The Connexions Blog

My Experience at the Connexions Conference 2012

2012-02-24T15:00:00.004-06:00

Guest post by Hans Voss, the 2012 Connexions Conference Scholarship Recipient.

Hello! My name is Hans Voss and I’m guest-blogging today on the Connexions blog. Last week I attended the Connexions Conference at Rice University as a recipient of the conference’s student scholarship. I am extremely grateful for this opportunity as the conference was a truly unique experience.

I’ll tell all about my trip to Houston, but first, a little information about myself: I’m currently a graduate student at American University in Washington, DC, earning a Master’s in Public Administration. I also work as an intern at Achieve, Inc., an education nonprofit here in DC dedicated to making college and career readiness a national priority so the transition from high school graduation to postsecondary education and careers is seamless. I was brought on at Achieve to support our work in OER. Achieve has developed a series of rubrics that measure various aspects of OER quality, including alignment to standards. To implement these rubrics, we partnered with the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, to develop an OER Evaluation Tool that is embedded in their OER Commons website, an online OER repository. You can learn more about this project here.

Considering my involvement with OER at Achieve, I jumped at the chance to attend the conference in Houston. I had never been to Houston before (the 75 degree weather in February was a treat!) and I was definitely impressed by Rice University’s campus—it’s absolutely gorgeous. At the conference, I was able to meet activists, educators, administrators, and others who work in the OER arena.

One of the things I found especially interesting was how technology-focused the conference was (as a student of political science and public administration and I have to admit that much of it was over my head!). I’m accustomed to thinking about the content and quality of OER from an end-user perspective, so the technology focus of the conference was both a welcome change of pace and complement to my daily work. Steve Midgley and Greg Grossmeier did a fabulous job explaining metadata and paradata sharing through the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative and the Learning Registry, something that affects Achieve’s OER work, but that I don’t think I fully grasped until hearing their presentation.

A highlight of the conference was definitely hearing about the great achievements of Siyavula in South Africa. If you haven’t heard, this Shuttleworth-funded organization has developed mathematics and science textbooks that the South African Department of Education is distributing to students for free—an impressive accomplishment! Other highlights from the conference include the OpenStax College launch, learning about badges in coordination with OER, and Kathi Fletcher’s presentation on OER APIs. Badges and APIs are both topics in OER that were unfamiliar to me before attending the conference. Both could have great impacts for OER projects, especially as it relates to displaying and measuring learning from open resources, as well as sharing and creating OER in easier ways. Learning about topics like this certainly expanded how I think about OER and the different ways groups can contribute to open education.

Finally, it was great to be in the company of others so committed to the same goal: promoting openness in education. Considering all the changes going on around us—both in technology and education—it’s certainly an exciting time to be working in open education.

2012 Connexions Conference Day 1

2012-02-14T21:54:00.000-06:00

The Connexions Conference got started today with a Connexions Consortium meeting at Rice University. The day long meeting was followed by a Welcome Dinner for the conference attendees. The main conference starts tomorrow!

Consortium meeting begins

Lunch at McMurtry College

Guest Speaker Karien Bezuidenhout of the Shuttleworth Foundation speaks to the group.

Tech Committee breakout meeting

Chatting before the Welcome dinner at Hull House at Rice University

Rich Baraniuk, Connexions Founder and Director, welcomes attendees to the dinner

OpenStax College Goes Live!

2012-02-01T16:31:00.000-06:00

OpenStax College is our new textbook initiative. Free peer reviewed textbooks that are readable and accurate. The site went live today so check it out.

We will be talking more about OpenStax College at the Connexions Conference in a couple of weeks.

You can follow OpenStax College on Google+, Facebook and Twitter.

Want a free Connexions T-Shirt?

2012-01-23T19:51:00.004-06:00

Next week, we are going to be having a contest!

Here's the scoop.

Next week, January 30th - February 3rd, 2012, we will ask a Connexions related trivia question on twitter everyday. First to answer correctly by @replying to us on Twitter gets a free t-shirt!

This week we will be sharing some of the facts you will need to know in order to answer the questions correctly. So, keep an eye out for hints on twitter and facebook.

Unfortunately, we are only able to ship domestically. If you have any questions about this contest, please email dcwill@cnx.org.

Version 2.0 of Connexions for Android Released

2011-12-23T15:11:00.000-06:00

Connexions for Android has been updated to version 2.0. The app has been modified to be friendlier to those that have never heard of Connexions. The use of Connexions jargon has been minimized so users can immediately understand how to use the app and what is available via the app.

One defect was also fixed on this release that was causing the app to sometimes crash when downloading a PDF or EPUB file.

