Cloud Computing
eLearning Papers: Call for articles on Mobile Learning open until November 19th
While learning has always expanded beyond the walls of the classroom, the proliferation of devices and applications, which have greatly expanded when, where and how information can be accessed and stored, brings this issue to the fore. How have such devices had an impact in learning, and what role may they play in the future? This issue hopes to showcase practical examples and generate serious reflection on an emerging topic.
Today’s youth are growing up in a world very different from the world their teachers or parents knew when they were young. Where and how they learn is changing as mobile learning and social networking become part of their every day life. Ubiquitous access to social media, tools and knowledge resources is taken for granted, while passive teacher-directed work dominates life at school.
Open, social and participatory media have significant potential to transform learning and teaching. They offer numerous ways to communicate, collaborate and connect with peers. The range of free educational resources and tools is rapidly increasing. Cloud computing has enabled free or inexpensive access to applications that were once available only to those who were willing to pay premium license fees.
The gap between the potential and actual use of technology in education is a paradox. eLearning Papers seeks to facilitate the sharing of innovative and creative uses of technology to support learning among its readers. The upcoming 32nd issue focuses on mobile technology applications and their potential to enhance learning within the broad spectrum of education and training. Papers are welcome on any aspects related to the use of open, social and participatory media, cloud computing or mobile learning. Some suggested focus areas are listed below.
- How do mobile devices enhance learning and creativity?
- Mobile learning and creative classrooms
- OER for mobile learning
- Mobile learning management models and strategies
- Learning design for mobile learning
- Mobile learning platforms, devices and operating systems
- Authoring tools and technologies for mobile learning
- Content design and development for mobile learning
- Platform specific applications for learning
- Augmented reality in education
- Mixed reality and mobile devices supporting learning
- Mobile devices and schoolwork, in classrooms and beyond
- Mobile devices supporting performance and learning at work
- Low-tech mobile learning, e.g. the power of SMS
The article submission deadline is November 19th, 2012. The provisional date of publication is December, 2012. For further information and to submit your article, please contact: jimena.marquez@elearningpapers.eu
Guest editor: Prof. Dr. Martin Wolpers, Fraunhofer-Institut für Angewandte Informationstechnik FIT
32 Partners from 28 Countries Launch LoCloud - Local Content in Europeana Cloud
LoCloud explores the potential of cloud computing technologies for Europeana, with a focus on small and medium sized institutions.
On 19-20 March, at the National Archives of Norway in Oslo, the LoCloud Best Practice Network project was officially launched. The meeting gathered 32 partners from 28 different countries to present, plan and discuss the activities of the project over the next three years.
Content from small and medium local institutions such as museums, archives and libraries is still underrepresented in the digital European arena. Cloud-based technology could offer an affordable and user-friendly solution for making their content available on-line.
LoCloud aims to develop cloud-based technology and services to help small and medium local institutions to aggregate their digital resources and make them accessible on-line, via Europeana.eu, the European Library, Museum and Archive.
The project will explore the potential of a cloud-based technology infrastructure for aggregating local content. It will also develop a number of micro-services offering geo-location and metadata enrichment, multilingual vocabularies for local history and archaeology, a historical place name gazetteer and a Wikimedia application to handling relevant ‘crowd-sourced’ content.
As a result of the LoCloud’s activities, access to over 4 million items of digital content will be made available through Europeana.
LoCloud relies on a large group of technical partners, content providers, aggregating services and partners with specific expertise which make together a very strong consortium. Gunnar Urtegaard, from National Archives of Norway, project coordinator, underlined during the meetings close: "If we can keep it simple for content providers, keep simple for users and remove all the complexity in-between, then this project has the potential to be a great success."
Contact LoCloud:
Gunnar Urtegaard
gunurt@arkivverket.no
National Archive Norway/Riksarkivet
Box 4013 Ullevål stadion
0806 Oslo
Norway
About LoCloud:
Europeana.eu provides access to the digitized content of Europe's galleries, libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections. It currently includes over 26 million books, photographs, paintings, films, sound recordings and archival resources from more than 2,200 institutions in every European member state.
More information can be found at http://www.europeana.eu/portal/.
LoCloud is one of a suite of projects, funded by the European Commission, to develop Europeana and enhance its contents. It will explore the potential of cloud computing technologies for Europeana, with a focus on small and medium sized institutions. It aims to support them in making their content and metadata available to Europeana.eu. To this purpose a set of services and tools will be developed to help to reduce technical, semantic and skills barriers and to enhance Europeana.
LoCloud aims to build on the achievements of two earlier Best Practice Network projects: CARARE, in establishing a repository-based aggregator for Archaeological and Architectural heritage; and Europeana Local, in its work with local institutions and their regional and national aggregators, which has resulted in the contribution to date of well over 5 million items to Europeana.
The LoCloud web site will go live at the end of April at: www.locloud.eu.
LoCloud is co-funded by the European Commission's ICT Policy Support Programme.
Over 18 million students and staff to benefit from faster and more secure cloud-computing in the UK
More than 18 million students, staff and researchers at institutions across the UK could start to benefit from a faster and more secure connection when using their institution’s cloud-based IT services, thanks to a new peering arrangement signed on 21 May 2013 between Microsoft and Janet, the UK’s research and education network..
