Mailing Number 24 from Seb Schmoller

Mailing Number 24 - 10 October 2003

138 subscribers on publication date

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Awards. Several Further Education colleges have been singled out for significant awards in the last couple of days, which is why I held back from publishing Number 24 till now.

Firstly, world-wide recognition for North Tyneside College:

North Tyneside College provides the ultimate proof that good intranets depend more on will, talent, clarity of mission, and commitment to usability than on having lavish funding. This winning intranet, which supports 300 staff and 15,000 students, was designed and developed by a single person -- Adam Liptrot -- who might be the true hero of this year's design competition.

So writes Jakob Nielsen in Ten Best Intranets of 2003.

Secondly, the UK's 8 South Yorkshire Further Education Colleges have finally and belatedly won a National Training Award, the UK's premier accolade for organisations and individuals that have achieved lasting excellence through training, for the LeTTOL course, an online course about how to be an online tutor.

Richard Stallman to speak in Sheffield. Richard Stallman, influential founder of the GNU Project, and internationally renowned advocate for free software, and opponent of proprietary or patented software, will speak in Sheffield at 12.00 on Saturday 25/10/2003 at Sheffield Hallam University. Tickets from 0800 0737474. Places are going fast.

UK Government Open Source Trials. According to The Register, the UK Government is kicking off nine "proof of concept" trials, run by IBM, of the use of open source software in the public sector. The intention is to create "a level playing field" between open source and proprietary software. The trials are being jointly co-ordinated by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) and the Office of the eEnvoy (OeE). Readable article in the 9/10/2003 Register.

Eolas lawsuit against Microsoft. I referred in Fortnightly Mailing Number 22 to University of California and Eolas Technologies winning $520.6 million in damages against Microsoft because Microsoft improperly put patented Web browser technology into Internet Explorer. Here are some links explaining how Microsoft will be altering Internet Explorer to prevent continuing breach of the patent.

7 October 2003 article in News.Com;

8 October 2003 article in The Register.

It is also worth keeping an eye on the W3C FAQ page on this subject.

Resources [back to top]

E-Government Bulletin. Via Julia Duggleby, I came across the E-Government Bulletin, a highly regarded email service covering electronic government, teledemocracy and the information society in the UK and worldwide. What Julia had actually highlighted to me was the Text Email Newsletter standard, TEN, an excellent copyright-free standard for the design of plain text email newsletters. If any readers are aware of any standards or guides relating to the accessibility of email, please let me know and I will summarise.

JISC Infonet. According to JISC Infonet, this service is for senior managers leading institutional strategy as well as for people working in the field of systems, processes or e-Learning. The core resources on the site are a series of infoKits (UGH) covering key topics relating to planning and implementing information systems, as well as a directory of external resources, and events listing. Definitely worth a visit.

From the ALT Conference. If you have Quicktime installed and a fast connection, then some interviews with attendees at the 2003 ALT conference may be of interest, partly because though the clips could be better organised, it is interesting to see how breaking video into smaller chunks does enable the viewer to navigate the individual pieces of video in a manner akin to browsing web pages. (Feel free to ignore the few involving me.) Certainly you could envisage designing some quite stimulating learning activities involving interviews, which are broken down in this way, in which learners are required to review the interviews, analyse speakers' views, summarise key points etc.

Oddments[back to top]

Readership breakdown. With a 14% jump in the number of subscribers to this mailing over the last couple of weeks, I thought you might be interested to see an approximate breakdown of the subscriber-list by country and by domain. Most of you are from England and Wales, with several more from Scotland. There is at least one reader from each of Ecuador, Finland, Greece, and South Africa, and there are at least 4 readers from each of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the USA. The domain breakdown, is as follows:

.ac.uk - 41

.com - 36

.co.uk - 26

.net - 9

.org.uk - 7

.nz - 4

.au - 3

.org - 3

.edu - 2

singletons - 7

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