We presented a poster and a demo on the JISC stall during the lunch slot today. Melissa gave an overview of the project and directed people to the demo given by Kathrin and Sirisha who very busy indeed but did a fantastic job. People were really interested in AWESOME, some asked for the source code, others gave us potential domains for extension. Good links were made with a number of JISC projects/groups, incl: HELMET, SkillClouds, APT-STAIRS, Southampton (several JISC projects there). We received very positive feedback from Graham Atwell who is on a large EU project on semantic wikis for organisational learning and found our system way ahead existing EU projects (we knew this was the case but it was good to get it confirmed). Graham pointed out that Karlsruhe (the semantic media wiki people) should see what a great job we have done to make a *usable* semantic wiki tool. Having the flexible development model and the constant feedback from users are paying off. But we know there is a lot to improve on the usability side...

report by Vania

 Tutors in the AWESOME trials:

For me, the things I kept thinking about afterwards were a discussion which we had about how reading practices change in the on-line environment, about the renegotiation - and re-perceoptions - of public and private boundaries in writing blogs and the connections between writing as design and the work on patterns. 

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Reb

I was also involved in helping two other groups submit proposals to the same call (different themes) - never again! But in those cases, I created a template in MS Word and sent it out to others in the group. In one case where there was only one other person working on the proposal this worked ok - he added bits, sent it back to me and so forth - proposal ping-pong.

In the second case, there were three or four people writing the proposal so I sent it to one who added her bits; she sent it on to the next person and she added her bits etc. It went around the loop a couple of times then ended up with the PI to pull it all together. Not too traumatic but messy.

Back to the proposal with Norman. I created the template but Norman suggested we use Google Docs instead. So I transferred the template to that environment (we both had Google accounts), removing all the formatting. This worked incredibly well. We could each see what the other had written; there is a list of all changes made and the ability to compare versions though I didn't try that. At several points we were both editing the document at the same time and Google coped perfectly - not sure what would happen if we both changed the same piece of text at the same time.

We also made use of Elluminate. After using it for the online Emerge event, I was sold on it. Since you can have a free room with up to 3 other participants, I created one and Norman and I met in it three or four times. At the beginning, we used the room to discuss what it was we were proposing to do - based on an idea of Norman's that we collaboratively extended and elaborated - using the whiteboard to load diagrams, sketch architectures and just talk. Later we used it much as we would have Skype, chatting as we together made changes to the document.

After a while, we had blocked out enough of the document and both had much the same understanding of what it was we were proposing to do, so we assigned bits of the document to each other and got on with the writing. Two or three days before the bid was due, Norman took the raw text, formatted it using LaTeX and produced the necessary pdf file. Then we just had to sit back and wait for others to come up with letters of support and budget templates (my fault for notgetting these organised earlier).

All in all, I was impressed with how well the collaborative tools, Google Docs and Elluminate, helped us in pulling the proposal together and I hope this brief write-up encourages others to try them out.