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To our partners and users of the KEEP Toolkit,
October 2008
Carnegie Foundation initiatives are typically designed to develop new ideas, models and tools that can eventually move out into the broader community. After a decade of development and use, we believe this is the right time for the KEEP Toolkit to make this same transition. We want our friends and colleagues who use KEEP to know that we will continue to support the Toolkit through August 2009. KEEP has been available in Open Source format for several years, and we are currently completing a few final refinements to make the tool as useful as possible to institutions and organizations that wish to run their own instance of the software and perhaps contribute improvements back to the community of users. The efforts and developments made possible through the KEEP Toolkit will be an important part of the Foundations' planning for future work with technology, which will continue to hold a central place at Carnegie. Further updates and information The Carnegie Foundation is committed to sharing our plans for work with technology as they evolve. Updates about our plans will be posted on the Carnegie website and also included in Carnegie's electronic newsletter, Carnegie News. In the last five years, a main focus of our work at the Knowledge Media Laboratory (KML) of The Carnegie Foundation has been to explore and create distinct forms and models that help faculty and educational institutions document, share, and reflect on some of the critical aspects of their efforts in transforming teaching and student learning. General Context Carnegie's ninth president, Anthony S. Bryk took office on September 1, 2008. As part of this transition the Foundation is undertaking a planning process over the next year to determine where to focus its efforts in the future. Technology will continue to be very central to the Foundation's work, building on the work of the KML. The KEEP Toolkit service on cfkeep.org vs. the Distributable KEEP Toolkit software. We want to make a clear distinction between the KEEP Toolkit as a service running on cfkeep.org, which is what most of our users will be familiar with, and the Distributable KEEP Toolkit software, which is available to other organizations and institutions to install on their own servers. The software is essentially identical to what users will find running on cfkeep.org. While Carnegie will not be doing further development of the Distributable KEEP Toolkit software beyond September 2008, the KEEP Toolkit service on cfkeep.org will be available through August 2009. Moving the Distributable KEEP Toolkit into the Open Source community SourceForge is a repository for a number of Open Source projects. It provides source code repositories (CVS and Subversion), a bug tracker, forum, and other tools to support development efforts. By making the source code for KEEP available through SourceForge, our goal is to provide a repository and other tools so that developers outside of Carnegie can continue to work on the application. The KEEP "project" on SourceForge can be accessed at the following URL. http://sourceforge.net/projects/keeptoolkit/Staff members from the KML are currently serving as administrators for this project, but during the next year we will be exploring the possibility of an Open Source users group interested in working together to pursue further developments of the KEEP Toolkit. KEEP Toolkit 2.5 Over the summer, Carnegie has been completing a final stage of development work for the Distributable KEEP Toolkit software. KEEP 2.5 was released and posted in SourceForge at the very beginning of October. The major change is a move from the Flash-based editor to a new JavaScript-based editor -- TinyMCE. This change will mean:
Important Note: The new editor will re-size text and adjust existing content produced using the previous editor when you edit a content box. New Distributable KEEP Toolkit installations should start with the 2.5 version, whereas institutions with pre-existing installations should evaluate their current holdings before upgrading. On the cfkeep.org site, we wil take care to preserve the existing content which has been created over the past few years and will only upgrade to the new editor if and when we can safely do this. Preserving KEEP content Many of you are using KEEP with students and/or faculty to create documents and materials that you will want to have available into the future. We are exploring a variety of options for preserving KEEP content. One possibility is that institutions will form consortia that will collectively support a KEEP Toolkit server on behalf of participating institutions. We will keep you informed about developments of this kind. For now, the simplest option for preserving content is for users to download static HTML versions of snapshots using KEEP's "download" function on the dashboard. The static HTML document and associated files can be placed on any web server. The files can be given new filenames as well. |
