Today was a good day beginning to see things really coming together. Moodle is up and running and powering what will be the consultation and shaping engine around SQA input to curriculum for excellence and Core Skills for the future. The rest of the site SQA Academy is being used to develop staff skills in assessment.

Assessment can be used as a dirty word until people actually realise how flexible and learner centred it can be. Interesting that school sector both seem to detest and cling on to exams and traditional forms of assessment while vocational sector are happy with portfolios and now e-portfolios. I wonder when the penny will drop and someone will realise that the SQA actually offers a very wide range of assessment strategies and can bring a depth of experience to all of this. It would be good to have more learner voices in all of this.

Please join the debate on Curriculum for Excellence and Core Skills for the Future

enrolment keys are "Excellence" and "Framework" respectively"

I had a meeting with Jane Richardson of Oracle who reported how well the Oracle Academy is rolling out in Scottish Schools and Colleges and how useful the link is between Higher Information Systems and the Oracle Programme - candidates getting dual certification and teachers being flown this year to Brussels for training. Last two cohorts went all the way to California for a week. Hey, the early adopters are the ones with the sun tans.

Marks high water mark on DIVA project we have successes to report like this with all the major vendors. School and College pupils have access to SQA Certification and Vendor Certification if they and the centres want this.

Also spotted a reassuring a reassuring school blog which I hope proves the new national certificate and National Progression awards are hitting the mark for school/college progression .

It feels like three years have passed in a blink of an eye on one level and then I look at my diary and see three years of very solid work quite scary really. The qualifications teams and all the staff from schools and colleges have done a power of work.

Is it a mirage - first time I have had chance to blog in three years too.

Who contributes and who lurks

Posting in stereo today -
I did this as I discovered that the links in my last post were not working. Especially the important one to Jorum.

I attending the Jorum steering group in York yesterday. It is great to hear that Colleges and Universities across the UK are signing up to the national repository. But we still have a way to go to get them all depositing and downloading the learning resources.

A sobering article was tabled from Thursday's Guardian highlighting that the 1% rule on contributing in online commmnities . Which is low is not holding up in research on web2

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

* 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don't contribute).
* 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
* 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions:


In fact it looks like YouTube and other Web2 services have contributor rates as low as 0.065%
This is something that may challenge us on the road ahead - it may just be telling us more about people rather than technology.
Worth a look at - I could not find Guardian story but found source here.

JISC and JORUM

I attended a scenario planning meeting for JORUM today at the HE Academy in York. I am still involved in JISC but no longer on
JIIE where I spent the last five years plotting the information environment for FE and HE in the UK. Today was interesting we now have in JORUM

a learning repository for all of UK HE and FE - the challenge is that we are now in year 5 of a 5 year plan and Web2 has firmly arrived. We need to change our thinking and models if the resource is to stay in step with learner behaviour . It will be interesting to see what comes out of today's discussions in York.

The challenge for organisations like JISC is in the lead time to procure and establish a service like JORUM versus the rate that technology changes and disrupts the process.


Also back on the blog - and playing with Mozilla

In the Beginning

I have res-surrected this old blog that sat alongside my website while I was working on some other projects. I will use it from time to time for a few things.

Welcome to Joe's Diner