The OU and KMI were represented last week at the International Conference on Open & Online Learning (ICOOL03), where I was invited to give a keynote address. Held at the University on the beautiful island of Mauritius, ICOOL attracted a wide range of delegates from all over the world. A distinctive feature of ICOOL was…
An audience of around 25 visitors, including members of the Milton Keynes mountaineering club, joined a number of webcast viewers from countries around the world (some as far away as Alaska) to witness Lorenzo Gariano's slide/talk presentation of his adventures in the Everest region. Lorenzo took part in the Adventures International expedition to Everest, organized…
The Science Museum in London is the scene for today's launch of ClimatePrediction.net, the world's largest climate prediction experiment . The experiment, using thousands of personal computers to run different facets of a highly complex simulation, has been developed by a large team including the Oxford University Department of Atmospheric Physics, The University of Reading,…
The First European Summer School on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web (SSSW-2003) took place on 21-26 July in Cercedilla (Spain). The event was the first opportunity anywhere in the world for postgraduate students to equip themselves with the range of theoretical and practical skills necessary for full engagement with the challenges involved in developing…
On 21st May 2003, a dozen OU staff plus a few external guests spent an afternoon being trained in the Compendium approach to visual problem analysis and meeting support. Compendium provides a suite of techniques and a hypertext software tool for managing different kinds of connections between ideas. The training was conducted by Simon Buckingham…
The annual World Wide Web conference held in Budapest last week lived up to its reputation for internationalism and foresight. Keynote speakers included Tim Berners-Lee on the semantic web and Pal Tamas on economics and the information society, a spread which reflects the diversity of the conference which encompasses both technical and societal aspects of…
Al Selvin, Senior Manager in the Information Technology Group at Verizon Communications, today presented a visiting speaker seminar on 'Practising Knowledge Art' at KMi's Podium. Creating and producing situated knowledge artifacts – for example, creating a model of a problem unique to a single group or organization – involves a range of roles and skills….
The AKT project is an Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration funded by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Its six-year, multi-million pound programme brings together internationally-recognised research groups from the Universities of Southampton, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Sheffield and the Open University under the directorship of Professor Nigel Shadbolt, to develop and extend a range of technologies…
The CABER Online project was one of a number of schools’ broadband internet projects to be showcased at the BETT 2003 educational technology show at London’s Olympia Exhibition Centre. The project’s funding body, the East of England Broadband Network (E2BN), is one of several regional broadband consortia whose responsibility it is to create the UK’s…
The seventh international conference on the internet and medicine, MEDNET was recently held in Amsterdam. As a largely technical forum, many of the papers lacked a clear evaluation component. As with the medical informatics literature there was a huge pre-occupation with quality and the kite-marking of quality. For me, the most interesting papers centred around…
