Welcome to the "Village Pump" for the JISC Flexible Service Delivery Programme and Enterprise Architecture Practice Group. This site gathers together activity, blogging and resources relevant to people working in developing flexible business-oriented IT services in Higher and Further Education. It is primarily a site for people "doing stuff", where projects can see what their peers are doing and can proceed to offer comment and exchange ideas.
Yesterday we presented a five minute overview if our project to around fifteen groups of people. It was exhausting and for every bit we improved through repetition, it was levelled by tiredness! It’s also really difficult to fit all of the things we’ve been doing in to a such a small amount of time, so [...]
James and I arrived in California yesterday for the IMS Learning Impact conference, where our nomination has been accepted for a Learning Impact Award in the research category. The conference is giving us a great opportunity to promote our work and the LTI standard, and also to introduce our new logo! We will be manning [...]
Session covered by Steve Nunn, CEO, Association of Open Group Architects Topics raised Implementing TOGAF -what parts work -how to get started -how to make TOGAF more agile Is it necessary to have some level of IT maturity {architectural maturity or } within the organisation? What is the justification for using TOGAF within an immature [...]
Principles in an EA context Erik Proper, Senior Research Manager, Public Research Center Henri Tudor, Luxemberg Definitions Identification of the problem statement to articulate the key drivers Enterprises evolve and require controls to keep key business focus (cost, agility) EA provides such controls but architecture today has deviated from this goal. EA principles are general [...]
Vincenzo Marchese, Head of Architecture Capability & Performance, BP Oil International, UK Tailoring the ADM to fit BP The design review stage of the framework is one critical phase used in BP- drafting the stakeholder map process. The design review must include stakeholder concerns. (Possess an architectural review: reuse is more able knowledge and skills [...]
David Rose, JISC CETIS Lead for EAPG Wilbert Kraan, Assistant Director, JISC CETIS Adam Watson, Portal Content Manager, Leeds Metorpolitan University The community and change – David Rose Business mantra “Learning by doing“ Drivers for change in HE sector Demographics – declining number of home students leads to an increased level of competition between universities. [...]
Henk Jonkers, BiZZdesign The famous archisurance company acquires two new businesses. Typical IT landscape – Fragmented IT Proposed change is to migrate to one archisurance crm system Ingredients of an EA approach – to develop new processes requires a language to express the different viewpoints. ArchiMate provides the flexibility to represent different viewpoints. It is [...]
Georgi wanted to know what problem Linked Data solves. Mapman wanted a list of all UK universities and colleges with postcodes. David needed a map of JISC Flexible Service Delivery projects that use Archimate. David Sherlock and I got mashing.
Overview This post outlines the improvements made to Reading Lists within WebLearn. This was made possible by virtue of the successful completion of the JISC funded Sir Louie Project. (Thanks to Angela Carritt for help with this post.) It is … Continue reading →
My thoughts from Richard Veryard’s ending remarks@ The Open Group Conference. Does product differentiation create value for customers? reference to the Ross, et al. 2006 four-quadrant in the book “Enterprise Architecture as strategy.” How should institutions use EA to manage differentiation instead of attempting to standardise systems, applications and processes across the business? What is [...]
Andreas Slogar, Manager IT Project Management and Consulting, DB Systel GmbH, Germany. How to CIO right! What does a CIO do? How do you define the role of a CIO? Today, the CIO is responsible for the strategic and operational management of IT Late 90′s, the CIO was responsible to the Finance Exchequer with detailed [...]
Ed Harrington, Principle Consultant, Architecting the Enterprise Dave Hornford, Co-chair of SOA-TOGAF Practical Guide WorkGroup and Chair of the Architecture Forum Preliminary phase enhancements – first of all, assess the organisation has the capability to manage the enhancements. The SOA Metamodel in TOGAF style. How do you map SOA onto existing functions within the organisation? [...]
