# cblesius schrieb am 8. Apr, 01:30:
Do not underestimate good old Germany...
<blatant software plug>We just launched an open source e-learning system for 30,000 users at the University of Heidelberg that has a nice multiuser blogging application built in (we have not advertised it yet in Heidelberg due to work on getting everything else running smoothly by the start of the semester... 10 days to go). The business school at MIT (one of our partners in the USA) is working on improving it for future versions right now (the main developer working on it taught the recent blogging course at MIT and is a regular at Harvard's Berkman Center weblogger meetings). Which system? .LRN 2.0 http://dotlrn.org (expect really cool blog related additions in 2.5)
</blatant software plug>
Carl
P.S. The University of Mannheim also launched the same system available to a similar number of students and there are other German universities toying with the idea.
P.P.S. Unlike the multiuser blogging tool that is running on your site .LRN supports one of the more common open source browsers: Firebird (I could not log in "twoday" to post a comment on this site and after trying a couple of times it crashed my browser >:-| )
# Stephan Mosel antwortete am 8. Apr, 12:42:
thx, Carl
thx for your comments, Carl!Sounds very interesting, I'm excited to hear more about it.
as far as twoday goes, sounds like there's a problem with the antville software or sumthing :(
as far the xhtml and css code on this site bildung.twoday.net goes (which is what I have access to only, cause it's a hosted service), it should be validating. ;)
# Annette antwortete am 8. Apr, 15:12:
soundz good
well Carl, I am happy to read your comment and I am excited how this project will develop. However, I have had a telephone call with someone from the BMBF, and she had no idea of let`s name it "open information movement" and I got the impression, that she even didn`t want to know anything about these things.
I took part in an "e-Learning meeting" last year and I remember one presentation very well: A CMS or LMS built by a company for 200.000 EUR(!), and the professor told us, that this was cheap, because the real price was calculated to be 400.000EUR. And he was proud, that other faculties of our(!) university are allowed to use this software as well (no GNU...). However, my question was: Who would be able to contribute to the content and who wants to do that?
I hope you plan to offer short "internet information courses" for the students as well, because they are not informed at all. PHDs use mozilla, but they are surprised, when I show them the "tab-function" and this is only one example, there are too many.
By the way the telephone call ended like this: I have told her that I am unemployed at the moment, but I have a great job in Switzerland which stats in June. I can do research in my subject (chemistry) there.
She answered: Possibly you can start a weblog project there.
I got the impression that patriotism is not welcome in good old Germany...
So people from Massachusetts have to launch Weblogs in Germany and people from Germany have to launch it in switzerland....?
Excuse my english please... I whish you all the best for this project and I give you two examples of elaerning in good old Germany:
http://www-public.rz.uni-duesseldorf.de/~pc1/scienceforum
http://campussource.de
