| A
Serious New Commercial Advance for Online Training and Education
"Opening Up Online Learning," by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed,
October 9, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/09/cartridge
This has not exactly been a season of
peace, love and harmony on the higher education technology
landscape. A
patent fight has broken out among
major developers of course management systems. Academic
publishers and university officials are warring over
open access to federally sponsored research.
And textbook makers are taking a pounding
for — among other things — the ways in which digital
enhancements are running up the prices of their products.
In that context, many may be heartened
by the announcement later today at the Educause meeting in
Dallas that three dozen academic publishers, providers of
learning management software, and others have agreed on a
common, open standard that will make it possible to move digital
content into and out of widely divergent online education
systems without expensive and time consuming reengineering. The
agreement by the diverse group of publishers and software
companies, who compete intensely with one another, is being
heralded as an important breakthrough that could expand the
array of digital content available to professors and students
and make it easier for colleges to switch among makers of
learning systems.
Of course, that’s only if the new
standard, known as the
“Common Cartridge,” becomes widely
adopted, which is always the question with developments deemed
to be potential technological advances.
Many observers believe this one has
promise, especially because so many of the key players have been
involved in it. Working through the IMS Global Learning
Consortium, leading publishers like Pearson Education and
McGraw-Hill Education and course-management system makers such
as
Blackboard,
ANGEL
Learning and open-source
Sakai
have worked to develop the technical specifications for the
common cartridge, and all of them have vowed to begin
incorporating the new standard into their products by next
spring — except Blackboard, which says it will do so eventually,
but has not set a timeline for when.
What exactly is the Common Cartridge?
In lay terms, it is a set of specifications and standards,
commonly agreed to by an IMS working group, that would allow
digitally produced content — supplements to textbooks such as
assessments or secondary readings, say, or faculty-produced
course add-ons like discussion groups — to “play,” or appear,
the same in any course management system, from proprietary ones
like Blackboard/WebCT and Desire2Learn to open source systems
like Moodle and Sakai.
“It is essentially a common
‘container,’ so you can import it and load it and have it look
similar when you get it inside” your local course system, says
Ray Henderson, chief products officer at ANGEL, who helped
conceive of the idea when he was president of the digital
publishing unit at Pearson.
The Common Cartridge approach is
designed to deal with two major issues: (1) the significant cost
and time that publishers now must spend (or others, if the costs
are passed along) to produce the material they produce for
multiple, differing learning management systems, and (2) the
inability to move courses produced in one course platform to
another, which makes it difficult for professors to move their
courses from one college to another and for campuses to consider
switching course management providers.
The clearest and surest upside of the
new standard, most observers agree, is that it could help lower
publishers’ production costs and, in turn, allow them to focus
their energies on producing more and better content. David
O’Connor, senior vice president for product development at
Pearson Education’s core technology group, says his company and
other major publishers spend “many hundreds of thousands of
dollars a year effectively moving content around” so that
ancillary material for textbooks can work in multiple course
management systems.
Because Blackboard and Web CT together
own in the neighborhood of 75 percent of the course management
market, Pearson and other publishers produce virtually all of
their materials to work in those proprietary systems. Materials
are typically produced on demand for smaller players like ANGEL,
Desire2Learn and Sakai, and it is even harder to find usable
materials for colleges’ homemade systems. While big publishers
such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill have sizable media groups that
can, when they choose to, spend what’s necessary to modify
digital content for selected textbooks, “small publishers often
have to say no,” O’Connor says. As a result, “there are just
fewer options for people who aren’t using Blackboard and WebCT,
and more hurdles to getting it.”
Supporters hope that adoption of the
common cartridge will allow publishers to spend less time and
money adapting one textbook’s digital content for multiple
course platforms and more time producing more and better
content. “This should have the result of broadening choice in
content to institutions,” says Catherine Burdt, an analyst at
Eduventures, an education research firm. “Colleges would no
longer be limited to the content that’s supported by their LMS
platform, but could now go out and choose the best content that
aligns with what’s happening in their curriculum.”
Less clear is how successful the effort
will be at improving the portability of course materials from
one learning management system to another. If all the major
providers introduce “export capability,” there is significant
promise, says Michael Feldstein, who writes the blog
e-Literate
and is assistant director of the State University of New York
Learning Network. “This has the potential to be one of the most
important standards to come out in a while, particularly for
faculty,” says Feldstein, who notes that his comments here
represent his own views, not SUNY’s. “It would become much
easier for them to take rich course content and course designs
and migrate them from one system to another with far less pain.”
