Since I wrote a post last month about agile edtech, I’ve been thinking and talking with Tim Owens a fair amount about what a virtualized sandbox for DTLT (through something like Amazon Web Services) might look like. What would it mean for our group to have the ability to fire up a variety of server environments and corresponding applications (such as EdX’s MOOC platform) in minutes? As Tim noted, this could be the next chapter of the BlueHost experiment UMW’s DTLT embarked on a decade ago now. I knew I’d read about these virtualized environments sometime last year on Brian Lamb’s Abject blog, and after a bit of digging  I found his “The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind” post in which he points to an approach, with prodding from Boris Mann, that might provide another way of thinking about deploying applications within educational environments. A couple of days after Brian wrote that post, Stephen Downes OLDaily’d it, noting the following: The … [Read more...]