In this article John Scott from the Chimera Institute, University of Essex, introduces ResourceBrowser a toolkit demonstrator project which links learning resources with the network of practitioners that created them.

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Selwyn Lloyd describes the recent Group Calendar Web Service toolkit project which is designed to enable interoperability between institutional calendaring systems.

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We report from the JISC CETIS conference; "Beyond Standards - Holistic Approaches to Educational Technology and Interoperability" held on the 20th and 21st November 2007 at the Lakeside Conference Centre, Aston, Birmingham. The conference gathered invited delegates to debate the innovative systems of the future and how JISC could support their development.

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Lester Gilbert describes the EFSCE project which developed a toolkit for course evaluation, and discusses the ease with which previously developed web services can be reused for new purposes.

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Two years ago the Scottish Funding Council funded six projects with the aims of achieving “accelerated strategic change using e-learning”. These projects have now reached the end of their funded period. We spoke to Lou McGill the JISC programme manager for the e-Learning Transformation Programme about what the projects have achieved so far.

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The Next Generation Environments Conference held at Aston Business School on 27 April 2007 explored the role of new technologies and next generation environments in higher education. The conference was aimed at senior policy-makers and influencers in the area of learning, teaching and research within higher education institutions.

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Wilbert Kraan and Scott Wilson from JISC CETIS review the 22 JISC toolkit and 12 toolkit demonstrator projects completed to date. One of the findings is that a strong developer community is a vital part of sustaining and building on any individual toolkit or demonstrator project. Another is that these smaller projects were successful in building up open-source development capacity and soa expertise in UK universities and colleges.

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The beneficiaries of institutional projects are often the students, but how often do we ask them about what they want out of a project? In putting together a bid to JISC, Paul Richardson and Graham Hall from Coleg Harlech asked a small group of students about the social software technologies they were using and why. The answers provide an interesting snapshot of the student experience at Coleg Harlech.

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The current JISC capital call for projects closes on the 21st June so for many this is a time of frenzied bid writing. But what makes a proposal successful? With success rates for JISC proposals sometimes as low as 10% bid writers will be keen to know what will make their proposal stand out from the crowd. We’ve pulled together a number of resources from the JISC and the RSCs about how to write that winning bid.

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Liverpool Hope University hosted the joint JISC CETIS Educational Content Special Interest Group and Pedagogy Forum meeting last week which focused on the JISC Design for Learning programme (D4L). There were updates on the two Pedagogy Planner projects three projects at Liverpool Hope which are using the IMS LD specification, and reports were given on LAMS version 2 and the TENCompetence project.

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A report from the JISC e-Framework for Education and Research workshop which took place on February 12th at the Aston Business School Conference Centre where projects were updated on the latest e-Framework developments.

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Developments in the e-Learning Programme were well represented at last week's JISC conference. Of particular interest was the announcement of a JISC Enterprise Working Group to evaluate The Open Group Architecture Framework for HE and FE.

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Steve Lay talks about the PyAssess project in the e-assessment domain which aimed to create an IMS QTI v2 compliant assessment system using Python and a means of migrating content between QTI versions 1 and 2. In the article Steve details the language incompatibilities that arose during the project and suggests that web services may provide the answer allowing: "better defined web services may help applications to break out of their language community silos".

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We spoke to Patrick Masson former Director of Technology for the SUNY Learning Network about what happened when they tried to implement a Service Oriented Architecture at the State University of New York, an institution with 64 campuses, 30,000 faculty and 414,000 students. Patrick reflects on the lessons he’s learned and how he plans to implement Service Oriented Architectures in his new role as CIO at SUNY Delhi College of Technology. It’s quite a long interview but will be of great interest to anyone thinking about implementing SOA in their institution.

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Michael Gardner describes the development of DELTA, a tool for practitioners which enables them to submit, search and retrieve distributed resources, based on standardized metadata and identified pedagogical contexts. This article will be of interest to those following the current debates around pedagogic ontologies versus folksonomies.

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