LeMill blog

Preparing for annual ITK-days, the largest education technology event in Finland, we had to finally push an update to LeMill. There are few interesting features and some inner changes that prepare the base for nice new things in near future.

List of changes:

• New PILOT-player: should be more robust than the previous one and includes a fullscreen mode to make it better suitable to show in class.
• Embedding PILOTs. Pilots can be embedded into your blog much like YouTube videos or LeMill’s collections. When viewing a PILOT resource, the embed code is on the left side. Copy it to your clipboard and paste into your blog. (The feature to notice that now this is embedded into another page and offer a link back to LeMill is not there yet.)
• New text editor. Our previous easy-to-use text editor was quite problematic to maintain or modify, and we shifted to use tinyMCE-editor. For those who use Wordpress it should be familiar already: I’ve found that it is easier to modify and because of its huge userbase, it should be easy to upgrade. I’ve tried to keep the functionality as much like it was before; the table editor needs still some work, as tinyMCE:s default has too many features (and buttons) and the current table button doesn’t do enough alone. (To remove table, now it is easiest to switch to source mode and remove everything between table-tag and /table.) As a new feature I added Undo- and Redo-buttons. There are lots and lots features available for that editors, but our policy has always been to try to keep them in minimum to not distract with superfluous adjusting.
• Rewrote adding Media Pieces to Webpages and other similar resources. The difference is now only cosmetic, but inside there has been a prelimenary work for easier resource editing with less visible loading and saving of pages.
• With large groups and long lists of friends, only the first five names are displayed and other are folded behind ‘Show more…’-link. Don’t worry, clicking it won’t cause a slow page load.
• Simplified steps to create content and REMOVED ability to create Presentations, School Projects and Print Resources. The reason for this is explained by Hans in previous post. The existing resources are still there and won’t go away. They may be converted to other resource types at some point.
• Added resource tags to bee visible in left side bar. We hope that this way they get more use, and when they get more use, resources will have more tags and finding resources becomes easier.
• What else? Small fixes here and there, faster section front pages — the problem where loading a content section’s front page seems to take forever is now permanently solved. Generally smaller page loads.

We are happy to announce that now it is possible to download collections as PDF booklets. The booklet will contain a table of content, teaching and learning story and content, methods and tools that have been added to the collection. In addition to PDF booklet it is also possible to download collections as zipped HTML files and SCORM packages. An example PDF booklet that is created from LeMill collection is embedded below.

Töö allikatega, viitamine ja viidete haldamine e-õppes

Hi,

LeMill.net was down for a while in 20.1, as we had to rebuild all search indexes and the process seemed to be sensitive for all incoming traffic, so we had to shut down access to even read-only mode. Now it is back. Benefit of that downtime was that now the searches work better with all-georgian search phrases and other less common character sets.

I hope you like it.

Jukka

We released LeMill version 2.5 already more than a week ago, but haven’t announced it in this blog yet, because there were some problems that had to be fixed. This release comes with two new templates in the Content section and more flexible editing options.

Lesson plan template has special fields for goals / objectives, description of the lesson and evaluation / assessment. Current use of LeMill shows that in some countries teachers create quite a lot of lesson plans (see lesson plans from Czech teachers). We hope that this new template will simplify creating and finding lesson plans.

Second new template enables teachers to share information about school projects and find project partners. Currently we have quite a lot of school projects in the Methods section but at some point we plan to clean up the Methods section and move existing school projects to the new template. Then Methods section will contain only context free descriptions of educational methods that can be reused in any collection.

Both new templates have also special fields for linking related content, methods and tools. You can see example lesson plan and school project.

Besides new templates we have made some changed to the way people can edit content. From this version draft content is not visible for other users by default. This will help to keep test content hidden and have only real learning resources visible. Those users who want to work collaboratively on a draft version can make the draft visible for others.

We have also some plans about publishing ready textbooks in LeMill. One of these projects will hopefully be educational technology handbook for Estonian schools. For textbooks it is important to have a stable version that is not edited frequently. Therefore first author can now choose if other people will edit the same resource or a copy is made for them when they start editing. All the copies will be linked to the original version in a same way as translations are linked with each other.

We have released a small update with version 2.4.5. This release contains mostly internal changes that are not visible for end users. These changes are needed for new features in the upcoming 2.5 and better handling of large amounts of content.

We have also changed the way how resources are stored in LeMill database. It means that URL’s in the Content section have changed. Before all the URL’s in the Content section had the same structure: http://lemill.net/content/title. Now the structure of the URL is based on the content type: http://lemill.net/content/type/title.

Some examples of new URL’s:

• http://lemill.net/content/webpages/lemill-faq
• http://lemill.net/content/presentations/learning-resources-and-copyright
• http://lemill.net/content/exercises/british-newspapers-listening-comprehension
• http://lemill.net/content/pilots/1-hobuse-mure-pilot
• http://lemill.net/content/pieces/barnacle-goose
• http://lemill.net/content/references/oer-commons

If you have made links to LeMill content, please find some time to update links in your blog or web page.

