In keeping with the Shift Happens theme, this has been updated and is now on You Tube as ‘Did you know 2.0?’

Always worth showing people just to get get them to really think about the future.

And a further update to this in the Did you know 4.0.

They have also started a Wiki page to discuss this further http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com/ - join the debate.

As promised I have uploaded my slide deck to Slideshare.  I have also included the option to download the original PowerPoint presentation as some of you may want to use this to discuss your own SharePoint deployments.

I do plan to do a screen cast of the presentation later in the year to provide some background for those that were unable to make it.     If you didn’t attend and you didn’t follow the torrent of tweets I did during the day you can see them here http://search.twitter.com/search?q=lgcuk

The first an probably the most important change is the work Alex Pearce has done in rescuing what was really a failed attempt by Microsoft to promote MLG and re launch the http://www.learninggateway.net/ site and launch the Learning Gateway User Group

What is the Learning Gateway User Group?
This community site is here for you.  A place where you can share your personal experiences with the Learning Gateway.  You may just have Microsoft SharePoint as your Learning Gateway and you want to show off the work you have done, or you are a school and you want to talk about all the great ways students and teachers and working together, enriching the learners.

There are a number of bloggers who have moved their blogs to the site and we are starting to see some great posts on there.

To really kick start this drive Alex and Richard Willis (SalamanderSoft) have organised the first conference dedicated to the Microsoft Learning Gateway.

It is promising to be the best education SharePoint event this year for both technical and non-technical staff. Whether you are a Network Manager, VLE Co-ordinator or Head Teacher you will find this conference an opportunity to learn from industry recognised experts speaking about the technical best practice of the Learning Gateway and how to get your staff, pupils and parents engaged and secure. In addition you’ll be able to network with your peers and see how others are pushing forward their Gateway.

There are some great speakers lined up for the event including 5 MVPs in SharePoint and Exchange with the Keynote by Steve Beswick, Directory of Education at Microsoft.

SharePoint in Education

Mike Herrity, from Twynham School, has launched a fantastic blog where he is really sharing his experiences in working with SharePoint in Education.   Unlike myself who tends to work on the larger projects with local authorities and partners Mike is an Assistant Head Teacher so really does talk about what it’s like in the school.

http://sharepointineducation.com/

As I find more great resources I will add then to this post,  if you blog or tweet on the Microsoft Learning Gateway please add a comment below with a link.

We now we have a place to discuss issues and generally help each other get the most from it.  

http://www.21apps.com/2008/05/microsoft-release-e-learning-editor.html

Oh and these forums are using the nice new ones so look pretty cool.

https://www.microsoft.com/learning/tools/lcds/default.mspx

This is great news as one of the real pain points of the SLK/MLG platform, since the move from Class Server, has been the lack of any decent content editors that can deliver content that conforms to the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) 1.2, which can be hosted in SharePoint document libraries and used by the SharePoint Learning Kit. 

During the installation you will note that this is the Community Edition, I don’t have any information on if there is a plan to release any commercial at this time.

LCDS Author

LCDS works with Courses, modules, lessons and topics with each course being a separate project.  Clicking on New prompts you to enter details for the Course.

Note:  If you are running on Vista you need to Run ad Administrator or you will get a script error after clicking OK.

My First Course

Your course will be created with a module, lesson and four topics providing you with a basic structure, you can add new items and reorder the exiting ones using the Course Structure toolbar.

Selecting the Introduction topic allows you to select the template associated with this topic, we will choose the Read and Introduction.

Each template has a predefined Page designer with areas to enter relevant information.  I plan to cover some of the other Template types in future posts.

We will enter some basic information for My First Course.

Adding a picture seems a little awkward as I click on the browse button and look at my Pictures directory for the picture to upload, on clicking OK I get an error saying ‘You must select a file from the ‘media’ folder. It would be nice if the program would copy this in for me – i’ll do this by clicking Media Folder in the top tool bar and manually copying the file, this raises another design issue – why are my courses not stored in My Documents?  In Vista I need administrator rights to copy files to the Program Files directory…

Adding the picture (don’t worry about it looking squashed it will be ok) a heading, some introductory text and objectives.

At this point I recommend you preview the course using the button on the top toolbar.

