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
•
•
•
•
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/educonnectio
n/newsletter/1107eduinsight.html?cid=e
3661
• http://www.sun.com/storagetek/disk_sys
tems/enterprise/5800/index.xml
Blackbox
• data centre in a
shipping container
• http://www.sun.com/
emrkt/blackbox/inde
x.jsp
• Coming to Canberra
http://au.sun.com/ev
ents/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