Simon Grant

30th April

Today is the final day of the InLOC project — a European ICT Standardization Work Programme project I have been leading since November 2011.

Phil Barker

24th April

The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative aimed to help people discover useful learning resources by adding to the schema.org ontology properties to describe educational characteristics of creative works. Well, as of the release of schema draft version 1.0a a couple of weeks ago, the LRMI properties are in the official schema.org ontology.

Lorna M. Campbell

23rd April

The Scottish Funding Council has recently published a new Further and Higher Education ICT Strategy in response to the McClelland Review of ICT Infrastructure in the Public Sector in Scotland. This post summarises the main points of the SFC ICT strategy and briefly reflects on the the focus of the strategy and the potential role of open source and open standards to enable the delivery of its objectives.

Martin Hawksey

22nd April

This post originally appeared on the ocTEL blog on 15th April and was written in collaboration with David Jennings. I’ve reposted it here as it outlines some of the broad ideas we are using with this open course, but in particular I wanted to highlight the use of the WordPress plugin MailPress to distribute course updates.

Adam Cooper

22nd April

Early last week the government announced the Open Standards Board had finally been convened via a press release from Francis Maude, the Minister for the Cabinet Office, and via a blog post from Liam Maxwell, the government's Chief Technology Officer. This is a welcome development but what chuffed me most was that my application to be a Board member had been successful.

Sheila MacNeill

19th April

After much cajoling and numerous requests . . . well OK, one from Martin, I've decided to start a new, possibly weekly, feature for all of you out there who are grabbling with the numerous challenges of MOOCs. Whether you're an instructor or student, this could the place you've been looking for to get some words of wisdom based on my vast experience MOOCs (cough, cough).

Phil Barker

17th April

Lorna and I recently contributed a study on possible reforms to JACS, a study which is part of a larger piece of work on Redesigning the HE data landscape. JACS, the Joint Academic Coding System, is mainatained by HESA (the Higher Education Statistics Agency) and UCAS (Universities and Colleges Admissions Service) as a means of classifying UK University courses by subject.

Li Yuan

17th April

The question to MOOC or not to MOOC has perhaps been discussed in many institutions’ committee meetings recently, such as this tongue-in-cheek one on Tony Bates’ blog!

Wilbert Kraan

17th April

Last weekend, a motley crew of designers, students, developers, business and government people came together in Edinburgh to prototype designs and apps to help learners manage their journeys. With help, I built a prototype that showed how curriculum and course offering data can be combined with e-portfolios to help learners find their way.

Sheila MacNeill

14th April

It's not quite a chicken and egg situation, but there is a always a tension between technology and pedagogy. A common concern being that technology is being used in education "just because it can" and not because it has a sound pedagogical impact.