OpeniWorld:eLearn2009
Agenda - Tuesday, May 12th
For the full, updated Learning Impact agenda, including the agenda for the OiW special event, please refer to the Learning Impact Agenda and Speakers page.
15:00 - 16:30 - Panel Presentation
Service Oriented Architecture - State of the Art
A panel of experts on SOA and learning technologies will address the state of SOA and impact, or lack thereof, that SOA is having on learning technologies and their use. Panelists include:
Julià Minguillón received his Ph.D. degree from the Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) in September 2002. In January 2001 he joined the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) where he is a faculty member of the Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunication Studies department. Since November 2006 he has been working for the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) and the UOC Research Vice-Rectorate. He is also involved in the integration of e-learning standards into virtual learning environments, such as IEEE LOM, SCORM and IMS LD for both content and service description and IEEE PAPI and IMS LIP for user profiling. His main research interests include the formal description of the learning process by means of ontologies, personalizing the learning process by means of adaptive itineraries based on reusable learning objects, and user modeling in virtual e-learning environments applying web mining techniques for improving user experience and usability, accessibility and mobility issues. He is also interested in open educational resources and the uses of social tools for teaching and learning in virtual learning environments. He was in charge of the UOC participation in the OLCOS (Open Learning Content Observatory Services) EU funded project. He leads the Spanish Government funded PERSONAL(ONTO) project, the framework that articulates all the aforementioned research lines and the E-MATH++ project which promotes the use of learning object repositories in virtual learning environments. He also participates in the SUMA project about the use of open architectures for providing virtual learning environments with new services such as learning object repositories through OKI/OSID.
Stuart Sim is the CTO of CommonNeed and a passionate advocate of the practical adoption of technology to develop the systems that power the world education. Stuart is a leader in the development of open systems for education and has been building systems using open standards for educational tools for some of the worlds’ biggest distance learning systems. His primary focus is the practical use of open systems to bring down the cost of development and ownership of enterprise systems in educational institutions. Stuart has deep technical expertise in Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions using both open source and commercial platforms. His projects are often cited as reference platforms for open standards and best practice. Stuart is a technical co-chair on the IMS open standards group for interoperable systems where he is driving creation and adoption of open systems using reference architectures for large scale deployments. Stuart was the Chief Architect for Global Education & Research at Sun Microsystems for 7 years where he pioneered the development of very large systems on enterprise platforms for educational institutions around the world. He has designed, architected and managed the development of the some of the largest software platforms in the education sector and media sectors.
Dr. Charles R. Severance (Chuck) is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Charles also works with the IMS Global Learning Consortium as the IMS Developer Network Coordinator. Previously he was the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation and the Chief Architect of the Sakai Project. He is the author of the upcoming book, Using Google App Engine from O'Reilly and Associates. He also wrote the O'Reilly book on High Performance Computing, Second Edition. Charles has a background in standards including serving as the vice-chair for the IEEE Posix P1003 standards effort and edited the Standards Column in IEEE Computer Magazine from 1995-1999. Charles currently is teaching in the University of Michigan School of Information. He is active in television and radio as a hobby, he has co-hosted several television shows including "Nothin but Net" produced by MediaOne and a nationally televised program about the Internet called Internet:TCI. Charles appeared for over 10 years as an expert on Internet and Technology on a call-in radio program on the local Public Radio affiliate (www.wkar.org). Chuck's hobbies include off-road motorcycle riding, karaoke and playing hockey. Charles has a B.S., M.S., and Phd. in Computer Science from Michigan State University.
Colin Smythe has a degree in Applied Physics and was awarded a PhD for his work on spread spectrum local area networks; both degrees were from the University of Durham (UK). During the past 30 years he has worked in both the academic and the industrial world. He has been a lecturer at the Universities of Durham and Surrey, worked for several years at Logica Ltd., was the founder and managing director of the systems consultancy Hyperion Systems Ltd., has acted as independent consultant to many private and public organisations, and has also given numerous industrially oriented training courses on communications and software engineering.From 1992-1999 he was a member of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield where he was Head of Department and Professor of Computer Science. During the time at the University of Sheffield his research activity was focussed on the modelling and performance analysis of data networks, particularly those based on cable network architectures. Since October 1999 Colin has been consulting for the IMS Global Learning Consortium. The IMS Global Learning Consortium is the World's premier e-learning specification development organisation. He is currently the IMS Chief Architect and as such he is responsible for managing the development and maintenance of the full suite of IMS specifications.
17:00 - 18:30 - Demonstrations
MyUOC, an Adaptive Learning Management System
• Francesc Santanach, UOC Office of Learning Technologies
• Xavi Aracil, UOC Office of Learning Technologies
The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) has been evolving its actual learning environment under the name of MyUOC. MyUOC is a modular open source online campus to help faculty and students design their own learning experience. MyUOC started under the assumption that the next step to achieve a real interoperability would rely on adopting a SOA model. When these services implement a very clear-cut interface, then it is possible to isolate the interaction mechanisms in a unique layer, facilitating the control of the loose coupling across the systems. If a loose coupling is pursued, the layer can be implemented using web services. This is the case with MyUOC, in which heterogeneous tools (Java, PHP, Ruby and others) interact with some services of an also heterogeneous platform, UOC platform but also Moodle and Sakai. On top of that, one implemented tool is a widget container, compatible with iGoogle, giving the users to create "their UOC".
Open-endedness for content federation via Hive Repository and WebTV
• Sophie Touzé, Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire de Lyon, Membre de Université de Lyon, France
• Amiel Kaplan, Giunti Labs, Italie
The Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire de Lyon has for many years explored the use of new technologies in pedagogy. New technologies facilitate the integration of the four concepts of good pedagogy: interactivity, autonomy, simulation and collaborative work. The demonstrator will show via the use of HarvestRoad Hive Learning Object Repository and it's capability to integrate in an SOA environment the capability of federating learning objects using the OKI OSID layer. We will show the WebTV application developed on top of HarvestRoad Hive. This application has integrated the OKI Repository OSID. We will demonstrate search and retrieve of video type content with it's metadata as the description of the content. We will also show how, via the use of Hive Explorer (Java client application), we can federate content with more then one repository in order to collect learning items and rebuild a module for delivery via an LMS.
[TBA]
My Campus, Your Campus
Flexibility and Choice in the Age of Service Oriented Architecture