The Auricle

Just to provide a bit of balance to the concerns about proprietary enterprise approaches, here we have a Learning Circuits article by Barbara Ross, Chief Operations Officer for WebCT who is putting the case for the prosecution (or is that the defence?) in Driving Higher Ed Institutions to an Enterprise Approach. Just to balance the […]

In a couple of other articles this week I've referred to the University of Warwick's BlogBuilder system as a first rate example of how one institution makes potentially powerful eTools available to staff and students. I thought it might be helpful to show a few of the features of BlogBuilder from which we can all […]

Whilst waxing lyrical about the issues related to scaling up weblog use within higher education institutions yesterday I put forward a couple of refreshing alternatives to the 'e-learning=proprietary VLE' furrow now being ploughed by many institutions. I think we have a lot to learn from institutions that have opted for an eTools and services model […]

As editor of Auricle you would expect me to be quite a fan of blogs, and I am; but their personal publishing heritage tends to get the in the way of scaling up their widespread use in education. For example, what if an article has multiple authors? What if we want every student and faculty […]

Be warned this makes for uncomfortable reading for those considering migration to enterprise class proprietary VLEs, in this case WebCT Vista. In OLDaily (25 Sep 2004) Stephen Downes, senior research officer with the National Research Council of Canada, describes a key theme for the Australian leg of his world tour. “I have been touting the […]

Want some non trivial example of Web services for e-learning? There is certainly plenty of trivial examples of stock quotes or weather at airports but, otherwise, welcome to the dark zone. We're involved in a JISC project which requires us to study how to deliver and consume Web services so this article attempts to share […]

MoodleMoot is the name given by the international Moodle community to the Moodle conference programme. MoodleMoot Ireland took place on the 10th September 2004. I couldn't make it to Ireland so over a period of days I've watched the movie instead. There are many interesting presentations and discussions in the full event but in this […]

At this year's Association for Learning Technology conference (ALT-C 2004), held at the University of Exeter, there was the usual supporting vendor stands in the conference exhibition space, so in between sessions I took the opportunity to test VLE/LMS vendors' perspectives on a couple of pretty key issues. First, how possible and easy did they […]

The presentation I gave described the processes and outcomes of an e-learning initiative involving collaboration between the University of Bath's Centre for the Development of New Technologies in Learning (CDNTL), and the university's Department of Social and Policy Sciences. The collaboration tested one online solution to a very practical problem; the teaching of large cohorts […]

Well, seeing as Derek's doing a bit of pre-publicity for his presentation for ALT-C, University of Exeter, here's a brief plug for the demonstration I'm giving. CDNTL has recently received funding from the JISC to develop a prototype web application for collaborative group work, called GroupLog as part of the eTools programme. I'm going to […]