Development and Implementation Awayday July 31, 2009
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Yesterday we had our first awayday for the Development and Implementation Workpackage Group. Although, we did not get away from NTU we did all have the rare opportunity of getting away from our offices, to a remote part of the University, to focus on some activities without interruption. Those attending included members of the D & I Workpackage Group, Trevor Pull, Barry Gregory, Anna Armstrong, Lisa Warburton, Helen Adey, Marek Oledzki, Sarah Horrigan, Angela Trikic and Jon Fletcher, as well as representative from our academic liaison librarians team, Sharon Potter, Emma Tanner our admin support and also the Director of Libraries and Knowledge Resources, Sue McKnight. We also conferenced Yvonne Monterrroso in at the end of the day, and Richard Cross our e-Services manager joined us for this session. The packed programme for the day included presentations and activities.
In the first part of the day, Marek provided an overview of our Communications strategy, Trevor, gave an overview of trusts within the LOR, Lisa demonstrated our institutional repository, iREP http://irep.ntu.ac.uk/R?RN=472560279 and I gave a brief overview of JORUM.
After Coffee we broke out into groups, each group was named after a famous potter/pottery, Wedgwood (Josiah) Cliff (Clarice) Moorcroft (William) , an attempt to bring to the event something relating to my Stoke-on-Trent roots. The first activity required groups to come up with 5 issues that we will need to address with our project pilots. We used an approach that Sue McKnight has regularly used at our Library awaydays, brainstorming with Post-its. It goes something like this, each individual within the group writes his or her issues/ideas/thoughts on a Post-it, one Post-it for each. Then the group together consolidates all the issues that individuals have noted into themes, this has been described as the enzyme approach, the rationale being that eventually this will facilitate the identification of issues for the whole group…I think a demonstration of this technique would make a nice learning object, but that’s for another day.
After lunch, remaining in our groups we identified 5 activities that we would need to undertake when rolling out training and support, group were asked to put their activities in order of priority – again using the approach above. This was followed by a brainstorm on how to develop and enhance our relationships with projects within the inf11 programme and with D2L. Then a brief demo of the LOR. Then the intensive day was concluded with an overview of the LOR roadmap by Yvonne.
I would like to thank everybody for their enthusiastic contributions during the day, we successfully collated some useful observations and creative ideas that will inform the work of the Development and Implementation workpackage. These will be typed up and will be made pubicly available via our WIKI and our Blog. Despite the miserable weather we are experiencing at the moment I finished yesterday with quite a sunny disposition.
Project Site launched! July 22, 2009
Posted by sarahhorrigan in Comms, News.Tags: announcement, News, site
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The new site for the JISC-funded NTU SHARE project has been created. The site will be at http://www.ntushare.org and all content from this temporary WordPress-hosted blog has now been moved to the new system.
All those who had accounts on this draft site will be set up on the new system by the end of the week.
Sarah
Projects start-up meeting Information Environment 2009-11 & Virtual Research Environment July 9, 2009
Posted by vickimcgarvey in D&I.Tags: D&I, INF11, News
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Attended this event at Leicester University, with Angela Trikic (acting project lead) and Jon Tepper (Requirements Gathering wp lead). This get together was kick-started by a ginormous electrical storm, with the largest crack of thunder I have heard for a long time. JISC could not have planned it better. There were lots of useful presentations crammed into the day and a half. Excellent advice on project management and how to stay in touch with your progamme manager, from phone to tweets, including reporting on the good, the bad and the ugly. Some compelling if mind boggling stuff from the VRE (Virtual Research Environment) Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/vre2.aspx JISC had also pulled out the stops in relation to getting us all talking and sharing. Including on the first night a dance card with a list of related projects that you should hook up with. This was followed by each project providing a 30 second pitch the next day, a pack of plain cards was used to determine the order – very clever, we were 2 of diamonds, I think we did it in 26 seconds – no prize but all 3 of us were involved, we got a positive comment on our collaborative approach. With respect to our project it was reassuring to know that we are heading in the right direction. The particular things that I came away with were:
- think of your audience when describing your project
- try connect with other projects that are undertaking similar activities
- think about using critical friends or get an outsider to review some of your outputs
- think about how to make your reports interesting – use a narrative
- consider how you can change your users from being passive to creative.
Overall a very useful if intensive event. I always like the novelty factor of staying in student accommodation. I also managed to do some post conference tweets. I feel all enthused now to start working. It’s amazing what the impact of an electrical storm can have.
Communications Workpackage Update, June 2009 July 8, 2009
Posted by sarahhorrigan in Comms, News.Tags: Comms, update
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As part of the Communications Workpackage for the JISC SHARE project, we thought it would be useful if once a month we gave an update of what we’ve done / got planned for the near future and shared that with the team. So, here’s our update of what we’ve been up to during the past month:
General Update
The acronym “SHARE” will be used as the name of the project and the unique tag “NTUSHARE” will be used for any social media comments / resources / images / videos etc. I’ve written a brief article announcing the acronym and you can find it on this site. I should also mention that you can subscribe to this website using its RSS feed or track a tag too if you want to find out about a particular element of the project! If you’d like to know more about how RSS works then you might find this video useful:
Ian Mathers, D2L, will be joining the Communications Workpackage group. Thank you for agreeing to be part of the group, Ian.
There will be a section on the eLearning Community Website for the SHARE project which is currently being processed by Web Development. This area will contain static information for the project and link to this site which will contain news, updates and dynamic web 2.0 content.
We are currently testing an internal Confluence wiki and will be comparing it to the OpenSource wiki “TikiWiki” which will come as part of the external web host package as soon as that is set up.
