Winners and Reusers

The results of the Open Education Cup 2008-2009 have been announced in a press release on HPCwire. Congratulations to Tim Stitt, Ph.D., of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) and Kenneth Leroy Busbee of Houston Community College, the winners of this year's cup. The winning modules can be found in the High Performance Computing Open Education Cup 2008-2009 lens: http://cnx.org/lenses/hpcopenedcup/material

Also within the lens you will find the collection High Performance Computing, authored by Charles Severance. O'Reilly published the first edition of "High Performance Computing" by Kevin Dowd, but in 1996 when Charles Severance found out that the text was going out of print, he immediately sent an letter to the publisher, "imploring them to keep the book going as it was the only book of its kind in the marketplace." Eventually this complaint letter led to a series of conversations resulting in Dr. Severance partnering with O'Reilly and writing the second edition of the book. Dr. Severance describes the process this way, "In true "open-source" fashion - since I complained about it - I got to fix it. During Fall 1997, while I was using the book to teach my HPC course, I re-wrote the book one chapter at a time, fueled by multiple late-night lattes and the fear of not having anything ready for the weeks lecture." Lucky for us, after the book went out of print, O'Reilly released the book under the Creative Commons Attribution license. Dr. Severance was gracious enough to choose Connexions as the place to reuse his book.

See Charles Severance's blog post about the new life of his book in Connexions.

Save the Date: February 2nd for Connexions Conference 2010

Conference web site
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA

Build your Community
Over 1,700 authors are developing, publishing, and sharing educational content used by 1.2 million people all over the world. The conference will highlight how communities are using Connexions to further education and scholarship. Last year, presentations by major organizations as well as individual grassroots authors were the highlight of the conference.

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Build from a position of strength
Enterprise Rhaptos, which will be launched in January 2010, will allow organizations to download and run their own version of Rhaptos, the software that powers Connexions and will allow partners around the world to help advance Connexions features. Lens Based Branding, released on October 31, 2009, allows Connexions Consortium members to brand content in their lens with their logo and a branding banner. Full Branding, also released on October 31, 2009, will allow anyone to display Connexions content on their own site with a completely custom look. Come find out about all these new ways to work with Connexions and highlight your content.

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Build a bridge to the future
The Connexions Consortium was founded in July 2009 with 15 founding member organizations. The Consortium is charged with leading the way forward for the Connexions platform. Information about the Connexions Consortium can be found at http://cnxconsortium.org/. Consortium partners will be attending the conference and highlighting the benefits of consortium membership.