Plymouth, mentors, work based learning and Blogging

What a title but I think I should have covered it all! Mark and I went down to the Plymouth e-Learning conference, where Mark was the Key Note speaker. This had a lot of interesting things going on around work based learning, control and innovation (based on Marks talk), and "Web 2.0". Plymouth have a JISC project called Uspace, where they are looking at using iGoogle as a portal for their learners, and it will be interesting to see how they link that to university systems and authentication, at the moment most tools they are using appear to be those linked to Google, although they also link to their internal elgg installation. Another interesting point will be whether employers let learners access it at work (barriers on control/ what is learning and what is social). They have taken the approach that each partner college has their own tab within iGoogle - this is something that we will be looking at during the next meeting.

Other interesting issues linked to: Will learners really use devices they have for entertainment/social networking for learning? Previous studies have shown this to be unlikely so will we be able to encourage technology relating to learning as well as their other devices - or can we piggie back on devices they use for work? Are they happier using work/ personal devices as opposed to learning/ personal devices? No easy answers were there but still need to be considered and investigated.

The conference showed a move towards blogging in everyday learning, with learners now starting to complain that they have to reflect on too much. Where blogging has not joined the mainstream feedback shows the reason they like to do it is because it is new and different. I found it interesting one study appeared to have written their own blogging tool with a template for feedback in a certain way, the learners using this complained about the limited functionality and they had not been asked that if they had been given the template to go into their own blogging tool would they have been happier?

As we look at the Support Point and consider how the learner is being encouraged to blog their experiences will we have to think about linking learner blogs to different modules? And will the learner have to start thinking about different blogs for those modules? How will they be able to manage this experience?

Anyway enough of the questions!

Pilot has taken off

Well the pilot is now up and running, anyone interested in registering as an employer, learner, tutor or support staff can do so. While this has been going on I have tried to put a list of all the features together of everything we have discussed in meetings. This has been put in GoogleDocs (as it is a document that others in the project will need to contribute on). This list will form the project plan for implementation of features that will occur while the pilot is running. I am now looking forward to feedback on the document and the launch of the pilot.

On an aside I have avoided using GoogleDocs since the start of the project as its functionality seemed limited and there was no way to add folders, since then they seem to have spent some time on it and now there is a way to add content to folders etc so it might be worth thinking about again as a store for documents with the project as GoogleGroups now has over 60 documents in it and is getting difficult to manage.

Next week I am off to the CETIS conference which should be interesting. I get to take my business cards, which have finally arrived too, helping with getting the projects name out there.

Helping friends

Went out and about yesterday with Mark to talk to Bradford college about their HE in FE project that is using some of our content. It was an interesting day that reinforced some of the points raised at last weeks Project Management training when it comes to writing work packages and using GANTT charts. I know I need to spend a bit more time now on the next stage of the project and the features that need to be added to the support point once it has launched (still waiting on that one!). It also reminded me to send the work packages for the project to the Programme Manager.

It is always interesting to see how the same problems occur for different projects, often these revolve around senior management support, lack of internal communication, and unforseen technical issues. These problems always impact on the success of a project, especially on its timings. We have been lucky with communication with the project, by choosing and using tools to communicate (thanks Google!) from the start the team have always had ways of keeping in touch, along with the use of monthly meetings. We are also fully supported through senior management thanks to ensuring the project fits with strategy within the university and the partner colleges. We seem to have been hit by the technical issues bug though and I am not sure that there is any way that this could be managed any better, but I will certainly be working at it!

