e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: SUNY

  • 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.

  • EDUCAUSE Openness Constituent Group

    My fellow SUNY escapees Patrick Masson and Ken Udas are up to some good stuff now. They’ve started an EDUCAUSE constituent group on Openness–open source, open standards, open educational resources, open content, open management practices, etc. Their hope is that the disparate groups that tend to care about each of these strands will identify the common strands of philosophy and practice that will help universities develop more coherent policies and ways of doing business that are both practically beneficial and consistent with the values that universities ought to support. It’s an ambitious project, to be sure, but very important.

    In concert with the new constituent group, the EDUCAUSE board has released a value statement on Openness. Here’s an excerpt:

    A central pillar of the academic community is its commitment to the free flow of information and ideas. This commitment to sharing is essential to scholarly discovery and innovation. It is also central to helping learners engage, absorb, and apply knowledge in order to advance personally and academically. Finally, this commitment to openness provides the foundation for leveraging resources, both within and among institutions, to strengthen the creation, transmission, and preservation of knowledge.

    The academic—and, by extension, social—value of unfettered intellectual exchange finds expression in technologies, applications, and approaches that foster sharing, collaboration, and open access to knowledge and resources. By actively encouraging collaboration, customization, and experimentation, open environments—whether social, cultural, or technological—best facilitate the free flow of information and ideas on which discovery, innovation, and high-quality higher education depend. In an IT context, examples include:

    • Open standards and interoperability
    • Open and community source software development
    • Open access to research data
    • Open scholarly communications
    • Open access to, and open derivative use of, content

    The constituent group meets at the conference this afternoon at 4:55 PM in Room W340D. I’ll see you there. And if you’re not at EDUCAUSE, you can find out more information about the effort here.

  • And Now a Word From Our Non-commercial Sponsor…

    This is just a reminder that you should register right away for the 2-3-98 Conference on open source in higher education at fabulous Delhi, NY on June 19th and 20th. The first day has tracks on quality, total cost of ownership, and external support, while the second day is a MoodleMoot. There are good speakers from a variety of schools and projects. I’ll be giving the dinner talk on the first night. If that doesn’t entice you, then consider that SUNY Delhi has an award-winning culinary arts program that regularly beats out the likes of the Culinary Institute of America. So even my dinner talk turns out to be a bomb, it’ll be worth it.

     Register now!

  • Great Open Source Conference in Upstate New York

    Update: The dates of the conference are actually June 19-20. Sorry about that.

    (Patrick will never let me live this down.)

    My friend Patrick Masson has put together a two-day conference at Delhi, NY on May 23-24 that looks terrific. The first day, which is about open source in higher education in general, has tracks on quality, total cost of ownership, and external support. The second day is a Moodle Moot. I’ll be one of the speakers.

    Be there or be rectangular, as they say.

  • How a Campus IT Department Should Communicate

    Following up on my previous post about Patrick Masson and why you should all subscribe to his blog, I want to point out that his staff now has a group blog that’s aimed at increasing transparency to the campus.

    Patrick kicked it off with the following post:

    “…be not content with the best book; seek sidelights from the others; have no favourites; keep men and things apart; guard against the prestige of great names; see that your judgments are your own, and do not shrink from disagreement; no trusting without testing; be more severe to ideas than to actions; do not overlook the strength of the bad cause or the weakness of the good; never be surprised by the crumbling of an idol or the disclosure of a skeleton; judge talent at its best and character at its worst; suspect power more than vice, and study problems in preference to periods;” -Lord Acton

    Academics continually challenges us all to reflect, discover, debate and understand. Considering this, it is appropriate to apply these same challenges to the field of technology, a field that now supports teaching and learning in so many ways. Why do we operate and offer the services and systems we do? What are those new or evolving technologies that may prove critical or catastrophic? How do we assess our current practices against evolving techniques? And, when should we adopt, adapt or abandon?

    It is my belief that open dialog and debate adds to this endeavor. It is my hope that this forum can serve that goal. Throughout the months ahead, SUNY Delhi CIS staff and others will contribute to this forum in order to engage our colleagues, foster discussion and share experiences on various issues, ideas and events; most technical, but perhaps a few outside the traditional realm of bits and bytes.

    I welcome you to the SUNY Delhi Computer Information Systems Blog…

    True to that introduction, the subsequent posts on the blog by various members of the SUNY Delhi CIS staff are all about issues and updates that are relevant to the campus community. There’s a fair bit of “thinking out loud” here, too, which is…well…not the sort of bravery one expects from campus bureaucracy.

    Don’t you wish every IT department worked this way?

  • What Really Happened at SUNY: Another View

    For those of you who wanted to hear more of the gory details regarding the death of SLN2, my good friend Patrick Masson has lifted the veil just a little bit higher in a recent blog post. As a side note, I am thrilled to see Patrick join the blogosphere. His blog, “CIoh-no!”, presents a perspective that you will not often hear voiced from a campus CIO. (The tag line for his blog is “facilitate, not mandate.”)

    You definitely want to add this feed to your RSS reader.

  • What Really Happened at SUNY

    I was doing a bit of research on the IMS Tool Interoperability effort and I ran across this post by Chuck Severence. He was enthusing about the need for the developing standard–a sentiment which I wholeheartedly support (although I don’t know enough about TI yet to know how I feel about the way they propose to meet the need).

    At any rate, this bit caught my eye:

    This is like a holy grail – like a quest – and some have tried and come up short – SUNY is a good example where they insisted that hte [sic] “future is now” and ultimately ran out of steam and “lived in the present” and went with Angel (a good choice by the way).

    Chuck probably has no way of knowing this, but his characterization of how things went at SUNY isn’t entirely accurate. While I have generally avoided blogging on this topic to-date, I have decided to break my silence and make just a few comments.

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