Open Source E-Learning 4: KompoZer Web Editor

E-learning is intimately bound to IT networks and to the World Wide Web. At their heart, many e-learning courses are just specialized websites, and most are created with some input from a website authoring tool. Website authoring tools are applications to build and link individual web pages to create a website.

Website authoring tools are not stand-alone applications; their purpose is to create design content to be distributed to learners via web servers. Website authoring tools are also reliant on media editors for the graphics, animations, audio, video and other media integrated into courseware.

Today's open source e-learning toolkit component is a website authoring tool called KompoZer.

KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing capabilities found in Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe DreamWeaver and other high end programs. The application is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-specialist users who just want to create an attractive professional-looking website without needing to know HTML or web coding (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. KompoZer User Interface
[Click to Enlarge]

According to KompoZer's developers, the application supports:

• WYSIWYG editing of pages, making web creation as easy as typing a letter with your word processor.
• Integrated file management via FTP. Simply login to your website and navigate through your files, editing web pages on the fly, directly from your site.
• Reliable HTML code creation that will work with all of today's most popular browsers.
• Navigate between WYSIWYG Editing Mode and HTML using tabs.
• Tabbed editing to make working on multiple pages a snap.
• Powerful support for forms, tables, and templates.
• An easy-to-use, web authoring system for Linux, Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh.

Key Features and Capabilities
FTP site manager	All the sites you specify in your Publishing Settings become navigable in a sidebar. KompoZer supports an MS Explorer-style site tree view, or a directory-only view. It is also possible to filter / show all files, HTML documents only, or image files only.
Color Picker	KompoZer has an extended color picker. Colors can be set from the RGB, hue, saturation, and brightness choosers.
Tabs	Have one window only on your screen and edit several documents at once, each document having its own Undo/Redo stack! Just glance at the tabs to know if a document needs to be saved or not.
CSS Editor	Create style sheets easily and manage the styles attached to your documents. You can see your style settings applied '"live" to the document you're editing.
Styles Properties	KompoZer allows you to right-click on any element in the hierarchical toolbar at the bottom of the window and directly set its style properties.
Customizable Toolbars	Customize your toolbar and show only the buttons you want/need.
Forms	Use a XUL-based UI to edit all your forms, and edit all your form elements.
Cleaner Markup	KompoZer contains functionality to clean up redundant tags and to call W3C's HTML validator from within KompoZer.
XFN	When you create a new link to an external resource, or when you edit an existing link, you can now add XHTML Friends Network information to say that the owner of that resource is someone you know and trust.
Visible Editing/Layout Marks	In a complex page layout, you often need to see visible carriage returns and block borders. KompoZer can now do that for you. And of course, everything is controlled by a CSS style sheet so you can customize those marks and replace them with your own.
Table/Cell Resizing Rulers	Enable you to adjust the size of rows and columns in any table in the web page you design.
Automated Spellchecker	The integrated in-line spellchecker will underline all misspelled words as you type to ensure correct spelling throughout the entire web page.

Click here to download KompoZer.

More…

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Open Source E-learning Development 2: Image Manipulation

First today, a preamble, in which I shall use the word “beauty.”

I’ve had some queries about my forthcoming article, wherein I will revisit themes I addressed in my 2008 post Recession and the challenge to e-learning. I’m still researching this topic: there are many sources to reference and data to be interpreted – and of course, the socio-economic landscape is still changing apace.

I am also re-reading Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon, a short story about the travails of Captain McWhirr and the steamer Nan-Shan, as I attempt to find a suitable context for the piece. You don’t know Conrad’s work, you say? of course you do; Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now was based on Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness.

I’m not going to discuss this further here, except to express how extraordinary I think it is that a Polish man who did not speak English fluently until he was in his twenties became one of the 20th Century’s master prose stylists and novelist in English - which was essentially his second language - while most of us native speakers incompetently attempt to turn words into something meaningful, with utility, if not beauty.

Now read on…

The second open environment authoring tool highlighted in this series is an image editing application.

The GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP, is an open source graphics editor that is available for Linux, Windows, and OS X. It is a freely-distributed raster graphics editor used to process digital graphics and photographs. GIMP is primarily used for photo manipulation, including sizing, editing, and cropping images, combining multiple images, and converting between different image formats. GIMP can also be used to create basic animated GIFs.

