David Sowden gave a great presentation (session: http://altc2009.alt.ac.uk/talks/show/6869 ; materials here: http://prezi.com/-90jqrzyxcuy/view/#37)  Caboodle, a UPortal-based aggregator of learner facilities for 17000 lifelong learners in 10 colleges and one university, provides SSO for all the VLEs (Moodle, Bb & Sakai), queries MIS in all the colleges and uses Sun ID management system to authenticate users. Firmly … Continue reading Dave Sowden Caboodles in a portal #falt09 #altc2009

That is the ‘unofficial’ stuff. Now on to the official things – papers, symposia and the like. I have tried to develop a series of linked papers / contributions for these events (I am not sure whether it will work) around the themes of Web 2.0, digital identities and Personal Learning Environments.  For the first … Continue reading Sustaining Communities @GrahamAttwell

via ouseful.wordpress.com This was written about visualising the opened09 Open Education conference. But it is more widely useful as an exploration of the affordances of visualisation generally as an aid to understanding. In the Institutional innovation programme I am trying to understand the basic questions underlying visualisation of the programme: people, projects, technologies, themes and … Continue reading Preliminary Thoughts on Visualising #opened09 #jiscssbr

Who are the goverati, you might ask -- and are you among them? Goverati is a term I coined a few weeks ago while participating in a Social Media Club DC discussion panel. In essence, the goverati are people familiar with government and how it works and who understand new social technologies. They want to network … Continue reading Drapeau: The rise of the goverati — Federal Computer Week

What is Ensemble? Ensemble is a service that enbles you to locate RSS feeds that link to Open Educational Resources. You can search for feeds on particular topics, or browse by institutions or by categories, and then download the results in OPML format for use in a feed reader or other application. You can also … Continue reading Ensemble OER feeds: War-6; Peace-1 @scottbw

The SUSTE-IT project reflects the increasing importance of ICT-related energy and environmental issues, in the [higher education] sector and elsewhere. For example, there is ever growing consumption (and even more rapidly increasing costs) of electricity in data centres, and in computers and peripherals; legislative and other pressures are requiring reductions in ICT-related carbon emissions, and … Continue reading Sustainable IT In Tertiary Education (SUSTE-IT) report and tools #jiscssbr

The only model that makes sense is a distributed one: it’s a fundamentally harder problem to bring down a decentralized network, because there isn’t a single point of failure. via benwerd.com Ben's got it about right (http://bit.ly/zn868). I have been thinking down these lines, too, "mesh networks, distributed databases and natural language processing": - More … Continue reading Implications of @benwerd on Twitter DoS and single points of failure

Yesterday the JISC convened a meeting of people and projects providing support to JISC programmes. I attended with our colleague Patsy Clarke. Paul Bailey was at the meeting, too, balancing his JISC hat with his Institutional Innovation Benefits Realisation hat. via assemblies.inin.jisc-ssbr.net This is a note to cross-reference and link to a piece I wrote … Continue reading A support project assembly? #jiscssbr

Time to open up waste collection to proper competition I'd say. These people are your servants not your masters. via jockcoats.me Jock Coats writes in Refuseniks (http://jockcoats.me/refuseniks), objecting to the council trying to maintain city-wide standards of service for rubbish collection. He says, with some contempt, that "These people are your servants not your masters" … Continue reading Jock Coats, local Lib Dem activist, wants private rubbish collection?

We believe that in order to gain substantial improvements in the real quality of life of the populations of developed countries it is necessary that differences in income and wealth are greatly reduced. via equalitytrust.org.uk OK, so we joke about how we have the randiest teenage liggers in Europe, can out-belch the Belgians and who … Continue reading The Equality Trust