There are a couple interesting threads on EDUCAUSE's CIO Listserv that talk about using and Moving to Moodle. This one talks about the decision to choose a Learning Management System (LMS) and asks about Blackboard, Jenzabar and WebCT. Many of the responses talk about choosing Moodle. This one talks about the pains of switching from one LMS to another.

Changing from one system to another is a very expensive proposition, not because of the costs of licensing the software and its care and feeding, but in the re-training of thousands of users. In one post, someone says that if Blackboard doubled the $75K/year that it's costing this school now, he'd probably keep paying it, as the current price is half what he's currentlly paying Microsoft and provides similar fractions for lots of other very expensive stuff. That's all true, but the fact that once you've gone with a proprietary system you're forever beholden to their whims is what I get from this line of reasoning.

Couros has a link about Puppy Linux. It looks like with a few minutes one can download a CD, boot it, and then install this mini-distribution on a USB drive. It runs most everything from RAM disk, so it's pretty fast. This looks like a potentially useful way to have a computer on a USB drive so that wherever you go you have all of your files and settings with you.

A cool project would be to do something like outfit a classroom of students with these to see how their use of computers changed and whether they do stuff like, you know, actually edit and revise work that they create.

It's really small, so there's no OpenOffice, but it has Abiword, mozilla, and gnumeric. It looks pretty cool. One downside is that it wants to wipe away all the files on your USB drive to do the USB install (not necessary if you're willing to boot off a CD).

Well, it looks like I'm pretty close to completing an upgrade from RedHat FC1 to FC4 (Actually K12LTSP 4.4.0). If you've gotten errors today, or notes that mail has been postponed, this is why. Considering Fedora's supposed to have a 6 month lifespan, I've done pretty well keeping it going as long as I have. I would have upgraded to K12LTSP 4.2.0EL, but I couldn't get the drivers for my NVIDIA card to work. That's the downside of having to buy from someone who doesn't really check that there is support for the stuff that they sell. All in all, it was a fairly painless upgrade. The biggest bummer was that Dell somehow configured one of my drives in a way that couldn't be read and I had to drag everything back over from my backup server, which ain't the fastest machine in the world.

Here's a somewhat interesting story about Mambo, an Open Source content management system. I've been fairly rabid about content management systems since I started using Drupal a month or so ago. I'm fairly convinced that Normal People don't need to learn to use tools like NVU or Bluefish (or their proprietary cousins Dreamweaver and FrontPage) and that places like universities need content management systems in place if they want their faculty to, you know, manage content on the web. I'd guess that I'm better at creating web pages than at least 95% of university professors, but until I started using Drupal hadn't edited a web page in months.

But I digress. This story is interesting because it demonstrates that one software is Free (as in speech, not free as in beer) it can't be taken away. This is a story of how a company tried to regain control of a product that they made Open Source, but then decided that they didn't like what was happening. What was happening was that lots of people were taking their product and making it a lot better.

According to Mambo CMS developers exodus and form OpenSourceMatters - Mambo CMS developers unanimously depart from parent company, Miro, and form new non-profit foundation to protect their open-source code. [ArsTechnica]

So SFgate.com is running a story about how computers are interferring with "real learning." One group claims that kids are really different now because they're using computers so much. That may be, but they aren't using them so much at school. Most kids use computers less than a hour a week at school. I'm sure that the numbers are different in laptop schools & haven't seen any data on those lately.

Later, Oppenheimer is quoted:

"Computers are designed to be a consumer device, to make our lives simpler, easier and quicker," he continued. "That's not the main job of schools. Schools should slow things down and take things apart.

So computers are antithetical to learning, or being able to do stuff with computers doesn't really count. As I love to point out, Plato had the same concerns about text because it

``will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.'' (Plato's Phaedrus, p. 275a)

Plato's fear seems fairly analogous to Oppenheimer's. It seems to me that we've done some things with text that we might not have been able to do without it. I think that it's probably going to be true with computers too.