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As we work on our final report on the SkillClouds project, we have been reflecting on the way that the direction of the project has changed as we have responded to the new understandings that have emerged from our research.
The change in direction has been most marked around a key part of our original idea for the project, which foregrounded the use of the social bookmarking service delicious as a way of collecting institutional metadata on skills. Our idea was that we could view a course/module as an object which could be tagged with the skills that it would help students to acquire. We were particularly interested in exploring the potential clashes between an institutional taxonomy and a user generated folksonomy, and in seeing whether using a tool like delicious made the collection of skill data more acceptable to staff.
Initially, the staff we spoke to about this seemed keen (see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/user_engagement.php for a summary of activities carried out prior to bidding).
However, as we progressed further with the project, this approach began to seem less useful.
First of all, we had technical issues with the use of delicious. The delicious tagging model does not permit spaces in tags, whereas our stakeholders wanted skills to be expressed as naturally as possible ("data analysis and interpretation" rather than "data-analysis-and-interpretation"). We also had problems using the API for search as it was doing greedy matching - see http://stuartlamour.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/delicious-bug for a fuller description of these issues.
Even more significant were our findings about students' requirements. As our research progressed we gained a much deeper understanding of their information needs (for a description of this research, see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/pilot_stage.php and our presentation at ALTC2008 http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/publications.php?publication=altc2008). In our original plan of SkillClouds we had paid relatively little attention to the resources that would be made available to students who clicked on a skill-tag within our proposed tag cloud. We had described this in our original bid as:
The individual skill tags could then link the student into pages from the institutional student intranet, for example showing all the courses taken in which this skill was identified and enabling the student to drill down to view their course performance pages. Alternatively, skills tags could link to pages provided by careers specialists to support students in the development of their CVs.
However, by the end of our research phase, we had amassed rich data about where students really were in terms of understanding skills. We found that their information needs were much more basic than we had suspected and that they found the language of skills very alien. We therefore realised that a key to the project was going to be the provision of high quality data on each skill to empower students to use the language of skills themselves.
Whilst social bookmarking tools such as delicious would enable staff to tag university modules with relevant skills, they provide little support for the authoring and management of information that would help students to understand what was meant by a given skill and to see how they might be able to demonstrate this skill to employers.
A further reason for the reduced emphasis on the use of delicious for data collection was that of the work-flow for staff around the development of new modules/courses. Staff are expected to fill in a document using Microsoft Word, and even if they were using a tool such as delicious to collect the skills meta-data, the rest of the process for defining a new course would require them to use another system in addition to delicious. It was not feasible to build it into a work flow for general use.
We also discovered much more about the difficulties that academic staff face when they try to define the skills that their courses may help students to develop. When we tried to stimulate their interest in using SkillClouds to help them define skills for their courses, they told us that "What we like about SkillClouds is that you are doing it for us, so we don't have to!". There was little enthusiasm evident in the staff members that we spoke to in using SkillClouds tools to define skills. Staff were almost always excited by the possibilities of SkillClouds and how they could use it to work with their students, but not interested in being part of the data capture process. Staff who tried out the use of delicious to tag courses found it acceptable, but we realised that it was unlikely to be something we could roll out across the institution.
