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Before the advent of the Internet, the word “community” referred primarily to a group of people living in the same region. Today, the Internet — and in particular blogs, instant messaging, podcasts, chat, and wikis — are giving new meaning to community.
For technologists like Jonathan Markow, the power of online community has helped accelerate the development of crucial open source projects in higher education. Markow is the executive director of JA-SIG, the Java Architecture Special Interest Group, one of several Web-based communities either supported or founded by Sun Microsystems.
In the past year Sun has formed four user communities specifically for education IT, each one dedicated to providing users with resources to do their jobs better. These include communities focused on enriching the distance learning experience, overcoming the challenges of preserving vast digital archives and protecting the identity of students.
JA-SIG Is Model Online Community
JA-SIG was founded by users eight years ago as Java was becoming a mainstream programming language. University IT departments thought its open source nature made it ideal for the development of university applications.
“Universities don’t want to be tied to any proprietary technology,” said Markow, who was until recently also the assistant vice president of administrative information services at Columbia University. “We want to control our own destiny and don’t want to be at the mercy of upgrade cycles dictated by vendors. The original intent of JA-SIG was to have an informal collaboration of universities to share expertise and knowledge and promote the use of open source in higher education.”
According to Markow, JA-SIG participants were already active in sharing ideas and best practices, but the community evolved very quickly after Sun got involved as a sponsor and offered its technical support. In particular, Sun let JA-SIG use one of its testing facilities to determine performance characteristics of an open source portal for higher education being developed by JA-SIG, called uPortal.
“That was critical to us gaining credibility,” said Markow. “The partnership with commercial vendors, like our relationship with Sun, is the key to the success of open source in higher education .”
Why should you consider becoming a participant? One reason is to tap into a vast knowledge base to help solve technology problems and perhaps to approach problems in new ways.
“Let’s face it, you don’t have all the smartest people in the world working for you,” said Markow. “Shared collaboration means you have access to other’s knowledge as well as the people who work for you. It’s just another advantage of community.”
And because the Internet has no borders, you might be sharing valuable information with someone around the corner — or around the globe. In a virtual community, it doesn’t matter because your colleagues are all connected online.
The education sector tends to have a collaborative culture and so is a prime candidate for user communities, according to Markow. That’s partly because, unlike the commercial space, educators are not competing against one another in the traditional market sense and have many benefits to gain by sharing best practices.
Sun Enables Collaboration Through New Communities
Sun is eager to enable this collaboration and in the past year has launched several communities including:
- Sun Immersion Special Interest Group (Sun I-SIG)
This research and development community advances the use of open source technology for virtual worlds and gaming in education. It is open to academic institutions, commercial organizations, faculty, and students interested in working with Sun and sharing practical experiences in open immersion technologies. One example is Project Wonderland, a three-dimensional toolkit developed by Sun for creating collaborative virtual worlds. The University of Essex in the U.K. and Shanghai Jiaotong University in China have launched a joint project based on Project Wonderland and other technologies to create a virtual reality environment for remote students.
- Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (Sun PASIG)
Launched in October 2007, the Sun PASIG aims to help schools and libraries preserve digital research and cultural materials, paying special attention to the unique challenge posed by managing very large digital repositories. Members of this community, dubbed “cybrarians” by Art Pasquinelli, education market strategist for global education and research at Sun, meet semi-annually to share knowledge on storage trends and discuss best practices for implementation of commercial and community-developed solutions.
- Sun Identity Special Interest Group (Sun ID-SIG)
This is a customer-driven community to exchange technical knowledge about Sun’s identity management solutions for higher education. It is open to higher education customers and companies providing Sun’s identity management solutions to these customers. Participants can get the latest news and can view webinars on specific implementations. For example, a June webinar hosted on the site provided insight into North Carolina State University’s implementation of Sun’s identity manager technology and how to deal with compliance requirements as it relates to protecting student information.
- Sun Open Source University Meetup (Sun OSUM)
This community, which launched in September, is aimed at students who are interested in Sun open source technology, sort of like Facebook for the tech set. Student participants have access to a comprehensive portfolio of free training and technical resources and activity libraries as well as Java and Solaris OS forums. Sun provides technical content, media kits, and learning materials for the community. “We want students to learn about our technology straight from us,” said Tzel Anselmo-Ramos, program manager at Sun, “and we want to spread the news about open source.”
The genesis of Sun OSUM, according to Anselmo-Ramos, came from Sun’s Campus Ambassador program, in which about 500 student evangelists in 30 countries introduce Sun technology to academic developers and other students. Ambassadors start Sun user groups, demonstrate Sun technology, and promote Sun events and contests. Sun found that students were forming their own online communities as an outgrowth of the ambassador program and decided to formalize it with Sun OSUM.
Learn more about — and join — all Sun-sponsored education IT communities and user groups.
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Putting the Power of Peers to Work
Social networking and Web 2.0 technologies have improved the ways in which users can connect to each other. Sun is harnessing these for a sophisticated approach to education IT user communities that includes video, webinars, blogs, and forums.
Debuting in late October, EduConnection.org is a new community site for Sun education customers. It will feature articles, videos and other resources from Sun and its partners as well as user forums, providing new avenues of interaction.
For community members, the power of peer groups can’t be understated. Leveraging the knowledge of your colleagues and hearing what worked and what didn’t is in many ways more powerful and valuable than information from any other source.
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