David Vincent, the new PVC (Strategy, Planning & External Affairs), has requested a personal demo of Compendium from Simon Buckingham Shum.

Geoff Austin in LTS has finished a series of changes to the OU Forum (aka Phorum) system and it should be ready to go live very soon. Talk to Simon Buckingham Shum for details. Related Links: Existing ForumCreate Forum

The following quotes are taken from an article on distance learning in Guardian Online which used quotes from Ultralab, the OU and UKeU. Unfortunately someone fron the OU used the phrase “kipper ties” – a perfect example of reinforcing a negative stereotype! Read on:   “While this may be largely true, it ignores the fact…

Cipher, Clockwork, BuddySpace, D3E, Compendium shown at Library-organised knowledge event – Exploring Knowledge Management. Location was cramped, away from main body of the meeting and not a good means of presenting what is going on in KMi. Participants concluded that, while working with the Library is a worthy thing to do, this is not a…

The visitors – Prof. Sally Joy, Associate Dean Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Business and Economics and Dr.Andrew Treloar, Project Manager Strategic Information Initiatives, from Monash University – came by on a fact-finding mission on Information Management in the OU. They were met by Peter Scott and Simon Buckingham Shum. The main areas of…

The Chairman and Managing Director of Niftylift Ltd, a successful local engineering company, came for a visit today. They were escorted by David Hawkridge of the OUBS. They are interested in engineering design, design consistency, group communication and engineering education. Probable contacts should be ZZ, PM. PCW and PJS Related Links: Niftylift

As part of his visit to KMi to discuss potential collaboration, John Fox of Cancer Research UK gave a seminar on “Logics, tasks and agents: towards a unified model for delivering knowledge services”. This was an informal review of work at Cancer Research UK aimed at developing general methods and technologies for building knowledge based…

Marc Eisenstadt demonstrated the use of BuddySpace instant messaging to the Senior Faculty Administrators group. This follows the installation of the software on their machines by Jiri Komzak over the past few weeks.

The OU Council gig went *extremely well* on Friday. There were constant visitors (both from the council and OU deans) for the whole session. The last visitor had to be dragged off by the official dinner announcer. Everyone was a) knowledgeable about the web b) very impressed with our work and c) asked intelligent questions….

John Domingue in Luxembourg today at EC brainstorming session “Defining priorities for RTD activities for Technology Enhanced Learning”. John is one of only 10 invited participants; the only other from UK being Tony Hey, Head of E-Science Core Programme at EPSRC.