Skillclouds

Skillclouds - making it personal

2009-04-15T15:55:00.006+01:00

We're going to be heading to the University of Greenwich in July for their 2009 conference Making it personal.

The focus will be on personalisation in SkillClouds and on the way that SkillClouds can be used to support and develop the work done between students and their academic advisor / personal tutor.

You can read the abstract here.

What no database ?

2009-04-03T14:10:00.002+01:00

At Sussex University the data in Skillclouds comes from our Oracle database.

We cannot really expect everyone else to have the same database, tables or data. The data we display in Skillclouds at Sussex is personal and sensitive.

For this reason the Skillclouds open source version is not really a stand-alone system. It is a template for a webpage within an already existing (probably) internal and password protected web site. It's also not platform specific to a Framework, CMS or ILE like Moodle.

Skillclouds does provide you with data structure diagrams, UML, interactive Javascript, PHP classes, adaptable CSS and front end XHTML web pages to add the data you want to. SkillClouds also provides you with some dummy data, so when you unzip SkillClouds it all just works out the box as if you were a logged in as student at Sussex! Alongside the the code documentation, code layout and variable naming this 'out of the box' approach got the best response from our testing with developers.

The initial code we tested with some developers included PHP's PDO which allows you to connect many a database, and have a layer of abstraction.

Sounds great ? Well almost.

When testing the open source version of the Skillclouds code with developers and we came across some issues with this.

The first problem came when a developer we were testing with had a database PDO didn't support. Just our luck we thought.

The second set of problems came when we found some institutions didn't have the information Skillclouds was asking for in any database! They then had to edit more code than if the PDO layer had not been there.

Another developer described how they write queries for fetching things from their institutions database every day, and so knows how to do this like the back of their hand. Skillclouds having this layer of PDO was more of an obstacle then an advantage to them. They found it quicker to plug in their own code, then plug in the PDO layer.

It is a common problem for open source code that isn't platform dependent.

The outcome is we left the open source Skillclouds code as open as possible for the moment. The PDO layer might come back in the next stage, but for the moment the overwhelming developer feedback was to leave it out.

We can recommend the information you should provide in your own Skillclouds installation, but we are not going to tie you to it.

We are interested to hear from other projects having similar issues, other developers opinions on this and we are still looking for developers to test the next stage of development with. Just press the Contact us link above and say hello.

Skillclouds developer happiness

2009-03-26T14:16:00.002Z

On most of the projects I work on we spend a great deal of time looking at user experience and making the end user enjoy a site. Sometimes an equal amount of time is put into the back-end design with an enjoyable cms interface. Very rarely is the developer who has to set up the project considered in any user testing.

When programming code for the open source community it is a completely different approach. Whether contributing a plugin to wordpress or a library to jquery you're putting the code out there to your fellow developers for peer review, and they become your primary stakeholders/target audience.

After showing out SkillClouds code to a number of developers at the recent JISC dev8d developer happiness days we took the opportunity to extend our user centred design approach to the users who have to install, configure and implement SkillClouds in other Universities.

We started off asking developers about the SkillClouds documentation/readme file - the structure, the style of writing, how much detail they like and generally how ours could be better. Lots of very obvious things came up you might not think of when your head is so far into the code - just the same as during front end user testing.

At the next stage we started looking at code, and got some very nice comments from all the testers about the structure, variable names and general semantic nature of the code.

There were some conflicting views on data structure, with the general view being that to integrate SkillClouds into another University's systems it would take a developer, as compared to a systems administrator. Automated database installation was not seen as a good idea, but an abstract data layer was seen as helpful. There were also conflicting views on complexity vs object oriented abstraction, and how these might increase project set-up time.

Our approach of providing 'dummy data' so as SkillClouds runs straight out the box was given a thumbs up with, apart from a permissions problem, all users having a working demo almost straight after unzipping.

We are now refining the SkillClouds code based on the developer feedback - a big thanks to all involved!

SkillClouds at UCISA 2009

2009-03-16T12:53:00.002Z

Members of IT Services took a poster from the SkillClouds team up to Liverpool for the UCISA 2009 conference poster session:

http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/events/2009/conference/posters.aspx

Our poster and abstract are available for view on the publications site:
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/publications.php?publication=ucisa2009

SkillClouds forming over Sussex (and beyond)

2009-03-10T14:56:00.008Z

A key indicator of the success of JISC projects (from JISC’s perspective) seems to be the extent to which the outputs are adopted, by both the home institution and external organisations. In terms of the former, we can claim some success, as Sussex - and specifically, its Teaching and Learning Committee - has taken the view that SkillClouds can help support some of the University’s strategic priorities.