Tuesday am session: Jericho Forum James Whyte: The need for an effective digital ecosystem for cyberspace/cloud/critical infrastructures The cloud is an innovative idea but does it undermine the sense of cyber security? Do we jump in and take the risk? Some organisations would simply sit still until it’s breach-proof! The CIO needs to move from [...]
And the return journey back to the North Shore on an evening. iPhone camera doesn’t really do it justice. Need a 50mm lens for that, perhaps. No related posts.
No related posts.
Approaching the end of the project now and feeling reasonably comfortable about it. We are very pleased with tha way the actual module has leant itself to cloud deployment - User definable steps within the product workflow generate calls to the ESB which uses contextual information to define the nature of the data extraction required. The [...]
I’ve dusted off the blog, had the cable guy from Shaw around and finally got the blog back up an running -8Hrs from where it was last based. Suppose I...
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I’ve dusted off the blog, had the cable guy from Shaw around and finally got the blog back up an running -8Hrs from where it was last based. Suppose I...
Friday April 29th marked not only the Royal wedding, but also the official end of the EILE project. We have thoroughly enjoyed working with JISC, IMS and Canterbury Christ Church University on this project and would like to thank them all for their support and cooperation. The EILE project are very proud of their achievements [...]
When our team initially discussed the benefits of LTI with out elearning team, it became clear that we had to be very careful to ensure the integrity of our VLE. Security concerns are well mitigated by the standard and reliability becomes primarily the responsibility of the service provider, although the consumer plugin must also be [...]
The Juice DAIA extension developed as part of the Sir Louie project is now linked from the Juice ‘extensions bazaar’: http://juice-project.org/extensions_bazaar
The University of Kent currently maintains a Moodle instance to deliver course based learning and a web portal, powered by uPortal. The role of a web portal is to provide a single point of access to disparate institutional systems. The situation we find ourselves in now is that as the learning environment becomes richer and [...]
When constructing the initial bid for the EILE project, we were hoping to be able to prove the real cost savings achieved by becoming Full LTI compliant. It became clear that the deliverables of this project alone were perhaps more expensive than the alternative of creating custom integrations, though as discussed they would be more [...]
The EILE project team recently presented our findings at MoodleMoot UK 2011 and received a mixed reception. Our workshop presentation was very well received and sparked some interesting debate, which suggests the community are ready for the introduction of Full LTI, however, when I posed a direct question to Martin Dougiamas (creator of Moodle) over [...]
Members of the Strategic Technologies Group of the JISC's FSD programme met at King's Anatomy Theatre to, ahem, dissect the options for shared services and the cloud in HE.
This relates to the original post “Configuration changes to Primo” With the new SP 3.0.3, the architecture of Primo tiles has changed a bit, therefore the full Section 2 of “Configuration changes to Primo” can be replaced by this text: … Continue reading →
As mentioned in a previous post, the EILE project’s Learning Impact Award nomination has been accepted under the research category. We will be invited to set up a booth at the upcoming IMS Quarterly in Long Beach, California to present our project to a panel of judges and attendees. In preparation for the event, we [...]
I am currently writing from the first leg of my 5 hour journey to Plymouth, which desperately needs a high speed service! It is the first trip of a busy April for EILE. I will be in Devon to present at the Plymouth E-Learning Conference (PELC), which is an event designed to reach all levels [...]
In the original project plan, EILE had discussed providing tutorials on how to become LTI compliant. We have learned through the project that a single tutorial would be difficult to produce, especially on a changing specification. It has become apparent, however, that our presentation/screen cast and example providers are providing enough support for the creation [...]
We have recently created a screen cast based on the presentation we gave at the IMS quarterly in Utrecht, Netherlands. In the screen cast James and I provide a brief overview of the problems with integration, our introduction to LTI and the EILE project, before showing a demo of our LTI Moodle plug-in in and [...]
