Last week the SIMPLE project was given its final presentation at the JISC Pedagogy Expert Group meeting at Aston University, Birmingham -- http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearningpedagogy/elearningexp.... Slides up on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/paulmaharg/simple-presentation-presentation. Back in 2006 project members Brian Henderson, Helyn Gould & Paul Maharg presented the two-year project to the group, explaining aims & methods.

If you use Twitter (www.twitter.com) we now have a twitter hashtag set up for any one to use. Just add #simplecomm to your tweet.

The last 4 tweets will appear on the right hand side or you can check out the full list of tweets by searching for #simplecomm or going here.

Apologies to all SIMPLECommunity.org users, our web server suffered a failure in the communications link between the infrastructure and the data store, resulting in the web site being off line for a day.

This issue should now be resolved, and we're hoping it won't happen again.

Great session today with Philip Plowden, Dean of Northumbria U. Law School, and around 16 members of staff from Northumbria U. At his invitation Michael Hughes and I travelled down to Newcastle and spent most of the day with staff from the Law School, Built Environment and Business School demonstrating the SIMPLE platform, showing the tools, using them with staff, discussing simulation design, and much else.

SIMPLE was given an airing in Newcastle this week when Patricia McKellar demonstrated it to a Work-Related Learning workshop on Wednesday 1 October, organised by NetSkills for the JISC/HEA Collaboration Initiative. The workshop explored a variety of technological resources and investigated their pedagogic value in terms of work based and work related learning. Lots of interest shown in SIMPLE...

Finally SIMPLECommunity.org is officially "soft" launched. This means that to a greater extent the site now has all of the features that we think that everyone will need.

At present we do have one outstanding feature which hasn't been launched yet, and that is the issue tracking system. We *had* installed Trac, but we're not entirely happy with that as a bug tracker as we'd really like to to integrate with everyone's forum usernames and password.

Karen Counsell, at University of Glamorgan's Law School has won her Faculty Award for Humanities and Social Sciences for Excellence in technology-enhanced learning.

She will now go forward within this category for the overall University award, to be announced in September.