The pic is my architect and the island’s carpenter - all found on my iPod.

This blog entry was writting from my Ipod Touch: Very easy to include pictures

There is a long answer and a short one. Let’s try the latter at this time.

First soa:
A report to the Danish Ministry of Science describes SOA (as in Service Oriented Architecture) as an enabling strategy.

“SOA is the sets of policies, practices and frameworks that enable application functionality to be provided and consumed as sets of services using technology independent standards based interfaces.” (SOA Adoption in the Danish Public Sector Part II – Main Report).

SOA is here considered a policy driven approach grounded in public policy strategies (ref. the just presented Norwegian white paper on ICT policies “A information society for all”, St.meld. 17 2006 - 2007). We would suppose that this means that soa is not technology driven, and that the values systems guiding the technological development should be quite easy to extract.

If we are to explore the way learning technologies are informed by the expressed needs of the end-users, we should think that activities that take place within a soa framework would be worth focussing on.

So the e-Framework:
The initiative within learning technologies that has put most resources into defining service-oriented approaches for education is the e-Framework initiative of UK JISC and Australian DEST. The e-Framework for Education and Research emphasises a service-oriented approach that identifies, documents, and makes available resources to help an institution ’service-enable’ its IT infrastructure. The e-Framework does not mandate the use of Web Services. Other technical approaches are permitted where appropriate (e.g., where existing standards are already in use (such as LDAP or Z39.50), or where Web Services (SOAP or REST) do not yet meet performance or functional requirements such as for streaming large data sets or for secure transactions). The aim is to promote an iterative process rather than advocate the design and implementation of a complete Service Oriented Architecture.

In general the concept of services draws the attention towards user needs; the systems and systems design are not the primary focus of attention. This is valuable when we are exploring the need to ground more of the software development in community needs. Within the e-Framework the Domain Models serve a the vehicle for the needed dialogue - as a form of bridge between Users’ Needs and Services.

Reflection on what is written above:
1. Yesterday we had the proposal of extreme programming as a means of bridging the gap between teachers and techies. Now we have another one: domain maps. How many other ideas for boundary objects will we find out there?

2. Would it be possible to test and compare the efficiency of these means to bridge the communities? I would be a very difficult task to put extreme programming up against creating domain models. However, isn’t it what I am aspiring to do?