Alex Little

Found out this morning that our JISC Design for Learning bid has been successful, so that’s really good news From my point of view, this news means that we’ll be able to make Sled & CopperCore much more robust (though there are other aspects to the bid too!). Further information about the bid can be found in the proposal document.

Have just come back from the JISC conference in Edinburgh where I attended the Learning Design strand. We’re still now sorting out what we can bid for in the latest JISC toolkit and demonstrator project calls – we have a few ideas as to what we could do, and just need to get these refined into an actual bid in time

I have uploaded the latest version of Sled (2.0.2) to Sourceforge – which includes the fixes described in my last couple of entries in my LD diary/blog

Have been away quite a lot for the past few weeks – hence why I’ve not been keeping this up to date. I attended the latest Unfold CoP meeting in Glasgow a week or so ago which seemed to go well, I’ve put more about this in my LD blog, so have a look there!
I’ve just been back in the office for a day now, so just catching up on things. On 10th Oct we released our new IET website; the actual design hasn’t changed (well, only a little) but we have:

• Created the site content from scratch – there were 100′s (or 1000′s) of old, unmaintained, out of date pages on the old site, so in starting afresh we have removed all of these. They are still available on backup if we do need to restore any sections/pages for any reason, but we hope we’ve got the main content areas covered
• Moved to a clustered servers – so the website should be much more robust. Though we have had some intermittent problems with one or other of the cluster servers becoming unresponsive overnight. I think we’ve got this fixed now – might have been due to one of the server timeout settings not being set, so if a long running page was hit (or caused an infinite loop) the server didn’t automatically terminate the request after a certain amount of time.
• Changed the publishing system for the site – now all IET staff can edit the site via their web browser (a bit like a wiki) and everynoe has access to edit any of the pages. Previously people needed to use Dreamweaver or other web editing software to actually go and edit files – and also have access to the files. This meant that updates to the site often didn’t get done because of the hassle invovled in finding the right person who has access etc etc. We’re not sure yet that this will definitely solve the problem – but it does mean there is no excuse if someone spots a typo or incorrect email address etc for them not to just go and update the page themselves. It also means we can track more easily pages which haven’t been updated in a certain length of time – I think we should be aiming for ensuring pages get updated at least every 6 months – or at least reviewed even if nothing actually needs to be changed.

The next thing I’ve got to work on is getting the LD JISC projects finished off and what should be the priorities to get done, and also some work finishing off bits on the new IET site.

I’ve now got the Sled player running on Linux, more details are in the Learning Design section

Attended the recent Unfold meeting (Communities of Practice for Learning Design) which was very worthwhile. Had some interesting discussions and got to share thoughts and ideas with developers from both LAMS and Moodle. The main things we were discussing was how to make both of these VLEs Learning Design compliant, so they could both import and export LD XML. We found that especially for Moodle, the export to learning design would/should be relatively straightforward, though an import would be harder – due to the fact that Moodle wouldn’t currently cope with the complex activity structures that can be created in LD – so some ‘flattening’ of a deeply nested activity structure might be necessary.

The other problem we discussed for both LAMS and Moodle was how to describe and export the tools and services which are in both of these products, but the LD spec doesn’t allow for. The way we are thinking of working is to create a common description of each of these tools/services (eg forum, noticeboard, voting tool etc) which could then be exported into the LD package as resource file – so this resource file would be an xml file which describes the characteristics of the tool. Theres much to be done here, but I think we’ve got a plan of what needs to be looked at and a way of achieving this now, it will also tie in well with some of the work being done in the OKI/SAKAI projects.

Finally (!), I’ve been asked to present the progress of our 2 learning design projects at the next Unfold meeting which will be in Glasgow in October (more details)

Most of what I’ve been working on the last week or so (and will be for the next few months!) is for the next 2 JISC funded Learning Design projects. The details of this work can be found in my ‘LD diary’