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.

ALT-C 2007

As you can see this week I have been attending the ALT-C conference in Nottingham with some colleagues. This has been an interesting event covering some useful subjects for the project including methods of evaluation, although some ideas seemed very restrictive (i.e. just using positive interviewing to gather feedback). It was good to see some very controlled evaluation projects out there, which is difficult for our project but still made for interesting listening. The sessions seemed to be more around the experience for the learner rather than the technology itself which is good as this links into what we are trying to achieve with this project, the other interesting one was how frameworks fit with simply good learning and not with the technology that was being demonstrated. This was particularly clear with the sessions on wikis and I am still to be convinced that they are a useful tool for learning. The main problem seems to be a learners reluctance to change someones work (and who can blame them?). Podcasting is another one where someone mentioned something I have experienced myself - by uploading learning material (in my case learning Italian) onto my MP3 player it would appear during my random playing of music which was annoying and not something I like to experience, this was reflected in their study of learners. I am more likely to use my phone for this content as I don't use it as an MP3 player even though it has the fuctionality, but this requires learners to be using different technologies for different purposes (i.e. MP3 player for entertainment, phone for learning - and how likely is this?).


flickr photo by Fleur Corfield


Anyway back to the project!
We have now got a new version of lifeRay running on the test server, we are working on getting the look and feel right as the CSS is different in the new version. The Business school have expressed an interest in using the portal for the work placement learners, allowing all of them to access the information in the school relating to that module. Hopefully we will be able to cover this for them reasonably close to the start of the evaluation period - the more the better! We also have a meeting with CI to find out about linking through to course information and learner study history.
For enrolment it looks like we are OK about linking to the university login information, however we are having to think about how we validated who an employer is - it might have to be something the learner does - i.e. notification to learner that the employer has registered and wants to see their information.

Forums

Had a meeting this morning to discuss access and management of the forums within lifeRay. The main solution to managing the forums is to focus the information much like we already do in Blackboard. Thus tutors will be managing something they already take control of in the VLE. This way link tutors manage the overall generic work based learning forums and the subject specific forums are managed by tutors involved on the course. In order to ensure that the correct tutors get the right permissions we need to ensure that the right information is collected at registration (and kept up to date by the user). We need to ensure we cover main job roles in each of the institutions and the faculties/departments each institution has.
One bonus would be if we can show the different forums under different areas so that they could be under the generic WBL Support page and then the Learner sub category (and those categories under it) are also displayed under Learners Public area as the main category. This is being investigated by the technical team.
The technical team have managed to investigate further into the use of LDAP within lifeRay and copying data across (very like the tool in HIVE) into a local database and it is looking good. It could be an easier issue than previously thought (thanks to the new version of lifeRay - this should be up on our severs by the end of the week). We are planning a meeting with the Corp. Info people for two weeks time so that we can start looking at linking with their data too.

Timescales and planning

Had a few meetings recently, and will be having a few more, about the functionality of the support point and what will be possible for the end of September. The main one is LDAP authentication of users to access data from the university. We will need learners and tutors to go through this process to prove they are who they say they are. We need some way of verifying the employers now :)
Other than authentication we are looking at different ways of giving access to the forums and prioritising the different functions of the support point. To get everything together at once might be difficult but once the pilot is out functionality can be added as we go along. We do need to think about evaluation after the Christmas holidays to look at what everyone thinks, how often they have used it and also if they have any extra requirements that have not been considered.
Rather depressingly I have had no response from those sector skills councils I contacted about RSS feeds so it is looking like another load of emails.

Moving Closer

After a well rested week off I was busy last week catching up on everything the team had been up to as I missed a team meeting. I have also worked at updating the Google Group with all the registration screen shots and what information will be used for each login.

The project will be using its own database for the pilot phase of the project due to the time/ staff restrictions in place and also due to data protection issues. This is mainly because learners don't have to give employers access to their study information even if they have paid for it. This also allows the database to be used for other purposes in the future (i.e. Careers/ Competitive Workforce/ Marketing etc). It is important that we make it clear to all stakeholders involved in the pilot that the information in the site will be viewable by other users (mentors, learners, employers, tutors etc).

Everyone has given the thumbs up to the project leaflet so copies are now being printed and will be going out to project partners and to university staff.

The HIVE meeting went well, I was able to use it easily to upload some learning objects from the last project, however it was less obvious if IMS packages were used how they would be viewable through VLE's etc. The case studies really helped and also gave other departments ideas on how they would be using the repository.

There was also a meeting with AimHigher as we discussed their involvement in the project pilot phase. It was agreed that their role would be more as advisors with regards to setting up the pilots but they will be in charge of any focus groups.

I have contacted a number sector skill councils, based on their websites, about the possibility of them setting up RSS feeds to both their news and events items.