Washington Post: College coders working with IBM’s Project Zero
February 14 2008
One of the concerns I have heard from the Lotus community is that IBM isn't doing enough to introduce students to IBM technologies. While this article from the Washington Post is not about IBM efforts specific to Lotus, it does highlight some of the work IBM is doing to introduce university students to Web 2.0 skills (or should I say skillz).
James Governor, an analyst with Redmonk, suggested it makes sense for IBM to embrace newer development methods in its work with schools.I am hopeful that, especially with the opportunities around technologies like Eclipse (see next blog post, shortly), Lotus-branded capabilities will start making their way into these kinds of efforts.
"IBM doesn't want to be your father's IBM, it wants to be your son's," he said. ...
Meanwhile, IBM and the University of California-Los Angeles previously created a program within one computer science course that sees students choose their own Web 2.0 project and then work with IBM mentors to complete it.
Jeffrey Tan, a UCLA senior from Palo Alto, California, built a mashup called Bounce along with two classmates. It leveraged the Facebook API along with listings from the Eventful event aggregator and maps from Google Maps. Tan's contributions focused on the application's front end.
Link: Washington Post: College coders working with IBM's Project Zero >
Post a Comment
- 2
Eric http://www.ericlohry.com | 2/14/2008 9:43:48 PM
Just like the cigarette companies, start 'em young and they are hooked for life. Or is that a bad comparison?
- 3
bill mccuistion | 2/14/2008 11:32:34 PM
How sad. Who is the student and who is the teacher here?
Seems the SS IBM has lost its rudder and doesn't know where to steer.
Ed, I asked you for assitance from IBM to get no-cost support for disaster-relief planning support, but was told, by you, that IBM does not care.
- 4
Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 2/15/2008 5:44:31 AM
Bill, attacking me in this manner on my blog, especially on the day i'm leaving for vacation, is not a chapter in the book "How to win friends and influence people". There are two sides to every story. It's not like I ignored you.
- 5
Jim Casale | 2/15/2008 7:28:01 AM
@3 I don't know the details of what happened with you and IBM/Ed but I can tell you Ed has been gone above and beyond for me. They would be doing more if management here would let them (I am fighting the political move to Exchange). Since you speak of disaster-relief planning support I can tell you one of the saving graces of our infrastructure here is people expect and get 100% uptime 24/7. In our Exchange meetings, management was shocked to learn that out of the box Exchange will not provide what we have now. They are looking at third party products to get what we already have with Domino. Sorry about going off on a tangent here.
I don't see how you can expect no-cost support on a project like that from IBM or any other vendor. There are many resources out there that can help you. Heck you can even post a request for help/advice in one of the forums.
- 6
Mike Mcp http://www.openntf/mPortal | 2/15/2008 11:40:44 AM
@1, I'm with ya. MS has student versions of everything, but they still cost a few bucks. Why not create a marketing group that pushes hard for Symphony/Notes infrastructures on campus, including a Domino server on the backend? Domino really has a tempting suite of apps once again, and I can't think of any holes in the lineup.
take care,
Mike
- 7
Luke Kolin http://www.deltava.org/ | 2/15/2008 2:30:07 PM
I'm not sure what compelling advantages Domino has from an educational perspective when it comes to training students; I'd much rather have them learning Java, C, Lisp, markup, data structures, concurrency, set theory, etc. etc.
Apart from attempting to get it into the curriculum as a way of getting more seats sold down the road, what is Domino uniquely-positioned to teach?
Luke
- 8
Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 2/15/2008 2:49:20 PM
@7 - Developing collaborative applications that allow both online and offline access to the same data. You can't do that easily except with Notes/Domino.
- 9
Henry Ferlauto http://www.geniusinside.com | 2/15/2008 4:22:56 PM
@7 - Read @2, take with a grain of salt, and humor.
The point is to introduce people while they are young to IBM / Lotus technologies so they don't believe that Microsoft is the only major software company in the world.
Just having Notes and Symphony taught as end-user classes would be a huge step in the right direction.
@3 - What is truly sad is the manner in which you are (horribly) attempting to vent a grievance you have with IBM and /or Ed personally.
- 10
Luke Kolin http://www.deltava.org/ | 2/15/2008 8:09:20 PM
@8 - Fair enough. There's some value in that, but it's pretty far down the list relative to some of the other things we need folks to know. Understanding the effects of asynchronous replication is an important niche skill; my Notes experience is handy when working in an environment that makes extensive use of mySQL replication.
But my point remains - there are an awful lot of programming concepts such as object inheritance, concurrency and multi-threading and basic scope that need to be taught far before Domino. We're struggling to find folks that understand this, and can grasp how to use relational databases beyond vanilla INSERTs and SELECTs. Don't even get me started about generics, closures and functions as first-order objects.
Teaching kids Domino may introduce a few interesting wrinkles to slightly broaden their education, but as @9 points out, it's really a variation on the old Microsoft illusion that "if you get in front of them early enough, they'll stick with you".
The reality is that kids today already know that Microsoft isn't the only software company in the world. You've won that battle - the problem is that when folks move away from Microsoft, it's in the direction of Java, PHP, Python or a variety of other open and more powerful directions.
I certainly wouldn't want educational institutions teaching a proprietary platform, whether it's IBM or Microsoft.
Cheers!
Luke
- 11
Jeff Picco | 2/16/2008 5:05:09 PM
You have no idea how happy I'll be when I get a resume from an undergrad that shows they have experience in Lotus technologies from college rather than just MS products.
I still have hope
It would be very nice to see Lotus reincarnate the old "LEAP" program. There are plenty of colleges and universities that use Lotus Notes, Domino and related technologies. Now how about they actually teach them?