Open ICT Tools - Presented by Chris Turnock, Learning Academy, Northumbria University

Open ICT Tools project is part of the national Trialling Collaborative Online Tools for BCE. The Open ICT Tools project, has been funded by JISC, sleeked to trial Information Communication Technology (ICT) tools to facilitate global collaboration between Northumbria students and students at other universities around the world as well as with external business partners. A challenge has been facilitating communication and multimedia data exchange between Northumbria University and participating external educational and business organisations without compromising the security of either Northumbria University IT infrastructure or of partner organisations. However, use of existing university technical infrastructure has been problematic, as software licence agreements limit use of technology to Northumbria students. Therefore, the project has explored potential for open source tools to enable effective collaboration.

The project aimed to build on the ICT infrastructure at Northumbria by identifying and trialling open source collaborative ICT tools that:

(a) Might support engagement between the university and its external collaborative educational and business partners.

(b) Might be embedded with the current university IT infrastructure.

Chris will briefly describe challenges to the university IT infrastructure posed by external collaboration and then present the nature of student collaboration and solutions that have been tested as part of the project.

Learning Outcome:
To develop insights into how open source technology might facilitate safe student collaboration.

Additional information: http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/central/ar/lts/events/nc/nconf09/prog09/nc09s...

Category:

Education

Tags:

• e-learning;
• Global
• Studio;
• distributed
• design
• teams;
• internationalising
• education