Frank Benneker
Educational Technologist
University of Amsterdam
Driek Heesakkers
Project Manager
University of Amsterdam
Modern universities are becoming loose conglomerates of (inter)disciplinary expertise that have a high degree of connectedness with society in the broader sense. 21st century universities may also be regarded as ‘knowledge servers’ in which a number of communities create, share, publish and apply knowledge. Learning and research, in other words, is becoming a community-wide activity. For the University of Amsterdam, SURFconext, a nationwide Dutch initiative by SURFnet (the Dutch National Research and Education Network), has many of the key features for next generation collaboration infrastructure that create new opportunities for online collaboration. SURFconext combines several key infrastructures based on open standards for federated identity and group management (e.g. saml, grouper), Open Social as widget library, and access to collaboration services. The University of Amsterdam is working on examples of institutional implementation (UvAConext) as a way to set up virtual research environments for researchers by opening up the UvA Sakai and Uportal-based collaboration tools. In this session, topics discussed will include organizational, political and financial as well as technical issues.
http://www.surfnet.nl/en/Thema/coin/Pages/default.aspx
Presentation