 Okay, my name is Red Lambert, this is Cameron Barlow, we're from in Praxis, we're the people behind edgy commons, the software used for open source management. I assume that you've heard of it before, has anybody not heard of edgy commons? Okay, all right, a couple of you. So edgy commons, we call it an open source management system. What we're doing today, we've been in this business for quite a long time. We got started very early on when MIT first started doing open core square with a grant from the William & Florida Hewlett Foundation to be able to turn key solutions for doing open core square to lower the barriers and make it a low cost proposition. What we'd like to do today is kind of gloss over, we're really excited because we have a brand new release out today with a bunch of new features. So what we'll do is we'll talk about some of those new features and then if you have more interest in the general platform and stuff like that then please feel free to come talk to us later at the science fair that we're doing. So to just to get into the thing first of all, our platform is built on Plum and the newest release is built on Plum 4 and one of the things that was a major focus in Plum 4 performance. So what we're seeing here, this is just the raw Plum 4 performance that we're built on, we're seeing means of 65, 53, 41 percent. So it's pretty significant speed up in the platform. If you look at, and this is not our slides, this is slides by the Plum community. So and you're taking from what they are, but you can see if you compare them to some of the other platforms, it is also a significant increase across the board with open source platforms. Any increase in speed of student access? Performance of the actual software pages being rendered. Okay, so how fast students might be? Which is actually a really important thing for open source software because if people have to sit and wait for their pages to load, then you might lose them. So okay. All right, so some things we've done is we've done major updates to the UI and we'll see that in a minute here. But we've customized it with a more modern fix with display. We've moved some of the additional functionality around so that it's more intuitive. So that, you know, with this idea and keep the simple things simple and the complicated complicated things possible. We updated the table styling and light box integration, a lot of other wonderful up-to-date things. So we've also integrated the top level schools object and within this for a number of reasons, because some schools are divided into like arts and science or and then they have departments and then they have courses. Some institutions, however, just focus on departments and courses. It's an optional thing so that you have this flexibility, but it's, it's, it goes one step further. It's even optional enough that if you wanted to adopt intercoms across multiple institutions, then you could use that schools function as a top level organizer. You know, it is to make it very simple. Okay, talking about metadata, what we've done is we've, I don't know if you've seen MIT's latest site. They have little boxes that, that next to the course posting that takes you right to the lectures, right to the video and stuff in the courses. What we've done is we've taken that idea and moved it a step further. So now when you build your courses, you can go, the contentator courses, you can mark them as a syllabus assignment or something like this and it gets embedded in the metadata. So now that it's embedded in the metadata, we can do things like enable that for semantic web crawling as well as human crawling. And we've implemented a system similar with those icons on the front page. So now when you see the whole list of courses in your open courseware, you can, from that single page, you can build that right to a particular resource in that course. So we've, one of the always, always, what we've always worked on is this value proposition of, you know, when you first are running an open courseware and you want to build content, the last thing you want to be, you know, worried about is metadata standards and, you know, is it IMS compliant? You know, who can we, you know, you're really focused on the data. You want to build the course, you know, you have this content, you want to get up, you want to get it out there. And our value proposition is if you use edge of commons, then you get all this extra stuff for free that you don't have to worry about. Things like RDFU for semantic web features, OEI fees for harvesting metadata and holding a digital library, RSS feeds, which holds the metadata, which is a primary way of integrating your content with the open courseware consortium website, being able to import and export your materials with the metadata intact. So if you assign an offer to your course, when you move that content around, that information will go with the course, and go into your LMS or into any other environment you use that content. What we've done is kind of done some hover things that we've included a little fix to be able to be able to tag your metadata if you're, so that if you put a little app sign in front of it, then you could say it's institutional, or you can just put an individual name, and that way the system will recognize it. And we'll see that in action a little bit later here. But lots of little tweaks underneath to show, you know, to make it really, really easy to get all this stuff in your open courseware and not to have to worry about it. Now, one of the things we did when we first built Edge and Comments is we purposely held back from doing things like LMS functionality, grading and, you know, and keeping track