Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Rethinking Education

A new Michael Wesch video.  He wrote as the introduction:

This video was produced as a contribution to the EDUCAUSE book, The Tower and the Cloud: Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing, edited by Richard Katz and available as an e-Book athttp://www.educause.edu/thetowerandth… or commercially at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0967…Produced in 2007 as a conversation starter in small groups. Released in 2011 as a conversation starter online.


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3 responses to “Rethinking Education”

  1. Dan Brint Avatar

    Excellent Video.

    I loved the closing line ‘shift your career just 5 degrees.’

    I’ve got a query for you regarding Blackboard architecture :

    We (multi college institute) are possibly moving from Angel to Blackboard and we have at our disposal unlimited license (and support) for Oracle RAC and WebLogic Suite plus a group of 10 dedicated Oracle DBAs with a collective 100+ years of DB and OAS experience. Weblogic is a new for us but TomCat is new as well.

    Question is regarding Blackboard on WebLogic and why should I consider tomcat ?

    1. Ezra S F Avatar

      Regarding Oracle RAC, the last conversations I recall about us running Oracle RAC and remain supported, Blackboard insisted on being involved in the install. We could not set it up ourselves without Blackboard and remain supported. That information came from other CE/Vista clients who are running Oracle RAC. Maybe it is different with Learn9? Blackboard support for Oracle RAC came for Classic 8 first, I think, so probably not.

      I like you am using a product Blackboard bought rather than developed from the ground up. We’ve been in this situation since 2006. You since 2009? Weblogic is the technology underlying CE/Vista. So far in my reading about Learn9 it uses Apache and Tomcat on Linux or Solaris. There was a rumor about Blackboard switching to Weblogic or offering support for it, but until there is something there, I consider that vaporware.

      Also, consider my post Why Ten. Weblogic as it is implemented in CE/VIsta is designed to be easy to write documentation on how to start or stop or run the GUI installer. BEA support for Weblogic done this way was almost useless because the answer was generally, “You should not be running it this way.” Then hours were spent with BEA and Blackboard debating why Weblogic was or was not correctly implemented.

      Weblogic offers fantastic tools designed for management with near zero downtime. All changes to application happen within the application deployment, which happens per node. There is even a command-line interface so deployments could be scripted rather than depending on the consistency of a human. I think I am so impressed by what Weblogic can do that it greatly disappoints me Vista is not designed to make use of it. Guess it is like having a Lotus I can only get to 3,000 rpms.

      Does this help?

  2. Dan Brint Avatar

    Yup – as they say in Texas “IT’s all good!”

    I have some inquiries into blackboard that will hopefully illuminate our options. As you said – we’ve got a Lotus and we want to drive that puppy !!!

    Thank you very much for your insight and I’ll let you know if I find anything interesting.

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