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JIME submission to Royal Society inquiry

A JIME submission was made by Simon Buckingham Shum to the Royal Society Working Group on communicating the results of new scientific research. The Royal Society has set up a working group to carry out a study on best practice in communicating the results of new scientific research to the public. The study has been…

D3E Phorum About To Go Live As OU Forum

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

So … now what for Corous?

Last Friday we got the formal notification that Corous was having its independent spreadsheet surgically removed. They have lost Danny Nti and Jim Flood; and Dr Gerry Hancock in OUW is now formally in charge of their operations (Gerry, I think was ex-regional director for Birmingham?). The two remaining senior staff (Marion McKechnie and Shamus…

Lyceum Rocks!

Lyceum, the Open University&#39s virtual classroom tool originated in KMi, is alive, kicking, serving thousands of students, and delivering high-quality end-user experiences. I&#39m taking my first ever OU course – LZX194: Portales (Beginner&#39s Spanish), and using Lyceum as a student, partaking in its capabilities for multiparty audio conferencing with shared graphics. You see the world…

From the Guardian Online

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…

OUBS Relationship Progress

PJS hosted a visit today from Gilly Salmon (OUBS). Gilly was keen on progressing KMi activity on three fronts: (1) Her chairing of the OUBS Management Certificate course – with 5K students and very tight margins imposed by OU tariffs. (2) Her own external commercial activity. She has an international company with 8 (or maybe…

KMi Demonstrates Technologies at OU Knowledge Event – 24th October

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…

Macromedia PR Visitor (Education Case Study)

Tony Mays from a local PR firm (Newport pagnell based CIT Public Relations), who work for Macromedia Europe, will be visiting Peter Scott this coming Tues to chat about doing another case study of the lab – this time for their education section. The big headline for me is the sell for Flashmeeting; but I…

Hexagon Update

The new URL for access to the KMi ONLY Hexagon Room is: http://cnm.open.ac.uk/projects/hexagon/kmi.html Which is intended to be a private-to-kmi room for our experiments. Please join us, even if only to listen to News-24 🙂 And yes we know it is a bit broken up, we are musing on this … Actually, the direct to…

Collaboration tools demo leaves NERC Directors heads swimming

On Wednesday 15th October, three Directors from NERC (Nat. Env. Res. Cncl) visited the OU: Jonathan Bates, Avril Allman and Janice Timberlake. The visit was primarily to discuss the proposed course for postgraduate students undertaking research degrees, namely ST500: Doing Postgraduate Research in Science and Technology, but the visit included the role of KMi collaboration…