From Owen Stephens: Juice is a javascript library built on JQuery developed with the intention of making it easier to add additional functionality to library interfaces – see http://juice-project.org/ for more details. I’ve been working on a project with the University … Continue reading →
From Owen Stephens: Documentation and screenshots for the DAIA Juice extension now available at http://juice-project.org/node/41 We will hopefully get a link added to http://juice-project.org/extensions_bazaar in due course. The code developed here has been added to the Juice source tree at http://code.google.com/p/juice-project/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2Fextensions, so … Continue reading →
Going into the last 3 months of the project. Development work almost complete. So far the module is available to all the project institutions, their own data exists in the cloud hosted database and testing is about to start. The module integrates with other systems using Biztalk to orchestrate the selection and execution of web [...]
Previous posts here have considered the costs of both buying and building storage in the cloud. Based on our work so far, we estimate that is possible to build an academic cloud infrastructure (storage and compute) that is both sustainable and that can be offered in broadly the same price 'ball-park' as, say, Amazon Web Services.
We have released our Moodle consumer and WordPress provider to demonstrate our work with the menu linking functionality of the Full LTI specification. Our resource linking code will be uploaded soon! We would like to emphasise that both are based on the draft specification which is due to be finalised and publicly released late this [...]
Greetings from Exeter,
Here’s just a quick summary of the work that has gone into the data for the pilot phase of the iPaMS project, this should be of interest to anyone working with iPaMS in the future.
The first stage of the project was to locate the data across the newly formed college of humanities [...]
Mapping the outputs of the curriculum management system to the XCRI-CAP standard for curriculum data is complete and the XCRI r1.0 standard for curriculum management data is just about ready. These standards have been given to UNIT4, the supplier, to meet with their web service based import /export processes.
These web services are themselves nearly complete – [...]
Straight after the IMS quarterly I made my way to Dev8D for the second consecutive year. Dev8D is a developer happiness event (hence the 8D) that brings together some of the best developers in and around the JISC community. For me it’s coming full circle. It was at the Dev8D conference in 2010 that I [...]
With development phase coming to a close, we’ve really started to drive our EILE dissemination. Earlier this week James and I travelled to Utrecht, Netherlands, to present at an IMS quarterly conference. Most of the first day had been spent refining our presentation, however in the evening we had the opportunity to put a few [...]
Firstly, apologies – this should have gone up a few weeks ago, but never mind. Here’s the latest incarnation of the database model:
iPaMS ERD v0.4
Whilst the design maintains the overall structure of previous versions, we have made some significant changes around descriptive programme and module data, and also to satisfy requirements for producing the [...]
Here’s our rough roadmap (in approximate order) over the next 2/3 weeks: 1. Event/calendar sharing 2. Public calendars 3. Epic source code clean up (and source code release) 4. Properly set up http://calendar.lincoln.ac.uk 5. Integrate library return dates 6. Open to everyone (7. Rewrite OAuth/SSO to use SQL + Windows server) Future desirables (in no [...]
New job, new platform. Occasional readers of this blog will remember that I picked up a copy of DragonDictate [formerly known as MacSpeech] for the Mac some time ago. In...
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New job, new platform. Occasional readers of this blog will remember that I picked up a copy of DragonDictate [formerly known as MacSpeech] for the Mac some time ago. In...
Hmm… Came across this is worth looking at tidying up a bunch of old draft hoax. Not entirely sure why didn’t just publish this in the first place, but there...
Hmm… Came across this is worth looking at tidying up a bunch of old draft hoax. Not entirely sure why didn’t just publish this in the first place, but there...
No related posts.
On Friday 21st January, the Kindura team met with Andy Richards from University College London. Andy is Project Manager of a new project called ResearchData@UCL that is investigating the storage research data at UCL, ranging from very large to small datasets, and the protection and preservation actions of such data assets. We agreed to add [...]
Building on our experience from developing the Common Web Design (CWD), we present the CWDx 1.0, designed specifically for awesome web based applications. CWDx is 100% HTML5 and CSS3, includes extensive WIA-ARIA mark-up for accessibility, is Ajax driven and is wonderfully minimalistic. The application is build using the CodeIgniter 2.0 PHP framework, and uses MongoDB [...]
