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I had the opportunity recently to speak at the Sun Microsystems 2008 Japan Education and Research Conference, and as I looked out over our large audience, it wasn’t difficult to imagine all of us in the conference room wearing bearskin garments and hunting wooly mammoths with spears.
The topic of my address was how open communities are changing education. Preparing my slideshow reminded me that the phenomenon of “community” isn’t a new phenomenon at all — it’s a primal human instinct that has enabled us to survive and prosper as a species.
Fundamentally, not much has changed between our cave-dwelling ancestors of 15,000 B.C. and the ultra-wired technologists and educators at our Japan conference. And although you hear a lot about online communities these days, technology's role in facilitating community isn't new, either.
For instance, the “technology” of ink and paper enabled the creation in 868 of the Chinese Diamond Sutra, the oldest known dated printed book in the world. (Interestingly, this book was open source — the author wrote that it was created for “universal free distribution.”)
Of course, the author never imagined that one day, his book would be available online, in 3D, at the Web site of the British Library for the whole digital world to see.
In the computer age, virtual communities are as old as the dial-up modem, beginning with the bulletin board system, or BBS. From paper to BBS, technologies that enable what we loosely call “social networking” are compelling because they build upon this basic truth about humans:
We band together with others who share common interests to achieve common goals.
The Network Effect of Virtual Communities
Fast forward to today, and the community-driven social networking is booming. It’s dissolved geographic boundaries and increased potential for global participation in communities of common interests. It's like the network effect, which says that the value of any device connected to a network increases as the number of devices connected to the network increases. Of course, online communities involve people, not things.
Community-driven social networking has dissolved geographic boundaries and increased potential for global participation.
In their first incarnations, online communities have been predominantly playful. Think of Facebook and YouTube and Flickr, for instance. The opportunity and challenge facing Sun and educational institutions is how to create purposeful online communities and social networks.
The first step in creating a purposeful community is to define its purpose. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, authors of the new book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, have identified five reasons people build communities.
- Communities can be formed to listen to what members are saying
- Communities can be formed to speak to members through blogs or other mediums
- Some communities exist solely to energize members around a product or issue
- Others support members through forums and other self-help features
- Some communities empower members by involving them in the product or service development process
Driving Innovation with Open Source Software Communities
As compelling as those reasons are, I think they missed the most compelling reason to form a community — to create. Free and open source software is a perfect example.
Software like Linux, Apache, and MySQL was created collaboratively by communities of programmers who shared their creations with community and opened their creation for modification and improvement.
This fits perfectly with Sun's philosophy. Sun was founded on the ideals of openness and sharing. This is why we're so active in the free and open source community. According the European Union, Sun is the number-one contributor of open source technology by more than three times that of the next closest contributor.
Sun is committed to creating a vibrant, purposeful developer community around open source software. We realize that a bigger community is better for everyone, because it results in more innovation, more opportunities, and more choice.
Coming Soon: EduConnection.org Plan to participate in this new online community for IT professionals in higher education to be launched in late October.
- Share ideas
- Make contacts
- Build on your peers' knowledge
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Why Communities Are Important to Education
Why are communities important to education? Educational institutions all over the world are benefiting from community development to advance learning and share knowledge. Four great examples of purposeful education communities are:
The Kuali Foundation: A non-profit organization that’s creating an open suite of administrative software for higher education.
The Sakai Project: A global free and open source online collaboration and learning environment.
The New Media Consortium: An organization of 250 leading universities around the world that are exploring the use of new media and technologies in learning.
The Texas Advanced Computing Center: One of the largest high performance computing (HPC) installations in the world, it’s part of a greater community of researchers called the Teragrid community.
Sun is very supportive and involved in these communities, and we’ve founded a number of special interest communities that exist both online and in the real world to help to allow our customers to exchange best practices with each other.
Be sure to see the article in this issue of EduConnection about these Sun-supported communities:
And for HPC practitioners, there’s the Sun HPC Community Portal Web site for users to engage with Sun engineers, partners, and other customers.
On campuses worldwide, we offer the Sun Campus Ambassador program, under which we have hired over 500 student interns around the world. The number-one thing the Campus Ambassadors say they value about the program is that they are part of a global network — a network of students with similar interests.
If they have a question about a Sun technology, they know that somewhere in the world, another Campus Ambassador is awake to answer it. That’s the power of community — the power of peers.
I see tremendous potential for all of us — students, educators, and researchers alike — to benefit from the communities enabled by technology. And I’m excited to see what the collective community imagination will dream up next.
Feedback or ideas? Email me at education_info@sun.com
Best regards,
Joe Hartley
VP, Global Government, Education and Healthcare
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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