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Yesterday I was very pleased to have informally met John Connell. John is the former Director of Glow (SSDN) He will be visiting me and my INT1 Biology class tomorrow morning to observe Glow in action. Yesterday John showed me a little of the background planning and specifications of Glow. This was an excellent opportunity for me to gain a wider knowledge of what we are now currently using in the classroom. Glow has been planned, created and constructed over the last 6 years. Initially, glow started as a simple idea. John illustrated the concept with this diagram

From this, a more complex mind map was then derived. Many concepts branching from the initial three. This mind map illustrates how the planning progressed

Let’s take a look:

SSDN ‘State Of Requirements’The Scope of the Procurement
‘The procurement of the intranet will embrace the design, delivery and implementation of the software and applications as well as the management of the intranet as a service to authorities, schools and national bodies for the agreed period of the contract. An agreed subset of intranet functions will require to be made available to all users across the country whatever they’re networking and connectivity arrangements’.

It was fascinating to see how such a huge initiative originally stemmed from such simple concepts. Obviously the process of where John was ‘then‘ and where we are now is far more complex. I won’t go into excessive detail, but John also showed me some of the prototypes that were initially involved.

Prototype created by Robert Skey

This looks very different to the trial portal. Indeed, my first vision of Glow was similar to what we see above. Though this is largely due to the fact I use applications like windows media player and MSN Messenger every day. The portal is still in it’s trial phase. Other collaborative and VLE tools will be integrated between now and mid-2007.

All very exciting nevertheless. I would like to thank John for taking time to meet Dave and I yesterday, it was very interesting to see some of the foundations of Glow.