Qualifications

The advantage of posting proposed entries for individual boxes here is that we will be able to see what others are doing and how the developments are shaping as a whole.

It will also be possible to link to content on your own sites or elsewhere: see the four links at the top right above this entry.

One question I have concerns the insert in the hard copy of the Irish version of the leaflet: will that content be covered in the individual entries or would it be useful to have some general accompanying text like that - it could be placed alongside the rough guide in some way.

What do others think?

For some time now, thanks to Alan Brown's astute intervention, we here at KnowNet have been exploring options for a dynamic, online version of the information presented in the leaflet(s) "Qualifications can cross boundaries - a rough guide to comparing qualifications in the UK and Ireland". That work is still preliminary, but I'll be posting at least one option later this morning.

To provide some background, I attach the PDF leaflets of the crossing boundaries information for Scotland, Ireland, and England, Wales & Northern Ireland (the difference between the leaflets is in the order of the information columns and in the contact details provided).

Watch this weblog for further posts about the crossing boundaries interfaces.

By the way, I am posting the entry from ECTO - my favourite weblog-editing desktop application. It is easy to post weblog entries from within the weblog itself, but you may find that it is even easier to post from special desktop applications like ECTO - for instance it allows multiple file attachments / thumbnails in one step.

I have just posted a first alpha-version to illustrate some of the features that an interactive, online interpretation of the Qualifications can cross boundaries information could have. To view the mock-up, go to Qualifications can cross boundaries - interactive version alpha v1.

When you are looking at the new mockup, you can click on links/buttons to hide and show the instructions and/or the individual columns of the information table. I am aware that repeated clicking to hide/show causes some glitchy behaviour. I'll be re-writing the dynamic interface to avoid those glitches and also to provide more powerful choices for how the user wants to view the comparative information.

Please let us know what you think, either by leaving a comment on this weblog entry or by posting a new weblog entry with your comments. It is easy to do either; if you register as a member of the site you can do both (if you do not want to join the site, you can still leave a comment on this entry by going to its 'permalink', scrolling down to the quick-reply form, and using the anonymous comment option. If you are logged into the site, you can post a weblog entry directly from the mock-up crossing boundaries interface by clicking the icon.

The problem Alan noted with the QualsCrossBoundaries interface has been fixed...

By the way, it's not just that there were 3 rows of content in scottish level 8... web content has to 'flow' in order to be accessible to the visually impaired; so for instance the QualsCrossBoundaries interface tries to be fairly robust against the user massively increasing the text size ( unlike the pdf file, the text has to be able to be made bigger without blowing up the entire layout )

I've tried the changed interface with pretty big user-increased text and it still has the irish 7 halfway between scottish 8 and 9 :o)

can everyone let me know if this looks OK - especially if there are other problems to see to.

PS - As soon as we get a chance, we have ideas for a much more powerful / adaptable format which we'd like to base further work on...