Alex August 29th, 2008
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!
Alex June 1st, 2008
I’ve long been involved with the environmental conservation charity BTCV, and have always been surprised that they haven’t tried to get more from the willingness of companies to spend money on team-building type days…
Well, it appears they are now, with their Employee Volunteering scheme. I’m not sure how long this has been running – so I may be a little behind the times!. Groups can spend a day (or more) on a practical conservation task (similar to the day some of us from KMi spent at the Greensands Trust in Leighton Buzzard helping to build a new boardwalk). It’s all good fun so will see if we can get a group from KMi out again…
Alex December 4th, 2007
(image courtesy of Chris Valentine)
On Friday Marc, one of the founders of KMi, took early retirement, see the full story with more pics.
It’ll be a shame not having Marc around (though I’m sure we’ve not seen the last of him!), especially having worked closely with him on MSG over the last year or so, but wish him all the best in his retirement
Alex August 7th, 2006
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
Alex July 14th, 2006
All been going well this week, had another day working on OCI, which was mainly meetings discussing how 3 KMi tools (BuddySpace, Compendium and FlashMeeting) could be intergrated into Moodle, and also how the authentication & registration was going to work across the OCI sites.
Also spent some time this week handing over some the Sled/CopperCore work – though spent most of the time trying to remember what I’d done all those months ago. We eventually got to the point where we can compile and run Sled on Juliettes machine. I’ve still got a few more bits to hand over to her about this, eg how the CCSI module works etc.
Finally, updated the database on our Sled demo site (http://sled.open.ac.uk), so that it uses a MS SQL database instead of HSQL. We had loads of reliability and performance problems using HSQL, especially as more people registered on the system. It’s still not as fast as it could be, but is much faster and more reliable than it was!
Alex July 7th, 2006
First day working in KMi on the Open Content Project today, all going well so far! Been reading through some of the technical documentaiton and functional specs and all making sense 
Also been looking at the architecture & code base for BuddySpace and MSG, that Chris has given me access to. The other thing that I’ve been doing is installing Moodle, I’m trying to get apache, PHP & mysql installed separately (rather than just using the bundled package) and running together, gradually getting there with this but finding that setting up PHP to work with apache & mysql isn’t totally straightforward – too many config file changes etc for my liking! Should be up and running soon
Alex June 28th, 2006
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.
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.
Alex Little. Licensed under