Testing for Wednesday

With the launch coming up the technical team are working hard with testing to ensure everything works smoothly next week. We have over 30 people registered for the event with a number from the partner colleges, which is great news. The technical team even booked the room we are using for testing today so we were all sat at laptops going through what we were expecting to do on the Wednesday. Fortunately on the whole everything went well. There were a few bugs found in the system and I now have a few to dos to do from comments from the LDI team. This includes putting some images against the demo accounts so people can see how the forums work and making sure all the links work. Sam is going through and proof reading things and changing the look of the site, and is hoping to have this done by end of play Tuesday, cutting things a bit fine but as it is a spit and a polish will not effect functionality. I have put some simple questions in the forums for people to answer after the activities so we should get some meaningful feedback from the event too.

ALT-C 2008

I am back in the office after a good week at ALT-C, even though the event was over three days last week I was still thinking about it on Friday and sharing my experience with colleagues through pebblepad. Hopefully my notes make sense! It was an interesting experience with lots of discussion around social networking and using web 2.0 tools to support learners, although most of the focus was still around traditional learners there were some talks specific to WBL, including the one we did during the graveyard session (9am the day after the conference dinner) we had a turn out of over 40 and presented along with a paper on supporting prisoners as learners, the development of a Fd supported across Wales in eCommerce for Small Businesses and understanding the Net Generation in Eastern Australia. I know the technical team have been working on HIVE over the last few weeks, and this is important if we want it to work correctly with the Support Point but with the Launch coming up soon I will need to check that everything is running well and data is correct. I also need to check the status of setting up the hardware and make sure that we have people from each of the colleges in the consortium. So far we have attendance from Stafford University, Stafford College and Burton on Trent.

Date set and planning ahead

The event is set for 1st October, at Staffordshire University and will be held over a morning, with lunch at the end. I have now posted information about the event in the WBL Google Calendar that we created for the project, the Support Point itself and I am also looking to publicise it through the WBL Moodle site and using email and posters at partner colleges. The date is slightly short notice but fingers crossed people (learners, employers, mentors, tutors etc!) will be interested in attending.

This week I will aslo be preparing my presentation for ALT-C and getting ready for the monthly team meeting on Thursday.