In addition to the fact that the future workforce is immersed in educational technology, a lot of what we are involved with has a direct correlation to the perceived and not-yet-perceived needs beyond the ivory tower.

In many respects, the classroom is representative of a variety of deployment scenarios, and the communication challenges encountered here are similar to ones found within organizations, between organizations and their constituents, between corporations and their customers, and between governments and their citizens. Currently, our work overlaps most directly with work happening in the NGO and activist sectors, but these cultures are spreading rapidly.

Our project portfolio will give you a good sense of the range of projects we engage in, but some of the technical details underlying these projects may be of interest to you as well. We try to closely follow the advancements on the frontier of web development. We are involved with a few free software projects, and have completed many projects using Plone, MediaWiki, Wordpress, MochiKit, and soon Drupal, often contributing back patches and products. Lately have been developing new activities following this microapps pattern – a technique which can be described as building our own mashups.

Some of the theory motivating these explorations is described in this poster(pdf) and has spawned the yucca project which articulates these principles in code.

We really enjoyed your visit. Come back soon!

/Jonah