Simon.BuckinghamShum.net

Members of Microsoft's group developing learning technologies for distance education visited the OU on 9th and 10th June. Hosted by Diana Laurillard (PVC Technology), Jim Ptaszynski, Eric Rait and David Kosbie spent a day in KMi, discussing several projects with staff, before presenting their own work in the afternoon.
They continue their consultations tomorrow with the Business School, Technology Faculty, Institute of Educational Technology and Academic Computing Service, concluding with a meeting with the Vice Chancellor Sir John Daniel.

5 June'98: John Rieman (Boulder, Colorado) presented an innovative drawing package called JSketch, designed to support the rough sketching that is so crucial to initial, creative design work. He contrasted this to conventional drawing and painting programs which obstruct the free-form lines that underpins informal sketching by producing inelegant, or over-precise forms.
Abstract and contact details on the KMi Visiting Speaker's page: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/kmi-speakers

A special issue of JIME went live today for open peer review, following several months' intensive author-reviewer debate:
. An integrating concept is the sharing and extension of educational Java applets via an Educational Object Economy

This issue has been submitted by the East/West Group, a research consortium of US publishers, universities and educational software companies.

The issue is open until 15 May'98 for anyone to contribute to the author-reviewer discussions, after which articles will be revised in the light of the discussions.

The Journal of Interactive Media in Education is edited and published by KMi as an action research project into new forms of scholarly and technical publishing.

JIME uses D3E (Digital Document Discourse Environment) to generate its sites, which tightly integrate an article with a structured annotation and debate area.

KMi Contacts:

Simon Buckingham Shum [sbs@acm.org]
Tamara Sumner [T.Sumner@open.ac.uk]

Dearing Report Discussion Site: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/Dearing/
D3E (Digital Document Discourse Environment) has been used to generate a web site to serve as a forum for national discussion of the Dearing Report into Higher Education. The report's 93 recommendations to the government will be influential in shaping HE in the UK, and many bodies who submitted evidence to the committee are now responding to it.
The web site has been designed to support structured pooling and discussion of commentaries on each recommendation, so that related material can be easily browsed. The D3E Publisher's Toolkit generates the integrated environment for browsing the recommendations and viewing/adding to commentaries.
D3E Project: http://d3e.open.ac.uk

The “Digital Document Discourse Environment” (D3E) has been used to design and publish a special issue of the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, focusing on World Wide Web Usability, just published at:
http://www.hbuk.co.uk/ap/ijhcs/webusability .
A special issue is an excellent way for a publisher to gauge the potential of next generation e-journal media for an established journal and readership. KMi will be studying the usage and reader feedback on this special issue as part of the D3E Project's research, and to provide Academic Press with insight into the potential of e-journals.
D3E: http://d3e.open.ac.uk

The London Mathematical Society has chosen KMi's D3E (Digital Document Discourse Environment) as the environment for their new flagship e-journal, “The Journal of Computation and Mathematics”. D3E is the tailorable shell on which KMi's experimental “Journal of Interactive Media in Education” is built. The D3E team will be training an LMS programmer in D3E beginning ~April.
Details of the Journal of Computation and Mathematics can be found at: http://www.qmw.ac.uk/~lms/jcm/welcomejcm.html
KMi's JIME can be found at: http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/jime/