Here’s YALLTWLT from the 2005 Open Source Business Conference. Lessig’s talk is “Clearing the Air About Open Source” and he doesn’t pull any punches. (Download the talk from IT Conversations.) If you’re interested in supporting an environment of technological innovation then you need to be aware of the issues that Lessig is talking about.
Category Archives: Open source
Ticketing systems for tech support (and more)
Over the past year our district’s tech support department has come to rely on our ticketing system more and more. We use Request Tracker, a free and open source, Web-based tech support product that has Web and email interfaces. What began as an experiment has become an integral part of our district’s technology infrastructure.
Each of our schools has its own email address for tech support requests. Teachers and other staff simply send an email message to that address describing the problem and a ticket is automatically created in the RT database. The building tech support person then gets an email notification for each new ticket and the teacher gets an email “receipt” so they know that the information was received. The teachers like it because they know that their requests haven’t been lost. The techs love it because it helps them avoid the dreaded “hallway ambush” where a teacher corners them about a tech problem and expects them to remember every detail until they get back to their desk to write it down.
We’ve found lots of other uses for Request Tracker too. The Buildings and Grounds Department is starting to use it for their requests and we hope to eliminate the “fill out in quadruplicate” work order forms entirely. Now we’re building a system to process technology purchases so the tech support staff in the buildings aren’t surprised when new equipment arrives. It will also help us ensure that the technology is appropriate for the curriculum and compatible with our computers and network.
Top notch tech support is absolutely crucial if teachers are going be confident enough in their technology systems to be innovative with their curriculum. I saw an example of this recently when we were having some stability issues with our student file server. It only took one bad experience for many teachers to put their technology plans on hold. Unfortunately, it takes much longer to build confidence than it does to ruin it.
There are dozens of ticketing systems to choose from (many of them free), but the important point is that any organization that relies on technology needs a system like RT. I guarantee it will improve the tech support in your school or district and encourage teachers to use technology more frequently.
Online surveys made easy
I got back from Rochester tonight following a couple days of work with about 50 educators from southeast Minnesota. I had a great time and I’m looking forward to continued discussions with the groups as they pursue their technology integration and school improvement goals. My colleague Corey Lunn and I shared some resources that we’ve used in our own work, and I promised to post some links here. I’ll start with the online survey tools.
Online surveys are great tools for a broad range of applications. From a community-wide questionnaire about a proposed school board policy to a quick survey of the teaching staff by a principal, online surveys make it easy to collect and analyze data. I’m familiar with three different survey tools: Zoomerang, KeySurvey, and phpESP. Choosing the right tool for the job requires careful consideration of its intended uses, the technical skills of your IT staff, and your budget.
You can test the online survey waters easily by trying the free version of Zoomerang. It’s limited in the number of respondents and questions per survey and, most importantly, you can’t export the results for further analysis. You can see simple bar graphs and charts online though and that will probably do the job most of the time. You’ll have to step up to the paid version for serious surveying work.
KeySurvey is what we’re using in Hopkins this year. It’s not as cheap as Zoomerang, but it has nearly every bell and whistle. You can create very complex surveys with conditional branching. (In other words, the users may get different questions depending on how they answer other questions.) The analysis tools are very advanced. You can do cross-tabulations on the Web and export all of the data in CSV, direct to Excel, and even SPSS.
Finally, there’s phpESP. If you’ve got a Web server that can run PHP and MySQL, you’ve got all you need. It’s open source and free so there’s little reason not to give it a try. It’s got all the standard survey question types and can export the results in CSV format for easy importing into the analysis tool of your choice.
We use online surveys to collect data from students and parents during each content area’s curriculum review process. I’ve had good luck using the surveys for staff development evaluations too. Are you using an online survey tool? Leave a comment and tell me how you’re using it.
New mail and calendar project from Novell
We don’t run Exchange in my district, and nothing we’ve seen makes our email admin eager to give it a try. We’re also a cross-platform district which makes finding an email and calendaring solution that works equally well for everyone quite a challenge. As of today, and thanks to the fine folks at Novell who’ve found religion in Linux, there’s another option to investigate. Hula is an open source and open standards-based calendar and mail server. From Novell employee Nat Friedman’s blog:
Our direction is distinct from other open source collaboration server projects in that we’re not trying to build every conceivable bit of functionality that someone might consider “collaboration” into the server. Instead, we are focused on building great calendar and mail functionality. The dominant collaboration solutions today (Exchange and Notes) are built on a pre-Internet design and are just no fun to use for real people who live on the web, who collaborate across organizational boundaries (or who don’t have organizational boundaries to worry about), who want light-weight tools and URLs for their meetings and their appointments on their cell phone and so on.
This sounds interesting.
We want to build a real web-based calendar: to make it trivially easy to publish a calendar, to invite anyone with an email address to an an appointment and process their RSVPs, to get to your calendar via HTML or RSS or with an instant messenger or with SMS.
Also interesting is the Hula team’s decision to use a wiki for their Web site. Will the site blow up from wiki spam or will the user community collaborate on the site in cool ways?
A primer on FOSS in education
The International Open Source Network (IOSN) has just released a primer on Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) in education. The document highlights uses of open source software in the infrastructure, administration, and classroom work of schools, focusing on a number of high-profile projects such as the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP), OpenOffice.org, Koha, Moodle, MIT’s OpenCourseWare, and Wikipedia. Low cost isn’t the only reason to move toward open source software, and this document does an excellent job of providing important information to school leaders who want to learn more.
Using FOSS for real-life learning
Red Hat Magazine is running an article by Jeff Elkner where he describes his 10-year career using free and open source software (FOSS). He’s got a big dream:
I am motivated by a desire to live in a world in which democracy and social justice are the birthrights of all people, and convinced that the best way to bring this about is for people to have direct control over the economic and social forces that effect them. Since the world around us is increasingly dominated by information technology and the software that runs it, democracy and software freedom go hand in hand.
I got to know Jeff a few years ago when I was teaching Python as a computer science teacher at Henry Sibley High School. We were both using the same textbook, the freely available Python version of How To Think Like a Computer Scientist, and shared some student project ideas. He’s always done a masterful job of creating opportunities for his students to do real programming, not just the dreadfully boring assignments typical of most introductory programming classes.
This article shows how using open source software creates opportunities for students to explore and develop their skills. Jeff’s work illustrates one of my own long-held beliefs: students excel when they are given a chance to work on projects that expand their perspective beyond themselves.