The app can be found in the Android Market and on the Connexions site . If you use the app, let us know what you think about the changes at android at cnx.org.

How to report a site problem to Connexions

2011-12-15T14:30:00.000-06:00

The Connexions team works hard to make our site as error free as possible, but as with all software sometimes problems will occcur. To those of you that have taken the time to report a problem in the past, thank you! We cannot improve our site without that kind of help.

We frequently get problem reports this time of year as students are preparing for finals. We want to provide the best tech support that we can and good error reports go a long way in helping us do that. To create a good error report, follow these 4 simple guidelines.

1. Use the "Report a Bug" link to let us know about the problem. The Report a Bug link creates a ticket in our system so that we have documented information about when the problem occured and where in the site it occured. We need this information so we can recreate the problem. If we cannot recreate it, it is very difficult to fix.

2. Always fill out the email address field in the Report a Bug form. Without an email address, we cannot contact the user for additional information. We received a Report a Bug ticket today from a professor having problems with our site while the class was taking an open book final. An email address was not included in the ticket so there was nothing that could be done other than checking that our site was working for me.

3. Always include the Problem URL in the Report a Bug form. Without the URL, we cannot know which of our 1200 collections or 19,000 modules the user is having trouble with. The form will autofill the URL field with the URL where the Report A Bug link was clicked. This is very helpful except when a user has returned to the Home page or is on a help page. Check the autofilled URL to make sure it is the URL for the collection or module with the problem.

4. Give a detailed description. Let us know what you were doing, what happened, what Operating System you are using (Windows, Mac or Linux) and what browser you are using (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.). All of this is very important for us when we try to recreate the problem.

These four key pieces of information can help us give you a quick response to your problem. Even without the info, we will do our best to help.

Connexions Improves IE9 Support

2011-12-09T08:53:00.001-06:00

On Wednesday, we released an update that improved the performance of Connexions in Internet Explorer 9 (IE9). Before this release, math was not displayed correctly in IE9 and the math rendering could sometimes cause IE9 to become unresponsive.

This new release corrects the math rendering issue, but did not solve all of the IE9 problems. We will continue to work toward improving our performance in IE9. More information is on our Browser Support page.

The release also contains 2 other additions.

A Google +1 button is now displayed on all content next to the Facebook and Twitter buttons. Users can show their appreciation for a module or collection by giving it a +1 or by sharing it on Google+. Giving a module or collection a +1 can improve its ranking in Google search results.
We added a link to our new Google+ page in the footer of most non-content pages.

Connexions is on Google Plus

2011-11-08T08:26:00.000-06:00

Connexions is now on Google+! Add us to your circles to get the latest news and updates. Google+ is another way to stay informed about everything Connexions just like Twitter, Facebook and our blog.

Now Share Content with Friends in Connexions for Android

2011-10-31T15:56:00.000-05:00

Connexions for Android Version 1.8 has been released. It adds some nice features that make the app easier to use.

ActionBars have been added to the bottom of the Web View and the Note Editor to put the most popular actions at your fingertips. In the Web View, adding a note, sharing, downloading EPUB and PDF files are on the ActionBar. Saving a note, exporting a note and deleting a note are on the Note Editor ActionBar. An example of the Web View ActionBar is at the bottom of the screenshot in this post.
Users can now share content they like in the app via other Android apps (email, sms, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Use the Share button on the Web View ActionBar to bring up a list of apps installed on your phone to share with.
Fixed two defects that were reported by users.

The app can be found in the Android Market and on the Connexions site. If you use the app, please send us some feedback at android at cnx.org or add a comment or rating to the Android Market. We would love to hear from you.

World Innovation Summit for Education recognizes Connexions as leader in education

2011-09-27T09:59:00.002-05:00

(September 27, 2011) – Rice University’s Connexions project has been recognized as a leader in education by the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), an initiative of the Qatar Foundation.

Connexions, a popular online education site that attracts nearly 2 million visits per month, was chosen from hundreds of projects as one of the six 2011 WISE Award winners.

The annual WISE Awards are designed to identify, showcase, and promote innovative educational projects from around the world with the goal to spread best practices and build the future of education. The theme of this year’s WISE Awards is “Transforming Education: Investment, Innovation, and Inclusion.”

Connexions is an open education initiative founded in 1999 by Richard Baraniuk, the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical Engineering at Rice University. Connexions is a global repository of small “Lego-block” like modules. Modules can be used and reused to create customized learning materials like e-textbooks and courses. Connexions currently houses nearly 20,000 modules organized into over 1,100 free courses that are available for free online and at a very low-cost in print.

Click here to link to the press release!

