eLearning Africa was a great conference, with 1778 delegates from 78 countries. The main theme was concentrating on the question how to improve education in Africa with technologies.

I was invited for the VLIR-UOS pre-conference workshop “ICT in education”. This workshop was set up as a Train the Trainer session for the African partner universities of the VLIR-UOS, similar to the session for the rest of the world in the Universidad 2010 conference in Cuba. It’s always great to have many VLIR-UOS partners brought together. We were happy to attract also many non-VLIR-UOS-partners in a fully booked room (peaks of 70 participants).

As Open Source was a major theme of eLearning Africa, I was also invited to talk about Strategies and Policies to implement Free & Open Source Software in Higher Education. African universities use already mainly Open Source Learning Environments, and they are stimulating the use of Open Educational Resources and Open Access journals, but their desktops are mainly running proprietary software. They would love to migrate everything to Open Source, but their entrenchment and lock-in into proprietary systems is already so deep that migrations or new deployments will need strategies and policies.

My first presentation was “New learning paradigms and educational technologies part II” (part I, focusing on the paradigms, was presented by Prof. Libotton):

My presentation “Strategies & Policies for the implementation of Free & and Open Source Software in Higher Education” was again a duo presentation with Paul Scott from the Western Cape University of South Africa.

I received great feedback on both presentations and have invitations for organizing related training and management workshops in different countries.

My pictures of eLearning Africa and Lusaka can be found here.

So how did I get Linux running on the Sony Vaio VPCZ11X9E with most basic features working, including nvidia driven graphics at 1600×900?

All Linux distributions and versions I tried (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian, Mint, Fedora) have a failing installation in someway on this (very new) laptop. The newer distributions fail on the graphics (blank screen, except Kubuntu 8.10). The older versions fail to enable the WiFi. All need a little help for the touchpad. Some distributions can’t handle the RAID disk (2×64GB SSD). So I deleted the RAID config (in BIOS enable ‘Show Raidinfo’ and use the delete option in the RAID configurator).

Eventually I used the Ubuntu 10.04 amd64 Release Candidate DVD in text installation mode.
I created a software RAID with LVM on top of it.
Once installed, the system failed on the graphics (blank screen, totally frozen, no text terminals). Holding the Shift key during boot gives access to the Grub menu. Replacing kernel parameters ‘quiet splash’ with ’single nomodeset i8042.nopnp’ gives a single user (root) mode that does not suffer from a blank screen (nomodeset) and will be able to use the touchpad (i8042.nopnp) once the graphics are running.
At that point it’s clear that Ubuntu 10.04 has working wired and wireless network on this VPCZ11. I tried apt-get upgrade without further success. Installing nvidia driver through Ubuntu sources or from the nVidia website helped neither. nvidia-detector said ‘none’. Starting X on nvidia driver complained about not finding an nvidia device.
The Intel driver failed with a blank screen without nomodeset and with a kernel panic with nomodeset enabled.
With nvidia-xconfig I created a basic /etc/X11/xorg.conf. When I set in that file ‘Driver’ to ‘vesa’ I get graphics working! But limited to 1024×768, which is probably the limit of the vesa driver. I read Sony is very special in how the LCD screen describes it self (with EDID), which could be the reason of the failing graphics. I did apt-get install read-edid. get-edid|parse-edid gives a monitor section which you can enter in xorg.conf. But this didn’t help me.

lspci always show both the intel and nvidia graphics, no matter if the hardware button is on Stamina, Speed of Auto. The hardware graphics selection lights almost never follow the button’s settings. The only way to get it really running in a certain graphics mode, is by running first an older kernel into that graphics mode. I did that first by running my Kubuntu 8.10 CD in between. UPDATE 5/5/10: I found that booting the 2.6.31-10-rt kernel (included in the Ubuntu Lucid Lynx repository) will also do the trick on the next reboot.

UPDATE 6/5/10: Based on the suggestions of Atrawog hereunder in the comments, it is possible to configure one kernel that does all the basics for nvidia (graphics switch is always ok, 1600×900, network, sound, hibernate).

