Your Laptop as the Server

This post is a sequel. It takes an idea from an earlier paper and makes it real.

Where We Left Off

In an earlier paper, I argued that Indonesian lecturers should not have to upload the same documents to multiple government systems. Instead, each lecturer's data should live at the source and be served through REST. I called it redefining the data provider.

That paper was the theory. This one is the implementation. The question became: what actually serves the data? The answer turned out to be a tool I had already built for a different purpose.

Reusing What Already Exists

I had built the Lecturer Based Supportive Tool (LBST) to help lecturers author learning content offline in low-bandwidth Indonesia. Run one script, get a local web server, write content, sync it to your LMS later.

Then I realized: the same tool could solve the administrative reporting mess. The learning materials a lecturer already creates in LBST can be turned into portfolios. Supporting documents (PDFs, reports) can be stored in LBST's virtual storage. And LBST already speaks REST. So it can expose all of that as a data provider.

The lecturer's own laptop, running LBST, becomes the data provider. The government system fetches the data when it needs it. No repeated uploads. No redundancy. No server meltdown.

The Nice Part

What I liked most: this did not require rebuilding anything. The comparison table in the paper shows it clearly. Authoring learning material becomes authoring portfolios. Syncing to a remote LMS becomes syncing to a government system. Serving content becomes serving portfolios. Same architecture, new purpose.

Good abstractions pay off later in ways you did not plan. I built LBST for bandwidth problems. It turned out to also solve bureaucratic problems, because at the core, both are about who holds the data and how it is served.

Read the Full Paper

Read the full paper: The use of Lecturer Based Supportive Tools (LBST) as Data Provider for Indonesian Lecturer Administrative Problems →

Published at the 2015 IEEE International Electronics Symposium (IES), Surabaya. Part of my doctoral research at Kumamoto University.