in News, April 09, 2006
CETIS wins new JISC interoperability service contract
You might well wonder if providing a service about interoperability standards for JISC isn't what CETIS has been doing for quite a while now; you'd be right, it has. The new contract means a step change in the way CETIS will fulfill that service to the community, though.

in Blogpost, March 07, 2006
UCISA workshop slides
The slides and the audio for a talk I gave recently entitled "Challenges for Institutions in Adapting to the Global Information Infrastructure" at the joint ULKON/UCISA/CETIS workshop "Initiatives & Innovation: Managing Disruptive Technologies" are linked from this page.

in Event, March 05, 2006
Joint Portfolio SIG & Lifelong Learning Group Meeting

in Event, December 06, 2005
Call for papers - 6th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT2006)
Theme: "Advanced Technologies for Life-Long Learning". Life-long learning becomes much more achievable as versatile infrastructures for mobile communication and portable Web access emerge. Supplementary to this, social software for supporting learners in sharing common views and actually build authentic understanding on relevant themes for learning needs to be conceptualized and experimented with.

in Event, December 06, 2005
Call for papers: Interoperable e-learning systems in action
The workshop is being organised and funded by the Telcert project and is sponsored by the European eLearning Industry Group, SURF SiX and European IMS Network. The workshop is hosted by the Open University of the Netherlands, one of the Telcert project partners.

in Event, November 22, 2005
Next generation activity based eLearning
The Communities of Practice meeting in Berlin is the FINAL UNFOLD CoP meeting and provides a unique opportunity to participate in a working meeting whose goals are to “map out the requirements for the next generation of Learning Design based systems”. The meeting will be led by Rob Koper of the OUNL.

in Blogpost, November 04, 2005
PLE project at CETIS conference
The PLE project will be presenting its work at the CETIS conference on November 15/16 in Edinburgh.

in Event, September 22, 2005
UNFOLD Communities of Practice meeting
The Communities of Practice meeting in Glasgow provides a unique opportunity to spend three days talking with others who are working with the IMS LD specification, and participating in practical workshops.

in Event, September 07, 2005
Pedagogy and Metadata event
This is a joint meeting of the CETIS Metadata SIG (Special Interest Group) and the CETIS Pedagogy Forum The Meeting will be held at the Open University at their Milton Keynes campus on Tuesday 20th September 2005, 10.30am - 4pm.

in News, September 01, 2005
Alt-I-Lab 2005 Demonstrators
The Alt-I-Lab conference has a regular demonstrators session where participants can show off their latest interoperability wares to the assembled crowd. This session tends to be held in an informal market-style which lends itself to a great deal of informed discussion between participants and really is at the core of what the Alt-I-Lab conference is about.

in Event, August 31, 2005
Connecting Teachers & Technologists
Organized by the Enterprise SIG, the Pedagogy Forum & the JISC e-Learning Focus Journalists

Link, added March 04, 2005
Software should be stuff that gets you laid...
And inf argues that software is not VLEs or LMSs- its social software such as blogs. It's mostly a rant about the fact that groupware and VLEs are the kinds of things people have to use because they've been told to by management, not because they want to. Its chosen by comparing feature charts, and used as a means of control or saving money.

in Event, February 21, 2005
Beyond the Red Tape, Are the needs of governments, institutions, and learners inherently at odds with e-learning?
Why do many teachers and lecturers feel reluctant to use IT in their courses? Is it just an aversion to trying out new things, are they afraid of technology, or do they have justifiable reasons based on their teaching practices? Are the Government and educational institutions doing enough to support and promote e-learning, or do they actually hinder its adoption? Are things like traditional exam methods to blame? Or is it the measures by which teachers are externally audited?

in News, February 07, 2005
Learning Design tool bash in Valkenburg
It's like the buses; you wait for one for ages, and then several come along at once. The IMS Learning Design specification was finalised in 2002, and about four implementations are getting ready now. A good time, then, to start playing around with them, exploring what they can do, and seeing whether they interoperate.

in Event, February 01, 2005
Joint Pedagogy and EC SIG meeting on Learning Design
Update on learning design meeting

Link, added January 18, 2005
Games help you 'learn and play'
BBC report on research findings that specific kinds of games can help learning. While that may not be shocking news, the game and the domain of learning the research focussed on is: language learning via the Sims. The argument is that, rather than rote learn vocabulary and abstract structure, modified versions of the Sims allow learners to explore and acquire the language in a context. Also notable is the indication that it is getting easier to modify existing games for such educational purposes, which addresses the old gap in production values between commercial and educational games.

Link, added January 12, 2005
From individualisation to co-creation
Typically free form musing of Jay Cross, the well-known e-learning guru, about how "learner centric" has been well and truly dealt with, and how it's time to start focussing on things like collaboration, forging connections and other 'co-'s. What's notable is that Jay's thought seems to connect with a general shift in more than one way: it's not just that personalised content is bad, and collaboration good, it's more that we've done enough on the former, and need to focus on the latter.
"Learning isn’t content. Learning isn’t infrastructure. Learning is a process of forging neural links."
Thanks to elearnspace for the link.

in Event, January 06, 2005
Joint CETIS Pedagogy Forum and Accessibility SIG Meeting
A joint meeting for the Pedagogy Forum and Accessibility SIG with the theme of accessibility and pedagogy.

in News, December 22, 2004
The state of standards at Online Educa 2004
In amongst many, many other things, Berlin's Online Educa 2004 conference had almost a full day's worth of events on the topic of educational interoperability standards. Since the morning's session was mostly about content interoperability, and the afternoon session about collaborative technology, the panel discussion at the end made for some pretty clear contrasts about where different people think interoperability standards are.

in News, November 17, 2004
Filling out the E-Learning Framework boxes
The results of the first JISC/CETIS conference in Oxford are now available online. The conference brought together specialists from a number of international e-learning initiatives with all current JISC sponsored e-learning technology development projects. Purpose: to start filling out all those boxes in the E-Learning Framework (ELF), but also to give geeks and regular people an opportunity to explore trends in e-learning technology in general.

