I've written before about the application bundle the OU gives out on CD to our students and how we might consider alternative approaches to this in the form of delivering portable apps on a USB memory stick, or downloadable bundles like the Google Pack.
There is a third way, of course, that is increasingly possible and that is to provide an online application wrapper that allows students to easily set up an online office environment for themselves.
For example, with Google's purchase of Writely presumably putting Writely on a secure footing, we could now point students to that as a possible application for them to use for writing documents.
I don't know if anyone is scouting the Numsum online spreadsheet, but that's another online application we could possibly be referring students to.
Ideally of course we'd be able to offer one click registration to these services (or the ones they select) for students who aren't already registered with them.
A section of the student's personal profile page on the OU system could also be used to allow them to enter their web apps login details so they could access these third party services from within the OU (or OCI learning environment.
Ideally we'd be able to offer common authenitication to allow students who have an current OU authentication ticket to access Writely, or Numsum etc. although I suspect the OU powers that be would be wary of exploring any such relationship with a web startup, or a web monster!
Web services would provide an alternative integration route, of course, even if it's only at the level of syndicating feeds (e.g. the Writely personal RSS feed can be accessed via a secure https route.)
That's still pretty neat, though. For example, I just added Writely to my Netvibes profile (read how here), and was immediatley able to click through from Netvibes to any of my public Writely documents (and then edit them with another single click). The feed keeps users updated as to changes that may have been made by other authors collaborating on a document, which could be very handy in an OU context, with several students working at a distance on a common document as a part of a group exercise, for example. One for MyOpenLibrary, perhaps?
Netvibes has several other neat feed consuming ideas - for example GMail, and iCal calendar feeds. (Hmmm - calandars... perhaps we could add an online calendar to the mix, like 30 Boxes perhaps? I know calendaring is one of the VLE mini-projects - I really hope they make whatever solution they go for syndication friendly (both in and out)!)
And finally - you may have noticed that this is (sort of) an apps corollary to the ad hoc community doodle I posted with last week. That's purely intentional...
Posted by ajh59 at March 24, 2006 03:14 PM