Alison Chisholm wrote her PhD on the transition from Primary Care Groups (PCGs) to Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) and worked for the Picker Institute for four years. I sought her views on the ConDem proposals for NHS commissioning. She writes (and I post with permission): Well I've not had my finger on the pulse very … Continue reading A comment on the new NHS GP commissioning plans: “bonkers”

In light of the Gulf oil well catastrophe and the financial services collapse, I am reminded of the joke about a true believer (TB).Neighbour comes up says, "Ain't you heard the news? Big flood coming. Better get to high ground for safety." TB says, "My faith in god will keep me safe."As the waters begin … Continue reading How many warnings do we need? via @HallyMk1 RT @courosa http://is.gd/ddwMc

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More thoughts arising from Stephen Downes digest of the current Facebook privacy brouhaha (http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=52445). Ben Werdmuller von Elgg suggests that certain kinds of organisation: educational, corporate/commercial, and probably - implicitly - military/security are walled gardens which nevertheless require - or strongly desire - the social networking functionality of systems like Facebook. But, they also require … Continue reading Federated walled gardens – do they offer a way to appropriate the online privacy? @downes @benwerd

So the message shouldn't be, "Teach Facebook." The message should be, teach web literacy. Because you - as a product - are being bought and sold pretty much everywhere in the commercial web. via downes.ca Excellent digest of the current storm in Facebook's teacup Posted via web from George's posterous

Congratulations to the Phase 2 Institutional Innovation projects on reaching a big milestone in the journey. I am really pleased to be seeing their final reports and project outputs. Phase 3: keep calm and carry on! The support team (SSBR) is being reshaped and refocused to concentrate on synthesising the outcomes from what has in … Continue reading JISC Institutional Innovation programme milestone

At the Alliance Universities Dinner on 29/03/2010 we were addressed by Dame Lynne Brindley, the chief executive of the British Library and head of the HEFCE Online Learning Task Force (see news release http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/hefce/2009/taskforce.htm and site http://www.hefce.ac.uk/Learning/enhance/taskforce/). She was refreshingly sceptical about some of the underlying assumptions (is Britain a world leader in online learning; … Continue reading Alliance Universities consider HEFCE Online Learning Task Force

More Success with Less Stress MyEdu's ground breaking applications make it easy for college students to design, manage and navigate the path towards graduation. We give you everything you need to pick the best professors, design a great schedule, balance work and social life - and more. Learn More via myedu.com Of course the George … Continue reading MyEdu #education #portal building a uni for the i-me-me-mine generation? #jisc

Point: No matter how many servers Google or RackSpace etc install, the amount of available storage will never "approach infinity". No matter how much you have, there could always be infinitely more (in this thought-experimental world where there are still infinitely more possible servers). A gazillion servers with peta peta peta bytes of memory each … Continue reading Infinitely sloppy thinking: one point and one question about “approaching infinity”

by Sharlyn Lauby via mashable.com It would be good to see ALT planning to incorporate some wave into the social networking around the ALT-C conference. Maybe the official Crowdvine network (http://cmalt-net.alt.ac.uk/) could kick it off, or the F-ALT fringe (http://f-alt.wetpaint.com/). The problem is that Google has not yet opened Wave up to public registration. This … Continue reading 5 Ways to Use Wave for Business or Academic/Educational Development #ALT #JISC