Another busy day. My impression is that there are no "big-ideas" around at the show to interest the geeks but, having finally got time to go around the galleries at least, there are lots of companies with interesting products for the teachers.

One really good product which has come on leaps and bounds over the last year or so is gigajam which offers online instrumental lessons. At first sight (hear?) this sounds impossible but when you have seen it workings and kids using it you soon see its potential. It is very useful for drawing kids into playing instruments together - and hopefully they will then go on to to "proper" teacher.

The big learning platform/VLE/MLE companies are here of course: this year's "must have" word on a stand "learning platform"! This is becoming a very crowded and competitive space but few really compelling offerings in my opinion. I am still undecided about this whole area: does it really mean anything? Are the products worth the investment a school/LA/RBC needs to make in time are money to make it work? What about the whole issue of taking your "learning space" with when you move school? Or go to Uni? Who owns the contents of the platform and who has access to it? Still lots of work to do on this I think.

And then we have shibboleth to contend with and all the data cleaning and inter-departmental liaison that will involve. It never fails to amaze me how much detailed work needs to go on behind the screens in order to make a simple; clean; transparent process for the end-user...

The shows seems much busier today - we've had lots of visitors to the Easynet stand to talk about filtering. There are lots of foreign visitors it appears: we've had enquiries from Denmakrk, Sweden, India, Spain, Cyprus & Iceland. A pretty comprehensive geographical spread. So far I've not had any time to look around the show - perhaps tomorrow?

I've managed to look around on of the galleries a bit. Some interesting stuff - Moodle is here again; some very interesting media creation things going on as well. The Apple stand has lots of cool stuff (as always) but no iPhone!

So here we are - I arrived at 8am and spent the best part of two hours trying to set up the server that failed to arrive yesterday. We finally got the required IP details and managed to set up the Appliansys cache and install the Protex software just in time for the 10 am start.

In the meantime we also had another problem with the Cambs cache - so while setting up the server here I also spent time redirecting all the cambs caching up to our core! Still, all seems to be happy now.

Jeff has done the Making the News presentation; I've has some lunch and am now (13:00) manning the E2BNProtex stand...

The show seems quite busy and we've had a few interesting conversations - moodle on a USB stick for example - and a chance to catch up with a colleagues. I finally left about just before 6pm to struggle home on the train.

The conference went very well - there was loss of internet connectivity in the afternoon which was unfortunate but apart from that it was very successful. Had several conversations with Chris Stolberg (DfES) about Learning platforms and other government initiatives in this area which were very useful.

The filtering presentations were not very well attended - but this is a good thing. I am sure that if there was general discontent we'd have been booked out! It seems to have bedded down very well and been well received - we also now have full Becta accreditation on all the student profiles (confirmed on Monday) which will be a good "selling" point. C&W/Appliansys were happy with the responses they had and are also talking to other potential users. Herts were positive about it and will shortly be asking for our input into a trial of the system.

My "Expanding Horizons using Online tools" presentation went quite well - I overran the first day but the second one went much nearer to time.

I finished my two presentations for the E2BN conference this morning. The "Expanding Horizons with Online Tools" one I did in Keynote and exported as a QuickTime movie - it is posted on my website. The other one (about Protex) is a combination of a short overview presentation and live demo of the web-interface and comment handling system.

I have moved my work blogs to b2evolution from the iBlog software I have been using until now. This should give me greater flexibility and make them more manageable. iBlog is very good software and has some advantages in being stored on a desktop and then uploaded but as the blog is growing the number of files being uploaded was growing. A single change may cause most of the pages to be rebuilt as the archive, calendar or links lists were changed on each page. The last update caused over 600 hundred files to be uploaded!

b2evolution is database driven and instead of hosting it remotely I have put it on my home web-server (the database itself is on another server not accessible from the internet) which offers better performance when I am at home but is still available when I am away. I can back up the database and save the backup to my remote host for security.

I did look at using elgg for this - I even went to the extent of writing a page to modify the posted date (something which is not available in elgg at the moment) before finally coming down in the side of using b2evo. The advantages would have been the file storage integration which is very useful and the community aspect: but the files I can upload to my server and just link to (not quite as easy but not that much of an effort) and the "community" is covered by the user managment and publishing controls in e2evo.

Elgg will win over b2evo in a larger installation where the community really comes into its own: this is an extra level over b2evo which is more of a pure blogging tool which can cope with large numbers of users writing & reading blogs.

I have copied any existing entries from my old blog for April 2005 into this one: entries pre-April 2005 can be found HERE. Prior to this I used Blogger.com but posted the files to my server: entries older from February to October 2004 can be found HERE