Summer Holiday

Well you may have noticed that blogs have been a bit thin on the ground, this is due to a number of reasons, one of which links to the summer holidays, I have been enjoying some short weeks, and will continue to be doing so until the end of August (which is nice!) as has my colleague. Sam has been working hard on the baseline for JISC and the project, while that has been going on we have also been talking about the next stage of the project, the review, while sorting out the next stage of interviews, and attending JISC workshops on Phoebe and Learner Engagement. All these things have been very interesting and are worthy of mention.

The Learner Engagement workshop was very interesting and linked nicely to a meeting I was in the day before with our study skills team, and I will be passing my notes from the day on to them and other spoke projects we are engaged with talking to. As part of the day the project team need to write a learner engagement plan, which I have started, and am hoping that the rest of the team contribute to before the 15th July (when it needs to be "handed in"). I will be using the information from this day during the meeting with the Student Union too.

As part of the next stage of the project, we have created a new, closed, Elgg group at Staffordshire University to discuss issue groups (such as do we even want to call them issue groups) and the up and coming SMWG that we are planning for at the end of July. We are still putting notes from events and interviews up into our open Elgg group so that our spokes can see what is going on, and I am in talks with the Elgg administrator to see if we can get any useful statistics out of it about views to see if it is being used at all.

Dissemination

As part of a presentation Prof Mark Stiles did for an internal conference on "Seize the Technology" Mark mentions the work of the Enable project and how it is disseminating the work it is doing to people in the university and the wider community.

This part of the presentation is just under 3mins long.

Catching up

The weekly catch up meeting was very interesting with Mark this week, we have a number of tasks for the next week, mostly based on the blog I wrote last week while Mark was away. We are still planning to speak to Gill Howland about the Change Groups that have been set up within the university, and as part of this we will be pointing her to my notes in Elgg around project management. For this I needed to spend some time making them a bit tidier than they were originally. We need to get this sorted fairly quickly so we don’t have a number of different groups going off in different directions.

I have also given Mark, Jenny and Sam access to the work I am doing in MS Office Live, which gives them access to all the contacts for the project, and the start of the evaluation document. I have requested a meeting on this with the whole team as it is a big job that needs to be done with the entire team rather than just me in a room on my own. At this meeting we will need to discuss our strategy around engaging employers and learners. Mark is planning to talk to the Students Union before this meeting to ensure they are on board.

I have finished the presentation to partners, including me speaking over it, and have published it in the Elgg group for now. I have also uploaded it to sliderocket but this has stripped out the sound, so I am having to spend some time getting that back in, which is a pain as I recorded it in PowerPoint directly rather than using MP3’s which means I have had to use Audacity to pull the sound out of PowerPoint (rather than re-doing it all again)

Finally we have a critical friend meeting today with Tony Toole, which should be interesting.

Life, the University, and change

As Mark has been away this week the project has yet to hear back about how the new change groups will fit within the Enable project. I have, however, updated Elgg with my notes from the training Sam and I did late last year (which I always meant to talk about but never quite got around to) which talks about managing complex projects, programmes and portfolios. As I continue to try and read the Project Management book I have it has become clear we need to manage what is going on in the University with regards to managing change around curriculum design and development. Obviously this will be discussed at my next Enable meeting with Mark next week.

I have also started thinking about writing the Evaluation plan, this is something that looks like taking up a lot of time, but as part of the work I recognised we need to find a baseline for the employer stakeholder. I have been on the email with Richard Benefer who seems to have provided me with the answer to my prayers, an Employer Engagement report for Staffordshire University in 2006. I have uploaded it to the new Live Office space I have created (yes I’m testing new communication tools for the project as GoogleDocs doesn’t quite hit the spot). Of course the next step will be to get baseline from learners too…

Last but not least, based on feedback on the partner presentation and discussions with Sam I am attempting a new approach to the presentation for the visits to Shrewsbury, Ashton, Stafford and Burton. See it here soon!

one week and one day ago

I released the Elgg network to the SMWG last week and found that only one member has managed to successfully join the network. We will have to keep an eye on this and see if the others join slowly over the next few weeks, or even just before the next working group in March.
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Edit 02/2011
Since then all members have successfully accessed the Elgg (SUN) site and it has been used to disseminate the different aspects of Enable to those SMWG members unable to attend the meetings. It has also been used to store sanitised versions of the interviews for members to read, and has started some useful conversations. Using it as a consistent source of information for the SMWG has helped make it successful. As a whole using Elgg has been very successful for internal communication, much better than using outside tools that can change their charging models at a moments notice (Ning/ Grou.ps).
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There have been a number of discussions this week about the role of Enable and how it should work in the university, the main idea being that this project is a "programme" that focuses on managing change around Curriculum Design and Development, to include looking at the curriculum, the student experience and learning and teaching. Rather interestingly the Executive are also looking at starting and number of change groups in these areas, as well as Research. This could end up with being a duplication of effort or confusing roles. How will Enable be fitted into these groups? This is something that has been top of our minds this week as we go on with our work.

Other thoughts have been around CETIS's phone call and supporting the change of the learning and teaching using PHOEBE, this is something that will not be addressed in Enable yet. However these thoughts raise the question do we need an initiative that will look at ways to use HIVE and learning object creators in the best way? This will be something that can be thought about more when we get the latest version of HIVE as some software that comes with it may answer some of the questions being raised at this point.

Documents, Social Networking and Helping Others

Since Tuesday I have been very busy working on the Enable Social Networking side of things, the university has been developing a new tool, elgg (http://learning.staffs.ac.uk/elgg) that I have been investigating for the project as the tool for communication for those involved in the project at Staffordshire University. So far my work has been very successful and I have managed to create pages to link to resources in HIVE, and have uploaded files directly into elgg where they don't need to be accessed outside of the university. All good, it is a shame that the links to HIVE still open up that extra window, and therefore there is still no easy right click/ download file option for end users, but it seems much better than using forum software. I have also created pages based on the events JISC have run with regards to supporting the project.

I have also been working on getting the Validation Support Point right for the Enable group, including changing the logo to just being the power button, so it is clearly associated with the enable project, and sending an invite from that group to the main project partner contacts. I have also started making friends with partners who have already joined the network. This has not resulted in anyone new being a member to the Enable/ Foundation degree group but hopefully it will over the next few weeks - this could be linked to colleges not being able to see the site correctly.