(If you get a warning about ActiveX controls right click and allow).

Already things look pretty good   

However, more work needed

What I did find whilst working with the templates like the Sort Game was difficulty in previewing the contents.  The tools look very user friendly but I found in my Vista environment that I could not test all of them.

So Microsoft have made significant progress to providing us with a SCORM editor,  although if you are using Vista you may experience some of the difficulties I have noted above.

I recommend you download the tools and have a play for yourself, the UI is very well laid out and appear easy to use.  I just need to resolve some of the preview issues before i can really test it out fully.

I am very interested in your experiences and would welcome posts to this thread on SUGUK web site so that we can share this knowledge and experiences, if you blog about it please add a link so it’s easy for others to find you post.

A recent article on MSDN UK Schools Blog is one such post.

It has recently become apparent that the SLK version in MLG was based on the code branch from before the Version 1.1 release and has subsequently missed out on some of the key fixes including:

Compression fails for content with multiple levels – effectively the MLG version of SLK does not support a large number of SCORM Editors without this fix

64-bit support – MLG solution is currently only 32bit which is a problem when it is starting to become common practice to deploy 64bit solutions.

There is however some hope on the horizon, we have heard that it is planned to merge the code bases over the next few months so the MLG changes will be added back to the SLK code branch.

One thing is not clear is whether a multi-language pack will be created for MLG so that it falls inline with the SLK language support.   And if they are changing the MLG components making them work with Site Collections for School sites would be a nice to have out of the box

This forum aims to cover all areas of SharePoint in Education from the Microsoft Learning Gateway, SharePoint Learning Kit,  Community Kit for SharePoint : Schools Edition to 3rd Party VLE integration, best practice, general support and user wish lists.   

Out hope is the forum will be used by

• Teachers and Students who have a SharePoint solution in their school or college
• IT support people who install and manage these school based installation
• Local Authorities who provide managed solutions
• SharePoint developers and consultants who work in education 
• solutions providers to support there products and looking for ideas on new features

to share experiences, pain points, and just help improve what we can achieved and through its inclusion in the SUGUK we should see some cross over in support and expertise.

The forum is open so please use this to ask questions,  make suggestions or generally talk about what’s hot and what’s not.   

Want to see something specific in your school?  ask the question – someone may have an answer, have the code to share or just might be willing to write something.

Are you doing something really great that you want to share?

The interest in SharePoint in Education is increasing exponentially,  the use of My Sites as the ‘approved’ MySpace or Facebook is starting to happen with early years pupils happily adding content to their My Sites.

If you have an interest in, or are working with, SharePoint in Education I recommend you subscribe to the Microsoft UK Higher Education Blog where Dominic Watts is posting some useful information and events, including the Higher Education Consortium which has been started to address missing, but critical, teaching and learning work roles and start the collaborative process for using SharePoint as the development platform.

There is a lot of information being published and these links provide a good starting point,  if you have any more please add them as comments.

http://www.microsoft.com/education/default.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/default.mspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/ukschools/default.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/education/schooloffuture.mspx

I will be bring further posts on my work on the Community Kit for SharePoint,  projects in Education in the UK and any interesting articles that I think will be useful to the community at large.

http://www.codeplex.com/LG

This refresh is designed to help you leverage your core Microsoft platform skills by delivering a set of web parts that will make SharePoint 2007 immediately relevant to the education and training market. To minimize the amount of time you need to spend configuring components, these web parts have been built to work together, and a new deployment guide designed to simplify deployment. Significant in this release is new information architecture that more clearly supports a diverse set of sites and workspaces, as well as better customization and use of in-built MOSS capabilities such as blogs and wikis.

You should also look at the SharePoint Learning Kit

http://www.codeplex.com/SLK

SharePoint Learning Kit is a SCORM 2004-conformant e-learning delivery and tracking application built as a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 solution. It works with either Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and has the following core features:

• Supports SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, and Class Server content, allowing users to store and manage this content in SharePoint document libraries.
• Supports learner-centric and instructor-led (assigned) workflows.
• Allows assignment, tracking and grading of both e-learning and non-e-learning content.

And please also bookmark the Community Kit for SharePoint Schools Edition (CKS:SE) as there are some exciting things planned.