Welcome to SkillClouds

The SkillClouds project has now started!

Two main questions provide the motivation for the SkillClouds project

1. Can tag clouds help students to engage with the skills that they have acquired and developed during their time at university?

2. To what extent can Web 2.0 approaches, such as social bookmarking, support administrative processes like the recording of information from module and programme specifications?

The SkillClouds project will explore how tag clouds might help students visualise their emerging skills set.

We will work closely with undergraduate students who are participating in a Career Development Course. This module introduces students to the fundamental principles of successful, lifelong career development so this group will be well-placed to comment on effective ways of presenting skills information.

Each tag cloud will be formed from two sets of data - the skills recorded by the student that may have been obtained outside the formal curriculum (for example through volunteering schemes or employment) and those acquired from the student’s educational experiences. The latter will be drawn from an institutional database and we will examine how a social bookmarking approach might support the administrative task of recording skills data for modules and programmes.


We will pilot the use of social bookmarking for recording skills – as tags – against modules – as urls with a small group of curriculum administrators. Whilst the task of defining skills for given courses is different from tagging web sites, our hypothesis is that element of the social bookmarking system’s interface would support administrators. In particular, we expect the ease of identifying existing tags afforded by social bookmarking services to be of value.

The two parts of the SkillClouds project are complementary and will provide a thorough grounding for an investigation of the advantages of social bookmarking and tagging approaches to the design of systems to support learning and teaching.