ACADEMIA

During a keynote at EduCAUSE, a leading Information Technology-related conference for higher education, Sun Microsystems Inc. Chairman and CEO, Scott McNealy, shared how technology and open source curriculum can remove barriers, and help provide better educational resources to teachers, students and parents worldwide. Sun also announced activities to support excellence in education, including: spinning off its Global and Education Learning Community (GELC) as an independent non-profit organization to better serve the needs of the education community; and sponsoring a university-level contest focused on developing innovative applications based on the Solaris 10 Operating System. "Barriers to education, whether cultural, economic, or physical, are being broken down by the confluence of education content and technology," stated Scott McNealy. "One such trend is the use of open source software to make educational materials freely accessible to everyone on the Internet. This sharing approach creates global, participative communities for both educators and students alike." The GELC organization is aimed at helping to improve education through the sharing of open content and best practices through an online community. Separately, many leading universities have also taken steps to open source curriculum, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is actively using open source software to share the university's course materials to a broader network of educators and students. Other notable institutions in the U.S. and Japan are beginning to follow suit. In addition, leading institutions and Web service companies are creating digital libraries that are available for free on the Internet. With 1 billion people on the global network today, and growing to 1.5 billion in the next two years, the ability to access and interact with content is massive. And as more people join the network, the majority will experience it using a mobile device not a PC, requiring that the industry invest in the appropriate technologies for the next generation of network participants. "The emergence of communities that interact, collaborate and share on a global scale is a hallmark of what we call The Participation Age," explained McNealy. "Technology is no longer just a tool to process or gather information from the global network, or Internet. Instead, The Participation Age represents a fundamental change in our relationship with technology where the network is a platform and students and educators from all over the globe can interact and share knowledge and ideas - in short, it's about empowering people." Participants in the Solaris 10 University Challenge are encouraged to leverage Sun's $500 million R&D investment in operating systems to create innovative projects in, with or on the Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Operating Systems. The winner will receive cash and Sun technology for themselves and up to US$100,000 in technology for the associated university. The Solaris 10 University Challenge is open to undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and IT staff at accredited universities in participating countries and is scheduled to begin in November 2005 and continue through June 2006. To participate, interested parties should go to its Web site to get full contest details and requirements. One individual or one team of up to four individuals from the same university will be awarded the Grand Prize - US$5,000 prize purse per individual, plus a Sun Ultra 20 Workstation. The winner's university will receive a credit with a retail value of US$100,000 good toward the purchase of Sun Microsystems products including Sun Fire x64 servers and UltraSPARC processor-based systems, to help the campus expand its technology capabilities. "With OpenSolaris we've enabled students from around the world to share in the collective work of the most innovative engineers on the planet," said Tom Goguen, Vice President, Operating Platforms Group, Sun Microsystems. "The University Challenge encourages students to capitalize on free access to the advanced technology in Solaris 10, letting them take their projects to the next level. We are enthusiastic about this program and excited to see the submissions." All submissions must be based on the Solaris 10 OS or OpenSolaris OS technologies. Eligible projects submitted in accordance with the official rules will be judged by a panel of Solaris 10 OS and OpenSolaris OS experts based on the following judging criteria: usability, quality, innovation, including uniqueness and originality, effective use of technology, and benefits to the Solaris 10 OS end-user or OpenSolaris OS community. The source code for the Solaris 10 OS is available for free at opensolaris.org under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). Any of the open source Solaris 10 OS technologies, including Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), Solaris Containers and Predictive Self-Healing, can be the basis for development and submission to the Solaris University Challenge.