If you are ready to make that move to Linux, but don't know where to start, the Open University's new ten week short course Linux: An Introduction might have caught your eye. First though, a bit of disclosure, my day job is with the Open University (but don't take my views and comments as representing them) and I'm an open source enthusiast. I met up with Andrew Smith of the Maths, Computers and Technology Faculty, who is the academic behind the course, to find out more. I had many questions for him, including some from colleagues and those of you who follow me on Twitter.

From the olnet.org site:

The aim of OLnet is to tackle gathering evidence and methods about how we can research and understand ways to learn in a more open world, particularly linked to Open Educational Resources (OER) but also looking at other influences. We want to gather evidence together but also spot the ideas that people see emerging from the opportunities. 

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is supporting The Open University to work with Carnegie Mellon University to develop OLnet.

Back in December 2008 I wrote a small perl script to enable you to enjoy podcasts from the Open University in MythStream, an add on for MythTV that enables you to watch streaming video content through MythTV. The OU's podcasts site has a number of RSS feeds that relate to the varioud subject areas that the podcasts covered and to a number of containing sections like OU Life and OU Research. At the time the script was written there was no easy overall way to autodiscover all of these feeds and tie them together, so I wrote a bit of code that would work this out from the menu rendered on the right hand side. This sort of screen scraping technique is great as a short term way to get the data we need, but the problem is that it is using output that was intended for a human to read rather than a machine to process. This sort of process can easily break if the layout of the page changes. To solve this problem I've been working with Chris Valentine of the Knowledge Media Institite at the OU who has kindly provided a better way to extract this information (many thanks Chris!).

Christmas is upon us once again and inevitably many people will be thinking about what to enjoy on television as they recover from all of that food and drink! So in my last blog post for this year I thought I would experiment with MythStream, a plugin for MythTV which is a multimedia home entertainment system designed for PCs that are connected to your TV and you operate with a remote control rather than the traditional laptop and desktop experience of computing. In my last post the Open University's new podcast website was brought inside Miro, but in this example, information will be extracted from it to integrate it with MythStream and MythTV so you can enjoy the content of the site from your armchair. The OU's podcast site uses a hierarchical navigational structure that made it a bit difficult to import the whole thing into MythStream straight away. Fortunately, MythStream enables you to write your own parsers for external websites, so you can import the same navigational logic, even if it is not supported out of the box.

The OU produces a range of podcasts covering a wide variety of subjects that can be interesting not only to current students but also to people who enjoy more informal learning, or who are maybe just curious about a subject. Up until recently, this treasure trove was sadly locked away in iTunesU and so unavailable to Linux users (as iTunes is not available for Linux). Users of other platforms also had to use iTunesU as well, regardless of how they felt about this software. Fortunately, the OU has put this situation right though the release of a website that makes these podcasts available to all, it can be found at: http://podcast.open.ac.uk. The website is so new the paint is practically drying on it, but, despite being in beta, it is still capable of delivering a first class experience. It includes a number of ways to easily subscribe to podcasts, including RSS feeds (useful for programs like Amarok), a really great feature though is the sites ability to integrate with Miro, an application which is described as an "internet tv and video player". Miro is free, open source, cross platform and provides the ability to subscribe to, watch and manage video and audio podcast feeds. You can use the OU podcasts site entirely within it, providing a nice integrated experience and leaving you to enjoy the content.

The Open University here in the UK regularly coproduces educational programming in partnership with the BBC. Some of these programmes are for a wide audience such as Coast, and other programmes are for more specialist audiences such as The Story of Maths. To catch these programmes you don't have to necessarily stay in and make sure that you are sat on your sofa in front of the TV at a scheduled time, instead you can catch the repeats on BBC iPlayer (sorry - UK, IoM & Channel Islands only). My colleague Tony Hirst recently created a mash up to find the OU programmes from the last seven days posted to iPlayer using feeds from Twitter, iPlayer and a Yahoo Pipe, he then presented the results in a web page. When looking at his blog post on this it struck me that it would be really nice if this could be presented in a way more suitable for a media centre PC connected to a TV, so this would mean nice big fonts, an attractive interactive-TV type interface and ease of use from a remote control, and then I thought it would be even better to feed this into MythTV, integrating seven days of OU programming alongside the rest of your entertainment.

PlanetOU has become a FriendFeed Room. You can subscribe to updates there, or alternatively on Twitter by following @planetou or on Identi.ca, again by following planetou.

Last week I had the pleasure of being at the SocialLearn workshop held for OU students, staff (including many Associate Lecturers - the vital members of staff who act as learning mentors to students) and alumni to discuss and get input for the SocialLearn project (a next-generation educational social network platform, more information can be found in Martin Weller's slideshow). A few of the participants have already written blog posts describing their experience of the event, Jo Badge asked if this is a new OU philosophy, Nigel Gibson reflected that the event was a chance to "an opportunity to share space with some really imaginative, smart, intelligent, bright, awesomely clever and switched-on people", ok I like that quote I have to admit! Martin Weller reflected on the use of Twitter and how it added an extra dimension to the workshop. I've been working with my OU colleagues Nick Freear and Alex Little to produce some add-on applications for the platform, early forms of which were demonstrated. I also got the chance to run a small spin off workshop (for the first time) to explore scenarios for the use of mobile technology with SocialLearn.

Ambient technology is definitely not about mood lighting, instead it is something far more interesting. It is a term which describes an idea that technology will adapt itself to your presence, performing the necessary reconfigurations and integration to meet your needs or simply increase your comfort. Typically it will do this without much of a need for human interaction, instead it just quietly gets on with its job. Such technology can be used for a variety of purposes, one of them being to deliver information to the user in situations where it is appropriate to take in a chunk of information at a glance, think of quickly glancing at a photo rather than looking at a spreadsheet. You could stare at a photo for quite a long time, but you can take in most of the information it has to offer quite quickly, the same is generally not true for a spreadsheet. An ambient information system such as this can be used to get a sense of what a community is up to, a perfect candidate being a community of Twitter users. A system which does just that is Twitterspaces which is now available as a view of OU users on Twitter at: http://eniac.hopto.org/soiaware/twitter_display/planetou.php.

Over the past few weeks for various reasons I have been asked to communicate with people using Skype, the popular program for making calls over the Internet. The chats I have been asked on though are just text chats. I'm slightly wary of Skype after reading a thought provoking entry on the Ubuntu Wiki about the ethics of using the service and because I can't get a version that will work on a 64bit operating system. As it is not interoperable, there is a big risk of lock in, once all of your contacts are on Skype surely you will have to go on Skype too. It seems very backward to me to have such lock in, imagine if you had a mobile phone and you could only call people on the same network, it would be a ridiculous situation. The only interface out of Skype appears to be to the PSTN not to other chat clients.