of students and private views versus public views. Our idea was that this is open courseware, we want to make it as public as we possibly can, integrating it to everything that we can. And, you know, we did some experiments with some social stuff that, you know, this was, you know, probably a good seven or eight years ago, you know, using forums and trying to get a social context around the content. And, you know, our first idea was to kind of integrate this loosely. And we did this with some limited success. And for those of you who know the history of, you know, MIT and social stuff, it was kind of a rough and rocky road. But what we, the real lesson we learned in doing this was that we don't need to build the platform, be all of everything. Focus on what we're good at and then integrate with, you know, people who are doing really clever things. And now today at Staying with Edge, we, you know, come to realize that that was a very, very smart decision. We're now integrating with a bunch of different people to provide an extra functionality on site. And because of the way we built it, it makes this really easy. Here are some of our partners. We have Open Study, Highlighter and Nixie. I'll just talk a little bit about those. How many of you here know about Open Study? Okay. So for just real quickly, for those of you who don't know about Open Study, it is a live feed you can put right on your OpenCourseWarrant page where it has a standard set of subjects where you can actually, you know, go live right then and there and go and ask your question and get an answer to it. Here's an example of how we've integrated that into Edge Commons. You see here, you're right here on the course view. If you go to the other tab, then you see you have Open Study groups here. But one of the things we did was we built into the backend. What you'll see here is now you have a drop-down group of these study groups list. And this is actually live feed from Open Study groups. So if they create a new one, you'll automatically see the new list. You just click which one you want, hit the update, and then boom, there it is on your site. And that is all you have to do to integrate Open Study. We've basically really, really taken all the pain out of that. There's no copying JavaScript and it's trying to stick them in your page or anything. It's just there and it just works. Next group we're going to talk about is Josh from Highlighter. He's with us today. So he's developed a really, really cool implementation of being able to highlight directly on a website using JavaScript tools. Really, really powerful thing that you just like if you're in a textbook, you know, sometimes you find a highlighted textbook and it's a gold mine because it has all these notes on it that highlight the important parts of it. This can now be integrated directly into your OpenCourseWare site. You can see here there, it just pulls this box. You can see here, here's a highlight that's on the site and if you click over it, you can see all the comments that are made by it. And this can happen in real time. You get analytics on the back end to see who's coming to your site and who's reading those, who's doing stuff with those. Now, one of the things that with this integration, we realized that not everybody's going to want their OpenCourseWare sites marked up added to the night. So we have a few controls over that. We have a highlight that has the ability to have moderation over the top of it. So you can kind of keep track of what's going on there. There's also Josh and his team is working on a really interesting functionality, a group's functionality, where you can come in as a professor and students and mark up the site and only have those highlights being viewed by those students. So this is all functionality you get out of the box by, you know, doing something similar with Albus study, just enabling it inside. So the third part now I want to talk about is NICS-T. How many of you are familiar with NICS-T? Okay, so there are a couple of people in the room. NICS-T is a learning management system that is institution agnostic. It's designed to be able to teach ad hoc courses on the fly, similar to like, you know, your Gmail or something like that. You don't have to manage the LMS on the back end. You don't have to have buy-off from the institution. You don't have to have approval from your administrators. You just go directly into it and you can teach courses, you know, directly out of there. You can have people sign up at any time, you know, and you can just go and teach your courses. So why is this interesting from an educone's point of view? Well, because we're a platform that deals with open courseware and open courseware materials. Our big hope is that somebody is going to be able to take these materials and use them, right? Benefit from that. So what we're doing with NICS-T is we're partnering with them to build a back end that takes the content out of the educone's side. It moves it directly into the NICS-T environment. But we're not just content to stop there because what we did when we built educone's is we support a number of formats being able to pull content in and out of educone's to make it easy, things like Moodle, Blackboard, WebCT, and, you know, a whole host of other elements. If they have an export, then we typically are very interested in giving that information back into an educone's side. Well, the partnership we have with NICS-T, we're actually taking the back end that we built in educone's for doing all this package management and integrating it into their platform as well. So they will have all the images that we have that begin to suck in WebCT and Blackboard