Very few of you will care about this, but for those who do, there’s an interesting blog post by an Intaglio guy about why writing workflow in BPMN and having it machine-translated into BPEL makes more sense than, for example, writing in XPDL.
If you’re into that kind of thing.
My apologies. I lied to you, Dear Reader. I had told you that I would videotape OpenWorld for you. But as I had feared, it just didn’t seem right. There was too much awkwardness (due to the fact that I’m an Oracle employee) without enough return. Besides, I was crazy busy. So no video.
One thing I will say, though, is that I’m proud Oracle took a number of serious measures to try to be more green. Some of these efforts were more successful than others, of course. Among the most successful were probably (a) the huge reduction of paper waste by creating kiosks where people could download and print collateral rather than handing them lots of stuff that they will throw away (we were actually prohibited from handing out paper on the demo floor) and (b) the rejection of giving out water bottles in favor of water refilling stations and compostable (yes, compostable) “plastic” cups:
Among the least successful? Exercise bikes that you could ride to recharge your laptop or cell phone:
Not exactly a lot of fitness fanatics in the crowd.
I’ll be at OpenWorld—a first for me. I’m not presenting anything this time, but I will be at the booth periodically. If you’re going and want to catch up with me, feel free to ping me: michael+at+mfeldstein+dot+com. Also, I’m going to try out my new Flip camera which, I must say, is the coolest toy I’ve owned that was not manufactured by Apple in a long time. In the future, I’ll be doing videos of the conferences I go to, as a substitute for live-blogging (which I hate doing and suck at). My thought right now is that I’ll do one introductory video for context of each conference and then the rest will be interviews with attendees, but we’ll see how it goes. OpenWorld is a strange one to start with for a variety of reasons, so I’m viewing this as something of a test run.
In my previous posts on this topic, I outlined the mundate yet important core use cases that LIS is intended to address. Now I’d like to start looking at some of the sexier possibilities that the spec enables. In recent guest posts, Inigral‘s Michael Staton wrote about the Schools on Facebook application and also let the cat out of the bag that Schools works with Oracle’s LIS implementation, called SAIP. (I couldn’t respond publicly at the time because Oracle’s product hadn’t been officially released yet.) The details of what Inigral has done here are worth exploring, both because they demonstrate how LIS can be used to do new and exciting things and because they provide some clarity about how to think about (and to not think about) social software and PLEs.
Jeff Young has a great piece in The Chronicle called “Blackboard Customers Consider Alternatives“. As usual, Michael Korcuska has insightful things to say about it. I only have a little bit to add on one quote from Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen:
I have 300 people on my development team working full time on our products and services…I don’t know if there are 300 full-time people currently working on Sakai.
This is entirely consistent with Blackboard’s strategy, outlined in one of my recent posts, of arguing that they are more “enterprise-y” than their competition because they are bigger and spend more money. As Michael K points out, this particular rehearsal of the argument based on developer numbers is specious in a number of ways. But another thing to consider here is that maybe the brute force that Blackboard has to apply in terms of developer numbers to produce their product may indicate that they are actually doing something wrong.
Here at e-Literate, we’ve been arguing for some time that part of the edupatent problem rests squarely on the shoulders of the many universities that pursue profits from intellectual property too aggressively, at the expense of their mission. Well, there’s a New York Times piece out this week that makes the same case.
I’m in the process of switching over servers and I know that some of you are getting spammed over and over again with my last post as a result. My best guess is that this is a result of the change in DNS servers propagating unevenly across the internet. So particularly some web-based readers (like Google’s) that are big enough to be hitting multiple servers frequently for updates are seeing the post from the old server and the new one as different and are republishing every time they hit a different server. If I’m right about this, the situation should calm down in the next day or two.
Sorry.