An external web host which offers both an affordable hosting service together with excellent service levels and is a green energy web host – which fits well with NTU’s top university place in the UK’s Green League – has been sourced. We hope to get this set up within the next two to three weeks.
We will also be putting together a communications briefing paper once we have made a decision on the wiki which will best serve the project’s needs and let everyone know about that as soon as we can.
The issue of using NTU branding needs to be explored as a priority and a decision made on its acceptable use on the project website etc.
Actions for Project Team
We need to get photographs of every person listed on the Project team page. If you already have a suitable photograph (head and shoulders shot preferred), could you send it to me or elearning@ntu.ac.uk? If you don’t have a photo available, let us know and we’ll arrange to get one taken.
We would like the workpackage leads to have access to http://elearnntu.wordpress.com (our temporary project website home) in order for them to be able to post monthly updates about their workpackage (details on an approach to doing this will be provided). It will help keep the flow of communications going and be a quick and easy way to keep everyone – both internal and external to the project – informed about what we’re up to. If you already have a WordPress account, please let us know the username so we can add you to the site, if you don’t then let us know that too and we’ll get it arranged!
A final thing to look out for is that we will be arranging to talk to each of the workpackage leads to get an overview of their workpackage to put on the wiki / website – we’ll try to get this sorted out soon so that it is ready to be put in place once we’ve made a decision on which wiki we’ll be using.
Any questions about any of the above, do get in touch with Marek or me.
Sarah, July 2009
SHARE acronym announced July 3, 2009
Posted by sarahhorrigan in News.Tags: NTUSHARE
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On 17th June we held our first project team meeting and, amongst other things, we made the decision that we will be using the acronym “SHARE” for our JISC and Desire2Learn supported Repository Enhancement project. The acronym aims to capture the spirit of the project and stands for:
Supporting
Harnessing and
Advancing
Repository
Enhancement
It will be used to identify the project both internally and externally and can also be extended to become the project’s unique social media ‘tag’: NTUSHARE.
Social Media Aggregation of services using the NTUSHARE acronym
Why the need for a unique tag? Well, it allows us to easily find and pull together all comments, postings, resources, videos etc connected with the project which is excellent for the purposes of collation and sharing. The NTUSHARE tag works regardless of the online service the resource originally came from. Every time you find something project-related which you want to share or if you want to make a comment on / about the project, just tag it with “NTUSHARE” and we can pull all of the project-related communications into one place for everyone to access. On Twitter, just use NTUSHARE as a ‘hashtag‘ in the form of #NTUSHARE and again, we can bring that together with everything else project-related using services such as Friendfeed, Cover It Live or NetVibes.
For more about tagging, you might like to read this article about hashtags on the Twitter fan wiki or this article on Tags & Folksonomies: What are they and Why Should you Care?
JISC Project success June 4, 2009
Posted by elearnntu in News.Tags: NTUSHARE
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“Integrating process and technology development for effective repository management”
Nottingham Trent University has attracted more than a quarter of a million pounds that will enable us to integrate processes and technology to develop effective management of the Learning Object Repository (LOR) in their virtual learning environment, the Nottingham Trent University Online Workspace (NOW).
JISC will support the project for the next two years with £210,000. A further £50,000 in kind has been committed by Desire2Learn who are investing in technical development.
This partnership draws on the work of the University’s LOR Working Group: Helen Adey, Trevor Pull, Jon Tepper, Helen Boulton, Vicki McGarvey, Barry Gregory, Lisa Warburton and Angela Trikic, who have carried out a range of tasks to prepare for the release of the LOR tool in NOW for the 2009-10 academic year.
Dr Trikic, Head of Educational Development, described how, building on the success of the Institutional Repository (IRep), the University is extending repository services to include a wider range of objects associated with learning and teaching. “For example, colleagues from the School of Animal, Rural & Environmental Sciences can look forward to using the LOR for resources being developed to improve science laboratory practical sessions,” Angela explained, adding, “There is a wide number of research methods modules that are delivered by most schools and there is likely to be a common pool of resources that each of these courses use..” Angela described how the LOR can be set up to support sharing across the University to maximise the use of research methods resources and to help reduce duplication of effort.
Programme Handbooks offer another example. Angela: “These are used by a suite of modules. By storing it in the LOR, the learning room for each module can link to the handbook, which will reduce the need for printed copy as well as economising on electronic storage.”
Here are some key highlights of the repository enhancement project:
• further develop the Institutional Repository and embed its use and content population into the life and work of academics at NTU
• collaborate with Desire2Learn to work on the integration of the Learning Object Repository with IRep and external repositories such as Jorum
• tackle metadata mapping and metadata application profiles for the description of different types of content
• develop policies for the sharing and licensing of content within the LOR, the IRep and National Repositories such as JORUM.
Fostering change in academic learning and teaching practice
The project has a significant cultural change goal and aims to promote and enhance content creation, facilitate learning and teaching resource sharing and management. By developing the interface between IRep, the VLE, LOR and external repositories such as JORUM we extend the range of learning and teaching resources that NTU can draw on, improve our capability to re-use and re-purpose these resources and contribute to a global bank of knowledge.
Angela explained that there are many learning and teaching resources currently locked up in personal storage devices, module locations on the VLE, and other less reliable media. “Within NTU there is a wealth of tried and tested resources and our academics are continuously building on this solid base and enhancing their teaching practice. Sharing these resources helps everyone, our academics boost their reputation, our students reap the benefits of a diverse learning experience and the institution is enriched as a whole,” she concluded.