courses into their environment. This kind of gets to, you know, that kind of solves the hotel-California problem. I call it the hotel-California problem because you know the eagle song, there's a line, you can come here anytime in your life, but you can never leave. You know, this is the problem that elements have while we're kind of on the opposite side now. You want you to be able to get your content both in and out of educone's very easily. So that's our partnerships. Now we want to actually show you now what a new version for educone's website looks like. This is Nora Dain's current website running on the previous production release. This is the brand new version. So you can see here are the updates. You see we've got new styling on all the tables and stuff like that. This has been customized particularly for, you know, Nora Dain, but it's a very light customization on top of it. So you can see that we have a nice new water look. So it will really update, be a nice update for you and people who are coming to your open course website. Now if you want to, yeah, just show the, so here's, now we're just going to pop in really quick to one of the courses in there, Nora Dain's new site. Internet is just a little bit slow today, for another segment too, but it doesn't come up. We'll come back to it. Okay, well basically what we wanted to show you is one of the actual courses. I'll show you with the open study integrated into it. You see we have the space right down here on the side where it easily comes in there. You saw that in the regular Edge Commons view. I think we'll just go ahead and move on. I think the web is going to be a bit slow for us. Okay, so some of the backend work that we're doing. One of the, you know, in our long history, you know, when we first started out, Edge Commons was a fairly difficult platform to install. And what we've done there is we've kind of eased the burden there. Well, first of all, let me talk about this. You have kind of multiple issues when you want to install your version of Edge Commons. One of those issues is getting the software up and running, but the other is getting all the supporting packages you need to have up and running on your server at the same time. And typically this has been a bit of a stumbling block for people who are running Edge Commons. So we're looking, we're going through that pain for you and looking at the best packages and performance on the whole server application level, not just on the web application level. With the idea of, you know, if you adopt Edge Commons, again, we want to make this the best platform and the best functioning website that we can. So we're looking at all these different tools and stuff to be able to, you know, to deal with things like caching your site, you know, increasing, you know, keeping stats, you know, hooking up with backups and maintenance and rotating your logs so you don't run out of server space. There are all things that you generally do when you're running a server to keep it nice and healthy. Now, one of the other things we want to do is take all this work for building the ultimate server and package it up and put it into a server appliance. So now if you're using something like VMware or KVM or Xen or, you know, virtual box or other major platforms, you can just pull down this thing right on your laptop or in your server environment, fire it up and it's ready to go. So huge time saver we're living in. And also you can do things like put up on Amazon Z3 service or you can create an install CD or a thumb drive or something like this and just run it in a live feed directly on your machine. Okay, then one thing we're doing is we're, because we're a praxis, we basically make our money by supporting people who are using edge of commons. And one of the things we do is we host a lot of edge of commons sites for people. So sometimes people say, oh, this is just too much. I just want the site to be up there. I want somebody else to worry about all the technical details. Maybe you don't have the technical staff to run your own phone server. We are, you know, we are very happy to help you out with that. We are currently in now that we have this new version 4 out. We are updating our hosting environment to be able to handle some really advanced capabilities to make that really, really easy. Okay, and we, you know, there really is a lot more with several bug fixes, performance issues and stuff that we have, you know, always constantly working on to make the platform as best as we possibly can. Some of the cool things that we have, we then have a low test tool built right into the software. So if you have questions of, you know, is this version of edge of commons going to perform well on my server, you can literally blow up your site up with hundreds of thousands of objects and do a test to see how fast the pantry responses are. And it's all built directly into the software in the back end so that you can actually, you know, get a good idea of just the performance of your server and whether it's going to be used or not. So that is the main presentation for today that I wanted to save some time for some questions. You know, whether they have to do with this latest version or if you have questions about history of edge of commons or you just have problems using it, you may be happy to answer any questions you have. One thing that I kind of heard, you said it's compatible with inside our board, how, how do they interface? Okay, I can actually, let me actually show you that. Okay, so here you have a force right here and this is what I was talking about earlier. We're kind of talking a little bit about, here's all the things that you typically