Deja Vu

The project team are now working towards inducting employers, mentors, learners and tutors into the support point. Rather interesting this has highlighted some standard issues (some of which were raised in our eXchange for Learning projects (X4L & SURF WBL), including IT fatigue, unclear roles in support foundation degrees (see Burtons Blog), and lack of learner knowledge of available tools available via the University. One thing can certainly be said of this project, we have found that these problems just keep coming up and have to be faced and dealt with. Thankfully that is the main role of the support point, delivering information where it is needed and helping those involved in WBL understand how they fit in. Ideally it will be used to reduce the technologies the stakeholders will be aware of (they will, of course, still be in the background) - one point of access to the tools and information available. For example the repository will be a tool they will use but wont need to know anything about, it will be delivering content to them as they request it using the support point as a front end. The same could be said from any MIS such as Dolphin, Frame-Up etc.

Happy New Year

We are now fully into the new year and its starting off with some interesting posts from other JISC projects, mainly SPLASH who are looking at different social networking technologies for their project and have come across some interesting software. Their links are well worth a peek.
The project team meeting has been cancelled for this month but the team are still working hard, Stoke have been making progress on finding out about initial thoughts from end users on the support point, fingers crossed that will be blogged soon. Also, from looking at statistics the PageFlakes page is bringing more traffic to our blog and raising awareness of the project. Still not getting much feedback from the community but I am forever hopeful! The Wiki is taking a while to get going, but as meetings take place at the colleges this should become more active. We will have to see.
I am talking with different departments about institutional calendars and seeing if they are progressing beyond the traditional word/pdf files so that they can be shared through the support point as well as other methods (website, email etc). Plus it would bring all information into one place (open days, term dates, exam timetables, award events etc) rather than in different places.
Other than that I am down to London next week for the Engage Conference and presenting at the JISC conference the week after, which is keeping me busy.