available for teachers via iCal and 30-50 items have been populated a day. It is pretty cool to see such a grassroots curriculum guide coming together.

Hope to post more in depth soon, but today I’m just tring to get my fingers moving.

After finishing my Masters program his Spring, I needed a break to regain some enthusiasm and perspective. As fate would have it, a wonderful project has fallen into my lap and appears to be a great place to spend my “cognitive surplus” now that school is over.

My school district is using some calendaring software and a wiki to create an electronic curriculum guide. It is an exciting project because we are trying to take a number of great web-based tools to capture our district institutional knowledge. It is a pretty bold initiative, but so far it looks great and has incredible promise. I’ll talk more about it later as the details become more public.

At my individual site, we’ve made some great progress with teacher blog use and are now focusing on student blog use. While the staff isn’t ready to open the doors completely on student blogging, I’m currently developing a WordpressMU server as a structured portfolio for student writing. My eventual goal is to take the work that I’m doing and somehow turn it into a plugin. Initial testing suggests that the appropriate hooks are available to make this happen, but I have yet to determine if my programming skills are up to the the challenge of writing a plugin.

I would love to here from anybody that is interested in using WordpressMU for student portfolios.

The first article is from Will Richardson at Weblogg-ed. The basic premise of the post is a review of a book, “True Enough”, by Farhad Manjoo. Manjoo suggests that Stephen Colbert’s ideas about “truthiness” have some merit, and that technologies are making it easier than ever for individuals to connect with others whom share views. This has the paradoxical effect of narrowing our world view, because it is easier than ever to narrow our information stream to just others who think like us.

This is scary and has a huge negative potential. It also helps explain why our society has such a fragmented feeling these days. I also can’t help but notice how this book as not been mentioned on any of the other blog sites that I normally read. It would seem that edubloggers are ignoring an important ethical conversation that is lingering in the wings.

The next article appeared in some form in nearly every blog I read, the Gin, Television, and Social Surplus talk by Clay Shirky. The catch phrase of “Cognitive Surplus” is the talk of the town. Personally, I think it is a brilliantly simple idea to explain a complex event. And while a agree with everything he said about TV, I can’t help but wonder about the societal ramifications when you think about Manjoo’s paradoxical effect. TV, while a colossal waste of time gives many people something in common. Of course, this is kinda sad but the truth never the less.

I worry that the majority of “cognitive surplus” will be squandered in activities that are no better than television and in some cases worse (i.e. the search for “truthiness”).

As educators, we are doing a lousy job at preparing students to leverage the power of social technologies. In most cases it is feared and downright banned (i.e. MySpace). So, I just wonder what are the new literacies or ethics we need to acknowledge so students are cognizant of developing a balanced information? Are we (educators) developing a balanced informational stream for ourselves? And finally, as Web 2.0 technologies diminish the expert in favor of the folksonomy, how do we judge what if true and what is “truthiness”?

At this point I’m sharing it with a few educators who expressed interest in using student blog portfolios.  It ill be interesting to see how students will react to a school-based social network.

There seems to be a little funkiness with some of the site RSS, but it is an issue being addressed in the road map. I wish there were more documentation on the Elgg schema. I find it difficult to see how things are linked together and where various files are kept. This may be my short coming, but it is a bit trying due to all of the guess work.

I eagerly await the next version, and hope that I can give back soon enough.

It turns out that the friends able is used someway in the browse feature and users that register themselves are automatically made friends with a “0″ user that doesn’t really exist. So basically, you have to add a little code to the /auth/LDAP/lib.php and then your LDAP created users will work wonderfully.

Basically, I slightly modified a post that I found on the Elgg forums.

1. Find line 153:

$user_id = insert_record(’users’,$user);

2. Add the following below:

// adds “virtual” friend, so that user has at least one connection, and shows up in the browse feature.
$newid = user_info_username(’ident’, $username);
$owner = 0;
$f = new StdClass;
$f->owner = $owner;
$f->friend = $newid;
$f->status = ‘perm’;

insert_record(’friends’,$f);

The additionally code simple grabs the new users “ident” from the User table and inserts a friend record with the shadowy “0″ user.

Now, if I can just figure out how to setup the tag cloud to work correctly.

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.

What made me want to post is that I heard a great saying on the radio yesterday. It was the director of the new movie “Atonement”, who was talking about how when he was younger he always felt like he had to have something to to say, because everybody around him always had something to say. Then one day he had an epiphany.

He realized you don’t always have to have something to say, as long as you are still listening and learning. I think this may be a good definition for wisdom. Wisdom is listening and learning even if you don’t have something to say.

Let just say, I’ve been doing a lot of listening and learning in the last month.