Skillclouds open source - it's alive!

Today we finally made public the first edition of our Open Source version of the SkillClouds pages. Previously the development has been within the Sussex University MLE - Sussex Direct - but the latest versions are all non-platform specific.

We first took the open source demo to the Jisc emerge U&I strand meeting in York as our 'project artefact' and showed it to other members of our Jisc strand, from which we got some very nice feedback. While creating the artefact we thought it was important the developers could just unzip the file, add their 'in house' style sheet, and see exactly what the SkillClouds pages would look like within their institution.

During the recent Jisc Dev8d event we were able to show the front end, and code, to some other Jisc developers and get feedback on how they would like to see it develop from a coder's perspective. It's just as important to do your usability testing with the developers who have to implement a system, as the front end users. With this in mind, over the next few weeks we will be user testing our open source code with a few other developers in the Jisc community. If you're interested in taking part email us at skillclouds@sussex.ac.uk !

Want to take a look ?

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/demo

Bonus fun stuff :

Click on the link - Special - Change the style sheet, and you can add your own style sheet!

Liverpool University worked so well, we added it to the defaults in the drop down menu. If you find any interesting ones, email us or leave a comment and we will add them to the default list.

SkillClouds are BLU

It's official - SkillClouds are presenting at the Hertfordshire University Blended Learning Conference 2009.

For this presentation, we are going to be looking at the 'hidden curriculum' of skill outcomes and the way that this could potentially perpetuate inequalities.

We have found that some students are concerned about appearing to be 'arrogant' or 'boastful' when they are put into a position where they need to talk about the skills they have developed and practiced at University.

We'll explore how the use of SkillClouds can help students to feel more confident about articulating their skills.

For more details, see the SkillClouds web site:
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/publications.php?publication=blu2009