John Bolland (Gradintel.com) has outlined some of the forthcoming developments with the software being used to generate e-transcripts. One particularly useful development is a link from a student’s ‘e-vision’ page (i.e. their personal portal page), which will allow a student to request their HEAR. If the student is not registered with the Gradintel.com system, then [...]
4th meeting of the Project Board -
We have an instance of the Curriculum Management Module “in the cloud” and a database which is populated so far with data from Nottingham and Roehampton. The first meeting of the Test Plan sub-group meets on the 31st January.
UNIT4 have completed the web services and full schema for the [...]
A useful meeting with the University’s Deputy Academic Registrar (Student Systems and Administration) has confirmed that the e-transcripts offered through the Gradintel software will be the classed as the University’s ‘Higher Education Achievement Reports’, and that development of these will be in line with the recommendations for the HEAR pilot institutions. This means that the [...]
Following on form whorkshop 2, this workshop focused on what we needed to get from our engagement with academic staff in respect of modelling assessment. It was agreed that two forms of engagement would be undertaken: - a questionnaire to … Continue reading →
Behind the academic side of the University lies an army of support and administrative staff. It’s their job to look after the bits and pieces which let the University actually function, and Total ReCal was built not only to help students and academic staff get on with their life but also to make the business [...]
The purpose of this middleware is to find availablity for items that are electronic. The API that can return information about these items is a hosted service run by SFX. A good way to see examples of the service in … Continue reading →
Total ReCal is aimed most directly at the students, there’s no denying it. However, universities are complex places with more special interest groups than you can shake a stick at. We affectionately refer to these people as “academics”, and this blog post is about how Total ReCal and My Calendar will help them. One of [...]
The report and presentations from December’s EA Practice Group event at Liverpool John Moores University are now available from the filestore at: http://bit.ly/jiscmailEA [...]
As Total ReCal nears completion, we’re preparing to open the beta to our pilot group and I’m starting to throw together our promotional materials it’s time to start writing up bits and pieces of our analysis. Contrary to popular belief this isn’t an incredibly dry, boring process which will make you all want to cry [...]
The STOP project had a nice Christmas present just before the holiday!The project team were able to take one of the Schools all the way through the timetabling process; scheduling and rooming their semester 1 timetable and viewing it through ePortal. [...]
Current Project Progress We are currently making steady progress on the development side of the project. There are four main components; the lti-php library, the Moodle LTI module using the lti-php library, a Scala LTI provider library and the Media Streming Server LTI Tool Provider built on the Scala library. Media Streaming Server Overview The [...]
Please find below our first crack at an ERD for the iPaMS database schema, and accompanying notes:
iPaMS ERD v0.1 Notes
iPaMS ERD v0.1
The design is not 100% complete yet, for example we still need to incorporate ‘marketing friendly’ versions of fields on certain tables – however I would hope it is heading in the right direction [...]
Hello folks – links below to latest iPaMS Module XSD, sample XML and PNG schema image from Oxygen:
iPaMS Modules v0.1c XSD (PDF)
iPaMS Modules v0.1c XSD Schema (PNG)
This latest incarnation includes some excellent contributions from Gary Stringer (UoE) including:
Playing with logical groupings; if formatting with XSLT, grouping info can be a real help. So some suggestions [...]
A presentation on Kindura was given at the Fedora UK&I User group meeting at LSE on 13th December. Currently none of the group are using the DuraCloud software, but there was a lot of interest in the capabilities that can be enabled.
We thought it may be useful to detail all the changes that need to be made to Ex-Libris Primo in order that it may communicate with WebLearn (Sakai) 1. Addition of a URI to Primo OpenURL Requested change A new … Continue reading →
What is interesting is whether [those prices] can be matched or beaten by academic providers (such as Eduserv) and/or in-house institutional provision, and if so by how much?
