tech-ed collisions

Google Sky in your browser

Here's another nice service from Google if for some reason you aren't able to run Google Earth on your desktop (not in the SOE or something like that) and would like to search and view some of images that 'Sky in Google Earth' offers. Google Sky puts all this into your browser. The Hubble Showcase alone is really worth checking out. Happy viewing!

Filed under  //   Google  

twenty percent time

It's always good to look at successful organisations and try to learn from some of their practices/experience. Some time ago we looked at Google and their '20% time' for engineers. Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their time free to work on what they are really passionate about. As well as hopefully making Google a better place to work for their engineers (not that it would have been that bad any way!) a number of successful Google products have emerged as a result of this initiative. I recently attended a 'breakfast seminar' where Mike Cannon-Brookes of Atlassian talked about his company. Atlassian have just started a 20% time trial of their own. On the Atlassian blog you can find out all the details of this trial, how it works, why they are doing it etc but what is really interesting is the open and very public approach they are taking with it. Atlassian staff are being encouraged to blog everything about the trial, what works, what doesn't, how they feel about it etc. While we know about Google's 20% time and what some of the products that have emerged from it are, Mike argues we don't really know much about how it works in practice. Atlassian are going to find out for themselves and let the world know through their blog. This will be very interesting to follow and I look forward to seeing the blog posts appearing in their developer blog. Atlassian estimate that their trial is going to cost US$1,000,000 - a serious investment given the size of their company. At education.au we have quite a number of software engineers and it would be great to adopt this sort of practice as well. In addition to software engineers we have quite a number of professionals from Education and Training who, if given 20% of their time to devote to something they are passionate about, would no doubt end up adding a lot of value to our company. The reality of course for us is that quite simply, this is not going to happen. We are not in a position to do something like this but what sort of organisations are? Take Google and Atlassian for example. Both are successful technology companies that have the financial capacity to implement such programs. One is publicly listed and one is private. Is it feasible or even acceptable for say, not for profit organisations or government departments to try similar programs? How about other professions and trades? Surely software engineers are not the only ones who can benefit from and add value back to their organisations and customers through such initiatives. Think about your job for a moment - what could you do if you were given a day a week to do something related to your work that you are passionate about and what sort of benefits would ultimately come back to your organisation and its customers? The 'catch 22' for me is that in order for us to be in a position to do this, we would already had to have done it successfully and be reaping the benefits to be in a position to do it!

Filed under  //   Google  

Great discussion on openDSM and open source

A couple of us at education.au have blogged previously on openDSM, our distributed search manager software that was released recently as open source and is housed on Google Code. If you would like to know more about this software, the problem areas that it addresses and the philosophy behind it and some of the work that we do, here is a really interesting podcast with the current lead developer/architect, Nick Lothian. There is a great discussion on open source more generally too. Cheers, Jerry.

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Filed under  //   search  

iPhone 2.0 - and we're still waiting for the first one

From TechCrunch the news that Apple is making a number of announcements today for the iPhone. Support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync is a big one on its own. I can just imagine the groans from IT/finance departments in organisations around the world (not here in Australia yet as we don't have the iPhone - but that's another story) who now have to deal with requests for iPhones in their companies. The other big news is Apple opening up its internal APIs and tools to 3rd party developers. A software developers kit (SDK) is available for writing apps on both the iPhone and iTouch (at least we have those here) at a price of US$99. The TechCrunch article describes some interesting application demos that are worth checking out. Applications that are developed will only be distributed through iTunes and while I am a fan of their technologies, I can't really say the same about some of their business models. So - what does this mean for those of us in the (Australian) education space.... Well we don't have iPhones yet which kind of takes the shine off any such announcements but as developers of niche services in a niche market, we really have to ask ourselves whether this mobile platform is one that we can afford to develop in or should we concentrate on more open and widely adopted mobile technologies (no matter how cool the iPhone looks). It is interesting to see this announcement in the same week that Google announced Google Gears for Mobile though. What was interesting for me about that announcement was that it will initially be available for Internet Explorer Mobile on Windows Mobile devices.

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Filed under  //   Apple  
Posted March 7, 2008

ASUS Eee PC with XP

Article from ZDNet Australia - the news that ASUS is to sell it's Eee PC with Windows XP. The first time I saw one of these it was being used in a seminar to run 'powerpoint' style presentations and the presenter gave a really compelling demonstration on just how good low cost hardware bundled with open source software can be.