Mobile CNX.ORG Updated

2011-09-19T10:16:00.000-05:00

The mobile version of Connexions has been enhanced to improve content display on smartphones. The site has a slightly different look that fits the screen size of a smartphone.

The Table of Contents for Collections has also been modified to allow sections to be opened and closed to reduce the amount of scrolling needed. The new Table of Contents is displayed in the screenshot on the right.

Feature Phone (non-smartphone) users will also notice a smaller Connexions header which allows more content to be displayed "above the fold". This puts more text on the screen which is important on a small screen size.

These enhancements were funded by the College Open Textbooks project and we are thankful for their support. You can see the changes by visiting m.cnx.org, mobile.cnx.org or by clicking the link at the top of this post.

Take Notes in Connexions for Android

2011-09-09T10:48:00.000-05:00

Now you can take notes on the go as you read your favorite Connexions content in the Connexions for Android app. Just select the "Add Note" menu item and a note editor will open. Notes can be exported as a text file to your phone's SDCard or memory so you can move your notes off your phone. There are also some bug fixes in this release.

The app can be found in the Android Market and on the Connexions site. If you use the app, please send us some feedback at techsupport at cnx.org. We would love to hear from you.

Connexions for Android Updated

2011-07-28T08:36:00.002-05:00

Connexions for Android was updated today to correct a bug reported by users. The update is available in the Android Market or on our website. If you have used our Android app, we would love to get some feedback on your experience. Please email us at techsupport at cnx.org.

Calling All Authors! The Connexions Community Google Group

2011-07-26T09:41:00.002-05:00

Are you a Connexions author or thinking about being one? Join the Connexions Community Google Group, the place where authors can meet and share tips with other Connexions authors. Having trouble with the Word importer? Can't get your YouTube video to display in Connexions? Find answers here, or help other authors with authoring tips you know. Check it out!

Everyone Loves Webinars!

2011-07-18T10:35:00.006-05:00

Like summer seminars? Then you'll love these summer webinars! On July 19 at 2pm EDT, Connexions (along with SoftChalk, IMS Global, and MERLOT) will host the first of four webinars in a series about the Open Educational Resources Movement, or OER. The webinars will provide plenty of insight on what exactly OERs are, why they are so efficient, and how they can be produced and executed. Anyone interested in learning more about what makes OERs (and Connexions) so remarkable is invited to attend. Hope to see you there!

Version 1.6 of Connexions for Android Released

2011-06-06T10:55:00.007-05:00

This new release contains some small changes.

Corrected a user reported bug that was sometimes causing a force close when viewing a lens.
Added Recently Published Content as a selection on the Content tab.
Added a small animation to lens listings.

You can download the app directly from Connexions or from the Android Market. If you try the app and find it useful, please leave a comment in the Android Market.

Authoring Tips: Embedding powerpoint presentations

2011-05-26T21:52:00.003-05:00

You just spent a week pulling your slides together and gave the presentation of your life. Now you are feeling bounteous and want to share your presentation with the world. Good for you.

The CNXML markup that Connexions uses does not natively support powerpoints, which is why we suggest using one of our editors to convert your information to CNXML -- paragraphs, lists, images, and all. That makes it easily searchable, it can be read by screen readers and other devices, and our system will generate a professional PDF and EPUB version of your module along with the online version.

If you still want the interactivity of the original presentation, you can embed that into the online version, and use an alternate print image to place a static image in the PDF in its place.

To do this, upload your presentation to SlideShare, or another third-party site that will give you code to embed into another website. SlideShare creates flash objects for embedding, which CNXML can include as a child of a <media> tag. Copy the src URL into the CNXML code, and voila! A dynamic module in Connexions.

Want to try this yourself? Check out our help page which explains where to find the embedding code and copy it in to your module.

Authoring Tips: How to size images

2011-05-17T22:34:00.004-05:00

Yikes! I missed last week's posting while we prepared for the Plone Symposium this week.

Sizing images

The most-uploaded media type we see are images of some sort. It's a good idea to always create and save your images in the size you want them to appear online. That means that you don't need to specify height and width attributes, and your image will always appear clear and not blurry. But in those cases where you need to scale or resize your images, the height and width attributes will do the trick. Specify the height and width in pixels:

<media id="a_unique_id" display="block" alt="An example."> <image mime-type="image/png" src="myfile.png" height="480" width="640" /> </media>

Thumbnail images

Alternatively, you may want to only show a relevant portion of an image, but link to a bigger version of the image to give more context. This is especially useful for screenshots. Upload both the thumbnail file and the larger file to your module, and specify the thumbnail image with the thumbnail attribute. It will link to the larger file when clicked:

