Alex Little

After over 7½ years at the OU, today is my last day. Still hasn’t quite yet sunk in that I’m leaving, or that in only 2 weeks time I’ll be beginning my placement in Ethiopia.

I’ve really enjoyed working here, in IET, KMi and on the OpenLearn team, have learnt loads and have met lots of great people.

Also thanks for all your generosity in donating to VSO to help with the work they’re doing – very close to reaching my fundraising target now

I’ll be making sure that I keep my blog up to date so you’ll be able to keep track of how things are going, so keep in touch and there’s an open invitation if you fancy a holiday in Ethiopia!

Had the final project meeting for the JoinIn project last week, up in Manchester, so we demo’d all the software runing from my tablet PC. All seemed to go well, we’d had a bit of a frantic time getting it running properly, as I was using different versions of PHP and Moodle to the versions Juliette had been using on her machine for the development work.  Anyway, all worked out well in the end – just got to help finish writing the final report for the project now.

Last week in IET this week before I move over to KMi, so have got lots of packing to do! Looking forward to getting started full time in KMi though

Had quite a hectic last couple of weeks, trying to catch up with everything I missed whilst I was away in Oz, and also preparing for the fact that I’m moving over to the OUs Open Content Initiative on secondment for 2 years. I’ll be based in KMi whilst on secondment, and I’m really looking forward to getting started, just a lot to finish off and hand over here in IET first! Start the new job part time, but just one day a week, next week, then full time from middle of August. If you’re interested the job ad for my replacement is up on the OU jobs site.

Met up with my new manager this morning, so found out a lot more about what I’m going to be working on for the first few months anyway, and all seems to be interesting stuff – looking as getting a version KMi’s BuddySpace instant messaging system (based on Jabber) integrated into Moodle. Also found that the work we’ve been doing on the JoinIn project, especially the new Moodle Grouping Module, is going to be very relevant in this work, as we’ll need to ensure that the groups set up in Moodle can be shared across with BuddySpace.