Mailing Number 12 - 21 February 2003

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News/comment

BS8426. Last week, with David Jennings, I finished work on the draft of "British Standard 8426 - A code of practice for e-support in electronic learning systems". The likelyhood is that the British Standards Institution will issue the document as a Draft for Public Comment during April, aiming to finalise the standard well before the end of 2003.

Google buys Pyra Labs. The recent purchase by Google of Pyra Labs, the company which developed the software used by many publishers of weblogs is causing quite a stir. If you want to follow this up, you may want to review:

• a selection of different people's views about the acquisition, accessible via the weblog published by Six Apart, the company behind the elegant Movable Type weblogging system;
• an article by Bill Thompson on the BBC's site - Is Google too powerful?, which raises interesting questions about why Google collects so much information about the search-behaviour of its users. (For more on the latter see Google Watch.)

New National Learning Network (NLN) website. The NLN has just launched a substantially improved site, organised around the anticipated needs of tutors, technical staff, and developers.

European Schoolnet. A q4 2002 survey of virtual learning environment use in over 500 European Schools found that around 35% are using commercial products, over 50% have developed their VLE in-house, and that around 15% are using an Open Source product.

Resources [back to top]

Usability news. Martin Cooke highlights Usability News, a research-based web newsletter from Wichita State University in Kansas. The current issue contains valuable articles on:

• scrolling - found not to be the problem which it is sometimes said to be;
• cascading versus indexed menu-design - with horizontal cascading menus found to be particularly unsatisfactory.

Effective practices. The US Sloan Consortium's excellent effective practices site, continues to grow, with several new case studies being added each month. The site's aim is to help make quality education online part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines. Recent additions include:

• Student-Led Discussion Build Complex Understandings of Psychology Concepts;
• Social Presence Begins with Introductions;
• Designing a "One-Page" for Tuition and Funding.

UK based e-learning courses. Kate Butler, who is closely associated with the South Yorkshire FE Consortium's LeTTOL course, and CIPD's Certificate in Online Learning course, has just produced a comprehensive list of UK based courses about e-learning [July 2004 - amended version of list issued, pending update by Kate Butler later in 2004] organised as a one page "quick summary", and a longer, course-by-course review, including prices, course structures, URIs.

"White papers" from Epic Group. Epic, which is probably the UK's leading online learning content company, has a range of "white papers" on topics of potential interest, including accessibility, blended learning, standards in e-learning. Scroll down on Epic's home page to find them.

Oddments[back to top]

Word for Northerners. Mike Morris sent this translation of certain help screens from a well-known wordprocessing application. Well, I thought it was funny.....

Feedback [back to top]

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Last updated - 26/2/2003, 25/6/2004, 27/7/2004; © Seb Schmoller, but licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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