Gosh, it's great to have caught up on my sleep and to log on a couple days later and find Al's warm welcome on this forum!
I did indeed organize the conference, thanks to some money from the U.S. Embassy and the wonderful assistance of our computer center (ZEDAT) and the .LRN and OpenACS people Al listed. The conference program is available at: http://home.arcor.de/civici01a/programming/conference_program_oct03.pdf. We will also be transcribing the talks and posting them for the .LRN community, and our local video conference team is keen on putting the extraordinary interview with Carl Robert Blesius online, too. In this way we hope to return, if only in part, something of the terrific help we have gratefully received.
The conference was a tremendous success because Al and the others, who I quickly identified as the .LRN Voluntary Fire Department, for their rallying to my call for help, gave highly-informative presentations and offered stimulating commentary that helped a dozen or more key decision-makers understand what open source, OpenACS, and .LRN is about, why this route might be preferable to proprietary alternatives, and how our work adapting this technology to our needs might best be integrated in the larger .LRN and OpenACS development process.
I have since received commitments from two more professors outside my little project at the JFKI to use .LRN, have already trained them in its use, and their students are already signing up (it is the beginning of our semester). We have also won the support of a number of key people to further this project at the Free University as one of a number of initiatives, and so weve got some vital support near the top. And finally, there was a lot of networking to the point that I think we have a fine team for developing our implementation. I am grateful to Don Baccus, Dirk Gomez, and Tilmann Singer for their generosity and patience in explaining a zillion things about the applications that I only partly understood. I could only marvel, and take detailed notes, as Michael Hebgen and Al Essa shared some of the lessons they have learned in managing such project. I am such a beginner at this business that it is simply the case that I could not do this without such help, and of course, therein lies much of the power and advantage of open source development communities.
In addition to supporting our initial small group of users, our next step is to design a research project and secure additional funding, which we will do over the next couple of months. Dirk has given this project its current title: Developing E-Learning for the Social Sciences Using .LRN, and we will concentrate on problems of implementation, including, the development of extensive documentation, participating in interface design, and exploring a variety of pedagogical strategies already well-developed in the field of higher education teacher training that might help instructors here fully exploit this marvelous technology.
I will now post the first of these documentation materials with the hope of finding others addressing similar issues. Maybe someone has already done a lot of this, or has a program already in place that I might join? Thanks to all!
Bruce Spear
