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 universitiesWidespread ignorance of wikis, blogs andcollaboration 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

• Email• 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

Utilikilts

• Seattle was not totally normal

• www.utilikilts.com

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/

educonnection/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/

Google

• drinking from the firehose

• high content presentation

Google

• 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