The University is particularly interested in using SkillClouds to support student personal development and the role academic advising (personal tutoring). For the remainder of the academic year we will be meeting all departments at Sussex to explore how they can use to tool in their differing contexts. We have secured additional funding to carry out further development and integration of the SkillClouds.

In terms of the possibility of SkillClouds forming over other parts of the country, we have had some interest from other universities and are currently liaising with them. Stuart (the project’s technical developer) has created the first version of an open source version of SkillCloud pages. People can add their in-house style sheet and see exactly what the SkillClouds pages would look like within their institution.

Feedback on this version has so far been positive and has been described by one member of the Emerge team as ‘beautiful code’. Now, as a non-developer, I’m not entirely sure what this means, but I imagine there can be no higher praise from one of your peers.

Finally we are in discussion people working at a university in Australia who think SkillClouds could be useful to their institution.

You can read more about the open source version at the SkillClouds blog http://skillclouds.blogspot.com/2009/02/skillclouds-open-source-its-alive.html

Skillclouds open source - it's alive!

2009-02-27T17:06:00.005Z

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

2009-02-21T18:23:00.003Z

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

Reflecting on changes in the project aims

2009-01-08T09:46:00.005Z

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.

Rapid development documents and Ajax style skills search

2008-11-19T12:30:00.001Z

The SkillClouds Rapid development cycle page has now been updated with documentation on our wireframes, screen shots, videos and working prototypes of the functionality for the project.

As the first of a few blog posts we are going to tell you a little bit about how we coded some of the functionality the users requested, starting with searching the tag cloud.

During the SkillClouds pilot stage there was a desire by users to use a search box rather than scanning through a list of tags.

The approach :
SkillCloud displays all the user's skills on the page already, so rather than any database search of the user's skills we implemented a DOM search.

Now you see it, now you don't :
The Blacktree application Quicksilver uses a display mechanism in searching for files in your pc folders. It 'hides' those files which do not match the search criteria you enter.

Now you see it, now you see it 'more' :
Applying this with javascript to an xhtml DOM we can pattern match to a list of items and apply some dynamic 'hightlight' css class to those which match the user's search criteria, giving them emphasis. The code below shows the dynamic javascript css style 'highlight' applied to the tags which match the search for the consecutive letters PR in any tag.

Screenshot 'in-action':
The highlighted tags match the text in the search box in a greedy fashion - here the search is for any tags that contain the letters AN, with the corresponding tags highlighted and enlarged.

As you type more letters, the search is narrowed and a more precise match is shown. Here the search term ANALYSIS shows only those tags containing the the term.

Try it yourself :
Our greedy pattern matching skillclouds search prototype.

Footnote :
Since our implementation Jquery main man John Resig has designed an efficient way of the 'now you see it now you don't' DOM searching called jquery-livesearch which we will be looking at in comparison to our implementation and using if it's more efficient.

SkillClouds: the mini-series

2008-11-14T10:30:00.005Z

One of the things we want to do with the SkillClouds project is to create outputs that give simple and fun explanations for what the project is all about.

Last night I came across an incredible flash-based web animation tool called Xtranormal. The strap line is "if you can type, you can make movies".

Here is the first episode of the SkillClouds story:

Or you can view it from this Xtranormal page:

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch?e=20081113180917537

Where we've been for the last two months!

2008-10-28T17:32:00.015Z

We've been having a busy time at the SkillClouds depot over the last couple of months.

As Stuart described in his recent post, we have just launched a pilot SkillClouds resource for students within Biology and Environmental Sciences.

In September, we presented the SkillClouds project to senior management at the University, and are starting to explore with the University how SkillClouds will be evaluated to decide whether or not it should be developed further and launched here. We had extremely positive feedback from this meeting, and SkillClouds was included on a briefing note for departments at the University outlining some of the initiatives available at Sussex to support students.

