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 technologies to kee remote PhD students &#39present and aware&#39 of their host faculties, and their wider research communities.

The directors confessed themselves deeply impressed by live demonstrations of web-based video conferencing to a student&#39s home in New York using CNM&#39s FlashMeeting, the Hexagon video awareness wall and virtual coffee room, BuddySpace messaging and visualization, D3E instant publishing of any website for discussion, and a video clip of a KMi virtual PhD supervision session combining shared Compendium and FlashMeeting.

Related Links:

• NERC briefing on e-Science collaboration technologies