Google may launch more than one “fiber city” in America. This cyberinfrastructure project could will be a tipping point for a few lucky cities.
Tags: experimental network, Google, Network, internet access, Research, Internet2, Broadbandt, gigabit, high speed, trends,
Last year Google announced it would provide industrial strength email anti-spam & anti virus (Postini) to K12 schools for FREE. Act Now – Deploy later. Google’s offer ends July 2010
As budgets have been cut across the country for education, this is a smart move for many financially strapped school districts. Does it pay for a District to force taxpayers to pay for expensive, legacy email programs like FirstClass and Novell when cloud based solutions with robust feature sets are being embraced by K12 and Colleges around the country.
Tags: Google, Google Apps for Education, education, Postini, anti-virus, K12, trends
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.
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
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
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