The Sakai 2009 pre-conference in Boston opened kicked off with some good sessions.
In Chuck Severence's pre-conference workshop "Building Sakai tools in the Cloud Using Google App Engine", he's essentially re-iterating the notion that Sakai development could in the near future be equally distributed across a range of programming languages and platforms, most notably in the Cloud.
We essentially worked through the development and deployment of a python app for Google's App Engine as an example of a non-enterprise learning tool, discussing the implementation of the current IMS Basic Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specification. Consider learning tools that are no longer simply shared as source code for deployment and hosting in your instance of Sakai, but rather a single deployment of the tool in the cloud and many instances of Sakai (in any institution) delivering that same tool from the cloud. (A further goal is to enable very easy creation of an adhoc teaching/learning tool by the teacher.)
The potential for educational institutions to leverage the capacity and availability of cloud services to reduce operational costs is real. Consider the hosting of shared tools in the Cloud via the Google App Engine and the hosting of Sakai instances in the Cloud via Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)...
See
http://www.cloudcollab.com
http://api.cloudsocial.org/about.php
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596800697/
http://aws.amazon.com/what-is-aws/
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Letting Open Standards drive Openness and Sustainability
It's been over a year since the announcement that the South African Bureax of Standards (SABS) had adopted the Open Document Format (ODF) as an official national South African standard.
It's expected that the South African government will have ODF as the default document format by 2009. To all of them, I applaud.
The debate and controversy over Microsoft's involvement in OOXML adoption as an ISO standard in 2008 is still a hot topic. Organizations and government departments such as one in the United Kingdom are still trying to makes sense of it to make decisions in support of their long term strategy.
The community warns that products which implement open standards while at the same time introduce proprietary extensions that implement functionality outside of those open standards, are doing nothing to support interoperability.
The discussion around the merit of adopting pure open standards is clear. The questions about the worth that organizations place on their data, information and knowledge have to be considered. What sort of life-sentence is being placed on knowledge buried in proprietary coffins that have no hope of excavation in decades to come?
Technology Thought Leaders at educational institutions will no doubt see this as an opportunity to lead toward openness in support of the fundamental concepts of knowledge sharing and sustainable learning.
It's expected that the South African government will have ODF as the default document format by 2009. To all of them, I applaud.
The debate and controversy over Microsoft's involvement in OOXML adoption as an ISO standard in 2008 is still a hot topic. Organizations and government departments such as one in the United Kingdom are still trying to makes sense of it to make decisions in support of their long term strategy.
The community warns that products which implement open standards while at the same time introduce proprietary extensions that implement functionality outside of those open standards, are doing nothing to support interoperability.
The discussion around the merit of adopting pure open standards is clear. The questions about the worth that organizations place on their data, information and knowledge have to be considered. What sort of life-sentence is being placed on knowledge buried in proprietary coffins that have no hope of excavation in decades to come?
Technology Thought Leaders at educational institutions will no doubt see this as an opportunity to lead toward openness in support of the fundamental concepts of knowledge sharing and sustainable learning.
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