November 21, 2008
The new US report at contains some interesting discussion topics IMO for projects like ours that work with young people (or child labour as Paul Bailey would call it ...
From: Paul Mayes - Read more
November 07, 2008
UKAN-SKILLS is using Amazon Mechanical Turk as a way of crowdsourcing a specialised software task. We would be interested to hear from any other project or Emerge person that has used Mechanical Turk or other 'human intelligence task' services.Paul M ( paul.mayes@tees.ac.uk ...
From: Paul Mayes - Read more
November 06, 2008
This is a picture of a pizza-supported team meeting for some of the excellent young entrepreneurs who have helped with our various projects. They are available (through smartvalley@tees.ac.uk ) at a reasonable rate if you ever quickly need someone to garner user-input for people aged 14-20 (they have access to previously unsurveyed people from all youth 'tribes', genders, educational ...
From: Paul Mayes - Read more
October 15, 2008
This news of future funding looks to be interesting to a lot of us. It also seems a very good idea in itself ...
From: Paul Mayes - Read more
October 14, 2008
We would like to make it easier for students and staff to mark up different styles of writing with colour highlighting in Word 2007. Users find it slow to select, pull down etc each time to get to and choose from the highlight colour palette. We can offer a £200 crowdsourcing prize to anyone who can keep the colour ...
From: Paul Mayes - Read more
October 14, 2008
Our Project web site describes the many user-driven strands that have emerged for UKAN-SKILLS. Dave Cormier's demonstration repository (at ) now has its first batch of permission-cleared learning material. These objects will be linked to the online curriculum maps being developed by Janet A. Hale of curriculummapping101.com. Janet has written for us a very useful background paper for us ...
From: Paul Mayes - Read more
June 02, 2008
Given how so many projects are development web applications, I wondered how everyone is undertaking accessibility testing?In particular, can we achieve any "economy of scale" by combining efforts, or getting some support from the ...
From: Scott Wilson - Read more
May 07, 2008
A date for your diary possibly. The University of Teesside will be hosting a conference on 15th October 2008 featuring papers from 4 U&I Projects working in the 'student skills' cluster : ARGOSI, AWESOME Dissertation, SkillClouds and UKAN-SKILLS. It will be free but with an admin fee for delegates who cancel late or do not attend. More details will ...
From: Paul Mayes - Read more
January 17, 2008
Below is a draft version of our poster for the York event next week. Looking forward to seeing everyone thereA team led by University of Teesside Library & Information Services has been successful in a bid for funding of £50,000 from the JISC Next Generation Technologies and Practice Phase 2 Programme. The team includes the University ...
From: Paul Mayes - Read more
December 18, 2007
Well, our UKAN-SKILLS project (University of Teesside Library in collaboration with University of Prince Edward Island) was successful with a 'small' bid. Naturally, like all bidders, we used UIDM in our preparation. We found it to be a really useful approach for broader activities beyond software development and hope to include a 'toolkit' for use locally as one of ...
From: Paul Mayes - Read more