LeMill blog

We did a small update to lemill.net where some problems with aligning text in content was fixed. There used to be too much empty lines where they shouldn’t be and it made pages ugly, especially if they were copy-pasted from other sources. Now the algorithm is tuned so that pages should be nicer, but The content needs to be ‘edited’ for change to take effect. So if you find a content that seems to have display problems, go to edit, change nothing (or change something) and save. The page recalculates and should be nicer.

(Originally posted at LeMill development)

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.

(Originally posted at hanspoldoja.net)

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)