But while easier transferability would
obviously benefit the smaller players in the course management
market — and ANGEL and Sakai plan to announce today that their
systems will soon allow professors to create Common Cartridges
for export out of their systems — such a system would only take
off if the dominant player in the market, the combined
Blackboard/WebCT, eventually does the same. “I’m not sure how
excited Blackboard would be about making it easier for faculty
to migrate out of their product and into one of their
competitors,” says Feldstein.
Chris Vento, senior vice president of
technology and product development at Blackboard, was a leading
proponent of the IMS Common Cartridge concept when he was a
leading official at WebCT before last year’s merger. In an
interview, he acknowledged the question lots of others are
asking: “What’s in it for Blackboard? Why wouldn’t you just lock
up the format and force everybody to use it?” His answer, he
says, is that by helping the entire industry, he says, the
project cannot help but benefit its biggest player, too.
“This will enable publishers to really
do the best job of producing their content, making it richer and
better for students and faculty, and more lucrative for
publishers from the business perspective,” says Vento. “Anything
we can do to enable that content to be built, and more of it and
better quality, the more lucrative it is eventually for us.”
Blackboard is fully behind the project,
Vento says. Having endorsed the Common Cartridge charter,
Blackboard has also committed to incorporating the new standard
into its products, and that Blackboard intends to make export of
course materials possible out of its platform. “Exactly how that
maps to our product roadmap has not been finalized,” he said,
“but in the end, we’re all going to have to do this. It’s just a
question of when.” There will, he says, “be a lot of pressures
to do this.”
That pressure is likely to be
intensified because of the public relations pounding Blackboard
has taken among many in the academic technology world because of
its attempt to patent technology that many people believe is
fundamental to e-learning systems. O’Connor of Pearson says he
believes Blackboard could benefit from its involvement in the
Common Cartridge movement by being seen “as the dominant player,
to be someone supporting openness in the community.” He adds:
“There is an opportunity for them to mend some of the damage
from the patent issue.”
Like virtually all technological
advances — or would-be ones — Common Cartridge’s success will
ultimately rise and fall, says Burdt of Eduventures, on whether
Blackboard and others embrace it. “Everything comes down to
adoption,” she says. “The challenge with every standard is the
adoption model. Some are out the door too early. Some evolve too
early and are eclipsed by substitutes. For others, suppliers
decide not to support it for various reasons.”
Those behind the Common Cartridge
believe it’s off to a good start with the large number of
disparate parties not only involved in creating it, but already
committing to incorporate it into their offerings.
Yet even as they launch this standard,
some of them are already looking ahead to the next challenge.
While the Common Cartridge, if widely adopted, will allow for
easier movement of digital course materials into and out of
course management systems, it does not ensure that users will be
able to do the same thing with third-party e-learning tools
(like subject-specific tutoring modules) that are not part of
course management systems, or with the next generation of tools
that may emerge down the road. For that, the same parties would
have to reach a similar agreement on a standard for “tool
interoperability,” which is next on the IMS agenda.
“This is only one step,” Pearson’s
O’Connor says of the Common Cartridge. But it is, he says, an
important one.
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology and distance
education are linked at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
The Global Technology Revolution 2020 ---
http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/2006/RAND_TR303.pdf
Questions
What are the most significant changes expected in higher education
by the Year 2025?
What major universities are now experimenting on the leading edge of
such changes?
Answers
Answer 1 ---
Cluster and Grid Computing! The first test linked Caltech,
Fermilab,
UC San Diego, the University of Florida, and the University of
Wisconsin
What's Microsoft been up to in
grid/distributed computing? The company's not talking, but we've
ferreted out some interesting details about the hush-hush "Bigtop"
project. Our sources say it involves loosely coupled machines, and
perhaps even a new version of Windows. Read our story for more
details on what
"Bigtop" could be, and when to expect it.
