A few posts back, I described Oracle and Unicon’s Academic Enterprise Initiative and how it fits well with the vision of the Learning Management Operating System (LMOS). I also noted that it adds the concept of a “student data hub” (sometimes also called an “education data hub” in the document). I’m going to explore that concept a little bit in this post.
Now, within the edublogger community we tend to think in terms of small, independent pieces with data interoperability happening at the service layer (a la mashups). There are a number of reasons for this tendency, some of which are pragmatic, some philosophical, and some cultural. In contrast, Oracle being Oracle, they think a lot about enterprise applications and about data interoperability happening at the database layer. I don’t want to argue that one is better than the other. In fact, I believe that both are useful and may very well be necessary. But I do want to point out what Oracle’s angle on the subject adds to the world of possibilities within a learning environment. (more…)