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

Reflecting on changes in the project aims

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

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

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!

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

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.