This release also introduced some new bugs, but we will do our best to fix them soon. After that we will continue working with LeMill 2.5. In this release we are planning to have a long awaited possibility to upload Powerpoint files as presentations (in the same way as it works in SlideShare) and two new templates (lesson plan and school project).

We wish you all the best for the new school year and hope that you will find LeMill useful in your teaching and learning.

We have a few good news today. After a little break we have released a new version again. With this release we have worked a lot with the back-end of LeMill. Now things should work faster as they did before.

The most important new feature is added to the exercise template. Now it is possible to see if your answers were correct immediately after submitting the exercise. In addition to web-based feedback you can also get e-mail with your results.

We have also improved the reviewer role. Reviewer is a user who has some additional rights. Reviewers ca convert resources from one section to another. For example if some non-method is published in the Methods section it can be safely converted to a web page in the Content section. Reviewers can also delete resources to clean up LeMill from test content. We are planning to give reviewer rights to some of our most active users. If you are interested to become a reviewer you can contact us through the feedback form.

This is the first release that is completed with our new funding. After the end of CALIBRATE project in March 2008 we were able to receive support from Tiger Leap Foundation in Estonia. With this funding we are planning to have four major releases this year.

The third good news is that we have a blog now. I copied old posts from our personal blogs and LeMill development group to this blog, so you have all the history and future here. Have a nice summer and keep following our blog!

Happy new year!

Our year started with intense LeMill optimization. We have found ways to test server performance and found some weak spots, some of which were really bad and some our fault, some not. The optimization we have done is not ‘fine tuning’, but rewriting some parts so that they are 5-20 times faster. We hope you can feel the effect. We’ll be following the performance closely and fixing weak spots when we see them.

One other thing worth noticing, and very much related to speed issues, is that browsing results and search results are limited to show only languages that we guess that the user wants. This guess is based on following:

• Obviously if you select ‘browse by language’ from front-page you get results by that language.
• Otherwise, the language you have chosen for user interface (links at top left corner) is the main language.
• Also languages you have selected in your personal information are selected.

Usually this should result as more relevant results for you, but sometimes it can mean that some popular-looking tag gives you no results. This is because results are in language which you’ve not using, and if you really want to check what it is, try guessing the language of result and choose that from top left corner’s language links.

(Originally posted at LeMill development)

Our final deliverable for CALIBRATE project is ready. The original promise was to develop an ‘open source learning toolbox for collaborative learning’ and this should be it.

It looks like our latest version announcement was from version 1.9, so 2.0 doesn’t seem so big a step, but really, we have gone a long way from that: 1.13 was our latest previous release. Our community has grown close to 900 people, 800 learning resources, 2300 media pieces plus tools, methods, groups and references. This is good growth, yet not explosion of popularity. One notable feature of LeMill has always been our multilingualism (12 working translations for LeMill, 3 partial) and this is really affecting our feeling of community: there are few very active countries (Estonia, Georgia) and for me having those visible, but difficult to understand, gives me a good general feel of what we want for our language group to do together. Instead of one story about evolution of LeMill community, there probably will be as many stories as there are teachers native languages.

For next few weeks we’ll have a lighter touch on development, and concentrate more on just observing how people use LeMill. Welcome.

(Originally posted at le group)

After effective sprint in Tallinn, LeMill has been updated to 2.0, release candidate 1, which means that we’re having great new features, but we’re not yet hundred percent sure that they work smoothly. You should notice following new features:

• New content template: Exercise. It’s like the old Multimedia Material, but you can add questions that appear as blank boxes for students. You can direct your students to LeMill to do the exercise, and they can send the results to you as e-mail with simple buttons. We can do open-ended questions, fill-in-the-blanks-exercises and multiple choices questions, and the latter two can be automatically corrected.
• Tex-formatting for math teachers and others who know what it is about. You can insert formulas to text by writing ‘backslash(’ - tex formula - ‘backslash)’. Backslash is this character: ‘\’.
• Faster, faster
• Preparations for better visibility in Calibrate Portal. I don’t remember what actually.
• Bugfixes 

Have fun!

(Originally posted at LeMill development)

LeMill is updated to new version. We have two major visible changes and one internal change:

• You can download collections as either zips of web pages or as SCORM-packages. SCORM is a format recognized by many online learning environments, so you can easily import things you’ve found/made in LeMill to your local learning environment. Or you can add your created stuff to your home page. When you view a collection, there should be ‘Download’-link at left side.
• You can (better) browse by many categories. Browsing for exactly interesting content can be made step by step and if some selection criterion didn’t give good results, you can adjust it at the same results page. Can’t explain it, but just test browsing. It should be intuitive.
• Some internal changes how groups are handled. Groups shouldn’t behave any differently, but feel little snappier, especially large groups with many members. Fetching all group members and all related material was previously bit cumbersome.
• Other fixes? New footer, the low portion of the page.

Let’s mill around.

(Originally posted at LeMill development)