Add to /etc/apt/sources.list :

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kernel-ppa/pre-proposed/ubuntu  karmic main

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/kernel-ppa/pre-proposed/ubuntu karmic main

As root do:

apt-get update

apt-get install linux-image-2.6.31-20-generic

apt-get install linux-backports-modules-karmic-generic

apt-get install linux-backports-modules-2.6.31-20-generic

apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.31-20-generic

apt-get install linux-backports-modules-alsa-2.6.31-20-generic

./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-195.36.15-pkg2.run

Update grub to take the 2.6.31-20 as default with i8042.nopnp option

To sum up:

• with nvidia driver (speed mode) I get 1600×900 graphics!
• with the intel driver (stamina mode; which I would prefer) I get kernel panics or blank screens (with or without nomodeset).
• I’m still searching for a way to change the brightness of the screen.

• Yoilán Fimia León: Strategy to integrate digital portfolios in the teaching-learning process
• Roberto Carlos Rodríguez Hidalgo: Teaching Strategy for supporting the collaborative activities in the teaching-learning process through the use of social software
• Didiosky Benitez Erice: A methodology for knowledge management using Open Educational Resources in teaching-learning processes: the case of Central University “Marta Abreu” of Las Villas.
• Wilder González Díaz: Quality indicators for e-learning

At the Universidad 2010 conference in Havana, I gave together with Prof. Arno Libotton a keynote titled: “New learning paradigms and educational technologies”
My part, focussing on the technologies is shown hereunder:

Together with Paul Scott I gave a keynote titled: “Strategies & Policies for the implementation of Free & and Open Source Software in Higher Education Institutions”. Paul Scott is head of the Free Software Unit in the University of Western Cape. He is also the lead developer from the (mainly African) e-learning environment Chisimba. We met each other before shortly, but now that Prof. Georges Eisendrath invited us to work together on this presentation, I had the real pleasure to spend a week with Paul. I consider Paul a highly skilled hacker (in the original sense ofcourse) with a heart for the “right” technologies.

See my Aruba pictures.

One Laptop Per Child program presented to Aruba - The News 20091016

The design of this so called $100 laptop for kids from the developing world dates from 2006. I played with it at FOSDEM 2007, while it was still in preview. Since then it has started the minilaptop ‘netbook ‘ revolution. And while it is 3 years old, it still has many innovative concepts which are not yet common  in other laptops. Many laudatios have been written, but let me  share two features which I still appreciate: When there is enough light (or too much light for other laptops), the screen is very readable with the back-light switched off. This is a big energy saver. And while you are only reading the screen, the operating system (Fedora Linux) powers down most of the laptop components. It’s really impressive to see the power led go on and off while the screen remains powered. Netto result: between 0.3 and 8W is enough for the OLPC, while my other laptop consumes often 40W. The day I forgot my OLPC power supply, I could use another one from a dead Sony walkman with power specs (5.4W) lower than any other reported usable power supplies (see my contributions at the OLPC wiki).

Frits Hoff suggested me two current OLPC issues (mainly in the developed world) to think about: Flash support and speed improvements. Not all Flash content plays perfect. Some content plays too slow, certainly with multiple flash animations on the same web page. And one has to click on the animations to start them. The first root of these problems is the proprietary nature of the Flash format. The license of the Adobe Flash player doesn’t allow redistribution. That’s why the XO comes with the Free Open Source Gnash Flash player. But it’s very hard to make such alternative players perfect, as the Flash format is partly secret, partly available under a non-disclosure agreement, which only allows the development of Flash export functionality, not Flash playing. Those that  don’t mind such evilness and closed source software can install the Adobe Flash player. But it doesn’t matter if you are using Gnash, Adobe Flash player or another player like swfdec, it seems there are no tricks which result in  enough performance gain to play the heaviest Flash animations. Most Flash cartoonish content will play nicely, but e.g. the recent encoded Youtube movies will play with very slow framerate or not at all. The XO laptop is simply not fast enough for Flash. That’s no real shame, as Flash has performance issues on many other platforms, such as iPhones (but Youtube is providing iPhone versions of their movies. Maybe we could try to get these as default on the XO? Maybe that’s a matter of browser identification string?)

