The main event of my week was the CAA Conference in Loughborough. I’m rather amazed that in all my years of being involved with assessment from the days of Canvas onwards I’ve never managed to go to this conference before. There was not only some interesting stuff going in terms of content on but the entertainment laid on by the organisers (and bankrolled by Questionmark) made it really quite special. They took us on a steam train from Loughborough up to somewhere near Leicester, with dinner and a murder-mystery along the way.

My conference highlights included:
* A chap from Macedonia who is creating a SOA-based assessment system
* A demo of BTL Content Producer (which is being used by the SQA)
* A demo of EXAM-4, a tool for performing high stakes exams on unsecured laptops
* Question Buddy
* A long chat with a chap from Wolverhampton about open-source student record systems, and the evils of SITS…

Then I noticed that the servers were down again – and spent much of wednesday morning frantically skypeing MarkP to try and get them working again. See full explanation in entry to follow.

I stood up during the JISC session on day 2 to do a very terse overview of the e-framework, the toolkits, how wonderful FREMA is for the assessment end of it, and a general plug for CETIS and the SIGs and what we do. This seemed to go down fine.