According to GIMP.org,

[GIMP] has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

Typical uses include:

• creating graphics and logos
• resizing and cropping photos
• color management
• combining multiple images
• removing unwanted image features
• converting between different image formats

GIMP can also be used to create simple animated GIF images. It is often used as a “software replacement” (Paul, 2008) for Adobe Photoshop.

The application has read/write support for popular image formats such as BMP, JPEG, PNG, GIF and TIFF, as well as the proprietary file formats of several other applications such as Autodesk *.flic animations, Paintshop Pro images and Adobe Photoshop Documents. Other formats with read/write support include PostScript documents. GIMP can also read and write path information from SVG files. GIMP can also read/write ICO Windows icon files. Its native format is XCF.

Figure 1. A screenshot of the GIMP UI

GIMP can also import Adobe PDF documents and the raw image formats used by many digital cameras. However, it can’t save to these formats; rather files must be exported to one of the image file types it does support.

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References:

GNU Image Manipulation Program Home Page: http://www.gimp.org/

Paul, R. (2008). GIMP 2.6 released, one step closer to taking on Photoshop. Ars Technica. [Internet] Available from: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2008/10/gimp-2-6-released-one-step-closer-to-taking-on-photoshop.ars. Accessed 2nd July 2009.

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Open Environment E-learning: DocBook and XXE

I received an unexpected but nonetheless very welcome comment on yesterday's blog post from Brent Schlenker. In his remarks, Brent reinforced my own view about the viability of open source-based e-learning development; he said that

I truly do believe that there are enough OpenSource tools out there that we can be creating completely opensource learning solutions/environments. Once people get past their initial fears and the stigma, the Open Source learning development community will grow exponentially.

...thanks for keeping the Open Source movement alive in eLearning.

Thanks Brent!

Now, on with the show.

As discussed in a previous post, we can say that there are certain unresolved philosophical matters surrounding the notion of open environments; I will return to these presently. However, the gratis/libre debate should not preclude you from taking advantage of the range of 'open' and 'free' tools to develop an effective e-learning solution.

As a reminder, here are the categories of tools I recommend to implement this open development environment:

• Content Creation Tools
• Media Creation and Integration: OSS Tools
• Media Creation and Integration: Proprietary Tools
• Content Delivery Platform
• Optional Proprietary Tools

Click here for a full list of the applications and utilities.

While the tools themselves are a disparate group, their common characteristic is that they are XML-based. This, in theory at least, means that either the applications or their outputs are interoperable, and this creates the foundation for the "openness" that we seek.

Now read on...

Over the next few days, I will describe in detail the 'toolkit' used in this e-learning content development environment, before discussing pedagogical approaches and implementation processes. As the focus here is on developing e-learning in a specific environment, I am making the assumption that the learning content has already been developed, as learning content development and instructional design per se is not the topic being investigated. Click here to find out more about instructional design for e-learning.

The Powerhouse: DocBook and XXE

DocBook is a semantic markup language for technical documentation. While it was originally created for the purpose of writing technical documents for computer hardware and software, its inherent flexibility led to it being used authoring a broad range of documentation, including e-learning. Unlike proprietary word processors, DocBook documents do not describe what their contents "look like," but rather the meaning of those contents. For example, rather than explaining how an e-learning lesson page might be visually formatted, DocBook simply says that it is a page. An external processing tool or application is required to determine where the lesson page should go, and what it should look like – and to decide whether or not it should be included in the final output at all.

Because DocBook is XML-based, content can be authored and edited with any text editor.

XMLmind XML Editor (XXE) allows content creators to edit large, complex, modular, XML documents. In one sense, it is the friendly face of my open authoring environment. XXE is a ‘nearly’ WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that uses CSS to control the layout and style of DocBook XML (or XHTML) content. It successfully hides the complexities of XML markup from the author, so that the focus can be on the words, rather than the code.

In XXE, the document author does not see the DocBook XML tags; rather, XXE interprets the tags, and the application UI displays the content in the familiar look, feel, and style of a word processor interface (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 Screenshot of XMLmind XML Editor

Using XXE, the content author creates and edits content in the structured XML document by adding elements, setting attributes, selecting, cutting, pasting, and so on, and the editor automatically applies the appropriate styles.

The style is an interpretation of the DocBook DTD to simplify identification of the formatting elements without the need to understand all the XML tags.

Note, however that these styles are not linked to how the content is rendered. The final look and feel of the document is controlled by CSS style sheets.

