MESSAGE
| DATE | 2004-06-22 |
| FROM | From: "rc"
|
| SUBJECT | RE: [hangout] Large Plans for Linux at Marist College
|
This be me Alma Mater! They learnned me good
Actually, there has always been a deep running relationship between Marist
and the huge IBM campus just south of the college in Wappingers Falls. When
I was there they had the largest educational computing joint venture in the
country with the college acting as a live test bed for Big Blue's
initiatives. While I left code and computing for chicks and beers during
those years in the mid-80's, I do remember a bunch of DOS terminals, a
couple of Apples and an entire half of the one small lab at the time for the
daunting "mainframe". I was always impressed with the schools tech ties.
Yet, I was frustrated in recent years because whenever I spoke with anyone
still affiliated with the school they knew nothing of Linux. And I saw no
mention of it in the current CS curriculem. I am very happy to see that my
'ole school is still living up to it's geeky rep.
I still know people up there and would be more than happy to be a conduit if
anyone thought they could be of any help.
~Ray
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hangout-at-mrbrklyn.com [mailto:owner-hangout-at-mrbrklyn.com] On
Behalf Of Inker, Evan
Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2004 8:28 AM
To: hangout-at-nylxs.com
Subject: [hangout] Large Plans for Linux at Marist College
Here's one we should have been in charge of.
Large Plans for Linux at Marist College
The Red Foxes and the Penguin
http://linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/5448/1/
Jacqueline Emigh
Thursday, June 17, 2004 10:10:16 AM
Marist College, a smallish school in Upstate New York, gained large-scale
attention a few weeks ago, when it became one of just three OSDL-affiliated
research labs worldwide. Actually, though, the college has been quietly at
work on Linux- and open source for at least ten years now. Marist's recent
initiatives include Project Greystone, a Web-based learning project with
national aspirations.
In Project Greystone, a joint effort with IBM, Linux virtual machines (VMs)
are serving up content to Marist students and faculty, as well as to their
counterparts in two local public school districts: urban Poughkeepsie and a
rural district known as Highland.
At the moment, the Web-based content includes eight computer science
courses, liberal arts classes such as Writing II and "The Meaning of
History," and graduate courses for faculty.
On the computer sciences side, coursework runs the gamut from Web
programming to distributed systems, according to Dr. Roger Norton, dean of
the college.
"Students used to turn in their homework on floppies to get a grade. But
now, we can go up to their Web sites instead and check their work as they go
along," Norton said during an interview this week.
"Students are learning computer sciences in a real Linux environment," he
added. In the Web programming class, for instance, undergrads work with
languages such as Java and PHP. In the distributed systems class, they're
responsible for deploying multiple servers ranging from chat to Apache
Tomcat.
High school students in the Poughkeepsie and Highland districts are taking
advanced placement courses from their homes. Meanwhile, some of their
teachers are earning postgraduate degrees via distance learning.
"In the State of New York, teachers are required to get their master's
degrees within five years of gaining provisional certification. This can
otherwise be a tough requirement to meet, because of the time involved in
traveling to classes. A teacher could be driving for hours," Norton
contended.
Project Greystone uses a variant of Red Hat Linux. Marist is running the
Linux VMs on top of two zSeries mainframes, a Model 900 and a Model 990. The
same two machines are being used for e-mail, as well as for some production
apps.
In another Linux implementation, this one funded through an NSF grant,
Marist is collaborating on Globus-based grid computing with RPI, Lehigh
College, SUNY Geneseo; Argonne National Labs, and IBM Hawthorne.
On the other hand, a Franklin D. Roosevelt Web site -- hosted at Marist for
the US Library of Congress -- runs on an MVS-based mainframe. Marist's
Voyager library catalog system operates on AIX. "We also have a few rogue
Macs and some Windows apps," Norton acknowledged.
Plans are now under way, however, to port Marist's WebSphere-based course
management system to Linux running on blade machines, and ultimately to
Linux VMs.
"There are portlets up there for discussion groups and online attendance,
for example," said Project Greystone Lead Howard Baker, of IBM's
Poughkeepsie facility.
The course management system also includes training modules for "new teacher
support," addressing topics such as time management and teacher/parent
conferences.
"We're also working with Marist on support for rich media and Web streaming.
We're prototyping this on Windows, but then we'll move it over to Linux,"
noted IBM's Baker.
Aside from the Marist College campus, OSDL's other research lab facilities
are in Beaverton, Oregon and Yokahama, Japan.
Norton and Baker each credit Marist College President Dennis Murray for
acting as a catalyst for Linux teamwork between Marist and IBM over the past
decade or so. "A lot of people don't know this, but Marist College was
really the first place to distribute Linux source code for the S/390," Baker
pointed out.
IBM also provides internships for Marist students, and hires some of
Marist's computer science graduates. Marist is located in Poughkeepsie,
where IBM maintains a local site.
Beyond supplying students with highly marketable skills, the college's use
of Linux brings advantages ranging from lowered costs to easier
manageability, Norton maintained.
"We're running more than 500 VMs for the computer science students. If a
student messes something up, it will only bring own one VM. We can recreate
the VM in minutes. If we tried doing similar in Windows, we'd need 500
physical machines, and it'd probably take a lot longer to bring things back
up again," according to the college dean.
"My hope is to 'go national' with this new program. We're already in talks
with the State of New Hampshire, which has the highest number of
home-schooled students in the nation - a lot of them in very rural areas."
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____________________________
NYLXS: New Yorker Free Software Users Scene
Fair Use -
because it's either fair use or useless....
NYLXS is a trademark of NYLXS, Inc
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