I went to the JISC CETIS conference “A brave new world” last week in Birmingham, and I found it a very useful and friendly event. Grainne Conole and I live blogged some of the sessions - a new experience for me! I thought I'd supplement those notes with a summary of what I took away from the conference.

The Tempest, by John Waterhouse.

1. As Lorna Campbell reported common themes at the OER technical roundtable included tracking resources, search and discoverability, and the granularity of resources. There were no quick solutions, but
2. The JISC OER pilot projects appears to be progressing well. I am particularly interested in Steeple, a collaboration between several institutions including the University of Cambridge and The Open University – Dr Bjorn Hassler emphasised the importance of inclusive design, particularly relating to constraints such as bandwidth in the developing world and accessibility. And the OER Multimedia Training Videos from the University of Westminster, which are winning awards and are being energetically promoted through multiple channels including Vimeo, YouTube and Twitter. Russell Stannard talked about the challenges of progressing this relatively low-budget project and making a sound business case to the University's marketing department for further funds.
3. W3C Widgets are a viable cross-platform standard, particularly for mobile devices (unfortunately, not the iPhone yet). Scott Wilson talked us through how the widgets work, and showed us the Wookie widget server software, which was created through CETIS and has recently become an Apache Incubator project. The server also supports Google/OpenSocial gadgets. The project is looking for developers, and possibly organisations to host a server.
4. The final keynote from Bill Thompson painted a mostly optimistic picture of the future, with the prospect of lots of new technology, for example, augmented reality contact lenses. And as he pointed out, with East Africa recently gaining improved broadband, the dominance of native English speakers on the Internet will in the near future be overtaken by developing regions that are likely to be more outward looking and connected than for example, China. We should embrace this new world.