Open Source, Presentations/Speeches, and OSS

Begun in 1990, the Campus Computing Project is the largest continuing study of the role of computing, e-learning, and information technology in American higher education. The session will present the results of the 2007 Campus Computing Survey, including new data on P2P policies, open source deployment, IT security issues, strategic and financial planning for IT, instructional integration of IT, campus IT standards, course management systems, and Web site services.

Learn how Indiana University has successfully implemented the world's largest installation of the Sakai open source collaborative learning environment on eight campuses statewide. This presentation will cover migration from an enterprise legacy system, tiered support model, virtualized hardware solutions, source code management techniques, and balancing local needs with community-driven development.

Claremont McKenna College aims to migrate hundreds of courses and over 150 active instructors from WebCT to Sakai within a year. Whitman College has successfully completed its yearlong pilot and conversion from Blackboard to Sakai. Both schools have worked closely with faculty volunteers and have developed tools to address technical migration issues. The schools will share the different stages of their implementations, methods used, challenges, and successes.

Going back to the beginning and revisiting how current practices developed over time can help us understand where we are now, and where we are headed. When viewed in this light, open source licenses and business models stop looking like aberrations and start looking like part of the natural progression of an industry.

This session reviews the work that's currently taking place to solve the problem of practical multiplatform sharing of calendar and scheduling data over the Internet. OSAF engineer Lisa Dusseult has introduced CalDAV, a proposal to the IETF standards body to extend the existing WebDAV standard to handle rich event-based data. CalDAV has been very well received and work is under way at OSAF, Mozilla, Oracle, Novell (as part of the newly open sourced Hula project), the University of Washington, and other places to implement this new standard in both clients and servers.

The session will also discuss CalConnect, a new consortium established to promote interoperable calendar and scheduling standards. In January 2005, CalConnect sponsored an interoperability event where several early versions of clients and servers successfully exchanged calendar information. The hope is that these efforts will lead to open standardization and implementations that will provide end users with the same simplicity in sharing calendars with friends and co-workers that they now enjoy in sharing e-mail messages.