Link, added November 02, 2004
How Technology Will Destroy Schools
This will have the Ivan Ilich crowd sniggering in their beards: a bunch of luminaries from the received elearning crowd (David Wiley, Dan Rehak, Erik Duval, Wayne Hodgins) have arrived at the same conclusion as the hippy learning guru did thirty years ago: technology will allow us to blow up schools. What's more, the how is also quite similar: by shifting the focus from rote learning to the critical, social skills needed to deal with information. As with many of David Wiley's posts, the comments are at least as valuable as the post itself.

in Feature, September 30, 2004
When metadata becomes content, and authoring learning
and the result an assessment method and part of a learner's/learning profile, you have something like Topic Maps. One of a number of emerging semantic web standards, it is the subject of quite a bit of research and development. The Norwegian estandard project and its members are busy working on educational applications of the technology.

in News, July 29, 2004
Alt-I-Lab results: mind the gap...
between user expectation of interoperability and reality. Or so the University of Waterloo's Tom Carey thought. And repeated it in at least four other varieties of English to make sure the message hit home. Because last week's was the second alt-i-lab, we can begin to look at whether the participants in the interoperability fest are actually closing that gap.

in News, July 12, 2004
Learning Design communities UNFOLD
Not even Einstein could have conjured up something like the theory of relativity in isolation. For that, you need a community of practice. In that respect, implementing, teaching with or authoring Learning Design is no different. The EU sponsored UNFOLD project aims to provide the infrastructure and the expertise to help people form just such communities. The aim: the collaborative building of best practice in the Learning Design area.

Link, added April 30, 2004
Framework for the Pedagogical Evaluation of eLearning Environments
(652 Kb, MS Word) A restructuring and update of an influential JISC report on pedagogic aspects of virtual learning environments. Authors Sandy Britain and Oleg Liber take both an organisational and educational theoretic approach to the subject, informed though Stafford Beer's cybernetic perspective. The VLEs that are evaluated include WebCT Vista, Blackboard Academic Suite, Granada Learnwise, FirstClass, LAMS, COSE and Moodle. Link via EdtechPost

in Feature, March 05, 2004
JISC programme to foster the pick 'n mix MLE
The concept of an institutional learning environment that provides the information that people need, when and where they want it has been around for a while, but has not been easy to realise. The JISC's new e-learning programme includes the e-learning technical framework strand, that is designed to make it more do-able. Now that the first call for technical framework projects is out, we look at what the framework sets out to achieve and how it intends to get there.

in News, March 03, 2004
Flagship UKeU e-learning project faces major restructuring
Following disappointing student numbers and serious difficulty in raising private finance, the UK e-Universities has been asked by government funders to come up with a restructuring plan before April. The emphasis should shift from commercial provision of courses to supporting e-learning development in the state universities.

in Event, February 24, 2004
eLearning Results 2004
This is the second of the standards focussed e-learning conference organised by VLE maker Giunti. This edition focusses on implementation and streamlining rather than new specs and practices. The conference will be preceded by workshops on IMS Learning Design, SCORM 2004, OKI, and SCORM and AICC Certification.

in News, February 20, 2004
CopperCore to power Learning Design implementations
The Open University of the Netherlands (OUNL) has just released CopperCore: an IMS Learning Design engine, the first of its kind. Rather than provide a complete take-it-or-leave-it Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), the open source package is designed to be integrated into a range of existing e-learning infrastructures.

in Event, February 11, 2004
JISC Conference 2004
Delegates will be given opportunities to learn about the full range of JISC’s work by participating in seminars, debates, workshops and demonstrations. In the exhibition area, JISC services and initiatives will be able to provide you with advice and guidance on a range of support and resources available to your institution.

in Event, February 11, 2004
The Shock of the Old 4: "e-Learning, The Student Experience"
The fourth in The Learning Technologies Group at Oxford University Computing Services' educational technology conference. This one will focus on the problems and issues involved in designing and developing learning technologies with a focus on current and future needs of the student e-Learner.

in Event, February 11, 2004
Beyond the Learner: Student and Government Perceptions of the E-Learning Experience
Organised by Oxford University's Learning Technologies Group and sponsored by the JISC Committee for Learning and Teaching (JCLT), this conference aims to let education managers, Learners, Vendors and ICT Developers debate high level questions about the desirability and direction of e-learning.

in Event, October 02, 2003
Third Pedagogy Forum meeting: DfES e-learning strategy
The day will focus on the consultation of the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) 'Towards a Unified e-learning strategy'.

in Event, March 11, 2003
CETIS Pedagogy Forum - Launch event
The Pedagogy Forum is a new group within CETIS and aims to provide a forum to examine and discuss the pedagogic implications of interoperability standards and identify requirements that can be input into the specification process.