On Friday 24th October 1997 a team from British Aerospace visited the Open University to talk about the British Aerospace Virtual University initiative. The team visiting the OU included the VC of this new University, Geraldine Kenney-Wallace; the Director and Registrar, Alan Millican; the Director of BAe Personnel, Terry Morgan; the Dean of the BAe…
Tuesday 21st October, Bill Morris, General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, visited KMi. The purpose of the visit was Bill Morris’ first meeting as a Trustee of the OU Foundation. Bill has a true passion for education, and is a committed supporter of the OU. The Transport and General Workers Union have…
Following meetings with the Vice-Chancellor, Diana Laurillard (PVC-Tech. Devpt.), and KMi research groups, Mark Resmer (of Sonoma State Uni.) concluded his visit to the OU with a KMi Seminar on the Instructional Management System (IMS) Project. The IMS seeks to make the web more educationally useful by developing “a specific set of higher-order standards and…
Gale Moore is the Deputy-Director of the Knowledge Media Design Institute, an organization of over 50 faculty members from 20 different academic departments in the University of Toronto with a mission similar to KMi. Gale spoke about some of the work in KMDI including a demonstration of the Virtual Sandbox, a collaborative project with Xerox…
As part of ongoing provision of course material for print-disabled students, both on CD-ROM and the Internet, METg member Chris Valentine has been converting the OU Students’ Newspaper “Sesame” for Web presentation. In a press announcement from the editor: “Sesame can now be read by print-disabled students linked up to the Web at http://met.open.ac.uk/sesame/. The…
Ed Weeple, Under Secretary, Scottish Office Department for Education and Industry, and Graeme Dickson, Head of HE Division SOIED, visited KMI to discuss applications of IT for disabled learners with Professor Tom Vincent. During his visit, Ed Weeple was shown how developments in multimedia for disabled learners had brought benefits for all students. This was…
The METg’s Chris Valentine recently attended a meeting to discuss the future world file format for digital talking books in Sigtuna, just north of Stockholm, Sweden. The meeting was attended by at least seven talking book libraries and eleven visually-impaired research and support institutions from around the world. The principle driving force behind the development…