So, an interesting question is what the future will bring concerning speed improvements. The XO-1.5 and XO-2 are announced. The design of the XO-1.5 is finished and almost identical to the one of the XO-1, except for the mainboard. As it is difficult to estimate the speed improvement, I made a tabular comparison:

This shows that we can’t expect to much speed improvement from the processor. The main reason for the cpu switch is the discontinuation of the AMD Geode development. The C7-M is from the same era as the Geode. I found only one direct Geode – C7-M benchmark comparison, for CineBench, which measures both cpu and gpu speed, but the used gpu is not reported. Anyway, we can’t expect a lot of improvement per MHz, and when I look at the TDP, I guess the XO will often need to throttle down the cpu frequency (1GHz to 400MHz) for thermal constraints. With the same frequency, the C7-M cpu’s are roughly half the speed of the Intel Atom cpu’s typically used in the current netbooks. Then, I expect more speed improvement from the memory increase and the VX855 chipset, which is bigger and more recent than the cpu. VX855 gives impressive hardware support for H.264, MPEG-2/4, DivX and WMV9 video codecs, “allowing smooth playback of 1080p HD video”. That’s nice, but HD video  does not really matter now for the XO or the developing world. I guess not much Flash content will be accelerated with these codecs. But Youtube started using H.264 at least for their iPhone and HD versions. On the other hand this video acceleration will need specific driver support, and Via has not the best Linux reputation. So, there is hope, but it will need performance tests and probably lots of driver improvements.

And the XO-2? The design is not finalized yet, but it’s gonna be once again a revolution. For the moment one thinks about an ARM processor. ARM cpu’s are not x86 compatible. They are used a lot in embedded devices and smartphones, and I expect them to grow significantly in the netbook market in 2009-2010. Linux is strong on ARM; The Windows ecosystem is weak on ARM, like on anything non-x86. Yes Windows-CE for ARM exists, and Microsoft could port Windows 7 to ARM, but that still leaves a problem for all other closed source Windows software. Only the original manufacters can recompile their closed source software, and many have no experience with that. But don’t worry: the developing world is not really waiting for an import of the Microsoft Monopoly 

I gave a workshop about ‘FREE AND OPEN Source Software, Licenses, Technologies, Scientific Publications, Courseware, …’ (download PDF – 111 slides) in the framework of the International Training Program on INFORMATION.

• F. Questier, Free and Open Source Software, An ethical and pragmatic choice for education, International Conference ICT for education, invited plenary keynote lecture, University of Nairobi, Kenia, 2-4/02/09
• F. Questier, Free and Open Source Software, An ethical and pragmatic choice for education, Management workshop, Moi University, Kenia, 07/02/09
• F. Questier, Virtual Learning Environments, Experiences and reflections from Brussels, Management workshop, Moi University, Kenia, 08/02/09

Wrote a book “Onderwijsvernieuwing: een continu proces” (Educational Innovation, a continuing process), which we presented at our “seventh day of educational innovation / 7de dag van de onderwijsvernieuwing”.

Visited Italy (Naples, Pompei, Herculaneum). Pictures coming soon.

Went to Cuba, for head-hunting joint-PhD students and the Universidad 2008 conference. A report in Dutch can be found at my professional blog. Pictures coming soon.

Visited the Fosdem conference.

As Thea Derks is retiring, I’m starting as head of our VUB Educational Innovation & Educational Service Center (OSC).

28/10/07

We moved! From Brussels to Brussels. Mail me if you want our new address.

I’m appointed as guest professor for the Educational Technology course at the VUB teacher training.

I’m back from a sight seeing trip through Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Now I should try to make some time for processing and publishing our 3000 pictures.

30/11/2006 – 03/12/06

I visited the Dokeos conference 2006 in France, Valence, and stayed an extra day for sight-seeing.
See my pictures.

I attended a seminar about ‘Intellectual Property Rights‘ by Roger Kampf (Counsellor, WTO Secretariat). Interesting seminar, but I was disappointed that the lecture started by defining ‘the purpose of Intellectual Property Rights as to extract economic value through use or licensing’. I replied that I prefer the original idea that the purpose is (like mentioned in the US Constitution) ‘to promote progress of science and usefull arts’ and that ‘to allow economic value’ is the not the goal, but the mean. The lecture continued with a good discussion about TRIPS and finding the balance between protecting investments and not hindering public health treatment, e.g. in third world countries. I asked about TRIPS and soft patents: TRIPS on the one hand clearly states that software is protected by copyright, but on the other hand it is very broad about what can be patented, and TRIPS art 27 has a footnote which not only allows patents that have an industrial application, but also patents which are a useful utility. Software patent proponents use this as to argue that software patents would be allowed or even obligatory. Roger Kampf answered that TRIPS is not stating that software should be protected by patents, but that it leaves the “choice and flexibility” to the nations.