do on a course and then you have, with Florida Previous version, we just went tab crazy and they just went all over the place and we just kept adding more than it was deserved. So what we did is we created another tab and then what we have in the other tab is you have a whole list, sorry, I'm standing in the wrong place here. Internet is going to work. We're actually demoing this off the live site that is, my show that you saw is a document in edge of commons. So our wireless is, so while he's doing that I'll kind of describe what you'd see. As you see a list of, of ivans here, one of those ivans is in course an IMS package and in that IMS package there's a number of different formats you can specifically choose from and so typically IMS packages contain in a zip file so you just select that like you would upload file to any document and then it goes and reads the manifest source all the metadata that sticks in your edge of commons site and then puts all the content in your edge of commons site. So what do you want to do the other way? I mean a lot of people might find an edge commons course, they find it's going to get a lot of great resources. I'd like to use this in my course in my IMS. Yeah we have two ways of doing that. From a producer point of view you might want to pull it out and put it in something else in your IMS or something like that. If you're a back end developer of content on your edge of commons site we have that, we also have a function that allows you to push a button they'll package up the course and then put a nice link out to the site that just says download this course on the site and that makes it available to the end user so that the end user can come. If somebody you've never met before comes to your open course or site finds a download this course I think they can pull down a common cartridge format of that course. Okay so it's common cartridge. Yeah and we chose common cartridge because it is the most you know ridiculous. I mean it's a really nasty shark infested world out there with content packaging because like you know what I like the way I like to describe is the great thing about standards is there's so many to choose from and that's definitely the case when you come to content packaging everybody seems to be handling it a little bit differently. So here you can see here's the IMS import here so here you can say here you just get your file and then you can choose which one is coming from and currently we support these are MIT open courseware packages and IMS content package, WebCT VISTA, WebCT, IMS common cartridge, Blackboard and even a Google backup are the different options that are currently supported. And the export is under other or where is that? Yeah it's under other as well. So you can see you can export the same thing for WordPress so if you started out with your open courseware on a WordPress site and you decide you really want to kick it into high gear then you can import and export directly from your WordPress. So we've really thought really long and hard about the whole idea of moving content in and out of an open coursework site and we've tried to support that. Okay how are we doing for time? Four minutes. Okay we have time for a couple more questions. We've talked about metadata before, that's on your website that you're using by the standard and demo report. So in the case I'm designing the research into starting to move into the schema.org realm as the LRMI is starting up. We're constantly looking at those typically they're driven by our end user use cases. So we're doing IEEE and just specifically focusing on the Dublin core fields but we are always open to other things as well. We'd like to have that driven by the community because if the community has needs in that, we'd like to think we know what is the most important things but the community is oftentimes the people we know best. So if you have an interest in that let's talk about that later. So other questions. So are you guys currently, who in the room is currently using edgy comms? Have you looked at it? One of the things I would strongly suggest is we have a demo site demo.edgycomms.com you can go to and go and try and all the stuff out. We also have a bunch of training materials if you want to kind of get your hands wet with a kind of a manual that tells you how to do things let me know we can get that to you and you can experiment with it. Is it something kind of an individual instructor could use? Like if my institution is not going to, is it something like an individual creative course? Yes, yes. Typically because it's a platform, what we what you need to do is find a way to get that platform out and running but with the new schools functionality we have we have the ability for you to be able to join with people across schools and institutions and be able to come in and implement your courses. If you look at the editor, as you can see we have a rich text editor built right into the thing so it's as easy as using the word processor online with the finance, that's what people are used to. So we have a number of different models of the way people actually use the edgy comms. Some of them have people at the university who build distance or online courses that also do open courseware. We have models where you have where professors are actually coming in and building their courses in edgy comms themselves. So the idea is we want to make it as easy as possible to do this kind of thing. Okay, any other questions? Okay, if you want to see a live demo of this then stop by our booth at the science fair to celebrate our new release of edgy comms. We actually have t-shirts printed up so see us there at the booth in my house.