Well, this all started on a cold December morning in 2005 when my cell phone rang and there was Prof. Antanas Mitasiunas on the line calling from Switzerland…
It was a Saturday morning, as I recall, and I thought “what the hell… is Antanas among those who press their mobile phone buttons accidentally and then the first contact is called…”. Having your first name starting with “Ad” gives you a fairly high chance being called accidentally 
But it was not a mistake. Antanas told that we had a few days to bid in a tender for preparing a new course for master-level students (selected chapters of computer networks), which also included writing a text book. This sounded all-too-familiar, we have done quite a few things with Antanas at the last moment, so we started the process.
I will not bore you with the details of the process (we needed to find suitable authors quickly etc.), but at the end of the day we managed to beat the clock and bid in this tender. And thew we won it and needed to deliver on the promise.
The first thing to do was to some up with a set of topics we would bother to explain to ourselves and others. We checked the requirements for the course, then drank some strong coffee (not 32 cups per day like poor Robbie Williams does) and… well, frankly, it was kind of no-brainer to come-up with a good topic – the whole world is nuts about that SOA/Web services thingy so why should not be we?
Voila, here are the the main objectives and the learning outcomes (hopefully) of the course:
- Understanding of the principles of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and its place in the context of business and IT landscape
- Understanding of the architectural principles of Web Services and the interrelationships between various WS specifications
- Understanding of the Grid architectural principles
- Knowledge of the interrelation between the Grid and Web Services
- Ability to apply the knowledge of SOA, Web Services and Grid to provide business-oriented IT solutions. Back to the Earth and the bottomline, that is.
Some more details you can find here. In fact, some of the material was presented in Autumn 2005, just in a very different way. I thought we coud do better this time 
Then we needed to write a textbook for the course and in the process we have realised that a book won’t scale properly to convey all the information to the audience – it became a massive collection of hyperlinks and we felt that we do not want to flatten hyper-text into PDF and to freeze it – it would be a shame in Web 2.0 age. We will share the text book with a bit later.
So then I (Adomas) thought of blogging, calendaring etc. and soon realised that this is not a one-man show, it is rather an orchestra (or a choreographed act) where all the participants create knowledge in the process, so we needed more – a multi-user blog to allow ourselves to exercise freedom of speech.
Yes. You are right in thinking that you are also a teacher in this course. We value your thoughts, we want to hear from you, we want you to become an active part of this. You are the person of the year. And we need to eat our dogs’ food – to use Web 2.0 (WordPress gives me an excellent word processor, which I am using right now in my browser) for our own purposes. Then we will appreciate it better and will create better stuff for others.
So… please do come and join us. Invite along a friend if you feel like doing so. Bring some cookies (they sell some stuff and coffee from the vending machines down the hall here at VU MIF) – it’s gonna be on Saturdays as I need to drag my butt all the way up from southern France to meet you all and I cannot take as many days off at Eurecom as I would like.
I know, it sucks to sit inside on Saturdays that’s why we planned 6 sessions during February-March when the LT weather sucks accordingly. Giedrius sacrifices his Saturdays stealing time from his family and I will not have a chance to choose between swimming in the sea and skiing in Alpes-Maritimes. So we better make these SOA sessions good to justify the sacrifices According to what I heard from the students, the first session was not a total failure. That’s encouraging.
So here is what you may want to do: please go and register on Edublogs then please notify me so I could put you onto the authors’ list of our group blog. Of course, you will have your own at the same time.
Then, you may ask me – why this stuff is in English. Well, it is very simple – it is easier to talk about SOA in English and, more importantly, everyone needs to be perfectly fluent in English – you never know where your next port of call is For example, one person from the audience has already got my proposal to join our team at Eurecom to work on R4eGov – I could not have proposed this to someone not knowing English.
And we need to read, write and publish in English if we want to get “Proudly Made in Lithuania” message across to the world. We do want, don’t we?
Stay tuned & all the bestest. Adomas.
