2006-03-28 Oxford
Many thanks to all who made Oxford such a success - Vashti and Adam for sorting out a great venue, Adam's colleagues for making us so welcome and to all the speakers and contributors to both the XCRI event and the Phosphorix event that followed. It was a great celebration of what a community can achieve in only a short space of time and a fitting tribute to the support and inspiration provided by CETIS that it was arranged in conjunction with the Enterprise SIG. Vashti has provided an excellent write-up of the event, which captures extremely well the spirit of the day and comments from attendees.
The day and its inevitable "summit" at the Zizzi Italian Restaurant identified some important tasks and questions for future work:
- The style of informal iterative prototyping that had enabled XCRI's rapid progress in the first 12 months would need to be replaced by more formal issue tracking, code control and documentation as the schema matures - particular thanks to excellent feedback from Keith Lewis of Oxford University on this point.
- The schema had wider application than the FE/HE course information domain for which it had been initially developed - Oxford's deployment for aggregating short-courses for Professional Development activity demonstrated this point well, and it was noted that Nottingham University was contemplating an e-Portfolio scheme for staff as well as students to support reflection and planning of personal development.
- A good course information schema can bring widespread benefits to the community. With time and continued community critique, XCRI could become extremely useful in UK FE and HE sectors. To really add value to the lifelong learning agenda, XCRI will need to crack the difficult challenge of ensuring that recognitionsOfAchievement are specified in the same currency as entryRequirements, so that pathways for progression through increasingly-challenging learning opportunities can be highlighted to potential learners who can be supported in structuring their applications effectively.
XCRI's blog entry for Oxford would not be complete without a mention of the Malmaison hotel where we returned after the Zizzi summit (or, as Ben Ryan suggested: Zizzi top!). As the photo shows, Malmaison Oxford is a stylish conversion of a former prison. Guides suggested there had been a prison on the Oxford Castle site since 1166, and in 1236 the Chancellor of the University was authorised to use the Castle Gaol for imprisoning rebellious Scholars. The prison was finally closed in 1996 and re-opened as a hotel in 2005.
2006-03-30 Sofia, Bulgaria
Scott Wilson of CETIS kindly offered to present XCRI's work to the TENCompetence Learning Networks for Lifelong Competence Development workshop in Sofia the day after the Oxford XCRI/Phosphorix showcase. TENCompetence is a 4-year EU-funded Integrated IST-TEL project that will develop a technical and organisational infrastructure for lifelong competence development. A briefing paper had been authored jointly and submitted earlier to the Sofia workshop; slides crafted in the prison after the Oxford showcase were emailed across so that TENC delegates could be informed about XCRI's very latest progress.
Scott's presentation generated a lot of interest and some extremely encouraging emails from individuals keen to disseminate promote XCRI's work - opportunities to pursue links with the TENC project in the future will definitely be explored.