Jim Lauderback, What's New from Ziff Davis, December 30, 2004
From Syllabus News on September 24, 2002
Stanford Online Press Gets 'Clustering'
Software
Stanford's HighWire Press, an online
publisher of scientific and medical publications for researchers
and institutions, has licensed "clustering" software that will
allow it to organize its content into easy-to-navigate clusters
for end-users. HighWire licensed the Clustering Engine and
Enterprise Publisher from Vivisimo, Inc. to organize search
results and publish larger document subsets on its master site.
HighWire will offer the products to its own publishing customers
for use on their journal websites. "HighWire Press now has 13
million online articles, so researchers need tools to reduce,
refine, and tunnel into search results," said John Sack,
director of HighWire. The new software, he added, "will help
liberate readers from the need to make overly specific queries.
Instead, they can recognize interesting topic clusters and drill
down from there, in the `I know it when I see it' style."
For more information, visit:
http://highwire.stanford.edu .
"What Is Grid Computing,
Anyway?" by Tim McDonald, NewsFactor Network July 24, 2002
---
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/18722.html
One
good way to gauge a new technology's degree of acceptance is to
observe whether it has moved out of the laboratory and onto
store shelves -- from science to commerce. According to that
measure, grid computing is just coming of age.
Often
called the next big thing in global Internet technology, grid
computing employs clusters of locally or remotely networked
machines to work on specific computational projects.
One
well-known example of grid computing -- sometimes called
distributed or clustered computing -- is the ongoing
SETI (Search
for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project, in which thousands
of users are sharing their unused processor cycles to help
search for signs of "rational" signals from outer space.
From
Science to Commerce
Grid
computing traditionally has been useful to researchers working
on scientific or technical problems -- much like the SETI
project -- that require a great number of computer processing
cycles or access to large amounts of data.
But
while this technology was once exclusively the province of
academics in fields like biomedicine and weather forecasting, it
has recently been making a strong foray into potentially
lucrative e-commerce sectors. Although clustering has been used
for several years as a load-balancing technique by server
hardware manufacturers, grid computing now seems to be coming of
age for other applications as well.
"Grid
computing has advanced to the point now that there are products
out there like Sun's Grid Engine Enterprise Edition,"
Aberdeen Group analyst
Bill Claybrook told NewsFactor.
Much
like a load-balancing server cluster, Sun's Grid Engine software
lets organizations create networked grids to share resources on
a wider scale and to allocate processing resources according to
department priorities.
Grid
Computing Components
Essentially, grids are built from clusters of computer servers
joined together over a local area network (LAN) or over the
Internet.
While
several grids that run over the Internet -- like the SETI
project -- have been built with proprietary software, there are
several development tools that can facilitate the growth and
adoption of grid computing.
One of
those tools is Globus, a
research and development project focused on helping software
developers apply the grid concept.
The
Globus toolkit, the group's primary offering, is a set of
components that can be used to develop grid applications. For
each component in the toolkit, Globus provides an API
(application programmer interface) for use by software
developers.
Power
to the People
Research scientists historically have been attracted to grid
computing because it uses the power of idle computers to work on
difficult computational problems.
Proponents of grid computing say the technology will enable
universities and research institutions to share their
supercomputers, servers and storage capacity, allowing them to
perform massive calculations quickly and relatively cheaply.
In line
with those expectations, HP recently announced that a
9.2-teraflop supercomputer
soon will be connected to the Department of Energy's Science
Grid. When installed, it will be the largest supercomputer
attached to a grid anywhere in the world, according to the
company.
Sharing
Data
Until
now, the problem with grid computing has been a lack of common
software for developers to work with, largely because grids rely
on Internet-based software.
In an
effort to spur broader adoption of grids, the
National Science Foundation
established the US$12.1 million Middleware
Initiative last year, and the agency has recently released
software and other tools designed to make working on grids
easier for scientists and engineers.
"Scientists are now sharing data and instrumentation on an
unprecedented scale, and other geographically distributed groups
are beginning to work together in ways that were previously
impossible," according to the Grid Research Integration
Deployment and Support Center.
First
Gaming Grid
In a
real-world example of grid computing,
IBM (NYSE: IBM)
and Butterfly.net announced in May that they would soon release
a computing grid for the video game industry. Butterfly.net
spent two years building the grid, which distributes games
across a network of server
farms using IBM e-business infrastructure technology.
Massively multiplayer games (MMGs) historically have been run on
mirrored servers that essentially duplicate copies of the MMG
universe to balance user loads.
