End of another week

Wow - where has the last week gone? Can't believe it's Friday again ...

This week has been pretty quiet. Had another lunchtime seminar for staff on Wednesday. It was on another campus to the one I work on, and the staff who came along seemed pleased that we went to see them, rather than expecting them to make the trek to us. This time I didn't cough through the whole thing.

Other than that, I have been getting ready for a whole load of teaching next week; term has finished so it's a good week to catch staff for training. I'm also getting ready for my big meeting with the Senior Manager who is taking on the implementation of our e-learning strategy. Looking back at what we've done over the last few months, we've actually achieved quite a lot. It's been a month since the Advisor has been in post!

HTML Woes

I had forgotten how boring I found writing HTML!! Just spent the entire afternoon picking over a form trying to get it looking nice (and more to the point being accessible). My eyes hurt, my brain hurts ...

Fortunately it's time to go home. Off to meet my boys for afternoon tea, and a fun time shopping!!

RSS

After a week away and a week catching up, I am now back to the blog ...

Today's excitement has been playing around with RSS. We have an awful lot of content on our VLE support site, and I'm sure that hardly anyone looks at it (let alone looks at the new stuff we create). So, I have decided to see whether I can get RSS working; that way we can choose the highlights of the site and push them to other places (for example to the login screen of our VLE, and the homepage of our support site). So far, so good. I have managed to dust off my coding skills and write some basic XML, and have used an external parser to get stuff showing on the site. I have also downloaded an aggregator/reader and have news flowing onto my desktop (hurrah - I can see what Gordon Brown is doing in the Budget as I type!).

Pretty exciting stuff ... a long time ago, when I worked on a library resources gateway site, I remember reading about 'push' technology which claimed to bring information to you rather than you having to go out and find it yourself. Looks like I managed to get something like that working today (only 8 years after reading the original article!)

The next set is to get the feeds nicely formatted using CSS (need to dust off those skills too!)

Survey Presentation - part 2

The presentation went well (apart from a cough I managed to develop just as I started speaking!). Although there were only a few staff there, it was a good group who had lots of say. It was also a mixed group of staff so they had different insights to bring to using the VLE. We got some useful feedback, which will be helpful to take back into our e-learning strategy implementation process.

All in all a succesful session; I have another that I am running at another site, and I am hoping to make these events reasonably regular and have different speakers coming along.