Upcoming week there at least 4 interesting conferences in Brussels about Open Source, Internet and Technology: OSCON Open Source Convention, Drupal Conference, Govcamp and Barcamp. A few talks are directly educational related (e.g. “Using technology in education” by Dominik Lukes at Barcamp, and “Student registration using the eID” by Jurgen Lust from Ghent University at Govcamp).

As the upcoming week happens to be also the only week between two academic years, it is the most busiest week at our OSC-department. Half of our department is giving off-site teacher training (“onderwijsprofessionalisering seminarie“). The other half (including me) is preparing our e-learning platform for the new academic year: not only applying the new subscription data, but also bringing into production all the new functionalities we developed over the previous year. So, we won’t find time for these nice conferences in our own city, but I registered for the Barcamp conference, which is on Sunday. Also some of our VUB-colleagues from the Knosos project will visit at least Drupalcon, Govcamp and Barcamp.

14-22/07/06

I spent some holiday in Scotland.
See my pictures.

I was invited for the kick-off conference of the “Science Education and Learning in Freedom 2006″ project in Den Haag (Netherlands).

I followed a course about Project Cycle Management organized by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and South Research.

We organized our ““fifth day of educational innovation / 5de dag van de onderwijsvernieuwing”.

I visited the Pubelo study day around learning objects and meta data with talks by Erik Duval and Wayne Hodgins.

I was invited to take a seat in the VLIR UOS expert group ICT/OLL (Information and Communication technology / Online Learning)

I attended the Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen chair about Freemasonry and Social Progressive movements.

13/02/06-17/02/06

I was invited as a keynote speaker at the Fifth International Congress on Higher Education UNIVERSIDAD 2006″ in Cuba. I talked about the advantages and opportunities of Open Source Software for education. See my Cuba pictures.

I attended the Academic session in the Gothic Room of the Brussels Town Hall for 150 years of Flemish students in Brussels.
Afterwards I attended the piano recital from Frederic Rzewski. Rzewski is in favor of the Copyleft concept for his music.

I visited the workshop “e-learning standaarden en interoperabiliteit” (e-learning standards and interoperability).

I had a nice meeting with the people from the Knosos project. Their aim is to build a social network for sharing knowledge.

13/01/06

I edited (together with Dirk Gombeir) the book
“Open Bron, Open Inhoud, Open Leren” (Open Source, Open Content, Open Learning)
and wrote 2 chapters for it:

• “Extremadura: Vrije Software in onderwijs en overheid als basis van een informatiemaatschappij”
• “Open Source leerplatform opende nieuwe perspectieven voor Vrije Universiteit Brussel”

17/12/05 – 31/12/05

I visited Syria and Jordan.
See my pictures.

I visited the Dokeos User Day.

I gave a seminar at our university about intellectual property and privacy in e-learning.

13/11/05

I had a paper and a presentation about ‘Choice for Dokeos – Strategic choice for and implementation of an open source e-learning platform’ at the ‘Third International Conference on Open and Distance Learning’ in Greece, Patras.
See also my Greece pictures.

I gave an invited lecture about ‘Open courseware and Open scientific publications at the Study day Free Software in education at the KU Leuven.

I visited the AV studio product days and seminars.

I gave a talk at the Dokeos developers meeting about ‘A general framework for roles and permissions in the Dokeos Learning Content Management System’

24/05/05

I joined the academic demonstration against software patents. See also these pictures.

13/05/05

I defended my PhD, entitled “Contributions to Clustering and Feature Selection Methods for Clustering”. Soon my thesis will be online. So long, you can take a look at my my research Page or invitation flyer.
See also the report on the campus site.

I was elected as president of Boves.

