Hi Rob, Ken and colleagues,
A great thought provoking post. Regarding the boundaries of customisation, this is typically defined by easily workable programming interfaces (ideally correlating to open standards), system architecture and constraints of licensing - licensing constraints can also include incompatibilities between open source licenses. When you have a large community based open source project the architecture is often highly modular - e.g. Drupal, Moodle. This enables more customisation, plus better backwards and forwards compatibility. So individual institutions can have quite different configurations without forking. Moodle is a classic case where this application is being used for home schooling and institutions with many 10s of thousands of users. However, as the core code matures and it inherently becomes more complex and the skills and investment barrier for customisation can increase.
For Postulate Four, I'd like to refer way back to my post back in March here on Terra Incognita.
Actually I'm proud to say that our work here on enterprise scale implementations of Moodle, particularly at the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, helped Open University in their selection of Moodle.
Strategic adoption of open source infrastructure is happening in New Zealand at a pan-institutional level and may even start to impact the paradigm of institutional learning as we view it in a traditional sense. Over the past year I've been leading an initiative that has developed what we call Moodle Networks - it is a trusted Single Sign-on framework where multiple Moodle installations can be networked with all sorts of configurations possible. We used XML-RPC rather than a full Shibboleth framework. I often describe it as an “Intel inside” strategy whereby the institutional “nodes” are the access points to the network rather than typical (and in my view flawed) portal approach to learning networks.
It doesn't stop with Moodle. Mahara () is to be the ePortfolio and student social networking platform that will be deployed as http://www.myportfolio.ac.nz. This is a pan-institutional strategy that will bridge both further and higher education institutions. Similarly, open source repository systems where through the OARINZ project we are seeing wide-spread adoption of open source and OAIPMH compliant repository systems deployed across the entire sector - DSpace, Fedora and Eprints are all being used.
All this is happening outside of any direct Ministry direction (although naturally consistent with the eFramework SOA direction) and so I would argue these are very much institutional strategies but even more importantly the national virtual learning environment is underpinned by open source and open standards. When working with Ken Udas back in 2004 we set up http://www.eduforge.org 19 to help manage the various projects that make contribute to the overall framework. Being advocates of openness this was conceived as an open platform for anyone to use so it is heartening to see so many international projects there.
Anyway, I'm going on a bit here, excuse me ;-). Rob, perhaps I'll see you at the IMS meeting in Queenstwon in November.
regards Richard Wyles
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