.uni anyone?

In London at end of last week for UCISA Executive meeting - quite a short meeting, but some interesting discussions. We looked at the implications of a .uni or .university domain name for web sites under the new naming conventions. Would we want to use them? Would it affect our branding if other organisations used them? No answers, but plenty of issues.

John Denham, the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, is carrying out a review of Higher Education, and we looked at some of the papers that have been prepared for him to inform him of the issues. One of the contributions that is particularly relevant to us is the one from Sir Ron Cooke, until recently chairman of the JISC. He was asked to provide a contribution on becoming a world leader in e-learning, but his actual paper is entitled On-Line Innovation in Higher Education. It is worth reading - there is a good executive summary which outlines the three recomendations:

• a new approach to virtual education based on a corpus of open learning content
• revitalised investment into e-infrastructures
• development of institutional information strategies

UCISA will be looking closely at this paper and its recommendations to see how we can help take this agenda forward