LeMill 0.6 Released: Remixing learning materials

I am happy to report that version 0.6 of LeMill – a web community and engine for finding, authoring and sharing open/free/libre learning resources – has been released. LeMill is Open Source and Free Software.

What is there for you?

1. If you feel comfortable to install server software and host websites you may download LeMill engine from the download page and try it on your own. Then you can report us bugs. If you happen to be Zope/Plone/Python developer you may take part in the project taking place in Trac system. From there you will find tickets, documentation and of course the source code.
2. If you are more a person who rather just take things in use, you may try LeMill on our lemill.net. This is a “LeMill service” hosted by us. It is still LeMill Preview but we do our best to take good care of your data.
3. If you at first just want to know a bit more what is LeMill really about, you may have a look of the LeMill Preview FAQ or the little learning material called Learning Objects and LeMill.

Especially for those who already have checked out some earlier versions of LeMill, I would like to point out one new feature. Now when you add new content to LeMill you may create learning material with templates. You may choose from two templates: (1) Multimedia pages – text with images, audio and video elements; or (2) Presentation – a web page with your slides, comments, and possible audio. You may upload you multimedia elements and slides to the template or search elements from the pieces that are already uploaded to LeMill.

To test the presentation template I decided to use a presentation of my friend Teemu Arina. I never record my presentations, but he does. So, I borrowed his audio and slides and made a version of it to LeMill. When uploading and downloading the stuff I was thinking, maybe I should remix the audio and the slides. I could have record my comments between Arina’s talk, and also add some “better” slides to the version in LeMill. Anyway I do not agree with everything in his talk – it’s a good talk, but still :-). The remixing would have been relative easy thing to do with a standard PC. Well, it was late and I was tired. Maybe you will do it?

So, please play around with LeMill. For the existing members of the lemill.net we must admit that when updating the server we lost your portraits. We are really sorry. 😦 On the other hand that was only data we lost, so I think we did pretty well anyway. Please, upload your portraits again to lemill.net. Thanks!

I think I must present some acknowledgements. We are thankful for the developers of the following free/open source software and project, from which we have learned and borrowed a lot: Mediawiki, WordPress, Plone, Connexions / Rhaptos, EduCommons, KEWL.NextGen, and Ariadne. LeMill is developed in a EU IST funded CALIBRATE project.