m-ICTE 2005 (Multimedia and ICTs in Education) Caceres, Extremadura, Spain

I'd rather misjudged the level of this conference when originally writing my presentation. The conference was quite interesting but was (shall we say) one (or maybe two) level(s) down from my usual fare.

There were an awful lot of presentations (I'm guessing at 100+) split into several themes. There were a lot of presentations along the lines of: "I teach a course in X, we wrote this software package to help students with aspect Y of the course. Here is the software. We did an evaluation of the software and most of the students said they liked it becuase it was different to the norm." This sort of thing would have been interesting had I been a lecturer looking for novel ideas to deliver courseware. As a developer, it was interesting to see what people are doing, but the talks were not in general relevant to my work.

One talk did pop into my conciousness; it was by Ron Gonzales from Brigham Young University. Unfortunately Ron was so efficient in his submission of his paper that it fell of the front of the conference proceedings! He was looking at IT skills and pointed me towards www.sigite.org - ACM Special Interest Group for Information Technology Education which (if you look under 'curriculum') breaks IT skills down into a heirarchy akin to what we have done with the skills framework instance. I was interested to see if SIG ITE had used IMS RDCEO to represent these skills formally but it became apparent that they'd never considered this. (I dont think they even knew that such standards exist.)

My talk about the LUSID skills framework went down very well indeed; I guess as it was slightly more thought-provoking that the mean. I had a small huddle at the end and got a few contacts.The fact that the conference was (ahem) slightly dull meant that I could have a good rummage around the historic area of Caceres - very nice, very non-touristy. The even hold a

WOMAD once a year. Four and a half hours on the train from Madrid at a cort of about £12. The same journey would probably be £100 in the UK.

As well as the above I was of course (as ever) on a publicity for the Bodington VLE. I managed to distribute 50 Bodix (Bodington on Knoppix) CDs; I'm not sure whether we've had any feedback.Oh well back to the dubious English weather! [Actually, it's quite nice today.Oh yes, and to date we've beaten the Aussies at cricket twice in two games. Now if that's not tempting fate I don't know what is!

And oh yes once more. Liverpool FC have gained entry to the Champions League again!