I’m sure this is going to be linked all over the place, but it’s a very interesting read. It’s a reposting by David Gristwood, of an original article by Jim McCarthy (a manager on the MS Visual C++ team).
Particularly interesting and useful, it delves into the topic of “slippage”, but treats it as a necessary and good part of the process. Slippage becomes a transition from the unknown to the less unknown - as you know more, the timeline and estimates become more refined and realistic, often leading to slippage.
We’re working on a whole bunch of related (and sometimes dependent) projects here at the Learning Commons, and it’s sometimes difficult to communicate how they all fit together.
Although we are coming at several related problems from several directions simultaneously, we see them all as One Big Project, with each component making up part of a larger puzzle. Here’s the extremely simplified model of how the projects fit together:
Perhaps the easiest way of thinking about these projects is with APOLLO acting as a kind of malleable glue that can hold distinct and separate technologies together. We see things like ties to Blackboard LMS happening somehow via APOLLO, which can serve as a bridge between any of the other project puzzle pieces.
Scott Leslie is heading up a rather large initiative in BC to deploy some cool whiz-bang learning object technology across the province for a couple of very large organizations. His group recently made a decision on which technologies they were going to use, and they picked APOLLO.
Scott has written up an excellent description of his rationale, plan, and hopes for the BC/APOLLO collaboration. I really like his pragmatic stance - use what’s best for the job, and for the users. He likes Open Source, but isn’t married to it. He likes commercial software, but will use something else if it’s a better fit.
The NMC 2004 Small Pieces session yesterday went extremely well (I think ;-) ) - it was very chaotic, noisy, confusing, loud, and messy, but I think it was interesting or at least entertaining for all.
There was activity on the wiki, some on the weblogs, and some iChatAV video conferences. The Decentralists group wound up too deep in a very compelling discussion to break away for iChatAV. Our discussion turned into one of the most vibrant and engaging experiences I’ve had in quite a while (thank you Decentralists!)
Own you own domain name. If your blog is at your own domain name, then if you are using a hosted service and somebody takes it down, you can move your content without breaking links.
Keep backups of everything that is hosted by everybody else
In the long run, it will be so easy to host your stuff, that you will rather than having to worry about other people taking down your stuff. Decentralists rule long term!
The Norman family is just about ready for the big trek across the Rockies. We’re heading to Vancouver for NMC 2004 Summer Conference, then across to the Island for a few days before returning home.
As a result, things are likely going to get quiet(er) around here. I’ll likely be blogging something from the NMC 2004 conference, but aside from that, I hope to be completely offline for the week following the conference.
Well, we’re about an hour away from the Small Pieces session at NMC 2004. There has been a surprising amount of interest from people in the hallways, and some actual traffic on the weblog and wiki.
My gut tells me this may go exactly one of two ways, either:
Raving success
Confusing chaotic failure
My vote is currently on the first one (I think this is going to be fun for all involved, too), and I’m hoping that the real meat of the session shifts away from the tools themselves and into the somewhat contrived discussion we’ve tried to set up.
I’m trying a little experiment over on the Decentralists Weblog for the NMC 2004 Summer Conference.
The weblog can be edited via the web, and is password protected. I’m going to try it for a while with a public password, so folks can add/edit content. I’m not crazy. I’ve backed it up so if things go south I can restore it pretty quickly.
Just did some more searching on the Omni WO-Dev list to see if anyone else has cracked the same nut. Turns out not so much. Looks like everyone who needs to connect to an XML database just goes ahead and uses the database’s API(s) directly, forgoing EOF completely.
Here are some links of people who are/were interested in this problem:
I’m just downloading the 147 MB full archive of the mailing list so I can do some better searches (the web form keeps stripping out the “xml” term, which makes it kinda useless when searching for xml-related posts… )
Alan, Brian and myself are hitting the road again. This time, we’ll be presenting at the NMC 2004 Summer Conference in Vancouver (June 16-19, 2004).
The topic of this presentation is “Small Pieces Loosely Joined”, and it’s a session that we hope will be a bit, well, different. It’s a hands-on session, with attendees actually playing with (er, using) some of the various tools that are available.
The plan is to take the folks in Vancouver, and split them into 3 groups. We’ll assign each group to a role. They’ll become either “Centralists” ( bent on global domination with the One True Application ), “Decentralists” ( complete anarchists, with bits and pieces scattered across and off the ’net ), or the more conservative “Fence Sitters” (who will try whatever works, but aren’t religious about it).
