LeMill 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)

New version is up. Updating things took longer than previously: we spent the whole thursday afternoon and all until evening, and even today we had to run some things to make tag clouds right. Partly because we updated the system running underneath (Zope 2.8.7 to Zope 2.9.7 and Plone 2.5.0 to 2.5.3), partly because we had to add one little thing to every resource you have made and partly because our community has grown. And partly because we made some human errors.

New features and fixes:

• There should be no longer duplicate messages when editing stuff and messages are more apt.
• ‘Title clouds’ and ‘Name clouds’ where we show active people and resources bigger than inactive people or resources are now much more efficient; this means we can have put them to more prominent roles, we’re still thinking what those roles should be.
• Editing presentations should be more straightforward. It won’t ask for title and tags for every piece you upload, but the pieces inherit title and tags from presentation itself. You can of course modify them afterwards.

(Originally posted at LeMill development)

Sorry for inconvenience, as LeMill was down for hour today and yesterday. We had an exceptionally complicated update. Hopefully everything is working now.

There are good reasons for update, though:

We have rethought the browsing of LeMill resources. Now you can add criterions in a very intuitive way and limit your searches so that you’ll be able to find the relevant content faster and more reliably. We also thought forward this browsing stuff so that in future, when there are even more content it won’t slow down.

Other major thing is that members can set their subject areas. This helps people to find each other and in the future enables us to guide you to learning resources that might interest you.

One big thing that is not very visible for users, but should pay off in long term is addition of few managing tricks: those translations that get created too easily and confuse us in search results are now easier to manage and should automatically get cleaned away if they’re created by accident. Also there shouldn’t no more be ‘accidental authors’ Tarmo and Jukka — those got there when managers run their update scripts which modify resource objects a bit and then the manager got marked as a contributor. Because of these unpredictable changes our community managers have been maybe too careful, but for now on LeMill dev team tries to participate more.

Have fun and enjoy sharing and having more learning-related thingies!

(Originally posted at LeMill development)

Today we released new version, fixing several bugs and with nicer RSS-feeds and better delete-operation. Now we can start deleting duplicate toolbox/lemill-material and do other maintenance stuff much easier.

During this evening there have been some (3) bugs that were found only after the site went live, after the upgrade. They’re fixed now. Apologies to people who accidentally found them. It’s good that we have error log to catch such occurences.

(Originally posted at LeMill development)

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)

On behalf of the development team, I’m proud to announce the release of LeMill version 1.8. We finally figured out a way to give more prominence to teacher-generated experience reports (now called teaching and learning stories). Collections now double as teaching and learning stories, and they will be shown on the brand new front page that’s been in the works for the last few weeks.

We’re still keeping the new front page locked away for a while, so we have time to generate a few good stories into LeMill.net, so the front page won’t look completely anemic. We’ll enable the front page next week. So keep tuned.

But I guess the major news is that Hans finally removed the “preview” part from the LeMill logo. Which means this is the first version that he’s not “ashamed to release as his design”, to quote his words. In web 2.0 terminology, I guess we now dropped the “beta” from the logo.

For more information:

• lemill.net is the free, public online service that anyone can use
• lemill.org is the fully open development site where you can more closely follow our development progress
• you’re welcome to chat with us in IRC (irc://#lemill@freenode) which you can also conveniently access from the Community page of lemill.net
• and of course there are the mailing lists

We made some Christmas bugfixes and updated LeMill.net to 1.51.

(Originally posted at le group)