While
this technique is designed to reduce latency for all users -- so
that each set of servers behaves responsively to user actions --
the mirroring technique limits the number of players who can
participate at one time in the same game universe.
When
load balances increase, the typical MMG response has been to add
more servers, copy the game universe and spill the extra load
into that new copy.
Now,
however, Butterfly.net's grid technology provides "cross-server
sentinels" that supports the interaction of millions of players
in one world, with server boundaries invisible to players.
According to the company, the extension of grid computing to the
gaming world lets game developers support a limitless number of
users in their MMGs.
'Taking
Hold of an Industry'
Companies are lining up to jump on the Butterfly bandwagon. This
week, for example, software development site CollabNet announced
it will work with Butterfly.net to develop an online environment
that lets game developers test their games.
"IBM's
been extremely busy on a number of fronts in grid, in terms of
investing resources and winning new partners and customers," IBM
spokesperson Jim Larkin told NewsFactor.
"Butterfly is one of the key examples thus far of how IBM has
worked with another company to help develop a computing grid
that is in the commercial arena," Larkin said. "It's a clear
example of how grid is taking hold of an industry."
"Digipede to Showcase .NET Grid Computing Solutions at
Securities Industry Association Technology Management Conference,"
PR Web, June 19, 2006 ---
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/6/prweb400497.htm
"Grids Unleash the Power of Many," by John Gartner, MIT's
Technology Review, January 14, 2005 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/01/wo/wo_gartner011405.asp?trk=nl
Computer scientists in three states --
West Virginia, North Carolina, and Colorado -- are each
combining their technology resources into separate computer
grids that will give researchers, universities, private
companies and citizens access to powerful supercomputers.
The project designers say these
information aqueducts will encourage business development,
accelerate scientific research, and improve the efficiency of
government.
"Grid computing will provide 1,000
times more business opportunities than what we see over the
Internet today," says Wolfgang Gentzsch, managing director of
grid computing and networking services at MCNC in Research
Triangle Park, NC.
MCNC is spearheading North Carolina's
statewide grid development that currently includes seven
universities including North Carolina State, Duke, and the
University of North Carolina.
The North Carolina project -- which has
a goal to link 180 institutions -- is encouraging business
development through its Start Up Grid Initiative, which allows
fledgling companies to plug into the grid for up to nine months
free of charge and afterwards at discounted rates, Gentzsch
says.
Because raising capital and acquiring
technology takes up most of a new company's time, "Startups
usually only get to spend 10 percent of their time executing
their idea," says Gentzch, who has launched seven companies.
According to a 2003 report by Robert
Cohen, a Fellow at the Economic Strategy Institute, North
Carolina's grid could create 24,000 jobs and boost the state's
output by $10.1 billion by 2010 if effectively implemented.
Before statewide grids can become a
realit, the software used to share and manage resources needs to
be improved to include more standard communication protocols.
Gentzsch says the expected release of version 4.0 of the open
source Globus Toolkit, which he estimates is used by 90 percent
of grid projects, will greatly simplify connecting computers to
the grid.
Securing a location's computing
resources so that only specified resources are made available
for sharing is a significant challenge, Gentzsch says. To
protect data files, institutions must "encrypt everything," and
configure the grid network so that "the CPU cycles are separated
from the disk resources."
Gentzsch estimates that advanced
computing resource utilization is just 25 percent, and grid
computing could increase the efficiency to 75 percent.
"Back to Basics and the Next Big Thing," by Phillip D. Long,
Syllabus, August 2002, pp/ 10-11 ---
http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6590
Grid Computing: The Next Big Thing
The next big thing to transform the
Internet is likely to come from work going on with the grid. The
grid is an infrastructure that enables flexible, secure,
coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of
people, institutions, and resources.
It may be useful to recall that the
birth of the Web came from a desire to share research papers
among large numbers of particle physicists doing “big science”
at CERN, the Swiss research center. Tim Berners-Lee’s vision has
changed all our lives. In the world of international science,
its impact has been staggering. Recognizing this, the Joint
Information Systems Council (JISC), the UK analog of the
National Science Foundation, has embarked on a £98 million
project called the Core e-Science Programme, managed by the
Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) on
behalf of the UK Research Councils. The e-Science project
proposes to connect scientists with expensive remote facilities,
teraflop computers, and information resources stored in
dedicated databases. Add to these resources higher level
services such as workflow, transactions, data mining, and
knowledge discovery, and you begin to glimpse what’s envisioned.
