One issue is that where evidence doesn’t match ideology, ideology usually wins.

One of the strange facts in Scotland is that we have 3 education systems at prim and second level: state atheist, state catholic and private. The worst performing school are state atheist, then the best state school are the Roman Catholic ones, but the private ones out-perform the state schools by miles. Just simple numeric facts.

Given a choice, middle-class parents, such as read The Groaniad and listen to the Beeb, would all send their kids to the best schools. Nobody would send their kids to Inverclyde Academy High if the could get them into Largs Academy or Glasgow High. And I don’t think we are morally permitted as parents to mess around with our children’s education for the sake of some untried philisophical ideas.

I’m not sure the Tories are right. But, I’m not sure that we are getting it right in Scotland either. The gap between such as Lenzie and Port Glasgow schools increases every year. Perhaps the problem is educational researchers and their obsession with qualitative analyses and case studies. There is almost no hard-and-sure facts to base educational policy upon.

The biggest problem, imho, is that Call-me-Dave, Govey, Boris-the-Hair, Millibrain and the rest are just too thick to be trusted with running our country’s future citizens’ factories …

Ta for raising the issue of your blog, btw!

2011 Global Education Conference
http://globaleducation.ning.com/profile/MikeMcKay

Here is a web page I made that will help you get to the online room.
https://sites.google.com/site/cyprisglobaled/

Here is a quick link to the room. It requires you to download a small Blackboard Collaborate plugin.
https://sas.elluminate.com/d.jnlp?sid=2008350&password=GEC11Part309

The presentation will be recorded and available here the day after.
https://sas.elluminate.com/dr.jnlp?sid=2008350&suid=D.3E6C3B44E52CE332E055C4D7BBC398

Citation
McKay, M. D. (2011, 11). In S Hargadon (Chair), L. Gray (Co-Chair). Cypris Chat – virtual world language learning in second life. Presentation delivered at 2011 Global Education Conference, online. Retrieved from http://globaleducation.ning.com/page/2011-conference

Taking contributions for the next few weeks that will definitely go in the snapshot. After that, ones that come in may make it into the snapshot if there’s time.

Lengthy or detailed ones, especially with a screenshot, can also go on the website as a blog entry.

Many thanks for the additional points and thanks for checking us out via google. Screenshots would be quite helpful, unless you have easy access to video equipment. You can send either one to my direct email address.

Best,
Frank

Jorum is already indexed by google, try http://bit.ly/rtIg9f to see some Google generated results. Cross-repository indexing is very interesting, there are some implementation implications here, but its something that we are looking at as part of our bulk upload focus.

Thanks for writing about Jorum, there is interesting content here. Yes, downstream we are very much focussed on learners accessing Jorum content, preferably via their own learning support environments (which may of course be a browser and Google, but might also include VLEs and other web services). For the next year, there is a focus on supporting lecturers. My view is that to properly support one of teachers or learners is to support the other.

Detail of what is in the pipeline for Jorum will be posted on the Jorum blog http://www.jorum.ac.uk/blog and in the coming roadmap, which will also be available via the Jorum site.

If you have specific ideas and suggestions for Jorum beyond what’s in this post, please do get in touch.

Disclosure: Hedtek is assisting in the near-term development of Jorum.

A very interesting post and some useful criticisms of Jorum. I agree that a lot of time can be wasted trying to deposit in multiple repositories, and it is often the case that for a larger impact, users have to upload to several. In the case of Jorum, we are indexed by Google, so you can find resources that way, which then gets you into the repository. In addition, many of the resources we have are also automatically in Humbox, and services like Xerte also harvest from Jorum.

One of the major cases for Jorum is that it is a national repository, which does mean more people can have access to it than a university repository. By going completely open, we have also had feedback that our users are pleased with the increased accessibility to the materials. As you rightfully point out, the search often leaves much to be desired, and that is being re-developed, as is the ability to share search- strings.

Ideally, in the next phase(s) of Jorum, we are going to be working on much of what you said and asked for in this post; however, suffice it to say that impact-measurement is a kind of holy grail. It is something which institutions have directly asked for in the way of stats. As an academic, myself, I’ve learned that it becomes increasingly imperative that academics “learn the art of self promotion” and that is also something which Jorum can help with, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t blog about it either. Many have pointed out how using a repository plus tweeting plus blogging gets your message out there in ways which are much better than a newsletter or old-style type publications, and some institutions are even using that kind of dissemination as a form of publication for promotion.

So all in all, I really think your challenges and questions are highly important, and I am glad you had a chance to stop by the stand.

All the best,
Frank