Applications Development

This fifty-minute podcast features a session from the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference. The session,
"Kuali Rice: Simplifying Software Development," is presented by Aaron Godert, Senior Software Architect/Engineer at Cornell University.

Kuali Rice integrates workflow, a lightweight service bus, and centralized notification within an easy-to-use, enterprise class, development framework. The suite enables agile development so that developers can react to end-user business requirements in an efficient and productive manner, allowing them to focus on producing high-quality business applications. Additional resources are available for this session.

This forty-three minute podcast features a session from the 2007 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. The presentation, "Riding the 2.0 Wave (Successfully): A Strategy for Deploying Web 2.0 Technologies," explains Marist College's award-winning work with Web 2.0 applications. This work has led to the development of an e-learning 2.0 strategy for the pedagogically based deployment of these technologies. This session includes methodologies for controlling costs, enhancing learning, and ensuring alignment with strategic goals. PowerPoint slides are also available for this session.

Session presenters include:

In this 15 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Julian Lombardi, Assistant Vice President at Duke University and Executive Director of the Open Croquet Consortium. Croquet is a powerful new open source software development environment and software infrastructure for creating and deploying deeply collaborative multi-user online applications and metaverses on and across multiple operating systems and devices.

This 40-minute podcast recorded during the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference features James Farmer, Coordinator, Interoperability Center, Georgetown University, David W. Koehler, Director of Information Systems, CIT, Cornell University, and William G. Thompson, Jr., Associate Director, Enterprise Application Services, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey speaking on The uPortal Project. The moderator is Bradley Wheeler, VP for IT & CIO, Dean, and Professor, Indiana University.

The abstract from this session:

There is an article in "Customer Loyalty and experience design in e-business"  Design Management Review by Karl Long that really nails what good interface design is all about I think. It all comes down to these four items:

• Trust
• Competence
• Autonomy
• Enjoyment

Basically trust is the cornerstone of the developing customer loyalty. IMHO Google exemplifies this in a great way. Yahoo does too to a certain extent. There isn't anything invasive in their online products yet they are functional enough to allow to get done what I want to do.

Competence is the concept that that a website should make the user feel competent. Sites that are cluttered with ads and headlines of 'quasi' news erode that actually. Most marketers don't really get it yet that more is not always better. Also if things are to difficult to use that can really erode a users feelings of being competent.

Tying into this competence concept is the idea of autonomy. In other words the ability to allow the user to control their own destiny. Many times we as developers feel the need to handhold the user through a particular process. By allowing the user to learn the interface (as long as it is easy to learn) you give them the sense that they are controlling what the outcome is thus making them feel empowered.

This last semester I taught Java Web Development here at UNO. It was a great experience from the standpoint that it made me learn things even deeper. I hope my students got something out of it. I was also fortunate enough to have taken the approach of trying to facilitate learning rather than playing the "I know everything" game (in fact I don't :) ). This allowed me to leverage knowledge in the classroom and I think all had a better experience because of it. We went over many items and even put some of it into practice. The thing that really saved my rear though was Netbeans + Derby. Without that I probably would have created a bunch of people who decided that Java web development sucked. Even though it is only hard because it has gotten so complex and layered. Netbeans allowed me to skip all of the Tomcat setup. Derby allowed me to to skip the DB setup and Netbeans made integrating all of it a piece of cake. Great work guys! I am glad to see the Swing crew come though.

Since March 2005, France's Speechi has had a company blog covering all things Speechi-related, plus op. ed. on issues in software development, e-learning standards, and ICT. Originally available only in French, the blog is now bilingual, joining a growing web of French resources on blogs, educational technology, and design.

Author Thierry Klein's English is slightly idiosyncratic, but his blog gives external readers an interesting perspective on the e-learning landscape in France / Europe. Thierry's writing is colourful and opinionated, and his blog has generated several interesting debates on issues such as  the origin and value of the term "rapid learning" (sadly for non-linguists, discussions are still mostly in French).

OS note: Speechi software is not currently Open Source (see the op ed piece on this issue by Speechi's Thierry), however, the company claims that various issues pertaining to OS -- interoperability, philosophy etc. --  are "under consideration". Difficult to see how the company could move wholesale to OS, though, given that their Speechi Live product uses Skype (which is still free -- for now -- but not OS). For the moment, Speechi Lite is available as a free download.