Personalisation and Social tools

This is more of a general blog about what I have been up to this week rather than a total focus on the project. I have been to several meetings, including one covering the "dynamic prospectus" with our marketing department. Unfortunately the quotes are needed as this seems to be an idea at the moment rather than something that feels tangible. Further meetings with corporate information confirmed this impression, with their investigation into XCRi.
Another thing that has been keeping me busy is pushing the marketing of the project, including setting up the portal with the right information to be shown on leaflet screen grabs and creating Flash Demos from Wink of both the site and of HIVE and how it fits in to the site and local VLE's
On a side note to all this is the impact of ALT-C, and how people use social software. Since attending the conference I have had some friend requests for facebook, and as a result I have set up a second facebook account for my work persona. There are a number of groups I have got involved in which have got me attached to a few more blogs. In particular Helen Keegans EduSpaces Blog and Steve Wheelers e-learning blogspot have been interesting to read (and added to my Google Reader list) as well as adding myself to the Hood 2.0 facebook group. Another tool I have had my interest revived in is PebblePad - which seems like a handy tool.

e-learning at the cusp

Went to an event held at Stoke campus yesterday, once again it raised the issue of the use of Web 2.0 in an educational context, and the idea of the student being in control of their learning - to the point one institution calls their learners "researchers". Another interesting presentation was Mark Stiles' 'Living with the Uncontrollable' his framework made me think about what tools should the institution recognise, embed in the learning and take control of.

This project has been looking at providing one point of access to a number of stakeholders of not only institutional information but information personal to that stakeholder (i.e. blogs / rss feeds/ favourites (del.icio.us)), this information would not be controlled by the institution but just displayed by lifeRay. This is the best solution to encourage stakeholders to use the access point as a single reference for those either unfamiliar with information available to them or for those who need one area for all of their information.

As stakeholders gain familiarity with the information we can provide to them the more I wonder whether we need to take this a step further and look beyond the project.....allowing the institutional information to be accessed through authenticated rss feeds? Or using standard widgets which would allow them to be plugged into those tools we are using for project management (Google homepage, yahoo!, Flock, MS Live)? I will have to revisit this thought once we have managed to have a (successful!) pilot of the support access point.

Useful Links
Google Gadgets (Personalised Homepage) : http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/
Yahoo! Widgets: http://widgets.yahoo.com/workshop/
MS Live Gadgets: http://microsoftgadgets.com/

Coordination across projects

Had a really good meeting with Sue Lee (LDI) about a project she has been working on with some colleagues with the Creative Arts team. They have requested a portal similar in requirements to what we are doing in the project, we have taken it in under our project umbrella but should give us an in into colleges not directly involved in the project. Also combines well with the project group being set up by the SURF office.

I have been asked to deliver a presentation at JORUM next week “from the outside looking in”. It could be interesting, especially as we have been collating comments from other institutions as we demonstrate the last project outputs.

Tried to use Yahoo in the same way I have been looking at Microsoft Live Homepage and Google Personalised Homepage, unfortunately at the moment it looks like Yahoo have some way to go before getting the functionality and usability to the same level as these more mature tools and wont be something I recommend to the team to use instead of the Google / Live options. It could just be me but these two tools seem much more mature and more flexible than the Yahoo! Personalised Homepage. It seems that all these companies are embedding more options within their email tool rather than making the options modular – which could be more of a way forward, i.e. Google calendar with your Yahoo! Email and your live blog. We will have to see. Got a busy two weeks ahead – will have to try and keep this blog updated as I go!

Tools

The last project meeting got quite a lot agreed in the end with regards to project tools to be used. The last project used a WIKI for communication but soon was unweildy and became difficult to find anything, I think the main problem was with the management as it really needed more time than any one person could spend on it. This time we have started looking at online tools that can be pulled together in an online environment such as Google Personalised Homepage (GPH), I have been using this successfully for some time for management of my own time as it means one place to go no matter where I am. We have hit some issues, such as colleges blocking some of the more useful tools, or stopping staff from installing new browsers available such as Flock. Although investigation showed that although Flock is a good community tool its remit was too wide for the project and did not work/ layout was messy with some of the tools we wanted to use.

I have been pleased with the take up of the use of GPH by the team as it means that we can personalise the tools we use and get them all together in one place. At the moment I am the only one with a blog but I am hoping the others will set up their own. The main problem now is how to share documents, as we don't need the collaborative aspect of Google Documents and we need to display folder structures so we can't use Google Groups Beta. A lot of the free tools out there seem to be limited or can't be added nicely to GPH, or other personalised environments. I would love a plugin to GPH for DriveHQ that works like the box.net gadget.