The testing of the e-transcripts has taken longer than anticipated; however, it is hoped that these will go live by the end of today. The e-transcripts are still developing towards the full HEAR ‘standard’, and we will be working towards this in the New Year. It is anticipated that the project will organise an assembly [...]
David Wallom (OeRC) and Matt Johnson (Eduserv) will be speaking about the FleSSR project at the UCISA-IG/NG Seminar on Cloud Computing at Holywell Park, Loughborough University on Feb 16 next year.
As part of beginning to think about the business model issues around FleSSR (one of our deliverables for next year) I've been estimating the costs of storing various amounts of data in the cloud using Amazon S3, Dropbox and Rackspace.
I've done calculations for all 3 services for between 50GB and 500PB of storage for one year. [...]
The original middleware component (see WP6) is now to be known as Library Item Availability Service aka LIAS. We have identified the need for a second middleware component which will be known as Electronic Item Availability Service aka EIAS. Development … Continue reading →
3rd meeting of the Project Board (25 November) and some good progress
Project EWES – the link with Cumulus is explicitly recognised and indicates some changes which need to be made to the Services Layer to support the more complex Cumulus Project. The final report is nearly ready for submission to the JISC.
The XCRI standards [...]
As part of the Sir Louie project we are passing details of an reading list item from the library catalogue to a reading list in our VLE (WebLearn). To do this we are using the existing OpenURL Standard. For this … Continue reading →
If have performance problems with large numbers of XmlHttpRequests not working well in browsers we could possibly look the streaming the response back to the client through a long(ish) live connections, so the browser sends all the IDs it wants … Continue reading →
I’m guessing your grandmother probably didn’t have an API permissions control layer, but if she did this wouldn’t be it. This post is mostly about Nucleus, our name for the storage layer which drives the Total ReCal components. The only way to communicate with Nucleus is over our RESTful API. This comes as somewhat of [...]
I’m guessing your grandmother probably didn’t have an API permissions control layer, but if she did this wouldn’t be it. This post is mostly about Nucleus, our name for the storage layer which drives the Total ReCal components. The only way to communicate with Nucleus is over our RESTful API. This comes as somewhat of [...]
Introduction As part of the Sir Louie project we need to display availability information for items in a reading list. The reading list will be rendered as normal by WebLearn (Sakai) but then once the page is ready in the … Continue reading →
A Kindura project poster was presented at the NGS Innovation Forum on 23rd November 2010. The meeting was held at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Harwell. The poster summarises the project objectives, use cases, architecture, as well as relevant technologies and standards. Feedback was received from a number of potential users of such a [...]
Although the FleSSR project has no current plans to use it, the emergence of OpenStack is a very significant development in the open source cloud space and therefore something worth keeping an active eye on. Videos and other material from the recent OpenStack Design Summit are now available through the summit website.
When the Sir Louie started we were very keen to use the open source Juice JavaScript library but felt we would be unable to do so since the licence (GPL) was not compatible with the Sakai licence (Educational Community License, … Continue reading →
This has been a big month for Total ReCal. We’ve now perfected our event importers for Blackboard assignments and academic timetables, and we’ve started working on the main web application (screenshots too). We’ve also launched a beta registration page for interested staff and students to sign up for early access. Finally, our Talis Keystone service [...]
Hello everyone – a revised version of the iPaMS Functional Specification is now available for comments and feedback:
iPaMS_Functional_Specification_1.1
Please let us know what you think. Associated UML package and use case diagrams can be accessed below:
ipams_uc_packages
ipams_uc_prog_mngmt
ipams_uc_mod_mngmt
ipams_uc_prog_structures
ipams_uc_app_security
ipams_uc_org_structure
ipams_uc_config_mngmt
We shall shortly be releasing a revised XML schema for module descriptions – watch this space!
Thanks,
iPaMS Development Team
A presentation about community clouds, using FleSSR as a case study, given by Matt Johnson and Ed Zedlewski of Eduserv to the UCISA CISG 2010 conference in Brighton during November 2010:
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