A couple of weeks ago, we were invited to the School Management Meeting of a large school here at the University (at Sussex Uni, a school is a group of departments). The group were very keen on SkillClouds and identified that one of its key uses would be to support academic staff in discussing future careers with students in Academic Advising sessions. Several departments asked whether they could be part of the pilot.

John has created a screencast of our presentation.

One of the unexpected outcomes of these meetings for us was that several academic staff stated that they would find the set of skills within the cloud extremely useful as a tool for them to identify the range of skills that their graduates might be acquiring:

Skillclouds prototyping in Sussex University career development course

2008-10-28T16:40:00.006Z

The University of Sussex Careers Development and Employment Center (CDEC) is currently using a Skillclouds beta prototype in its course running with second year Biology and Environmental Science students.

Alongside a moodle course, developed by CDEC, Skillclouds will provide resources for the students' first assignment during the course.

We are quite excited about this and hoping to get some valuable feedback from both the tutors and the students on the course.

SkillClouds presentation at ALT-C 2008 ..

2008-09-12T22:44:00.004+01:00

We presented a short paper on the SkillClouds project at ALT-C 2008 in Leeds this week. The conference theme was "digital divide" and we tried to address this in our presentation by looking at skills from an institutional and an individual/student perspective. Full details at: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/publications.php?publication=altc2008

This paper drew on three main pieces of work from the project:

our user centred design sessions with students (see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/pilot_stage.php#user_centred_design for a brief summary and a link to the full report)
the card sorting activities and resulting analysis (see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/pilot_stage.php#card_sorting for further details)
our early work on the prototype

Head on over to the SkillClouds site and check us out!

Skillclouds - a user journey

2008-09-01T15:11:00.008+01:00

We have now added a user journey through skills to our Skillclouds Pilot Stage.

This user journey is based on the building of knowledge on top of what the user already knows, with stages acting to reinforce or reaffirm knowledge, and offering more in depth information if the user requests it.

Users can access parts at any stage, building up the tools to reach their own individual journey goal.

The next project stage details the 'interaction needs' of the user in the delivery of this information. We will be documenting wireframes, prototypes and a rapid development cycle of user testing the interface.

Open card sorting

2008-07-16T17:00:00.000+01:00

Stuart here - i'm the new team member, and this is my first blog.

When is it too early to start user testing ? never would be my answer.

Let your users guide and lead the development rather then presenting them with a product and then 'tweaking' it till it's possible for them to use. Retro development of adding features to an already formed system will always prove more difficult than having the right starting place and initial plan before beginning any code or programming.

That is just one of the reasons why i liked the approach to SkillClouds and their aim for user centered design when i arrived.

From the initial stages of user research, stakeholder interviews and group sessions there had been a great deal of information gathered as to needs of the users, institution, jisc and ideas as to how the project should fulfill these.

Interviews gave us proof of concept information

"After thinking about it for a while I realized that I could only come up with about three skills I acquire at University and that is with the physics department always telling us what skills a physics degree gives us. I am therefore convinced that students from other parts of the campus have the same difficulties if not worse."

"students don't really know what their skills are so telling them without them specifically having to look for this information would give them a big boost in motivation."

And plenty of ideas for what was needed from SkillClouds

"when you click or hover over a skill a short paragraph will appear on the same page outlining the general meaning of the skill."

"I wouldn't always want to open a new window and then having to read through a long essay to get a simple and short description of the skill,"

" .. more in-depth on skills. What else was there? Describing the skill, alternate words .."

"see how they’re transferable and maybe have a link to what kind of jobs they do "

"I mean on that web site you’re linking to your marks and everything as well so you could tie them in, right? […] So in “Essay 1 for Toy Design” you used your communication skills, so you click on that and it’ll give you your mark and an outline of what the report was or whatever. Cos then you could have that going through like all of your years and you could use it as a reference to say “Right, I’ve got communication skills from my 1st year in Toy Design” – and you’re in your 3rd year you’ve got to go back to what sort of skill sets you got."

"It could be useful as well to have feedback from your tutors as well, where you could have improved or things like that, that could"

After a series of user experience data-mining sessions based on analysis, transcripts and recordings of the Pilot Stage and Tag Cloud Navigation Strategies two semi-distinct types of user requirement for SkillClouds emerged :

1. Information
2. Presentation

Having constructed a list of users information goal statements we continued the user centered design process in order to define the information needs of the user, give them structure, order and explore how users saw the types of information SkillClouds might offer them.