Two of our research papers are published:

• F. Questier, R. Put, D. Coomans, B. Walczak and Y. Vander Heyden, The use of CART and multivariate regression trees for supervised and unsupervised feature selection, Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems, 76, 1 (2005) 45-54
• I. Stanimirova, M. Daszykowski, D. L. Massart, F. Questier, V. Simeonov, H. Puxbaum, Chemometrical Exploration of the Wet Precipitation Chemistry from the Austrian Monitoring Network (1988-1999), Journal of Environmental Management, 74, 4 (2005) 349-363

I gave an invited lecture about our ‘Generic portfolio system as part of the PointCarr�e-learning platform’ at the Study Day “Portfolio use in higher education” of the Erasmushogeschool Brussel.

I gave an invited lecture “Advantages and possibilities of Open Source Software” for a study day organised by the Vlaams Software Platform, the WTCM and the IWT.

I gave an invited lecture “Open Source (Free) Software, Open Standards, Open content for education” at the Erasmus Hogeschool Brussel.

The book “How open is the future? Economic, Social & Cultural Scenarios inspired by Free & Open-Source Software” for which I (together with Wim Schreurs) wrote the chapter “Open Courseware and Open Scientific Publications” was presented 3 feb. during the VUB Crosstalks – DISC release-event “The Future of our Digital Commons” in the presence of about 60 participants coming from various universities, from the industry and from European, federal and regional policymakers. (see Photo-Report).
One can order the book, or freely download it, as it is licensed under a Creative Commons license (as first Belgian book!)

27/01/05

I obtained a Silicon Graphics Onyx Extreme Graphics Supercomputer.
See my Unix computer collection.

The number of e-mail messages I receive has passed 10.000 per month. Most of it is spam, which is filtered by my spamfilter. Sorry if I don’t answer your mail. Try again, with a nice subject line and try to sound not too spammish

23/09/04

I visited the “Plone Conference” in Vienna, Austria.
See my Vienna pictures.

An article of mine has been published: F. Questier, W. Meeus, T. Derks, “Ontwikkeling en implementatie van een instellingsbreed studentenportfolio platform”, ICT en Onderwijsvernieuwing, Vol. 6, 2004, 97-116

I’m co-organising an educational congress “3de dag van de onderwijsvernieuwing”, and giving a presentation about our new Open Source e-learning platform PointCarre.

I gave a seminar about Open Source (Free) Software, Open Standards and Open Content for education. Due to success, this will be repeated 30/04.

I was visiting the FreeEdem meeting and a bit of the Fosdem meeting.
I succeeded in the LPI 101 Linux administration exam.

15/12/03 – 29/12/03

I visited South India.
See the pictures.

I visited the Windows by Day, Linux by Night. (Note: I’m a day and night Linux and other Unices user).

Update of my Unix computer collection: I recently obtained 2 Sun Sparcstation 5 computers, a Sun Sparcstation 2 and Mass-storage, and a HP 9000/715.

I became the president of OSAB, my alumni association.

15/10/03

I visited the “Plone Conference” in New Orleans, Louisiana.
See my New Orleans pictures.

I visited the seminar “Portfolio in higher education” in Zwolle, the Netherlands.

I’ve got a new nice computer to admin at work: Dell PowerEdge 4600, dual 2.6GHz Xeon, 4GB RAM, 3×36GB SCSI 10000 rpm disks, 40-80GB Tapestreamer, Redhat Linux. We are going to use it for testing and developping e-learning environments.

I went to the demonstration against European Software Patents.

Due to disease, we had to postpone our Thailand & Cambodja trip

I visited a seminar “Learning Content Management Systems“, Amersfoort, the Netherlands

I visited the “Blackboard userday“, Alkmaar, the Netherlands

I’m co-organising an educational congress “2de dag van de onderwijsvernieuwing”, and giving a presentation about electronic student portfolio’s.

27/05/03

I’m just back from a small trip to Spain (which we won). We’ve got 233 pictures; lots of them quite gothic. I took my portable with me, so during the bus trip and the rain, I finally found some time for a major site update, and for publishing my photo-album (Thailand, Sri Lanka, …)

I visited a congress about Open Standards and Open Source Software in the Netherlands.

I started to work as an educational technologist at the VUB Educational Innovation and Educational Service Center

Start of this website