September

I've not blogged recently as I've been away, this doesn't mean work on the project has stopped though, and yesterday we had our monthly meeting.

Everyone has been working away, compiling a list of award leaders - not as easy as it sounds! planning the launch of the community in NING and discussing the schema we want to use to describe the outputs of validation events.

Chris, Sam and Ben met to discuss the validation documents and how to:

• Automate as much as possible of the process of inputting the documents into the repository
• Use a schema that won't create more work for Chris and his colleagues.
• Perhaps using IMS, creating a "validation item" that could have workflows etc attached.

There was some discussion as to whether to go with IMS, Dublin Core or to write our own schema. We decided that though all had their merits we would never get a perfect fit and so we'd go with IMS.

Hamza has been looking at Gadgets in NING and using them to link to HIVE, he has joined a NING developers group so things look interesting on that front.

We are going to launch the NING community in the 3rd week of Sept and there are planned events for the run up to Christmas. For more news and details of this they have a blog.

In the next few weeks: I am going to talk to the University Learning and Teaching Enhancement Committee in Oct to introduce the project to them and to invite them to join the NING. I have also arranged to see the administrator in the faculty of computing and engineering who deals with all their validations to get her view of things. If I can I'd like to see some of the other administrators as each faculty has their own processes and this is something that the Foundation Degree people find a problem.