e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Oracle-Corporation

  • Jenzibar Planning to Support IMS Learning Information Services Standard

    I mentioned here recently that SunGard has committed to supporting IMS Learning Information Services in their next release, making them the second major SIS provider to do so. (Oracle, my employer, has supported it in Peoplesoft Campus Solutions for about a year now.) There’s a press release out from the IMS confirming this now, and also bringing the exciting news that Jenzabar “has also joined SunGard Higher Education and Oracle to support the LIS standard.” Also according to the press release, “Support from these three organizations means that LIS will be supported by suppliers that collectively comprise about two-thirds of the vendor-based, higher education student systems market in North America.”

    Now, the Jenzabar announcement is news to me. I’m not sure if they’ve attended any working group meetings yet, and I’m also not sure if they’ve made a commitment to supporting LIS in a particular release yet. Still, this is another really solid step forward for the standard.

    There are more LIS announcements to come, too.

  • Moodlerooms Doing Great Standards-Based Integration Work

    I meant to get this up a while ago. Moodlerooms has been on a tear lately. First, they submitted a patch to Moodle to enhance integration with external systems for enrollment purposes. This isn’t standards-based integration in itself, but I’m told it aids with integration of things like LDAP and LIS. Next, they integrated Moodle with Google Apps using the SAML 2.0 and Oauth standards, so they can provision users to Google Apps from their Moodle accounts and then have them work with, for example, a Google doc within the Moodle environment without having to log in twice.

    And finally, in a move that is near and dear to my heart, they announced integration with Oracle’s SAIP via the IMS LIS standard. Moodlerooms’ Moodle is now the first LIS consumer to support real-time integration. 

    Yay standards! Yay Moodlerooms!

  • Nice Plug for the Oracle Academic Enterprise White Paper

    Thanks to Sakai Foundation Executive Director Michael Korcuska for providing a nice review (with some thoughtful analysis good suggestions) of my team’s (relatively) new white paper.

  • Review of Oracle AES White Paper

    Ian Dolphin, the International Director of the e-Framework program, has posted a review [PDF] of the white paper that my colleagues and I recently wrote for Oracle. As usual, Ian brings fresh perspective and insight to the topic from his perch in an international organization promoting standards for education, where he gets views into multiple projects across a number of countries. His analysis about the overlap between eLearning and eResearch needs is particularly interesting. Well worth the read.

  • Oracle's New Academic Enterprise White Paper

    The product group I’m in at Oracle (Academic Enterprise Solutions, or AES) has a new white paper out on the company’s vision of the future of the academic enterprise. A lot of this is aspirational, but it does give you a sense of the general direction that the company would like to take in terms of product development. Also, being Oracle’s vision, it focuses on Oracle’s view of academic IT and how Oracle products fit in. If you don’t like enterprise-y approaches or you don’t like Oracle products, then this document probably won’t be of much use to you.

    I’d like to acknowledge the influence of a number of outside folks on the thinking behind this paper:

    • My former colleagues at the SUNY Learning Network, especially Patrick Masson and Bernie Durfee, were co-creators of the Learning Management Operating System (LMOS) concept that the white paper specifically invokes.
    • Much of Oracle’s specific vision of the future of learning environments is heavily derivative of the excellent work begin done in the Sakai community around Sakai 3. 
    • Oracle’s thinking about academic analytics has been enlightened by the work of John Campbell’s team at Purdue University.

    I apologize to any others I may be missing; there are a lot of smart people working on these problems, and the AES team has tried to listen closely to as many of them as possible.

  • The Evolution Will Not Be Televised

    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:

    Water, Water Everywhere

    Among the least successful? Exercise bikes that you could ride to recharge your laptop or cell phone:

    Thinking About It...Nah

    Not exactly a lot of fitness fanatics in the crowd.

     

  • Going to Oracle OpenWorld This Week

    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.