iCampus Framework
April 2001 — December 2006
"When it comes to educational computing, most universities are technology islands, each with its own infrastructure
for its own students and faculty. Web service frameworks could radically change the landscape for higher education by making it practical to create national
and global shared resources for learning. Some examples we’re working on in the iCampus Framework are shared laboratory equipment, shared libraries, and
shared course materials, but the range of national and global collaboration on learning Web services could be limitless."
—Professor Hal Abelson, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The iCampus Framework project demonstrated the benefits of a service-oriented architecture for the educational computing
infrastructure at MIT. These benefits included the ability to modularize implementations of educational computing applications, create reusable
components, and enable component and resource sharing within the university and across institutions.
This project implemented a collection of Web services using Microsoft Windows ServerSystemTM and the Microsoft .NET Framework
to demonstrate interoperability with other Web service architectures that adhere to the World Wide Web Consortium’s standards. The sample lab controllers
built provided the basic authorization, resource allocation, event notification, and collaboration services required to deploy scaleable online
laboratories across multiple institutions. These critical elements provided a foundation for two other iCampus projects—iLab and iMOAT.
Investigators:
Prof. Hal Abelson, Dept. of Electrical Engineering
and Computer Science
Dave Mitchell, Microsoft Research
Paul Oka, Microsoft Research
Additional Information:
http://icampus.mit.edu/projects/iCampusFramework.shtml
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Dspace: Archiving Opencourseware Materials in MIT Libraries' Digital Archive System
January 2004 — December 2006
MIT wished to use its OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative to publish all its course materials as static course Web sites,
available for free access worldwide, and to make course material available to scholars and instructors for inspiration and reuse. DSpace, MIT’s
institutional publication archive, makes that adaptation and reuse of materials possible with its professionally managed, structured, and sustainable
digital archiving system, rather than the ad hoc methods that were used earlier.
As a result of this iCampus project, OpenCourseWare is now automatically archived to DSpace, using standards for content
packaging as well as Web Services, and this valuable educational content is now under professional management for preservation over archival time frames.
It can now also be disseminated from DSpace via a growing number of mechanisms, including work developed on the CWSpace project: Packager Plugins for
Import/Export, an Application Profile for use of both METS and IMS Content Packages, and Web Services (WebDAV as well as SOAP) implemented on top of
DSpace, called the “Lightweight Network Interface” (LNI).
Central to this project was the development of a new standard for tagging Web sites and learning objects to maximize
preservation, as well as the implementation of ways to harvest content from OCW, using Microsoft Content Management System. The new approaches and
standards that DSpace has applied to organization issues involving long-term archiving, content management, and Web publishing will ensure that
valuable course materials from MIT will be optimized to achieve the highest-impact, longest-lasting results, both at MIT and worldwide.
Investigators:
Ann Wolpert, MIT Director of Libraries
MacKenzie
Smith, MIT Libraries Assoc. Director for Technology
William Reilly,
Technical Analyst, Digital Library Research Group
Additional Information:
http://icampus.mit.edu/projects/dspace.shtml
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