epic thinking
issue 61: March 2007

Top Ten Blogging Tools

Epic's irrepressible Keith Landsborough shares his top ten technology tools for building interactivity and content on your very own blog.

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Epic goes to the movies

As part of the new Skills for Life Improvement Programme, Epic is making four films that will demonstrate effective practice in teaching and learning in a range of settings.

Skills for Life is QIA's national strategy to improve the literacy, numeracy and language skills of adults to meet national targets. The new Improvement Programme, which CfBT Education Trust is delivering throughout England from November 2006, aims to build on the work of previous Skills for Life programmes and initiatives by supporting both individuals and organisations. For more information, please take a look at the website: www.sflip.org.uk.

Epic is currently working in partnership with LLU+ (the post-16 Literacy, Language and Numeracy Unit at London South Bank University) to produce films on outstanding practice for the 'Developing and Transferring Effective Practice' strand 4.

The programme will make a series of films to disseminate effective practice in the field to teachers and teacher educators. These will be delivered on DVD and via the QIA website.

Read the article here

Open source

Since publishing the well received open source and e-learning white paper, our clients have become increasingly interested in open source, and in particular Moodle. The article in our December newsletter about Moodle's impact on the LMS market was the most popular item on our website through December/January and created significant interest in both the Moodle and e-learning blogging communities. Subsequently we were interviewed about Moodle by ZDNet in their article 'Moodle tackles e-learning muddle'.

Read the article here

At Epic we've been embracing open source for many years. Most of our back-end systems rely on the security and reliability it gives open source (in particular Sendmail, Linux, Apache, Tripwire, Liberum, MySQL and Subversion). We also include open source in our knowledge management and learning solutions (in particular PHPBB2, Moodle, WordPress and MediaWiki).

Download the Moodle datasheet now (PDF)
Download Acrobat Reader

The effectiveness of e-learning

Howard Hills, co-author of Towards Maturity e-learning study commissioned by the Skills for Business Network, reviews recent research proving the effectiveness of e-learning in improving customer satisfaction.

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What's cooking on the Epic Blog this week?

How accurate are wikis?

Wikis at work

Sumtotal moves in on SME market

Educause 2007 Horizon Report

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