This is the final report from the Open Course Data project at Loughborough University. We have been funded by Jisc to develop an XCRI-CAP machine readable version of our online prospectus. In parallel we wanted to explore improving the way that the prospectus is developed. The reader can find out more about the project at http://open.lboro.ac.uk.

Here's a rather fuzzy video of my session on Google Apps from the JISC Innovating E-Learning Conference 2012.  In this talk I outline the aspects of Google Apps that Learning Technologists and those involved in pedagogical application of Google's tools may not be aware of, such as the Google Apps Marketplace for Education and Google's RESTful APIs for building on top of the products - and why this will all become hugely relevant with the proposed curriculum changes to encourage our children to learn to program.

You can also view the slides themselves via Slideshare, or embedded below:

JISCEL12 Open Architectures - Google Apps from Martin Hamilton

Or, since these are just a collection of web pages, why not open those links in your favourite browser?  I have collected them together in a handy companion document, embedded below.  Click through to edit or comment on this, should you wish to add your own voice.



And finally...  I will try never to say "whole bunch of stuff" again in a public talk!  Nearly used up my lifetime allocation in that one session :-)

Here's a quick teaser video for my talk at the JISC Innovating E-Learning Conference, on November 19th 2012.  Sign up now, so you don't miss out!

So here's a two minute video I just posted to YouTube outlining my plan to spend a tiny fraction of the JISC millions encouraging the community to open up its existing institutional code. You can vote for my idea here up until the end of March 2012.

In this blog post I'll return to our project to "field test" the JISC Strategic ICT Toolkit, with a round up of results and recommendations. If you haven't come across the Strategic ICT Toolkit before, please see the S-ICT area on the JISC website, and the JISC toolkit itself.

To kick off, here's a Prezi which I produced for the programme meeting in August 2011:

JISC Strategic ICT Toolkit Field Test at Loughborough on Prezi

"Institutional maturity" for Loughborough's IT Strategy

I've blogged in the past about a little project on IT Strategy that we are doing with JISC, exploring the potential of the Strategic ICT Toolkit at Loughborough. This is just to give people an update and pull out a few points that have come up during the course of this work.

In this blog post I'll spend a few moments looking at the institutional maturity self-analysis process (as illustrated above), and discuss some of the issues that this and the wider toolkit material have raised at Loughborough.

I’ve blogged in the past about our project to create a student portal at Loughborough this Autumn. This post is intended to provide a quick update and also to explore some of the architectural issues that have arisen.

In a previous post I introduced the concept that a portal did not necessarily equate to “a portal system”, i.e. a dedicated piece of software. This is a theme that I want to pick up on here. If we had been putting a portal in a few years ago, then we would almost certainly have surveyed the market and looked at packages like uPortal, Sakai and Liferay. Why not simply put one of these systems in now?

Here's why...

One of my current projects is to pull together a student portal for Loughborough.  For a variety of reasons we missed the boat and failed to develop such a system back in the Noughties, but I think this is something we can turn to our advantage by learning from other people's experiences.

My view is that our portal (see left for portal concept poster from Ben Spencer in our Web design team) will be mostly about giving people a handy preview of information that's relevant to them, and linking through to systems and services that we already run - rather than imposing a whole new IT system on everyone.  One convenient side-effect of this not being a direct replacement for an existing system is that we will be able to introduce it as and when it's ready, thereby avoiding the traditional mad rush to get everything ready for the start of the academic year.

The initial system will be very tightly scoped, and is mostly about us identifying a sensible underlying architecture that we can continue to build on.  On launch day we are aiming for something along like this: