National Progression Award and Adobe

They have got it in Islay and they are offering training in how you do it in Fife, at Adam Smith College.

You'd like a course that covers web design, is supported by learning and teaching materials , is platfom independent , could lead to Adobe Certification for some candidates , comes in three units and offers progression into National Certificate and other vocational awards in a College .

Web Design Fundamentals SCQF Level 5 is the one you should have a look at.

Now if only we could get centres between Islay and Kirkaldy to pick up this information.
It's great to see DIVA in action.

I am sure this information will be available from lots of sources but if you want some training
24 – 25th June 2008.
The Adam Smith College, as part of the DIVA initiative, is offering 2 days of training in Adobe products to help teaching staff prepare for delivering the NPA Web Design and associated units. The courses will focus on the relevant Adobe software tools and also provide an opportunity to discuss delivery and assessment with staff who have developed or delivered the units.
Open to college and school staff, cost is £50 per person per day and includes lunch. Venue is Adam Smith College, Stenton Campus, Glenrothes.
Please contact Colin Maxwell for bookings or further details. 01592 223719. colinmaxwell @ adamsmith.ac.uk (please remove spaces from e-mail)
Tuesday 24th June
Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 – preparation for F181 11 Web Design Fundamentals, and F182 11 Web Design and Development.
Wednesday 25th June
Adobe Flash CS3 – preparation for F180 11 Interactive Multimedia for Website Development.
_,_._.,___
View on the web Transfer elsewhere Respond on the web
NCDMC: http://ncdmc.jiglu.com/

Beginning of end or end of the Beginning

Books on demand production costs - 5p per copy - Interesting story about the author with most books on Amazon

Philip Parker

Now if learners had access to these algorithms -
Then maybe we could focus on what you do with knowledge rather than the facts on their own.

I have no idea how readable these books are - but if it saves you time researching the market for wooden toilet seats in Japan .. worth a look, the beginning of a shift in how we manage and access information.

JISC and JORUM

Yesterday I had a very early start for a JISC JORUM steering group . Those who work in College sector will know all about JISC and the services they provide . I just wanted to capture some of what is happening in one UK University.

The norm is for main lectures to be Videoed and are available as web streams. These can be accessed by students in satellite centres on other continents.

500 podcast lecture library is also available to learners.

They have a repository that contains lots of images and film footage digitised from a range of sources used for variety of purposes in lecture theatres or in the Virtual Learning Environment.

Through JISC they subscribe to many other collections , academic journals and other learning resources nationally and internationally.

They have problems with what to do with all the digital material they are building up - eg student concerts from the music department

They have some projects running in High Performance Computing area that are very bandwidth and storage hungry.

Faced with the digital deluge they are researching a data storage strategy.

Being Academics they are very concerned with Archiving but are never sure where to stop.

They use an Eprints repository and have a publications reporting strategy that automates their RAE returns ( captures and publishes research publications from all the academics on campus) .

The academic community make increasing use of local and national repositories mainly for research but increasingly for teaching and learning.

They have a search tool that allows searches across their Virtual Learning Environment, EPrints, the library catalogue and their learning object respository.

They may move sophistication of this out to i-google or some other external tool to open their meta data to others and improve local searches further.

They have been building intelligent classrooms that can utilise these resources with learners .

Soon they may do an MIT and release freely a lot of their learning and teaching materials.

The feeling is that as the momentum has grown so Research , learning and teaching have moved closer together.

They have a lot of student, learner generated content and are not sure how to manage this.

They have a "dead professor problem" - identity management issues across the institution some staff have multiple idents and Shibboleth authentication has not sorted this out yet.

They have now come to expect most students will arrive with a wireless laptop and expect access to all of the Universities services on campus and off campus 24/7

It's not the same everywhere and will vary a lot institution to institution and department to department even in a single university - but I thought this was a neat summary of a University that has got it and what learners get when they arrive at a University near you.

Colleges are couple of steps behind but sometimes stronger on Virtual Learning Environment implementation. Eight years working with JISC and the changes have been phenomenal . UKERNA delivers the backbone for GLOW.

Rattled this off on the train home last night sorry if it looks horrible

Little Britain Carol Sketch

Interesting and yet depressing debate over what schools in Scotland's 32 local authorities can and cannot access. Reflected in these postings

Ewan McIntosh and here

Andrew Brown

Jim Henderson

I should not have said schools I should have said learners and teachers. Those who wish to access the system for learning don't have the controls.

This issue is as old as the hills or at least as old as folks became aware that this could all be controlled. IBM counted keystrokes at one time as a measure of productivity maybe this could be used as a benchmark for educational computing ;-) t00.

It is so very "Little Britain" - "computer says no" and sets a fantastic example to teachers and learners on the flexibility of access to IT and probably does nothing to educate anyone about the dangers that do lurk on the unmoderated and unfiltered internet that we can all access in normal life. There is an institutional cowardice around this on a national scale at moment. But at least it means everyone in "education" has a clear conscience.

The filtering also hampers communication and prevents teachers becoming involved in national developments - some local authorities cannot access the SQA computing blog or other user groups - another reason that Glow cannot come fast enough. When computers say yes more often in schools we will finally get the majority of learners and teachers engaging with this medium around the serious ;-) business of learning. I hope this will at last provide fairly uniform access to the net ( with the exception of certain bits which will ofcourse strictly observe the Sabbath ;-) )