Alex Little

This morning the live OpenLearn servers have been updated with quite a few improvements…

• RSS feeds published for a variety for units (including unit content)
• MyLearningSpace and MyLabSpace – so you can see your courses, recent forum postings etc in one place (well really it’s 2 places!! – one for each OpenLearn site)
• More prominent forums – so will hopefully generate some more discussion, and what dicussion there is will be more visible to users
• much more sensible login navigation for users with OUCU (SAMS) user accounts
• plus, obviously the most important update (!) is to MSG block, so you now receive much more obvious new message notifications, when a new message arrives you’ll see a small pop up box appear in the bottom right of your browser window (in a similar way to how GTalk informs you of new messages)

Plus there have been lots of other updates to the servers too (bug fixes etc), but the ones above are (IMHO) the most significant.

In ‘other news’, I’ve put the FB stuff on bit a of a backburner for now, whilst we get chance to think about what exactly we want the FaceBook MSG application to actually do. The other (real!) reason for this is that I had quite an obscure bug which took most of last week to track down and fix. In the MSG forums there were a few people who weren’t getting automatically logged in to MSG. There didn’t appear to be any pattern to who was affected, and I didn;t have a user account which displayed the issue, so was difficult to pin down. Eventually we found it was to do with not all users being auto logged in to both LearningSpace and LabSpace, and it was these users who then didn;t get logged in to MSG. So we’re pretty sure we’ve got the issue fixed now, but if you’re still affected then please let us know!