<media id="a_unique_id" display="block" alt="An example of a thumbnail."> <image mime-type="image/png" src="mybigfile.png" thumbnail="mythumbfile.png" /> </media>

Alternate media online and in print

Finally, you may want to have two images: one suitable for online viewing, and one suitable for print. For instance, a scalable image may be used online, so that viewers can zoom in and out on the image without losing image quality, and a static image can be specified for print. Even more exotically, a video or slideshow may be used online, with an image file used in the print version. To do this, you need to specify two media items (video/image, image/image, etc.) within one <media> tag:

<media id="a_unique_id" display="block" alt="An example of an alternate print-image."> <image mime-type="image/png" src="myimagefile.png" for="pdf" /> <video mime-type="video/mpeg" src="myvideofile.mpg" for="online" /> </media>

New Release of Connexions for Android

2011-05-13T13:44:00.005-05:00

Version 1.5 of Connexions for Android has been released. It contains cosmetic and usability changes along with a bug fix. You can now search Connexions from any of the screens by selecting Search from the menu. All of the screens have menus activated by the menu button. If you are viewing a list of items, some features are on the "long press" menu that pops up when you hold your finger on an item. If you tried the app before and were unimpressed, please try it again and give us some feedback on the changes.

You can download the app directly from Connexions or from the Android Market. If you try the app and find it useful, please leave a comment in the Android Market.

Mobile Connexions Updated

2011-05-09T12:19:00.002-05:00

The mobile web version of Connexions has been updated to include the Table of Contents when viewing a Collection. This will allow for easier navigation and lessen the need to bookmark modules as frequently. Many thanks to Roche Compaan of Upfront Systems and Mark Horner of Siyavula for the update. Try it out on your phone and let us know what you think.

Authoring Tips: Images and other multimedia

2011-05-04T08:00:00.002-05:00

It is possible to create a module that is nothing but text. However, we find that many people have images, examples, documents, and more that they want to have interspersed in the text; after all: "a picture is worth 1,000 words". And so I'll blog (in three parts) about how to utilize multimedia in Connexions. This post will introduce you to the <media> tag. In the following weeks will will discuss popular sizing requests (like thumbnail images) and then a very popular request: embedding videos or powerpoints.

You will notice that the <media> tag is not an option in the drop-down "insert" menu on Edit-in-Place. You need to manually add in <media> code. For that it is handy to have the <media> help reference handy (cnx.org/eip-help/media) so that you can copy over the example code and change what is needed. The <media> tag allows you to easily include audio, image, flash, video, java-applet, and labview files right in the content of your module, as well as any other type of file (for download only). Let's use images as an example.

Upload the image

Click on the green "Files" tab just under the orange title of the module. There you can click on the blue "Add an image/included file" button to add any files you want to include in your module. Be sure to note the file name for later.

Use <media> to include the image

Click on the green "Edit" tab to return to Edit-in-Place. Open the element you want to add media to for editing (or insert a blank paragraph where you can add the code for your media):

The code to add an image looks like this:

<media id="a-unique-id" alt="Describe the image."> <image mime-type="image/jpeg" src="YourFileName.jpg" /> </media>

The mime-type of the media file depends on the filename extension. If your image is not saved as a JPEG like in this example, you can look up the mime-type here.

Authoring Tips: Glossaries for each module

2011-04-26T21:23:00.007-05:00

We first learned about <term> tags in last week's post, which for some reason posted under the wrong date. At the blog.cnx.org homepage you need to scroll down a bit to see it.

Each module can contain a glossary at the end of the module, containing definitions of important terms used in the module. Now, if you are using our Edit-in-Place online editor, you will notice that there is no "Glossary" option in the "insert" dropdown menu. For this, we need to bring out the big guns. Switch to the Full Source Editor by clicking on the link just above the editing area, as pictured below:

A glossary must go at the end of the module, so scroll down to the end of the text where you will find a </content> tag. After that tag, put in your glossary tags. It will look like this:

... </content> <glossary></glossary>

Between your opening and closing tags, you will have one or more <definition> tags. Each definition must contain one <term> tag (that's the term you are defining), and at least one <meaning>. It can also (optionally) contain one or more examples (examples follow the relevant meaning that they illustrate) and further references (<seealso>, which should be the last item in the <definition>). Be sure to give a unique id to each element that needs one.

