On Sun, Dec 09, 2007 at 05:51:44PM +1000, draicone@gmail.com wrote:
On Dec 9, 2007 3:17 PM, Gerald A <[1]geraldablists@gmail.com> wrote:
I think we would like to try out an array of learning techniques.Moodle would be a fantastic learning project -- I'm not sure if it could be done on this level (admin wise), but I'm sure at least of few WVers would poke around with it to see what it does. I'm not sure if there is a list of web-type software that might be interesting to evaluate, but perhaps we could create one. It might take some time to work through such a list, but the benefits if we find something with traction might definitely be worth it.Now that we've got the Sandbox Server running, I can give any of the techie custodians access to the server and we can experiment with different systems, useful mini-apps etc. We can start with a trial Moodle installation -- we've already got a sample MediaWiki installation up there. Regarding a list, head to [2]http://www.opensourcecms.com/ and try the "e-Learning" section.
For the web based teaching materials that I have been involved in and which I am planning to install on wikiversity, I need two things that are not currently present. The materials are graduate level (plus some undergraduate use) computational chemistry. There are already some straight text materials in this area on WV and they would nicely merge in with my materials. The two things that are missing are:-
1. The ability to display molecular models that can be manipulated by the reader. This function is available in an open source application called Jmol. A php extension is available to run in mediawiki and Jmol does run on, for example, the Jmol Wiki. I have tried to get this added to Wikipedia, where of course it would also be useful, but the technical folks, think the php is not sufficiently free of security concerns. I do not know php but I am trying to get this issue solved. Unfortunately the author of the Jmol php extension is too busy to do this.
2. The real innovation of our materials is that they allow the user to prepare data for a variety of different computational chemistry programs and then run the data, either directly in real time, getting the results back on a web page, or by queueing the job if it is larger and getting the results back later on a web page or by e-mail. Our materials use a variety of quite complex CGI scripts that handle the materials from html forms and menus and then run the code. While queueing the jobs is necessary in some cases, this is really only to restrict access to the disk for storing large temporary files. The CGI scripts prevent the user from entering large jobs. In this context "large job" equates to "large molecule" with the cpu time rising with some some power of the molecular size. For teaching, small molecules only are needed and these take little time. When a job is queued, for example, it leaves a URL link on the page returned by the CGI script. The user can keep clicking on it until it returns more than a header saying try again later.
While currently we use both open source and commercial codes, the commercial codes can be replaced by open source ones by writing a few more CGI scripts.
This use clearly needs a server that can run these CGI scripts and the programs they call. It does not have to be the server that handles the forms page. For a while we ran one application 3000 km away from the main server.
I have no idea what the equivalent to CGI scripts is within mediawiki and how we can run forms (the quiz extension may be a start here), but I'm willing to learn. Whether this is feasable, I do not really know. However, I think that what I am suggesting could have wider use. Wikiversity needs to have pages that are dynamic in ways that wikipedia does not need. Web based learning has to be more than reading text and looking at pictures on a computer screen. I think this is the greatest challenge for the technical people on wikiversity.
There has been a suggestion that these kinds of computer calculations can be handled by distributed computing using users own PCs, rather like the SETI project. These could be usefull for very large jobs in some cases on WV, but I do not think they are suitable for my applications where we just need a few seconds (maybe up to 100 secs) on a linux machine. Most of the codes we use are unix based. Distributing computing is not required and it would delay getting the response to the learner.
I would welcome suggestions for dealing with this.
Brian.
References
- mailto:geraldablists@gmail.com
- http://www.opensourcecms.com/
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