ah,
you were the other ex-sussex person! I spoke to Tom Brown and he said there were two of you in the room trying to work out exactly where the Creativity zone is! (the old undergrad concrete-bunker style computer lab in Pevensey 2!)
I find the whole JISC / HEA structure confusing - and add Eduserv and BECTA in to really confuse things...... I get the feeling that JISC, as the infrastructure provider, got into the e-learning funding / research side in order to inform the technology infrastructure decisions they would have to make in the future - whereas the HEA are coming at slightly from the other angle, having to take technology seriously as a tool for teaching and research. And as you say, just HE not FE and colleges which JISC includes.
We are funded by HEFCE (Higher Education funding council for England) which decided to put some serious money into teaching and learning and created the
CETL programme.
So we are one of 74 CETLs, 5 years of funding, the first year getting up and running with the building and staffing, year 2 piloting teaching and events in the zone, trying to thrash out evaluation strategies, sorting out the technical problems etc. - hopefully by October we will zipping along. We are a joint CETL with the university of Brighton, and I've just realised we only have a copy of their zone plan on the website, not any images from it - must get some up there. they had a different space to work with, different issues to tackle and have some interesting dimensions we don't - they have an olfactory "gizmo" that allows different smells to permeate their space - and a very large curved back projection screen..... but like us, they have to deal with the issue of people wanting to use it "as a nice space for their presentation" - we are working hard to get over the idea that they are both spaces for innovative teaching and learning, not just nicely decorated lecture theatres....
Diane