I learned quite a lot about robotics at JavaOne. Most of the time I when I was manning the counter at the java.net booth, I was accompanied by members of the java.net Robotics Community. In the early evening of the opening day of JavaOne, community members Jim Wright, Bruce Boyes, Roger Brinkley, and Brian Jenkins gathered to record a java.net Community Corner podcast. The scheduled topic was "robotics and education," but the discussion was more wide ranging than that, starting out with talk about java.net and Oracle, Larry Elison's presentation at the end of the opening keynote, and the future of the java.net Robotics Community given Oracle's acquisition of Sun.

While robotics seems the "odd man out" among java.net communities, in terms of immediate relevance for Oracle, the group agreed that robotics might be important to Oracle in the future, given Larry Elison's statements about his interest in hardware, and his desire to not allow other innovative companies to entirely own the marketplace for handheld mobile devices, etc.

The discussion did include a lot of talk about robotics, as well as the value of the java.net community. Brian Jenkins is a student, who will be graduating and enter the job market soon. He spoke about the value he has found in being a member of the java.net community. He hopes for greater engagement with universities by the java.net community, and vice versa.

The value of collaboration within the context of education was discussed. Brian noted that once students graduate, they need to collaborate with co-workers. Hence, it would be better if universities brought collaboration into their teaching methods. He considers java.net to be an ideal platform for bringing engineering students into collaboration with professionals and other students.

With respect to university education, times are changing, certainly. For the non-students in the discussion, collaboration was not allowed when they were in college. It would have been considered cheating. Today things have moved a bit in the collaborative direction, but there is still a long way to go.

Listening to this discussion, I was reminded of Felipe Gaucho's podcast about the PUJ (Premio Universitario Java) Competition, where software developed by students is judged by other students, professors, and software engineering professionals. Awareness of the value of the collaborative approach is definitely on the rise.

The discussion ended with some wondering about how java.net will evolve into the future: will it become more of a standard "developer network"? Will its open, free-wheeling nature be extended through increased involvement with universities?

These questions weren't answered in the Robotics Community podcast. I'd say it's ultimately up to the java.net community itself to provide the answers. My guess is that's what Oracle would like to see as well.