The grid is the architecture proposed to make this a reality.
What kinds of research are we talking
about? Everything from particle physics (what goes around comes
around) to basic medical investigation. For example, our
understanding of even basic human physiology remains terribly
limited. We don’t know how multiple parameters interact over
time in fundamental processes like heart rate, blood pressure,
and other cardiovascular indicators. Imagine if 100,000 people
volunteered to wear real-time monitoring devices so that their
daily metabolic functions were recorded and analyzed in real
time. The volume of data is enormous but that’s just the
beginning. We would want to compare how the data relate to the
activities of the people as they went about their daily lives.
In the end, predicting the likelihood of an impending physical
problem becomes a potential reality. Just like the work underway
to provide predictive intervention for the replacement of
computing hardware, you can imagine high risk heart patients
wearing proactive monitors that page them to head for a cardiac
care unit because the data indicate a potential problem in the
next 24 hours. Today it may seem like science fiction, but with
research using the grid, it’s emerging into possible science
fact.
This may seem far a field from the
classroom. How far it is remains to be seen of course, but there
are people working today on applying the potential of the grid
to learning management or virtual learning environments. Better
descriptions about teaching processes and the learning objects
needed, along with work on metadata for educational objects, are
underway. So stay tuned for more about the “next big thing” in
future columns.
References
Laurillard, D. The Changing
University. 1996.
http://itech1.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper13/paper13.html
Metadata for Education Group
www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/regproj
The full article is at
http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6590
CLUSTER AND GRID COMPUTING REFERENCES ---
http://www.ic.uff.br/~vefr/research/clcomp/clustrefs.html
"Time to Hop on the Gridwagon," by Daithí Ó hAnluain, Wired
News, July 26, 2002 ---
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,54098,00.html
"Grid computing was the reserve of 'big
science' five years ago," says Catlett, "But in five years, it
will be completely pedestrian. I was working on a Cray
Supercomputer in 1985, and my laptop would blow it away now!"
That's for the future. In the meantime,
Grids are currently deploying among Fortune 2000 companies to
deal with everything from batch analysis of financial data,
trend analysis of point-of-sale data, and design, engineering
and manufacture automation. Oh, and collaboration as well.
This last may seem a surprising tangent
to the pure processing power that grids typically deliver, but
collaboration and data analysis are two sides of the same
logistical coin. Engineers or scientists are increasingly
collaborating on projects and testing their theories across the
same grid. They are also dealing with terabytes of data.
It's one of the moves that makes
integration with Web services so obvious to grid gurus, like
IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of technology strategy.
"Grid computing is really the natural
evolution of the Internet. This is really looking at the
Internet, with all its promise of universal connectivity and
reach, and making it work far better by bringing the qualities
of service that people are used to in enterprise computing, and
... (what) we all have gotten used to in utilities like
electricity (and the) telephone."
Ultimately, then, the grid could
provide computing power on a utility model for consumers or
one-off projects or simply as a means to outsource processing.
Nonetheless, big science will still be
a major part of the grid's future. A case in point is the
TeraGrid, which goes live next spring and is set to steal the
No. 2 spot from IBM's ASCI White in the world supercomputer
rankings.
"The Earth Simulator is essentially a
big computer grid," Catlett says. "A bunch of computers put in a
grid to get the power. It's a short step from putting
supercomputers in a grid across the room to doing it across the
country, or across the world."
When completed, the TeraGrid will
include 13.6 teraflops of Linux Cluster computing power
distributed at the four TeraGrid sites, capable of managing and
storing more than 450 terabytes of data. It will be connected
through a network 40 Gbps, which will become a 50 to 80 Gbps
network or 16 times faster than today's fastest research
network.
It will be used for National Science
Foundation-sponsored projects and commercial applications.
So where will it all end? Nowhere in
sight, that's for sure.
"We have the genome sequence and now
we're working on the protein folding, and it won't be long
before the life sciences are looking at whole life systems,"
Baird says. "The nature of grid computing is going to allow for
bigger and bigger science applications. As long as we keep on
putting out more power, people will design better applications
for it."
