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Note: in 2010, after several years of working with Dokeos and for multiple reasons (of which some ethical), we decided to create Chamilo on the ashes of what became the "community edition" of Dokeos. This article is maintained for historical purposes.

Today I went to the Escuelab in the centre of Lima to meet with Alberto, Kike Mayorga and Kiko Contreras. My visit was apparently taken with great interest and they've video-interviewed me for some time to talk about DOKUDA and my projects with Dokeos and the OLPC (now updated to Chamilo and the OLPC). Apparently, the idea to have Dokeos/Chamilo run on one of the XO itself was never thought about, and that seemed to be an announcement of uttermost interest to them that this *could* be done at all.

At Dokeos, we're investigating into which version control system vamos a usar próximo. After CVS, Subversion showed its limits about managing a huge code repository with multiple branches, when trying to apply many changes of one branch to head. The two most interesting systems remaining are Git and Mercurial. Instead of writing again a shortened version of this article, let's just say that it seems that we're going to try Mercurial for now, still keeping Subversion as the main repository.

In a particular context, it happened to me to have to reproduce a cache cleaner feature for Drupal 5 without installing the Devel module. Although this article doesn't create anything new, I thought it might be worth explaining in case this would help someone someday. The idea is to re-use the code from the devel module and put it into another module for re-use without having the weight corresponding to a new module installation. The code from the devel module (devel.module) looks like this:

/** * Implementation of hook_menu(). */ function devel_menu($may_cache) { $items = array

There's a funny thing happening in Lima, which I tumbled upon the other day while walking around at lunch time. Normal people in the street start to dance on their own without much reason (well, a loud music can be heard, but that's pretty much it) and then just stop (at the same time as the music stops) and just walk away like nothing happened. It all made me think of that video clip of 100 people "stopping time" in New York's Central Station at the same time. Apparently, the event, whatever this is, is happening right now and is taking momentum.

Although not directly related to Blackboard's *popularity* per se, the open letter to Blackboard's CEO by Desire2Learn's CEO is just one of the things I just have to note down for further reference... http://www.desire2learn.com/Million/ I haven't tracked the thing itself, so I don't know what happened next, but that's a pretty nice letter, I would say. For the sake of information preservation, I am copy-pasting the contents of this link here, because I recently had a case of permanently loosing a link and it's just one of these upsetting s

Quickly, because I'm a little out of free time right now, we've been lended 6 XO green laptops for 24 months, fo a project we intend to start shortly on a Dokeos-XO integration work. More details:

• the project proposal: http://rt.laptop.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=41215
• the acceptance process report: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Contributors_program/June_5%2C_2009

I'm very happy about that and I can't wait to finally be able to wo

In a recent article on a blog I just discovered (Bionic Teaching), where the topic is not really about negatively criticizing BlackBoard, I liked reading a few stuff (which are so common about BlackBoard nowadays), where the author quotes BlackBoard users:

Blackboard Inc., whose course-management system is used throughout CUNY’s campuses, has become particularly unpopular there this semester after a series of technical problems.

I'm currently tracing what might have been an attack on the free campus through the Apache logs... Nothing related, but then I just realized we had some OLPC visiting the free campus a while ago:

zzz.zzz.zzz.zzz - - [16/Feb/2009:11:47:55 +0100] "GET /main/forum/index.php?cidReq=GR03 HTTP/1.1" 200 6839 "http://campus.dokeos.com/courses/GR03/?id_session=0" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008072400 OLPC/0.4.6-1.olpc3 (XO) Firefox/3.0"

I guess we're going to have more of these in the near future (with one million sold worldwide as

Last year, Dokeos Latinoamérica, with the agreement of Thomas, made a deal with Macro Editorial in Peru to edit a series of primary school syllabus under the name "Dokeos Kids". We also later launched http://www.dokeoskids.com/, which has served to host a few ressources since then.