The August Project Meeting

We had our August meeting this week. Most of the actions from the last meeting have been done. Hamza has checked the copyright issues with NING and everything seems to be OK and we have decided to pay NING to remove the adverts from the pages. We had quite a discussion on ways of getting people involved in the Community of Practice and when to really push it. We still think Sept would be a good time though it may be a good idea to hold some sort of face-to-face event in October to advertise the project within the University. Again the issue arose of sharing pre-validated documents. Whether to allow full access for people to compare before and after documents against how introducing an element of "This is what not to do", was ethically sound and what would it do to the positive feel of a community!

We finished the meeting will us all tasked to think about the requirements of people searching through the validations and to think of some use cases. Ben Sam & Chris are meeting up later in the week to look into descriptions with the validation documents that Chris and his colleagues currently store in a database.

I had been pondering over the question of how to attract the more experienced staff members to join the community. So at the end of last week I went to see the head of our Quality Improvement service, (essentially the powers that be when it comes to validation). She is part of the project steering group and is happy to for us to let the community know that they will have an influence on policy and process.

This week I also had meeting with a senior member of the SURF group and from our faculty of Computing & Engineering. A common theme is emerging from these meetings around support for panels and consistencies between faculties. It would seem that for the project to succeed then in order to develop more intelligent systems for validations we may need to put the emphasis on support. I am hoping to talk to some of the faculty administrative staff see how their approach differs cross-faculty.

Other things have arisen from the meetings. It was interesting how the wider University agenda affects the validations over time for example the new legislation on disabilities in 2005 meant questions about accessiblity became very prevalent. If (as I suggested may happen) panels were recommended to make more commendations would advice or guidance be available? Something I hadn't realised that the SURF Foundation degrees that involve Work-Based-Learning, often invite employers to validation events.

So lots to think about and lots to do so I'm off to the Maldives to lie on a beach and think about it. I wish!

A quiet week

No blog last week as I was away. Things are slowly moving along. Chris has sent Ben some validation documents to play with, and Ben has also had a meeting to discuss metadata with people from the library and information support team that he has described in his blog

I was sent a couple of very interesting links this week from Laura James from Cambridge, particularly relevant to us was the University of Wales, Newport site about their experience of using NING, hopefully Hamza and Sue will be able to pick up some useful pointers.

I am keeping an eye on the project plan and what is scheduled to start in August. I have several meetings around the university next week, I'm hoping to involve the SURF colleges and our Faculty of computing and engineering, so fingers crossed.

JISC Conference

Bit late this week with the blogging as it was the JISC Conference on Tues and Wed at Keele. The sessions I went to were probably a little too techy for me but I did get some useful pointers and they did make me think about how to apply the lessons learnt by the technical developers to the project in general. For example, some of the principles from the Engage project about identifying the community and understanding their values seemed very pertinent. And the sentiment "better not perfect" though being applied to software development summed up a lot about how I think we need to respond to get things done. So rather than go into detail about sessions (you should be able to read about them on their website ) I thought I'd blog about meeting the other projects who come under the same bid.

We had a short meeting, us, Ravensbourne, Manchester Met, Cambridge & Kingston a team from Netskills and Rob Bristow. It was good to meet everyone and hear a quick 30 sec resume of each project. Essentially Manchester are looking at mobile technology and SMS texting, Cambridge, linking up administrative systems using social networking tools, Kingston timetabling and Ravensbourne are looking at quality issues. For fuller descriptions there is a JISC website you can go to. I'm hoping we'll be able to work quite closely with the Ravensbourne project as the projects have common ground. It's being led by Cathryn Smith who is their head of quality so it should be interesting working with her.

Things to do: Holidays are coming up for a lot of the team so I'm hoping that things can keep moving. There are no major tasks in the plan to start until Sept but we need to make sure we're ready. I will probably spend a lot of time over the next week sending email reminders!

A busy week

Last week was a busy week for the project. On Thurs Rob Bristow the programme manager from JISC and Will Allen from Netskills came to Stafford to meet us. The project is one of a set of 6 that were funded by this call with one at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication in Kent being very similar. Rob and Will were both keen on all the projects working together so watch this space.

On Wed Chris and I met up with Glyn Skerrett from our sciences faculty. Glyn has lots of experience of validations and is happy to share his thoughts and experience with us. He also is willing to join in with the NING Community of Practice, hopefully we'll be able to persuade him to join us as an "expert". Yesterday Chris and I met another senior member of our academic staff from AMD who also gave us his view of the validation processes and we have started thinking about what a COP can offer experienced staff. I have a few more staff to meet to find out what potential users of the COP want but it is difficult at this time of year.

I contacted the SURF team and they are very interested in the project, I have been invited to their Curriculum Group meeting in Oct so I can meet the college representatives and get their views - it should be interesting!

July already!

We had the first team meeting of the DIVAS project this morning, unfortunately Chris couldn't be there but I sent him the meeting notes. We went through the project plan and hopefully we've all got a good idea of where we are going. We spoke about how we see the project and agreed upon a vision. Users come to the system, put in their requirements eg, I want to see all the validations over the last 2 years that are in Humanities, at masters level and delivered online - a set of reports come back and then the user can see if there are any common features, for example, all validation panels have asked about staff training. Or if there aren't any, perhaps the user can go to the community of practice in NING and ask if anybody can help.

A number of actions came out of the meeting, I need to arrange several meeting and I need to email somebody involved in SURF to see if the colleges want to join in. Sue KB is looking at getting a list of the award leaders and she and Hamza are thinking about how to get the NING off to a flying start in Sept. It was thought that it was better to leave until Sept as so many people are out of the university at this time of year.

The next push is to get some real data into the HIVE repository for Ben and Chris to look at so hopefully over summer we can identify some useful validation reports. Interestingly Jenny wondered how we could perhaps capture the issues raised at validations that are not necessarily recorded in the validation reports - food for thought.

Sue

Week 1

I've spent all week chatting to people about the project and generally getting my head around what we're doing and why we're doing it. I spoke to Hamza and Sue about setting up a NING community. Due to time constraints I decided to use NING, rather than consider alternatives, whether this was a good decision or not, only time will tell. Hamza has now set one up and I've put a link to it on the blog. I'm still not totally sure how this will fit together and what will be the driver behind the community of practice but I think things will become clearer as the site develops.

A few people have told me that they'll be at the focus group which is good news but I'm hoping to get more by the time we run it.

I still need to finalise the plan but the day job keeps getting in the way, and I also need to think about how to fit in the work on the models side of it with the team. Hopefully things should start coming together with our first team meeting next week and our meeting with Rob from JISC!

Starting again!

Well, after a change of personnel the DIVAS project is starting again. So far I've spent a lot of time talking to people and finding out what we really want to do.

So, today I've set up this blog and I've fed in a more technical blog that Ben has been posting to. I've sent an email to the Teaching and Learning Directors of the faculties asking them to a focus group - so far not a huge response but I have asked them to pass on the invite. Also I've invited all the project team and the project director to meetings once a month so we can all keep each other up to date.

Later on this week, hopefully the community of practice should be set up and then it'll be a push behind that. We have a meeting with Rob Bristow from Jisc on 3rd July and we should have a complete updated project plan by the end of the week.

It's been a bit of a slow start but hopefully things will speed up soon!