There will be one paradigm shift that
may be noticed only for what's missing: the end of technology.
"We're entering the post-technology age
where users will be able to get on with what they want to do
without worrying about making the technology work," IBM's Hawk
says.
"It used to be cool to change your own
oil. Now it's not. Soon people won't have to worry about the
technology. Grid computing is what will make that happen."
The other parts of this article are at
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,54098,00.html
"The future of computing: The next big thing?" The
Economist, January 15, 2004 ---
http://www.economist.co.uk/business/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2352183
IT is increasingly painful to watch
Carly Fiorina, the boss of Hewlett-Packard (HP), as she tries to
explain to yet another conference audience what her new grand
vision of “adaptive” information technology is about. It has
something to do with “Darwinian reference architectures”, she
suggests, and also with “modularising” and “integrating”, as
well as with lots of “enabling” and “processes”. IBM, HP's arch
rival, is trying even harder, with a marketing splurge for what
it calls “on-demand computing”. Microsoft's Bill Gates talks of
“seamless computing”. Other vendors prefer “ubiquitous”,
“autonomous” or “utility” computing. Forrester Research, a
consultancy, likes “organic”. Gartner, a rival, opts for
“real-time”.
Clearly, something monumental must be
going on in the world of computing for these technology titans
simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet
so hard to name. What is certainly monumental, reckons Pip
Coburn, an analyst at UBS, is the hype, which concerns, he says,
“stuff that doesn't work yet”. Frank Gens at IDC, another tech
consultancy, quips that, in 2004 at least, “utility” computing
is actually “futility” computing.
Yet as a long-term vision for
computing, what the likes of IBM, Microsoft and HP (and Oracle,
Sun, etc) are peddling is plausible. The question is, how long
will it take? Some day, firms will indeed stop maintaining huge,
complex and expensive computer systems that often sit idle and
cannot communicate with the computers of suppliers and
customers. Instead, they will outsource their computing to
specialists (IBM, HP, etc) and pay for it as they use it, just
as they now pay for their electricity, gas and water. As with
such traditional utilities, the complexity of the supply-systems
will be entirely hidden from users.
ER meets the Matrix The potential for a
computing infrastructure such as this to boost efficiency—and
even to save lives—is impressive. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, an
in-house guru at IBM, pictures an ambulance delivering an
unconscious patient to a random hospital. The doctors go online
and get the patient's data (medical history, drug allergies,
etc), which happens to be stored on the computer of a clinic on
the other side of the world. They upload their scans of the
patient on to the network and crunch the data with the
processing power of thousands of remote computers—not just the
little machine which is all that the hospital itself can
nowadays afford.
For its nuts and bolts, this vision
relies on two unglamorous technologies. The first is “web
services”—software that resides in a big shared “server”
computer and can be found and used by applications on other
servers, even ones far away and belonging to different
organisations. Mr Wladawsky-Berger's hospital would be getting
the patient's info from his home clinic through such a web
service.
The second technology is “grid
computing”. This involves the sharing of processing power. The
best-known example is a “search for extra-terrestrial
intelligence” project called SETI@home, overseen by the
University of California at Berkeley. Nearly 5m people in 226
countries have downloaded a screensaver that makes their
computer available, whenever it is sitting idle, to process
radio signals gathered from outer space. The aim is to find a
pattern that may be from aliens. Mr Wladawsky-Berger's hospital
would similarly crunch patient-data using the internet, or grid,
as if it were a single, giant virtual microprocessor, but for a
more earth-bound purpose.
Both technologies have made great
strides recently. Web services, for instance, need common
standards and protocols. Some basic standards already
exist—awkward acronyms such as XML, SOAP and WSDL provide a
rudimentary grammar to let computers talk to each other. But the
sticking point, says Phillip Merrick, boss of webMethods, one of
the pioneers in the field, has been the many other fiddly but
necessary protocols for security, transaction certification, and
so on. A breakthrough occurred in October, when the two
superpowers, IBM and Microsoft, simply got up on a stage
together and declared what protocols they will use. Dubbed “WS
splat” by the geeks, this ought to speed up the adoption of web
services.
Web services are currently most visible
in the business model of so-called application service
providers. These are firms that offer to host software
applications and databases for customers for a monthly fee—an
analogy would be for firms to do their e-mailing via Yahoo! or
their buying via eBay. The most successful is Salesforce.com, a
San Francisco firm that, as the name says, specialises in
software for managing customer information and marketing leads.
