Skillclouds - making it personal

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.

SkillClouds at UCISA 2009

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)

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 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