Introducing the Education and Research Community

Java.Net is a very big place on the net nowadays. There are a lot of communities and hundreds of projects. But what is in each community? Why would you host your project in one or the other? Today I am going to tell you about one of the Java.Net communities I manage, Education and Research (E&R).

But first, Education and Research? Why? In part, education needs software too. There are actually many open source projects developing software related to education. Some of the older projects are beginning to migrate to Java.Net to take advantage of the community and services provided here. But there is more than software for the sake of education. There are also projects related to student thesis and school projects. There are also many researchers that need a space to work with their peers in an open way.

Face it, we have good tools, a great overall community and its all free. Why not support education and our researchers that need all the help they can get?

This community is used by students, teachers, and individuals to create software for all aspects of education and learning from classroom management systems to teaching tools, to hosting projects of students for projects and thesis work. We also host tutorials for learning various subjects, authors post their code and sample chapters for books, and we also host academic research and thesis work.

This community is also important for collaboration between educators, students, and developers of educational software. We host discussions and areas for exploration important for learning or exploring new ideas and new technologies.

Why Host a Project in E&R?

E&R is definitely a loose community as far as projects go. We focus on education, so project here relate to schools, students, educators, or even the ongoing education of developers and managers. So tutorials, code examples, books, educational software, school management, testing, etc. can all be hosted or found here. We cross a wide range of the other communities from J2EE to Swing to Linux. As long as it is related to education and research, you can see there are advantages hosting in a community of teachers and students.

But why not another community? Why host a JXTA tutorial here when there is already a JXTA community? Simply this area is the place to go to learn just like a school is a place to learn. If you are hosting a new project you will have the tools to create and manage learning systems for new projects. We will be cross-linking the communities so that the core community has a link to the educational community hosting its tutorials. This way we can concentrate on the education aspects of a project as a whole plus get help from the experts in the subject community.

Another reason to host your project here is if it is highly experimental. Trying to refine an algorithm, experiment with different designs, implementing a new type of user interface? E&R is open to the educational, the new, the cool, and the strange. Math, science, the arts, and other subjects that we associate with academic and scientific endeavors too.

Project Areas

There are a lot of subjects in education and even more in research. To create a sense of order, we have divided the E&R community into several project areas. See if you can find an area or a project in that area that fits your needs and interests. If you have a project proposal and need a new category, let us know.

Community Leaders for E&R: Dr. Robert S. Stephenson, Daniel Brookshier.

Dr. Robert S. Stephenson
Community Leader - Education & Research at Java.Net
E-learning Architect
Assoc. Prof., Biological Sciences
Wayne State University, Detroit MI
http://www.science.wayne.edu/~rstephe
rstephe@sun.science.wayne.edu

Daniel Brookshier
Community Leader - Education & Research at Java.Net
Author - 'JXTA: Java P2P Programming'
Editor: P2PJournal.com
President JavaMUG
Director on the Board of JXTA.ORG
turbogeek@cluck.com