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My colleague Tarmo Toikkanen and I were invited to present LeMill in a conference that took place this Thursday in Brno, Czech Republic. Besides LeMill there were presentations and workshops about CALIBRATE portal and new Czech learning resource portal RVP. Our presentation slides are available in SlideShare.

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In last few months Czech teachers have been quite active in LeMill. As a result Czech language is the second largest language for published web pages in LeMill. It is interesting to see that teachers create different kind of content in different countries. In Estonia typical learning resources are worksheets and presentations. Czech teachers have so far published mostly lesson plans. One of the reasons for this is that they had a national competition for lesson plans and all the works were submitted through LeMill. Hopefully they will start to use other possibilities of LeMill as well.

This week marked also next step in LeMill’s growth — we have reached 2000 members. The growth has been faster than we expected and our current server is having hard times with this amount of users. We are looking for a hosting solution for lemill.net and hope to solve these problems in the near future.

This week I visited BETT 2008 with my colleagues from Tallinn Lillekyla Gymnasium. BETT is the world’s largest educational technology event, where different companies present their products and software. The aim of our visit was to see new solutions that can be tried out in ICT future school project.

On the first day I spent most of the time in Apple’s stand. Apple demonstrated the new features of Leopard Server could be used in a school. I was really impressed by the new Wiki Server. Until now our school had to use blogs and wikis from our own server or from sites that provide free blogs and wikis. It is quite a lot of work to update several WordPress and MediaWiki sites when new versions are released. Hosted blogs and wikis can have also several limitations. Leopard Wiki Server will make life easier not only for administrators but also for users. The WYSIWYG editor that they use in Leopard wiki seemed to be the most user-friendly web-based editor that I have seen so far. It is possible that we have to rethink our decision to use Elgg for creating e-portfolios in Lillekyla.

Other solutions that we found useful for Lillekyla school were CM2 MAX Portable Interactive Whiteboard System by ONfinity, Lego Mindstorms NTX classroom set, recently announced Sanako Study 500 mobile version for Nokia N810 handhelds and FileMaker 9.

After two busy days in BETT I also managed to walk around in London, buy some good CD’s and visit the Apple Store. Unfortunately it was raining a lot and I didn’t shoot much photos. I have organised some photos into two Flickr sets:

• London 2008
• BETT 2008

bett2008

In this blog and in several presentations I have expressed my worries that open educational resources are under three different licences that can’t be remixed with each other.

Two years ago when we were choosing an appropriate license for LeMill we had quite hot debates in our team. We decided to go with Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, because of the problems with NonCommercial restriction. In last year we have seen that it is a growing problem that people are not able to remix content between LeMill and Wikipedia.

One of the solutions that I was thinking about was having double licenses (CC BY-SA and GNU FDL) for all LeMill content. This would have been only half-way solution — our content would have become available for Wikipedia but not vice versa. Some weeks ago Teemu started a discussion about changing our license to GNU FDL, but that would have required agreement from all authors.

Now there is finally a solution for this problem.

On November 30 Jimmy Wales announced that Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons and Wikimedia Foundation have agreed on changing GNU Free Documentation License so that it will become compatible with Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. This means that all Wikipedia articles will be available for remixing with CC BY-SA content such as learning resources in LeMill.

It is not still clear when and how the actual migration from GNU FDL to CC BY-SA will take place. Wikimedia Foundation is going to initiate a community discussion and voting before making a final decision on relicensing.

More information:

• Breaking news: Wikipedia announces Creative Commons compatibility!
• Resolution: License update
• Some important news from Wikipedia to understand clearly

I am happy to announce that LeMill has reached 1000 users today. LeMill is a web community and software platform for finding, authoring and sharing free and open educational resources. It is now two years since we started our work in CALIBRATE project and 17 months since the release of first functional prototype.

Most active countries in LeMill are Estonia (160 members), Hungary (66 members), Finland (27 members), Austria (23 members) and Czech Republic (20 members). These people have published 399 learning resources and wrote descriptions for 57 educational methods and 143 educational tools.

That is only the beginning. Our focus in LeMill project is on collaborative authoring of learning resources. We can see some people making minor fixes to resources created by other users, but I would say that we still haven’t reached critical mass of users and content for real collaborative authoring.

You can help us to achieve our goals, come and join lemill.net.

Today I had a LeMill workshop with a group of Estonian preschool teachers. During the workshop they wrote some really nice educational games to our methods section. My presentation slides are available through Slideshare.