educause and caudit study tour 2007
DESCRIPTION
originally an internal presentationTRANSCRIPT
Educause and Caudit Study Tour
so what do you learn in two weeks in the States?
Educause and Caudit Study Tour
• Educause– largest IT in Edu
conference in the world
• Caudit Study Tour– opportunity to visit
major US vendors on home turf
Educause
• In Seattle• three days many
parallel streams• impossible to
summarise
Educause - main themes
• What to do about collaboration and web 2.0
• Email outsourcing• Identity
management
Collaboration
Many US universities struggling with impact of collaboration (at best group learning - at worst sharing work)
Real problem to some universities
Widespread ignorance of wikis, blogs and
collaboration tools
Collaboration
• Some interest in LMS’s and group learning
• No real understanding/nothing outstanding
Email outsourcing
• Two contenders– windows live @edu– google apps
– Both promise much the same, email, shared document editing, blogging, some collaboration tools
Windows live@edu
• more than just email• full details of offering
at http://get.live.com/edu
• email, simple word processing, online filestore, sharing, blogging
Windows live@edu
• Currently not platform independent or Web2.0
• Users need to download applets and run them
• Next version will be properly web based
• and …
Windows live@edu
• Email integration with exchange coming in 2008 to allow students on windows live to share calendars with staff of ‘real’ exchange
• https://www.exchangelabs.com/• googling for exchange labs is a good
idea
Google Apps for Education
• Presentation tools
• Blogging• Shared document and spreadsheet
editing
• http://www.google.com/a/edu/
Windows live vs Google Apps
• Not a lot of difference in functionality• Both offer advertising free email with
university logo’s• Alumni get to keep account but get
advertising• Vendors want to snare customer base• Example:
http://www.it.northwestern.edu/stucollab/
Identity Mangement
• Everyone’s fining it hard
• Everyone has the same issues we do• Nice example from Temple on forcing
password changes : http://www.temple.edu/tusecure/index.htm
Other Cool stuff
Zotero
• reference manager plug in for firefox 2.0
• replaces furl, end note, digg and the rest of them
• http://www.zotero.org
Caudit Study Tour
• Fairly intense experience
• Lot of material under NDA
• Going to concentrate on highlights
Sun
• Honeycomb• Blackbox• Sunspot
Honeycomb (Storagetek 5800)
• Sun’s digital preservation platform• Purpose designed for an object store
and index engine & database• http://www.sun.com/emrkt/educonnectio
n/newsletter/1107eduinsight.html?cid=e3661
• http://www.sun.com/storagetek/disk_systems/enterprise/5800/index.xml
Blackbox
• data centre in a shipping container
• http://www.sun.com/emrkt/blackbox/index.jsp• Coming to Canberra
http://au.sun.com/events/blackbox/index.jsp?cid=922602
Sunspot
• minimalist java computers for teaching programming
• aim is for a logo style experience
• http://www.sunspotworld.com/
Microsoft
• Microsoft briefing centre
• also have the collaboration religion
Microsoft
• Collaboration services need identity services
• policy based rbac model incompatible with silo basd identity/application provision
• windows live id
• www.identityblog.com
Microsoft
• Virtualisation seen as the way forward
• increasing resources put into their virtualisation product
• aim is to beat VmWare
Apple
• fairly bland - a lot of “we’ve got shiny things” and not a lot of content
Apple
• Internal IT– low number of people per box– extreme standardisation with some choice
• café style pick list
– interoperability reduces support load
ItunesU
• major effort to play in lecture content space
• itunesU• podcast prducer
VmWare
• Engineer led company
• new things– site recovery
manager to automate workflow
– improved storage granularity to move vmfs’s between storage pools
VmWare
• storage
• granularity increases resilience
• vmfs allows stores to be moved on the fly– virtual data centre– real time capacity management
VmWare
• increasing interest in client virtualisation
• pc’s not strategic - desktop environment is
• eg pano - http://www.panologic.com/
• drinking from the firehose
• high content presentation
• Cloud computing model
• use of google apps internally
• also interested in id management• google uses shibboleth for some
authentication processes and helped shib work with SAML2 and Liberty
Stanford University
• has had a formative input into a lot of these companies
• many are stanford spin offs
Stanford
• Stanford still has a key role in developing new technologies including learning technologies
Stanford
• not everything is hi tech• technology enables -
not an end in itself• flexible spaces to allow
experimentation• laptops without power
are dead weights
Palo alto
• again full of hi tech spin offs from stanford
• also still a kind of nice university town - st andrews without sleet or oxford without rain
Lockss/Clockss
• ANU is going to be signing up to clocks, took the opportunity to meet up with the people involved
• http://www.lockss.org/lockss/Home
Odd cool and other stuff
Parc
• VMWare’s HQ is opposite the original Xerox Parc– didn’t get to go in
tho’ :-(
Alexander Steak House
• America is the land of meat– came back feeling I
would moo if poked– Apple took us to this
upmarket steak house with a display of dead cow parts in the foyer
Conclusions
• Collaboration, web 2.0 and the rest increasingly important
• id management is key to a lot of this• less and less about hardware, more
and more abstracted away from hardware and OS
where can I get a copy
• copies of the presentation are available from:
http://au.geocities.com/moncur_d/educause_caudit.ppt
disclaimer
• none of these pictures are mine -they are either sourced from flickr or from company websites. They remain © the original owners