Connecting the networks privately eliminates the need to traverse data over the public internet. This enables a high bandwidth connection for students and staff to use Windows Azure. Bandwidth is managed, ensuring high-speed delivery with no delay or latency.
The move to peer the Microsoft Windows Azure data centre to the Janet network comes as part of a new strategic alliance between the two organisations.
“Cloud computing has the potential to revolutionise research by offering vast compute resources on-demand. At Newcastle University, we already have over £20M of research projects that are supported by the cloud. However, one of the major barriers holding back further cloud adoption is the time it takes to transfer large datasets from the lab to the cloud for analysis. This new link between Janet and the Azure Cloud removes this barrier, and will allow a far greater range of research projects to fully exploit the benefits of cloud computing,” said Paul Watson, Professor of Computing Science at Newcastle University.
The alliance agreement also means any UK education institution can benefit from standard terms and conditions on Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity software suite Office 365, negotiated by Janet.
19th EUNIS Congress - ICT Role for Next Generation Universities
The 19th edition of the EUNIS Congress is an ICT conference centered on the theme of higher education in Europe, which will be held in Riga (Latvia) from the 11-14 of June 2013.
EUNIS 2013 is the 19th congress in a series of conferences aimed at audiences from higher educational institutes. The following keynote speeches will be the centerpiece of this year's event:
- Richard Katz (President at Richard N. Katz & Associates) -
- "IT Leadership and Governance for Next Generation University"
- Voldemar A. Innus (Owner and principal of VAI Consulting, Pendleton, NY, USA) -
- "Innovation, incubation and the future of ICT in support of the academic mission"
- Ian Dolphin (Executive Director at Sakai Foundation)
- "The CIO and Finding the Future Technology Ecosystem Fit For Your Organization"
- Dr.Jan-Martin Lowendahl (Research Vice President at Gartner, Higher Education Strategies)
- "Opening Up Education – The European Commission initiative towards more ICT and OER in Education and Training Systems in Europe"
- Ricardo Ferreira (Policy Officer at European Commission)
- "Technological Tools for distance Collaborations"
- Greg Palmer (Executive Director at University of Pennsylvania, MAGPI (the Mid-Atlantic Gigapop in Philadelphia for Internet2))
- "Current status of Open Source and Kuali for administrative systems and the “Marketecture of Community”"
- Jennifer L. Foutty (Executive Director at Kuali Foundation)
- "Management Trends in Educational Institutions"
- Greg Mathers (RTU Riga Business School,Director of Accel Performance Consulting)
- "TERENA initiatives and the future of online video in Higher Education"
- Vicente Goyanes (Head of IT-Media technical assistance for University of Vigo & Campus do Mar, member of the TERENA Technical Committee and the Opencast Boarda)
Cloud Computing and the Power to Choose
“Cloud Computing and the Power to Choose” is an article published by the magazine Educause Review in June 2010. Written by Rob Bristow, Ted Dodds, Richard Northam, and Leo Plugge, it provides insight into the chances and risks in cloud computing and cloud services for higher education and research.
With many in higher education today eyeing the potential of the cloud, the question now according to the authors of the paper is not so much "Is cloud computing a good idea?" The key question to answer is: "What can we do with the cloud?"
Colleges and universities around the world are discussing, planning for, and using cloud computing and cloud services. The rate of adoption varies from country to country, but the need for awareness and preparation is universal.
This article examines cloud issues (both opportunities and risks) by looking at examples from four countries: Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.
Building an open social learning community around a DSpace repository on statistics
Learning Object Repositories (LORs) addressing content management and preservation have the positive collaterals of institutional positioning and dissemination, but their main benefit is the empowerment of interest-centred learning communities: the LOR provides the learner interaction with the LOs, but also with other learners and teachers.
“Building an open social learning community around a DSpace repository on statistics” was a conference delivered by Cesar Córcoles, Julià Minguillón and Brian Lamb at the 4th International Conference on Open Repositories, in Atlanta (USA) on May 2009. The text explains how the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) has built a LOR combining DSpace with Delicious.
University on a Cloud
This book, recently published by the Laboratori de Mitjans Interactius (Interactive Media Lab), surveys university presence "in the cloud" and the extent to which different institutions incorporate online learning systems into higher education. The book collects research from two research groups on either side of the Atlantic - the University of Barcelona's Interactive Media Lab, in Spain, and the Federal University of Santa Catarina New Technology Lab (Communic), in Brazil.
MobiCloud - Mobile Business Cloud Applications Platform
MobiCloud is a collaborative platform for developing, deploying and managing mobile cloud applications for business-critical scenarios such as public transport, field service or construction. Its initial demonstration scenarios focus on industries where collaborative mobile applications can support a more efficient, greener organization.
MobiCloud is also an online technology marketplace where end-users, mobile developers, application vendors, system integrators and cloud service providers can collaborate to develop end-to-end solutions with high ROI. MobiCloud is co-funded by the European Commission under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) of the Competitiveness and Innovation framework Programme (CIP).
The 2013 European Cloud Computing Conference
Critical Cloud Computing
This report considers cloud computing from a Critical Information Infrastructure Protection (CIIP) perspective and analyses a number of scenarios and threats, based on a survey of public sources on uptake of cloud computin, large cyber attacks, and disruptions of cloud computing services.