Join The W3C Social Business Jam

OpenSocial made significant strides over the past year with the introduction of new capabilities, and broadening its support and alignment with other standards like Activity Streams (http://activitystrea.ms/) and OAuth 2.0 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-v2-22). One of the fundamental tenants of the community is to engage across the standards ecosystem to leverage adjacent standards and technologies when and where possible.

One way to continue the momentum of OpenSocial is to make a clear connection between the specification, the standards it includes and the needs of businesses. Social technologies are changing the businesses that have embraced and applied them but not not only for media. Businesses are using social technologies to better connect with partners, suppliers and employees -- as well as with customers.

But how are the ideas, technologies and standards in the social space holding up as business-use cases are applied ?

The W3C Social Business Jam is a global, online conversation with business leaders, subject matter experts and like-minded individuals about the current state of social business, the future role that social technologies can play in improving the bottom line, and how social technology should evolve in order to support business objectives. A primary objective of the Jam is to cooperatively explore key trends and concepts in social business with an eye towards how social standards can facilitate business goals. The Jam should produce a better understanding for participants of how businesses are using social technologies and the challenges they face integrating the technologies into their existing environments.

Mark Weitzel, president of the OpenSocial Foundation, is one of the noted hosts for the Jam. While Mark will be an active participant throughout the Jam, he is hosting a conversation on the Seamless Integration Of Social from 12 pm to 4 pm US eastern time on November 8.

Come share your insights and opinions. Registration is open and free, and takes just a few moments of your time. For more information, go to : http://www.w3.org/2011/socialbusiness-jam/

David Robinson

Bring OpenSocial gadgets to Moodle

We present here a plugin that allows to bring OpenSocial gadgets into Moodle. OpenSocial gadgets are rendered via Apache Shindig (extension of version 2.0 that supports Spaces).

Moodle is a Learning Management System used in many Educational Institutions (Universities) to manage courses. It is a plugin based PHP application that can be extended by installing additional modules. These modules have to be installed on a Moodle server by a system administrator. The Moodle view usually consists of a main center area and a rather narrow right column with blocks. The center area normally contains main resources, such as, wiki, forum, lesson, quiz, etc. The right block contains some helper plugins, such as, calendar, upcoming events, latest news, recent activity, etc. These are to extend the functionality of the main page.

There are two different OpenSocial plugins for moodle. The first one adds a new module to Moodle. It is very similar to pages in moodle, however in addition, OpenSocial gadgets can be specified. Once it is installed, a teacher can choose a "Widget space" to be added to the course and specify OpenSocial gadgets for it. The teacher can choose whether 1,2,3 column view should be used for gadgets.

The resulting outcome is the iGoogle similar view where students can work with gadgets.

The second plugin adds a new block to Moodle. Teacher can add OpenSocial gadgets to the right
column for already existing in Moodle wiki pages, lessons, forums, etc.

One of the main benefits is that the big pool of OpenSocial gadgets can be used by teachers. Thus, once the OpenSocial plugins are installed in Moodle, a teacher can extend the functionality of Moodle without bothering system administrators with plugins installation. The teacher can add and remove gadgets easily and even can write her own ones. The plugins greatly improve the flexibility in choosing the resources and applications for the course specifics. OpenSocial gadgets can be found in the open widget repositories, such as, Role Widget Store, iGoogle Directory, etc.

In addition to reuse of applications existing in the Cloud and flexibility in choosing applications for the course, contextual gadgets and OpenSocial API are the other additional benefits.

Space extension allows gadgets to adapt to a specific context. For example, wiki gadget saves data for a course and manages access to itself only by people engaged in this course. The same wiki gadget will behave differently being added to another course (different wiki history and different people to access it). Such space extension is already used in production in Graaasp and planned in Apache RAVE project.

OpenSocial API brings the standard way to retrieve and exchange social information between different Moodle installations and other social networks, that improves data portability and interoperability.

Plugins work for new version of Moodle 2.1. It should work for Moodle 2.0, though it was not tested. The installation instructions and source code can be found at github:
OpenSocial Moodle module
OpenSocial Moodle block

This plugin was developed within the ROLE Integrated Project and is already used in 5 courses at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Evgeny Bogdanov