SkillClouds : Weblog

SkillClouds forming over Sussex (and beyond)

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:20:39 GMT

A key indicator of the success of JISC projects (from JISC’s perspective) seems to be the extent to which the outputs are adopted, by both the home institution and external organisations. In terms of the former, we can claim some success, as Sussex - and specifically, its Teaching and Learning Committee - has taken the view that SkillClouds can help support some of the University’s strategic priorities. It is particularly interested in using SkillClouds to support student personal development and the role academic advising (personal tutoring). For the remainder of the academic year we will be meeting all departments at Sussex to explore how they can use to tool in their differing contexts. We have secured additional funding to carry out further development and integration of the SkillClouds.

In terms of the possibility of SkillClouds forming over other parts of the country, we have had some interest from other universities and are currently liaising with them. Stuart (the project’s technical developer) has created the first version of an open source version of SkillCloud pages. People can add their in-house style sheet and see exactly what the SkillClouds pages would look like within their institution. Feedback on this version has so far been positive and has been described by one member of the Emerge team as ‘beautiful code’. Now, as a non-developer, I’m not entirely sure what this means, but I imagine there can be no higher praise from one of your peers.

Finally we are in discussion with some people working at a university in Australia who think SkillClouds could work in their institution.

You can read more about the open source version at the SkillClouds blog http://skillclouds.blogspot.com/

Emerge Conference Online session on June 25th "User 2.0 - exploring students' perceptions of tag clouds and our own experiences of tagging"

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:50:38 GMT

The SkillClouds project (www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds) will be running an online workshop on June 25th at the Emerge Online June Event, in which we will explore the idea of User 2.0 - one of the themes of this June conference - in a couple of ways.

The SkillClouds project is investigating whether tag clouds and other visualisation approaches based on feeds of data from institutional and student-owned sources, can help students to understand the skills they are acquiring during their degree. We have interviewed students about their use of tag clouds and their ideas for presenting information on skills and will use some of these findings as a basis for discussion with the workshop participants about the extent to which the outcomes of our work align with your experiences of students using Web 2.0 technologies.

In the second part of the workshop, we will invite you to create a shared Emerge folksonomy in del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/). We will facilitate a social bookmarking activity in which we will ask you to identify and tag visualisation tools that can present aggregated information (e.g. timelines such as http://www.dipity.com/), adding what ever annotations and comments you want. In the final stage of the session we'll present what has emerged and discuss it in relation to our own Web 2.0 experiences.

Please note that we will be running a session on 24th June between 1-2pm for those who feel they need some practice in using del.icio.us or setting up the del.icio.us toolbar buttons.

SkillClouds presentation at Shock of the Old 2008

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:25:52 GMT

We presented at Shock of the Old 2008: The Connected Future on 3rd April, giving a brief overview of the SkillClouds project generally and concentrating on a recent piece of work we did in which we invtied 116 undergraduate students to search for information about local services using a web page that had both a tag cloud and a search text entry box on it. We then briefly interviewed each participant.

Click on the image to download the presentation as powerpoint (ppt) file

In the experiment, where students were asked to search for 3 services, we found that 90% of the participants used the tag cloud at least once to search, and 65% used it for all three searches.

We report on emerging themes from interviews with the participants ..

SkillClouds - recruiting for E-learning Developer/Integrator

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 15:37:53 GMT

We are recruiting for a one year fixed term post of E-learning Developer/Integrator, to support the SkillClouds project and to work on other web related e-learning projects at the University of Sussex.

If you know anyone who might be interested, please circulate the details, which can be found at:

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/staffing/personnl/vacs/vac149.shtml

The closing date is 6th March 2008.

Many thanks.