Well the techie team has been working hard and its looking like they have the liferay performance issues licked. This was causing some problems with liferay only plodding on rather than running at full speed - giving problems for the pilot so hopefully they are now all sorted and people will no longer be experiencing a time lag in its use.
The project team meeting went well and I am pleased with the way the team is looking at different methods of keeping the employers & mentors engaged with the site, this has included two of the partners investigating sharing their attendance data with the Support Point.
I did a workshop last week at the Technology Supported Learning Conference at Staffordshire University around the Support Point. There was some interesting discussions around supporting stakeholders in WBL, and not many institutions seem to be involved in delivering the support given through the Support Point, and tutors seemed very interested in using it (or promoting the idea of it in their own institution). Hopefully the conference feedback will come back to me soon so I can use it in the ALT-C presentation.
I have had a busy May with lots of travelling to promote the SURF WBL-Way project and a week off to enjoy the first bit of sunshine for this year. We have received some good news today - we will be presenting a short paper at the ALT-C 2009 Conference in Leeds later this year.
Work has been progressing well with the Support Point, with enhancements added from comments at the last project meeting. I am looking at seeing if we can embed extra RSS feeds from Inute as a resource for both learners and tutors - this again would be linked to subjects that they are linked to. On a plus side JORUM resources will become easier to access with the launch of JORUM Open which will be happening in the future. We will have to consider which license we want to put resources into JORUM now - should anyone be able to access it or should it be limited to tutors etc as it is now? The biggest concern with our resources is that it includes Tutor guidelines. However HIVE should help with this allowing two IMS packages - 1 for the tutor and 1 for the learner, which can both be sent to JORUM as URLs.
The project is coming to an end in October so we want a system that can be built on and managed by the normal IS team. Even so it is hard to stop thinking about where we would like it to go next and how we can use it further within SURF. Still we need to get this first stage completed before moving forward.
We got some positive feedback from our project update which was nice, and I am planning to catch up with the other project summary that was sent out by the Programme Manager, David, as soon as I can.
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