LeMill Blog

As some may already know, LeMill is developed in the CALIBRATE project and so far the teachers participating in the project have used a separate, closed copy of LeMill for their testing. A month ago it was decided to combined the closed Toolbox and the open LeMill communities. Instead of having two small communities, we now have one that is more vibrant, and hopefully closer to reaching critical mass.

From our perspective as shepherds of the LeMill community, this merge makes our job much more meaningful. If there’s a useful pedagogical method that we’d like to write about, we don’t need to do it twice in both environments. Also we hope that the interaction between the contracted CALIBRATE teachers and volunteer (or enthusiast) members of LeMill will prove to be fruitful.

In summary, for LeMill users the only change is that the community grew by 150 people and the list of resources got a bit larger. Toolbox users need to get accustomed to the slightly different skin (happily the layout and functionality itself is identical), and also as single sign-on is now disabled, they need to create separate accounts to LeMill, or change the passwords of their current accounts. Hopefully we’ll later get a more open SSO scheme working, most likely based on OpenID.

(Originally posted at le group)

LeMill 1.9 is another step in getting everything right. This time we’ve redesigned the collections, and worked more on the new front page, and converted group blogs into group forums. The last change came from discussions where we concluded that for blogs to truly enable dialog, they must be used in an extreme way, meaning that each participant must have his own blog, follow other blogs, comment on other blogs, write about stuff in other blogs and respond to comments in his blog. Anything less means that you’re not really blogging, but just keeping a diary. So we converted blog to forums, since forums aren’t that demanding to enable dialogue.

What I’m exceited about is the upcoming merge of LeMill.net with the Learning Toolbox. The Toolbox is a closed instance of LeMill which has been used by the teachers participating in the CALIBRATE project. In our last consortium meeting is was decided that the two environments will be merged. So hopefully next week I can transfer some 150 teachers and the resources they’ve produced into LeMill.net. And from then on we’ll have only one community to grow and foster, instead of two overlapping ones.

(Originally posted at le group)