Tag: Education

Google’s Learning Management System

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date May 24, 2010

Google has released their internal learning platform, CloudCourse under an open source license. Built entirely on Google’s own App Engine, CloudCourse is a new entry into a crowded LMS arena. CloudCourse provides calendaring, waitlist management and approval features.

google cloudcourse LMS — Google CloudCourse LMS

To no surprise CloudCourse is fully integrated with Google Calendar. Google has also made CloudCourse customizable for schools by supporting service provider interfaces:

Sync services – Sync CloudCourse data with school’s internal systems
Room services – Schedule classes in school locations
User info services – Support for school profiles (employee title, picture, etc)

CloudCourse was built in Python and uses Django (web application framework) and the Closure Javascript library.
CloudCourse code site and wiki link

Tags: CloudCourse, open source, Learning Management System, LMS, education, python, django, trends

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Keep it simple Google

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date May 3, 2010

On top of introducing a new YouTube channel for Google’s Wave solution, Google is taking the “keep it simple stupid” approach to talking about Wave. Their first go-round was a two hour video….and in today’s short attention span economy – who had the time?

Tags: Google Wave, beta software, Collaboration, real-time, communication, test audience, limited preview, trends

Tags collaboration, communication, communication infrastructure, communication opportunities, Education, Google, google wave, non profits, organization, real-time, realtime, small groups, training session, video training, wave fans, waves

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Google puts Wave tutorials on YouTube

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date April 28, 2010

Imagine that! In the “what took so long” category Google has finally released a series of good video training session all about their real-time communication and collaboration tool Google Wave. I posted last month (read it here) Google is missing a real opportunity surrounding Wave acceptance due to limited access to Wave in groups.

As many have shared on twitter — a lot of people with Google Wave accounts simply “don’t get it” and the new channel on YouTube will provide a great single repository for Wave fans to learn about their real-time collaboration solution. Wave is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking.

As many have accomplished, Waves around the world have proved to be excellent communication opportunities for individuals. If Google wants to reach out to small groups and large organizations, they must provide mass accounts to really kick the tires and integrate this promising tool into their infrastructure…..BTW it can help revolutionize a number of outdated ‘workflows’ that are in use today in non-profits, education and business.

Tags: Google Wave, beta software, Collaboration, real-time, communication, test audience, limited preview, trends

Tags communication infrastructure, communication opportunities, Education, Google, google wave, non profits, organization, small groups, training session, video training, wave fans, waves

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Google providing migration tools for Microsoft Exchange

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date April 23, 2010

Google is making it easy to switch from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps for email. Google is providing a migration tool for business and K12 Districts to move from Microsoft Exchange 2003 and 2007 to Google’s Apps suite. This follows their migration solution for Lotus Notes last summer.

Google migration from Exchange:

The process to migrate looks relatively simple. Through Google Apps, a customer enters their Microsoft Exchange user name and what it calls “two-legged OAuth,” consisting of a consumer user key and a consumer “secret”. They then upload a .CSV file consisting of the email addresses, calendar and contact information. It is optional what to migrate. For example, an IT administrator may upload email addresses and contact data but not the calendar. Email service does not get interrupted during the migration.

Coupled with Google’s offer to provide free anti-spam and anti-virus filtering (Postini) for K12 schools until July 2010 — its getting more and more difficult for Districts to continue using expensive, power hungry ($$$$) and outdated email services like Novell and FirstClass.

Why? Check out Google’s simple cost calculator to see how much your School District (Tax Payers) can save by switching. The Oregon School District in Wisconsin left Novell for Google and saved over $11,000 annually. In tight economic times this makes a lot of sense (and lots of cents)

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Latest read: Remix

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date March 16, 2010

Regrettably the Vancouver Olympics interrupted my reading pattern and its been a slow recovery. I blogged about this book as soon as I learned it was in production back in August. Yikes!

I have been following Larry Lessig‘s work on copyright and our digital culture for some time, reading his positions online, previous books and keynote addresses at TED, Wired and last week to Italy’s Parliament among others. His work on Creative Commons is a direct action from the creative limitations of copyright.

His latest book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy is a very easy read for anyone who has also known his work. He tells an important story about how new technology is clashing with old money.

Lessig illustrates how copyright’s old money (the big media empires) are clashing with today’s society and technology. Old money is winning financial amounts here and there, but ultimately they are cutting their own throat as they can no longer control content. Their motto: since we cannot have it our way anymore (due to the easy distribution of digital content) we are going to sue as many people as we can and take outrageous amounts of money along the way.

Lessig simply points out the two different camps: Read-only versus Read-Write. Look at popular consumer phones and computers. Today anyone can create a short video and post it to YouTube. And by today’s “standard” in social networking — your somewhat expected to post multimedia content on Facebook and YouTube for example.

But post a 29 second video of a baby dancing to Prince’s Lets Go Crazy and Universal Music (they own Prince and his music) files a lawsuit claiming copyright violations. Its old money trying to control society and Lessig points out it clearly no longer works.