To illustrate:

<glossary> <definition id="cnxdef"> <term>Connexions</term> <meaning id="cnxdef-part1">An online repository of open educational resources licensed under the <link url="http://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons</link> CC-by license, powered by a unique content management system and editing interface called <link url="http://rhaptos.org/">Rhaptos</link>.</meaning> <example> <para id="cnxdef-part1-para">Are you using a textbook on Connexions for your class?</para> </example> <meaning id="cnxdef-part2">The British spelling of Am. 'connections'.</meaning> <seealso> <term>OER</term> <term>repository</term> </seealso> </definition> </glossary>

Click "Save" and move back to "Edit-in-Place" to continue editing your module. The above code results in this excellent display:

For extra coolness, you can link any terms you use in your module text directly to the definition in the glossary, using the linking techniques we learned two weeks ago. Link to the target-id of the definition:

Everyone should study with <link target-id="cnxdef">Connexions</link>!

Connexions for Android Updated

2011-04-20T12:06:00.004-05:00

Version 1.4 of Connexions for Android was released this morning. It adds two new features and fixes a file downloading issue.

The app now displays a list of the PDF or EPUB files that have been downloaded to your device. From this list, you can select a file which will open it in the appropriate application. An application for the file type must be installed for the file to be opened. Examples of apps for file types would be Adobe Reader for PDF files and Aldiko for EPUB files. You can also delete PDF or EPUB files from your device by doing a long press on the file name and selecting Delete from the menu.
Pinch and Zoom is now enabled in the web view on devices with Android 2.1 and above.
Corrected a defect that caused some devices to have problems when downloading large EPUB or PDF files.

You can download the app directly from Connexions or from the Android Market. If you try the app and find it useful, please leave a comment in the Android Market.

Connexions Improves Site Performance

2011-04-18T12:13:00.002-05:00

Last Thursday, the Connexions team, with the help of Enfold Systems, rolled out a new feature that doesn't change how the site works, but changes how the site performs. We have added additional caching of content pages which is resulting in quicker load times for those pages. From our internal testing, most pages are twice as fast as a result of the caching. The only obvious visual change is the addition of collection ids in module URLs when a module is viewed in a collection's context. An example is

http://cnx.org/content/m10884/latest/?collection=col10151/latest

We are continuing to improve the site and would like to hear if you notice the speed improvement. Leave a comment or email us at cnx@cnx.org.

Authoring Tips: Linking on Connexions

2011-04-12T22:36:00.004-05:00

What's an educational resource without copious amounts of cross-referencing? Not much, I say! Luckily, we've got you covered.

The <link> tag can create hyperlinks to webpages, files uploaded to your module, other modules or collections, specific portions of other modules and collections, and even specific versions of other modules or collections, or any combination of the above. Sound like a lot? We'll break it down for you.

The hyperlinks we are all familiar with whisk you away to a new webpage. This is easy enough to do in Connexions, where all you need to do is specify the @url attribute, like so:

Here's a link to a great <link url="http://cnx.org/">open educational resource repository</link>.

where what you see is:

Here's a link to a great open educational resource repository.

The fun starts when you want to link to other resources in the Connexions repository, for which you can use special Connexions attributes, like in these examples:

<link document="m12345">some text</link>: links you to a specific module or collection. You can find the module ID (the m12345 number) or the collection ID (a col12345 number) in the URL bar of the content you are linking to, or you can find it on the metadata page (a link to it is at the bottom of the page).
<link document="m12345" resource="FileName.png">some text</link>: links you directly to a file (in this case, named "FileName.png") that has been uploaded to module m12345. If you want to link to a file that you have uploaded to your own module, just leave out the document="m12345". This is hands-down the easiest way to point readers to included files; we'll be talking about other ways (like embedding) in the coming weeks.
<link document="m12345" target-id="eip-987">some text</link>: links you to a specific element in module m12345. (Again, if you want to link to the module you are editing, you can leave off the document="m12345".) Pretty much every element in your module (paragraphs, figures, sections, etc.) requires a unique ID. If you are using Edit-in-Place, or if you imported a Word document or LaTeX file to create your module, Connexions generates random unique IDs for you. You can find them by clicking on the element in Edit-in-Place to open it for editing. The target-id is in the upper left corner; this one is "delete_me":

<link document="m12345" version="1.2">some text</link>: links to version 1.2 of modules m12345, just in case the last overhaul of the module removed the information you wanted to link to. (You can find a list of all past versions through the link to the metadata at the bottom of the content.) And my favorites:
<link document="m12345" version="1.2" target-id="eip-987">some text</link>
<link document="m12345" version="1.2" resource="FileName.png">some text</link>: ...because who wouldn't want to link to a specific portion (or a specific file) of a specific version of a specific module in the Connexions repository?

So there you go. No excuses for not linking to your sources! As we discussed last week, you can find complete information about the <link> tag in our eip-help at http://cnx.org/eip-help/link.