Register at: http://jisc.cetis.org.uk/events/register.php?id=36

Agenda: http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/Enterprise_Meeting_16_Agenda

And the agenda is also here:

Agenda

INTRO & UPDATES HOUR

10.45 – 11.00 Vashti Zarach, JISC CETIS Enterprise SIG Coordinator
Introduction & Results from a JISC Systems Integration Survey

11.00 – 11.15 Scott Wilson, JISC CETIS / XCRI Support Project
Update on XCRI and the XCRI CAP (Course Advertising Profile) Mini Projects

11.15 – 11.45 Adam Cooper, JISC CETIS
Work in Progress in IMS: Enterprise Services v2.0 / Tools Interoperability v2.0

11.45 – 12.00 Teabreak

PROJECT UPDATES HOUR

12.00 – 12.30 Sandra Kingston, Centre for International ePortfolio Development, University of Nottingham
ADoM & DELIA: two new e-admissions projects

12.30 – 1.00 Garfield Southall, University of Chester
The SOLVS Project (Supporting Ongoing Learning in Vocational Settings)

1.00 – 2.00 Lunch

AFTERNOON: IDENTITY & COMPETENCIES

2.00 – 2.30 Simon Grant, JISC CETIS Portfolio SIG
Identity: Personal, Learner, Institutional, etc

2.30 – 2.45
Discussion time: Identity

2.45 – 3.15 Chris Kew, CETIS
The Tencompetence Project and the Personal Competence Manager

3.15 – 3.45 Roger Clark, Greater Manchester Strategic Alliance (ioNW2)
Adding A Competency Dimension into XCRI

3.45 – 4.00 End / Teas and Coffees

The projects will be supported by the XCRI Support Team, consisting of Mark Stubbs, Scott Wilson, Ben Ryan and Vashti Zarach, with website assistance from Mark Power and Sam Easterby-Smith. The Support Project is scheduled to run for 2 years, and has been extremely busy since beginning this March. So far we have held a Support Team start up meeting, attended by GMSA (the Greater Manchester Strategic Alliance), responded to lots of enquiries and interest about XCRI, dashed around the country meeting people (that’s mostly Mark Stubbs who urgently needs cloning!), worked on a validator (Ben Ryan) and aggregator (Scott Wilson), brainstormed user scenarios and began to set up the new XCRI website (Scott, Vashti, Mark Power and Sam), and planned an XCRI meeting for mini projects and general interested parties (mostly Vashti with help from all). Looks like we may have a busy year ahead!

The XCRI meeting, which is being hosted in Oxford by Sebastian Rahtz of Oxford University Computing Services, is being well attended. We have 28 people coming, including the Support Project Team, Sarah Davies from JISC, 14 project staff members, and 9 other people generally interested in being updated on XCRI.

A copy of the day’s agenda is below:

10.30am – 11.00am Teas and coffees

11.00am – 11.20am Intro to the Day: Vashti Zarach
What to expect from the day / Update on XCRI meetings, etc

11.20am – 11.40am XCRI Update: Mark Stubbs
Brief history of XCRI / Developments with XCRI / Interest from UK learning organizations, etc

11.40am – 12.00noon JISC Requirements: Sarah Davies
What JISC requires from the projects

12noon – 1.00pm Project Presentations: 6 Mini Projects
10 mins presentation time for each project

1.00pm – 2.00pm Lunch

2.00pm – 2.20pm XCRI Validator: Ben Ryan

2.20pm – 2.45pm XCRI Aggregator: Scott Wilson
Demo of the aggregator

2.45pm – 3.00pm Teas and coffees

3.00pm – 3.15pm XCRI.org: Scott Wilson and Vashti Zarach
Demo of the new website

3.15pm – 3.45pm XCRI Website discussion
Opportunity for the projects to discuss what they want from the website

In the morning, I went to Bill Olivier’s session on services oriented architectures and the eFramework. Bill delivered a very interesting presentation at breakneck speed, and I managed to get notes taken by typing very fast! I found his 3 definitions of the eFramework useful: 1. It’s a JISC Programme, 2. It’s an international programme, 3. It’s a website and knowledge base. 

One area the eFramework are focusing on is helping practitioners map out their domains, with Bill defining a domain as “a recognisable area of work or activity”, i.e. not necessarily something technical, just a way of outlining what people do. The domain modelling enables the discovery of issues which are common across institutions, with the idea being that projects with cross institutional benefits can be a priority for funding. Again, I thought this tied in nicely to the work XCRI is doing, plus many other projects I know of, such as the e-admissions domain mapping which MMU and Nottingham are undertaking.

 Lunch was the worst part of the day. As a non mushroom eating vegetarian, and a very hungry one by lunchtime, I was disappointed to see both veggie options contained mushrooms. I ended up with a plate of potato salad and wild rice, not very nourishing. It’s a very grand venue, but the food isn’t wonderful…Oh, and I couldn’t get the wifi to work!

After lunch I went to the Enabling Lifelong Learning session run by Sarah Davies. All the speakers were good, but I was most interested in the presentation given by the first speaker, Bill Pollard from Cheadle and Marple College, who discussed how they had dealt with the issue of a particular course where students never seemed to apply to carry on to university. They discovered that this was due to students being unable to find suitable courses for their interests and needs. They got the students to search on Flock for courses which suited their needs, and then, this is the crucial bit, got them to save courses they liked on del.icio.us us with appropriate tags of their choice, so that the students could share interesting courses with each other. They added a course code to the tags, to narrow down the tagged entries to ones chosen within the college. The outcome of all this searching, tagging and sharing, was that all bar one student applied to university this year, and this from a course where previously almost no one was applying. I thought this was great use of social software.

 The final keynote, entitled BBC 2.0, was given by Tom Loosemore from the BBC. Tom outlined 15 principles of web design, illustrated by examples from (mostly) BBC websites. I found this talk really fascinating, partly because I studied a bit about information design on my Information management course in Brighton some years back; partly because I run an events website for my local area and am interested in principles of good website design; and partly because I love the BBC websites, and it was really interesting to hear all about some of the rationale behind them.

So, in summary, a good and informative day, please can we have no mushrooms next year, and I really must find a pink, scarlet or electric blue suit, there were so many black suits there!