XXE supports the following features:

• Converts to XSLT-FO format then to PDF format
• Converts to HTML format
• Produces metadata files to support SCORM
• Checks spelling
• Checks that a document conforms to the DTD
• Checks that a document conforms to relevant documentation conventions
• Documents can be rendered as a number of separate files
• Controls document look and feel

Transformations (outputting content to a commonly-used delivery format) are applied to the XXE-authored XML using Formatting Objects Processor. Formatting Objects Processor (FOP) is driven by XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO). A Java application reads a formatting object (FO) tree and renders the resulting pages to a specified output.

Currently supported output formats include:

• Portable Document Format (PDF)
• Printer Command Language (PCL)
• PostScript (PS)
• Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
• eXtensible Markup Language XML (area tree representation)
• Print
• Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT)
• MapInfo Interchange Format (MIF)
• Text File (TXT)

The primary output target is PDF (see Figure 2).

Figure 2 Screenshot of PDF file generated from XXE via XSL-FO

Other outputs include HTML pages (see Figure 3) and help files.

Figure 3 Screenshot of HTML file generated from XXE via XSL-FO

These two outputs were generated from a command-line FO, because I’m a bit of a purist about this stuff, though I’m not a coder, so it must be straight-forward and usable!

Depending upon the level of expertise in your organization, you may decide to use a GUI shell to enable content authors to generate their outputs.

Figure 4 Screenshot of XSL-FO command line interface in Windows

More…

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Resources:

DocBook.org: http://www.docbook.org/

XMLMind XML Editor: http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/

HyperWrite Ltd. (2006) Review of XMLmind XML Editor v3.0. [Internet] Available from: http://www.hyperwrite.com/Articles/showarticle.aspx?id=63 Retrieved 24th September 2009

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An Open Source Environment for E-Learning Content Development

As I'm in the process of updating my website’s Learning Content Management System (LCMS), I though it would be interesting to discuss open source environments, and how they can be implemented in an e-learning content development ecosystem.

Context

When I began developing my website and blog, I decided to use an open standards approach during the course of their initial development, as much for philosophical as for financial or any other reasons. Consequently, as I implement new features (such as my podcasts), and maintain and enhance site functionality, I adhere to the approach, principles and methodologies of the Open Source movement in as far as is practicable.

Now read on...

In as much as is possible, I try to develop content using non-proprietary tools, usually freely available under the GNU Licence. Examples of this type of software include:

• Audacity - an audio editor
• Freemind - a mind mapping tool
• OpenOffice.org - an office application suite for a range of operating systems including Windows and Linux
• NeoOffice - A port of OpenOffice.org to the MacOS X platform.
• Apache - a Web server.
• PHP – a scripting language.
• MySQL - database software.

The Gratis versus Libre Debate

It is important to define usage of the word “open” in the term “open environment:” in this context, I qualify the use of "open" as adhering to the openformats.org definition:

We will say that a file format is open if the mode of presentation of its data is transparent and/or its specification is publicly available. Open formats are ordinarily standards fixed by public authorities or international institutions whose aim is to establish norms for software interoperability. There are nevertheless cases of open formats promoted by software companies which choose to make the specification of the formats used by their products publicly available.

It should be noted that an open format can either be coded in a transparent way (readable in any text editor: this is the case of markup languages) or in a binary mode (unreadable in a text editor but thoroughly decodable once the format specifications are known) .

I should note that while most of the tools I will discuss in this series of articles are ‘true’ open source applications - freely distributable (“free as in speech”), some (like Microsoft Movie Maker) are free from cost - “in the sense that one does not have to pay for some good or service. ” (Wikipedia.org).

My view is that both categories of software enable me to meet my objective of developing courseware, and being of a practical bent, I don't really suffer an ethical dilemma in combining a range of tools if they assist me in achieving my goals. However, I think that it is important to discuss the implications of open software, particularly as the debate is central to the notion of specifications and standards, and how they are implemented. I haven't discussed learning standards yet in my blog, but it is a topic I will be talking about at a later time; I think that elements of this discussion reflect directly on SCORM, AICC, QTI and other learning-related specifications and standards.

What is "free" software?

Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (Freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (Freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (Freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (Freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

A program is free software if users have all of these freedoms. Thus, you should be free to redistribute copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere. Being free to do these things means (among other things) that you do not have to ask or pay for permission.

(GNU.org)

So, how can we reconcile using free-from-cost software (which usually comes with the kinds of restrictions associated with commercial organizations' End User License Agreements) with this manifesto?

More...
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