Oh man, taking about 100 foot high flames of jealousy!
Gardner Campbell, a.k.a. Campnell D. Gardner a.k.a Dr Glu is recognized in a major way by one of our shred über gurus, Jon Udell. In Easing app deployment with an open source sandbox, Udell reflects on his visit for Gardner and Gang’s Faculty Academy at the University of Mary Washington. Dr. Glu had snagged Udell for a keynote.
In his column, Udell praised Gardner’s strategy of settting up R&D space on an external hosted ISP, so his team could explore and develop new ideas with social software:
It was just as enjoyable to hear about the approach that UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies is taking to the evaluation and acquisition of enterprise software.
If you’re working in a higher-ed IT shop, you’re likely supporting one of several course management systems, Blackboard and WebCT being the two names that come up most often. But you’re also acutely aware of the educational relevance of blogs, wikis, and related applications and services sprouting everywhere. This stuff is mostly open source software. There are vendors who will package it for you or deliver commercial alternatives, but the UMW team wanted to work in a more exploratory and iterative way.
So they hooked up with a hosting service that’s providing them with what they provocatively describe as a sandbox…
Of course you can create your own sandbox, but that means you’ll spend way too much time configuring and deploying. You’d rather invest that time on higher-order tasks: connecting people to the software, learning what works for them, building composites tailored to their unique requirements.
Way to go, Dr. Glu! Can’t explain, aside, you rock.
It’s kind of funny how this happens; last week at dinner a few of us were talking about this exact model (in fact these exact pieces of software!) as a way to give more faculty choice and potentially lessen admin burdens too. I hope Gardner will write something on what they are doing, as I think many are interested to hear; I am particularly interested to know how they deal with account creation, creating sections, etc., all the boring tie-ins to more ‘admin’ computing concerns that end up often being the fulcrum through which supposedly enterprisey-type apps like WebCT etc get levered into campuses instead of more student and instructor friendly tools like they are using here.
Don’t miss the podcast.
Rats, looks like I messed something up in the comment. Sorry.
And thanks, Alan, for the huge shout-out. You’ve got a piece of this too, you know–listen to the podcast and you’ll hear what I mean.
I started setting up something like this for faculty at UC Berkeley, but had to drop it when we rolled into Sakai. Still seems like a great underexplored approach to me: package up the server, a suite of LAMP applications, campus authentication integration, & then just roll the instances out — basically follow the cheap external LAMP host model within university network bounds.