Qualifications

I've just posted version 6 beta of Qualifications can cross boundaries - a rough guide to comparing qualifications in the UK and Ireland.

Changes in this version:

• Improvement to the controls for choosing to hide some columns, and/or hide the instructions. There is now a series of checkboxes to control this, which makes it look cleaner and also gives better feedback to the user.
• You can now choose an alternative, plain, styling instead of the leaflet appearance. There is a select-box (drop-down menu) to the right of the checkboxes mentioned above.

There is still room to add to these improvements. I can augment or change the palin stylesheet, and can easily create yet more alternative stylings ( the 'accessible semantic markup' of the table makes this very easy ). The user interface for controlling which columns are shown could be augmented with some ready-made pairwise choices (compare scotland with ireland for instance). And of course there is still a bit of work to be done with the rest of the interface,

Please give us feedback on what you think. Just add comment to this weblog entry, or email Alan with your comments.

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.

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.