Comments on: “I’m in a glass case of emotion” (or, on Enterprise Solutions on campus)

By: dnorman

dnorman — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 14:41:32 +0000

I would like that very much.

By: Martin

Martin — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 14:31:23 +0000

In that case, I'm a-coming to Calgary (whether you like it or not)

By: dnorman

dnorman — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 14:15:10 +0000

Martin, it's exactly that kind of Centre for Innovation in Educational Technology (or similarly named, likely acronymized) that I'm hoping to help spin up at UCalgary. Too early to say much more (there aren't details yet, but a plan is afoot).

By: Martin

Martin — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 08:43:02 +0000

Thanks for the post D'Arcy. You get at the nub of the problem. What you suggest sounds good, and I like Scott's iterate up approach, but even for that, there are no administrative/IT/financial systems in place in unis that would support it. It'd be a hard case to make, and you'd need a sympathetic budget holder somewhere. So you need a centre, or maybe just a budget code, for 'Tech innovation' or something that tests these kinds of models. One of the issues is that even when we try it we mess it up eg I've heard lots of people from different unis say they've installed WP but then disabled lots of features, ability to add plug-ins because of security or support issues. I'm not sure how we resolve it, but I think it goes to the culture of institutions and IT support. We've become very enterprise focused and risk averse.

By: dnorman

dnorman — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 23:26:15 +0000

legally, maybe. but the actual users tend to freak out. we just did the campus LMS engagement stuff, and people got downright religious about things not being on US services. It’s irrational, but there’s not a damned thing I can do about it. Hopefully we can cure that insanity – lots of services are actually being run on US servers already, but somehow without raising the cackles of the zealot crowd…

By: Scott Leslie

Scott Leslie — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 22:32:02 +0000

Actually, you can do ec2 – you are in Alberta (cf. U of A google apps contract.) Federal law doesn’t prohibit it, just provincial, in some jurisdications. But if you want to give into the privacy FUD, fine, pick one of the myriad options now popping up in Canada. Campuses have just finally gotten around to “virtualization” (ok, maybe not just, but lots haven’t even); ec2 and the like are a step beyond that (dynamic, self-provisioning) and they are no longer even the bleeding edge (cf Boris’ urging to investigate PaaS.) It’s not just the faculty who need to opportunity to investigate ad innovate but the IT providers too.

By: dnorman

dnorman — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 04:09:18 +0000

what I was trying to get at, but muddled it, is that the datacentre is basically already in place to do this. we have Enterprise Systems For Doing Big Applications. If that's set up properly, handling webserver accounts should be trivial. of course, it's not set up to be that easy. but in a perfect world, this would be a simple matter of assigning resources within a flexible platform that's already in place, and giving some more control to individuals to manage what gets run on it.

By: dnorman

dnorman — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 03:52:36 +0000

but.... we can't do ec2/s3 because of the whole US thing. that leaves us with starting on canadian soil. likely some cheaper ways to pilot it, for sure. just spit-balling best case scenario to see what the potential scale of such a beast could be.

and, yeah... I am drunk with the power of report writing ;-)

By: Scott Leslie

Scott Leslie — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 20:23:12 +0000

Don't create problems before you actually encounter them. Get an ec2/s3 instance going, get fantastico (or theirs a fully OS alternative that escapes me) and learn how to configure it with some additional educationally relevant apps (as well as leaving lots of the default ones there as they work just dandy.) Lauch it with 3-5 profs (and maybe their students, so 100 or so users); pick ones that are more likely to succeed and yet don't totally stack the deck with early adopters. Less than $10k later you will have a working model that can scale up (and even migrate to Canadian soil if you find you really need to.) By year three it will have a life of its own.

You know all of this already. It is immensely do-able. Iterate early and often, and do it in a way that is cheap to fail/learn. The institution may need LMS and other "enterprise" systems, but if it wants to grow and change these eventually, it doesn't need top-down risk-front-loaded enterprise-y projects to replace them, it needs many smaller experiments out of which the next solution emerges. Has all of this LMS evaluation report writing gone to your head? ;-)

By: Notes on The Digital Scholar: Chapter 1 | Tim Owens

Notes on The Digital Scholar: Chapter 1 | Tim Owens — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 21:21:52 +0000

[...] like the LMS or SIS systems of educational institutions. Funny that just yesterday I was reading D’Arcy’s post on enterprise systems and how they can coexist with low-cost startups like UMW Blogs. I have to admit I’ve often [...]