• Assessment, learning and technology: prospects at the periphery of control, by Dylan Wiliam, Deputy Director of the Institute of Education: Text transcript [75 kB PDF]; Slides [400 kB PDF]; MP3 recording [12 MB].
• Learning in an open world, by Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google: Text transcript [75 kB PDF]; Slides [13.5 MB PDF]; MP3 recording [23 MB].

Seb 

1. Markers

A mix of JISC employees and volunteers from FHE who are on JISC committees or otherwise connected to JISC.

They are:

• time poor;
• sceptical;
• liable to rush to judgement;
• not, in the main, caught up in "all this Web 2.0 stuff".

2. Read the call and its annexes:

• carefully;
• using a highlighter pen.

3. Write your bid:

• within the page limit;
• to fit the call - if it not in scope it will fail;
• to stand out from the crowd by its clarity and by your conviction;
• to map carefully against all of the scoring criteria;
• making explicit reference to the work of others (whether or not JISC funded) that you will build upon;
• using lay, jargon-free language, not written in JISC-speak.

4. Diagrams and tables (if and only if they add meaning). For example:

• expertise grid;
• risk assessment (this is now a requirement);
• project Gantt chart.

5. Project management

Do not skimp on this.

Convey the sense that if you get the money you will run your project well.

A couple of recent successful bids have taken account of http://www.schmoller.net/documents/project_management1.pdf

6. Why our bid matters

1. Its outputs will be of long term value because .....
2. It will make learning more efficient or more effective by .....

NB. Use numbers (of learners, of courses, of institutions etc) rather than terms like "many", "large-scale", "substantial", or "significant".

7. Disseminate and engage using the channels that exist. For example:

• our discipline community;
• the XYZ mailing list;
• our HEA benchmarking cluster;
• the ALT Newsletter (it has an editor so no gaurantees);
• ALT (has event-organising capability);
• ALT-C (subject to peer review).

Extract

"Curverider Limited is pleased to announce that it has secured investment from a group of Business Angels that will provide it with the financial ability to substantially develop its business and further invest in the development of its open source social framework, Elgg. In addition, Curverider has access to a deep pool of business experience and guidance that will allow it to effectively execute its ambitious plans to build Elgg into the world’s leading open source social networking framework and to develop a business providing services to Elgg users, present and future." 

Summary: The more engaged users are, the more features an application can sustain. But most users have low commitment - especially to websites, which must focus on simplicity, rather than features.

Location: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/features.html, from where you can also find a lot of other material about, for example, usability testing. Neilsen has an abrasive style, but this is worth putting up with.

Seb 

This week's Technology Quarterly from the 9/6/2007 Economist has several articles of interest, all of which seem to be accessible without a subscription:

1. Bringing free software down to earth, which is about entrepreneur and self-financed astronaut Mark Shuttleworth's successful efforts to fund the development of Ubuntu, a user-friendly version of Linux, which is distributed alongside a suite of Open Source applications for desktop PCs and laptops.

2. Home truths about telecoms, about anthropologists' findings concerning the way people use communication technologies. This is a "must read" article, which challenges assumptions about the convergence of digital technologies, and which offers evidence that:

• users are showing a growing preference for semi-synchronous writing (text, chat, email) over synchronous voice;
• private communications are invading the workplace rather than the other way around;
• migrants are the most advanced users of communications technology.

3. Online gaming's Netscape moment? , about Multiverse Network, set up by some of the original founders of Netscape, which has created client and server software (based on open standards), and free for download by anyone who wants to build and host a virtual world.

Here are two posts I wrote today in my own web log which may be of interest: 

• http://fm.schmoller.net/2007/05/using_your_brow.html - about Google Gear - which, as I understand it, is part of a family of methods to enable complicated interaction to happen in a user's browser whilst not connected to the internet;
• http://fm.schmoller.net/2007/05/are_us_students.html - about a discussion recently convened by Blackboard about US teachers and the extent to which, in the crudest of terms, they "know how to hack it" with digitally fluent students.

Regards, 

Seb Schmoller

The overwhelming majority of the pages on the Web that contain links to the Emerge home page are blog posts. The best way to get Emerge a better Google ranking would be for participants in the project to get a link made to the Emerge home page (or failing that to the Emerge "about" page) from their own organisation's web site. If links were place to Emerge from about 10 large organisation's web sites, the Emerge site ranking would jump considerably.

Seb