The ICEman cometh

First to thank Peter Sefton and family for looking after me so well. We’re just about to see the sights of Toowoomba – The garden city. I gave a talk yesterday about the Semantic web and other stuff and used the WP entry above to highlight the way that WP is almost magically capturing commonly agreed information. (Someone pointed out that the height was given wrongly so I urged them to fix the entry – all I know is that we are relatively high up!).
I gave my talk in HTML as normal – a series of ca. 100 major topic with 2-20 “slides” under  each. I select each “slide” as I go along and stop at the time limit. At least this means I never overrun. The system has evolved over the years and now has a vertical menu for each topic and a horizontal one within the topic.
Peter and colleagues have been working on educational technology for many years and his ICE is aimed at many things including slides and course content. Because it rigorously separates content from style it’s straightforward to repurpose material. Blogs, slides, courses, summaries – all can be derived from or into ICE.
So I shall leave Peter to blog about the details. (For a typical example, see Graphing with ICE). ICE has been carefully thought out with a balance between formal systems and pragmatics. It works with  normal systems susch as Word, PDF, etc. It seems ideal for theses but I’ll not give anything else away in this blog. The team is great – we picked some topics of mutual interest and within 24 hours we had proof of concept of two. (They involve chemsitry!) So we’ll be adopting and encouraging its use.