It says that it was poaching so much business from a more
traditional seller of customer-relations software, Siebel
Systems, that Siebel had to adopt the model itself. In October,
Siebel teamed up with IBM and now also offers its software as a
service over the internet.
Nonetheless, this particular form of
web services is overhyped, says Rahul Sood of Tech Strategy
Partners, a consultancy in Silicon Valley. Such services appeal
mostly to small businesses and firms that do not need to
customise their applications very much. For the grander
vision—the on-demand, adaptive, seamless, ubiquitous, organic
sort—a lot more needs to happen.
At the core of the vision is
flexibility—a firm must be able to make its operating costs, and
therefore its computing and information costs, totally variable
so that they go up and down with business volumes. Firms can
improve cost flexibility today, says Mr Sood, but only if they
stick with one vendor, such as IBM, or if they make only one of
their many computing functions (data storage, say) flexible. But
for computing to be bought and sold as a utility, firms must be
able to switch vendors, to do it for all their computing
functions, and with meter-based pricing. All of this will take a
few more years to get right.
Continued in the article.
The Video Game
Revolution (also available from PBS on videotape) ---
http://www.pbs.org/kcts/videogamerevolution/
This is the story of how a whimsical
invention of the 1960s helped spawn the computer industry as we
know it. Video games have influenced the way children live and
play, forever altered the entertainment industry, and even
affected the way wars are fought. See how it all began and find
out what it means for the future.
When recruiting teens for college
and/or particular careers such as accounting, here's one of the
competitive tools that we have not successfully exploited.
This type of thing is also being successfully employed in recruiting
and training, but does not seem to have widespread success in
educational institutions.
Question
What has become the most successful and most controversial
recruiting tool of the U.S. Army?
Answer
I
viewed the answer to the first question of television.
I watched this while eating breakfast on March 31.
CBS News on March 30, 2004 proclaimed that an Internet game has
become a major recruitment tool. The game that is especially
successful is called America's Army. The official
version of this game is at
http://www.americasarmy.com/
"Army Recruits Video
Gamers," CBS News, March 30, 2004 ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/30/eveningnews/main609489.shtml
The
soldiers are real. But they're also actors, staging scenes for
the Army's latest war game.
It's a
video game created by the U.S. Army to win over the hearts and
minds of American teenagers.
And, as
CBS News Correspondent Jim Acosta reports, judging by these
faces, mission accomplished.
Game
player Rob Calcagni believes the game is going to work on a lot
of guys his age.
"Definitely, because it's a fun game," says Calcagni.
The
game, "America's Army" has become such an overnight hit, the
Army staged a tournament in New York. Recruiters were waiting at
the door.
"This
is a fantastic recruiting opportunity," says Lt. Col. John
Gillette. "We would like to sign up as many as possible. We are
looking for five to ten."
One of
these teens enlisted after playing the game, the other two are
thinking about it, which is exactly what the creator of
"America's Army" had in mind.
"We
look at all the things that the Army is doing that is under the
control of the Army that captures people's attention and the
game is number one," says the game's creator Col. Casey
Wardynksi.
America's Army has surpassed even the Pentagon's expectations.
It's now the number one online action game in the country. The
Army hasn't seen a recruiting tool this effective since "Be all
that you can be."
But
psychology professor Brad Bushman of the University of Michigan,
a critic of violent video games, complains "America's Army"
isn't real enough.
"War is
not a game," he says.
"The
video game does provide a sanitized view of violence," says
Bushman. "For example, when you shoot someone or when you are
shot you see a puff of blood; you don't see anyone suffering or
writhing in pain."
"Kids
aren't stupid," says Wardynski. "They know if they come into the
army there is a reason that we have rifles and tanks and all
that stuff."
The
players insist they understand the meaning of "game over."
"If you
are going to join the Army, you know the risk," says one gamer,
Bart Koscinski. "In this game you might die like eight times in
like 15 minutes. In real life people know what they are getting
themselves into."
New
editions of "America's Army" are now being developed for home
video game systems -- a move that will deploy even more young
cyber-soldiers to the military's virtual battlefield.
CombatSim.com ---
http://www.combatsim.com/
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