9 Students were recruited through Facebook and the SkillClouds mailing list to take part in an open card sorting exercise. The results of even such a small sample group gave us a very strong steer for the development of our information architecture, how users saw the information, what information they want/need and how it should be how/why it should be delivered.

A description, some photos and the initial output of the card sorting is now up on the SkillClouds project website here.

We are currently mapping out a user journey based on the card sorting output which will evolve into our user driven design for SkillClouds.

Seven key skills in information literacy - and SkillClouds project

2008-07-15T21:43:00.011+01:00

Back in 1999, SCONUL (the Society for College, National and University Libraries) proposed and have subsequently refined a set of seven key skills (described as pillars) in information literacy.

Here at the JISC Innovation Forum 2008 in the theme on How to Meet the Changing Student Experience there was a discussion today on the "Google Generation" and on information seeking behaviour. Maggie Fieldhouse discussed the report "Information behaviour of the researcher of the future" commissioned by the British Library and JISC and conducted by the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) at UCL. The SCONUL pillars were discussed, as one of the key findings of the report is that all of us - students, researchers and professors alike - appear to be increasingly adopting shallow search strategies:

CIBER deep log studies show that, from undergraduates to professors, people exhibit a strong tendency towards shallow, horizontal, `ﬂicking’ behaviour in digital libraries. Power browsing and viewing appear to be the norm for all.
Information behaviour of the researcher of the future, p.19

SCONUL's seven key skills in information literacy:

the ability to recognise a need for information
the ability to recognise different ways in which the information 'gap' may be addressed
the ability to construct strategies for locating information
the ability to locate and access information
the ability to compare and evaluate information obtained from different sources
the ability to organise, apply and communicate information to others in appropriate ways
the ability to synthesise and build on existing information, contributing to the creation of new knowledge

This strikes a chord with me in relation to the SkillClouds project. The seven key skills describe a journey through information skill space that seems similar to the kind of user journey that Stuart has started to articulate within the project.

The journey starts when someone becomes aware that they need information about their skills, and starts to look at possible ways of addressing that gap. Part of our work in the SkillClouds project is to explore some of the ways to 'mind the gap', and to support students as they explore the different strategies they can adopt.

Image from Flickr by Forzagaribaldi licensed under Creative Commons

SkillClouds pilot stage outputs

2008-06-26T20:02:00.006+01:00

The SkillClouds project Pilot stage ran from Feb to May 2008. In this stage of the project, we focused on trying to flesh out our understanding of what our project stakeholders want from the SkillClouds project. We've focused particularly on students' needs. We've carried out a range of research activities including a navigation experiment with 116 undergraduate students, some user centred design activities and a card sorting exercise.

Write ups of these activities can be found on the project web site:

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/pilot_stage.php

Our next task will be to pull these outputs together into a set of requirements and run some rapid development iterations around implementing them.

Skillclouds recruitment

2008-05-06T15:52:00.004+01:00

SkillClouds would like to welcome Stuart Lamour who is joining the project as a Developer/Integrator.

Stuart joined the University of Sussex at the end of April from Cogapp, a Brighton based company providing consultancy, design and production for online and interactive communications.

At Cogapp, Stuart had a broad role undertaking user research, statistical analysis, project management, software development and the technical implementation of graphic design, wireframes and Information Architecture (see his Cogapp blog for more details).

Stuart is also a seasoned blogger, and provides consultancy advice on areas such as web site design, blogging and using social networking sites.

We're looking forward to working with him on SkillClouds!

SkillClouds presentation at Shock2008

2008-04-07T14:01:00.003+01:00

Full details at http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/publications.php?publication=shock2008

SkillClouds activity for Feb and March 2008

2008-02-08T20:08:00.002Z

Over the next couple of months we're going to be focusing on the following activities:

running user centred design sessions with students, in which we'll ask the participants to evaluate our initial ideas and invite them to contribute fresh ideas to the development process
running sessions with Career Development staff to find out how they think SkillClouds might support students
carrying out some usability testing for tag clouds to better understand how our target market of undergraduate students respond to and conceptualise tag clouds

Once we've wrapped up each strand of work, we'll blog about it in some detail.

We're also going to be recruiting to a Developer/Integrator to work on SkillClouds.

Welcome to SkillClouds

2008-01-09T19:27:00.000Z

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.