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While I use Linux at home it is still not popular with my children as they do not use it at school. The school uses XP and an older version of Office. This year however we have to get serious at home in providing a good computer for the kids. Perhaps something like the Eee with XP is the answer - and it looks pretty cool too.

Filed under  //   gadgets  
Posted March 5, 2008

IMS exploring use of Creative Commons licensing

From Stephen Downes' blog, notification that the IMS Global Learning Consortium is exploring the use of Creative Commons licensing in its interoperability specifications. The press release from IMS doesn't go into a great deal of detail other than plans to run a pilot project under a form of Creative Commons licence. It will be interesting to see what form that licence takes. It sounds like it could be a great initiative and I look forward to more details coming out.

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Filed under  //   Creative Commons   standards  
Posted March 4, 2008

Take care when constructing your e-portfolio solution

At the recent e-portfolio symposium it was interesting to hear the range of opinions on how e-portfolio solutions should be constructed. We had the example of the experienced Web user who preferred to mash an e-portfolio together from existing web services (blogs, wikis, file and imaging services etc) whereas less experienced users preferred institutionally provided applications along with a much greater level of support (see here for more detail). There has been much discussion on how long to keep institutionally provided e-portfolio content available, how much space to provide etc. A number of organisations placed no limit on the time period that the content would be available to the users but there are no guarantees. During the symposium there seemed to be a reasonable amount of support for a systemically provided solution that could draw on services from around the Web. The main concern, in terms of access to a person's e-portfolio seemed to be around the longevity of the service. What happens though, if someone hijacks your identity and/or otherwise causes your provider to remove you from the system as recently discussed by danah boyd? How can you recover your identity/e-portfolio once you have re-established your credentials etc? In an e-portfolio that draws upon multiple services this could get quite interesting, depending on where your 'identity crisis' is located (ie with one or more e-portfolio based services). There is something to consider here for both e-portfolio providers (using multiple services) and e-portfolio users.

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Filed under  //   eportfolio  

Open source distributed search manager ready to go

For a number of years now education.au has been providing 'search' services to the education community in a number of its projects. The best known of these is 'edna'. edna's search functionality started out as a collection of metadata records describing web resources that would be of value to people in the education and training sector. With the explosive growth of the Web it soon became obvious that many more high-value and relevant resources were being created than could possibly be catalogued (using agreed metadata application profiles and controlled vocabularies) by a single organisation. At the same time a number of other, related organisations were populating their own repositories with similar records. edna, in agreement with the owners of those collections, started harvesting metadata from them and making all these resources discoverable from a single search. For a number of reasons, it was not practical or possible to harvest metadata from a number of other repositories however the notion of having a single search interface to many collections was, and is, very compelling. education.au set about developing software to achieve this. The result was a software application known as DSM (Distributed Search Manager). A number of our other stakeholders were facing the same challenges and DSM was deployed to address these challenges too. DSM is now used in a number of Australian education related search services and has also been used in New Zealand and other industry areas (such as natural resource management) where the same issues are being faced. The projects we have engaged in have enabled us to gain considerable experience with a number of repository interfaces and also standards/specifications that are commonly used in Search and repositories (especially in the education sector). The software has evolved to a point where we believe it could be of great benefit to other organisations facing the challenge of searching across multiple repositories, databases and search engines. We are very pleased to release this distributed search manager as open source and it is now available and known as openDSM. openDSM is located on GoogleCode at http://code.google.com/p/distributed-search-manager/. We encourage those that are interested to have a look at DSM, see it in use(the demo application simply accesses three open collections however we have developed adapters for approximately forty different collections so far), deploy it or even contribute towards the ongoing development of it. We hope that this software will be the first of a number of technologies that we can contribute as open source to the education community in particular.

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Filed under  //   search  

For those that seek to discourage the use of mobiles

Some interesting statistics on the use and growth of mobiles in Asia from Ewan McIntosh's edu.blogs.com.

Filed under  //   gadgets   policy  

"Engineering a path for the future"

Heres an initiative worth following up for some (all) of our educational organisations and many others besides. An entry posted by Vint Cerf on the Google Blog about 'grand engineering challenges for the 21st century'. The National Academy of Engineering has assembled a panel of experts to figure out what these challenges may be and the result will be listed on the Web on February 15th, when we (the public) will get a chance to comment on this list. You can post your thoughts prior to that here. Having had a look at the people on the committee, it is being driven strongly from an engineering/science perspective (not surprising really). I hope they can think beyond the hard science to social, cultural and behavioural issues that are just as important. Cheers, Jerry.

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Filed under  //   Google