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.

Looking forward

After a short team meeting (due to it being Summer break) I went to see Shrewsbury on site last week to discuss what the project was planning as they missed the project meeting. It was a good thing I went as they reminded me it was not long to the ALT-C conference and that I needed to sort out the presentation for it. Time is just flying at the moment. We also discussed the idea of a launch party - this has been agreed to, it is just a matter of picking a date that the team can attend, and that gives us the conference facilities at Stafford. Once a date has been picked I am planning to speak to the Employer Engagement dept again about getting employers to attend.
As we move towards the end of the project we are still doing a lot of work on the Support Point - this includes more work on the portlet that links to the MIS data (TheSiS) and checking links to the Staffordshire website as the site has been updated and most of the URL's used by the Support Point have changed. We are also hoping to get some new portlets in place by the end of the project that link to HIVE, and I need to give some thought and investigation time into what information is used with the content that goes in (IMS 1.3 etc). As already mentioned as this is now core business work will continue beyond the project and work done in other projects will impact on what we can do in the Support Point.

Busy May

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.