Skillclouds recruitment

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

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

Tag clouds - designing for accessibility

When we put together the SkillClouds proposal, we knew that we would need to think carefully about making SkillClouds accessible. I was very aware that tag clouds are a fundamentally visual approach to presenting information, and that we would therefore need to ensure we didn't exclude students with visual impairment from accessing skills information from our project.

I bumped into Pete Rainger at a Sussex Learning Networks event last month, and knowing that Pete in an e-learning and web accessibility specialist (find out more at his site http://www.key2access.co.uk/index.php), I discussed with him what issues he thought would be particularly important issues for the SkillClouds project to address.

Last week he got back to me with an incredibly helpful email, which I'm working my way through, and thought it would be useful to start blogging about here.

Pete raised two key accessibility issues. First of all, designing for screen readers. He sent me the link to an article - http://24ways.org/2006/marking-up-a-tag-cloud about ensuring that tag clouds can be made sense of by screen readers. Mark Norman Francis goes through a number of tag clouds and identifies the highs and lows of the html mark up used. Lots of good advice about keeping the html clean and semantically meaningful for screen readers.

The second issue that Pete raised was ensuring that students with dyslexia were able to access information from SkillClouds. He described tag clouds as being language heavy. From a dyslexic's point of view, I guess a tag cloud is a jumble of signs, with strong horizontal and vertical features, but also random patterning caused by the pattern of tags rendered in a large font. So scanning the cloud to find a particular tag may not be at all easy.

This makes me remember how much I want to do an eye-tracking study of tag cloud users, and how interesting it would be to ask people with dyslexia to participate in this.

This is a very good time to be reflecting on the email from Pete, because over the last week we have been piloting a usability experiment and ran a user-centred design session. It's emerging that the order of tags in the cloud is not obvious. For many users, in their initial encounters with a tag cloud, it looks like a jumble of tags.

Pete poses some interesting questions, particularly in relation to tag clouds with frequency represented by font size. He asks:

• whether we could use images instead of or as well as words
• if we could enable users to toggle between sort by frequency and sort alphabetically
• whether using colour as well as size could help with the display

Here's a couple of screen shots from AOL's news site, showing tag clouds with a toggle to a visually simpler list:






(Not quite sure what the order of these tags is ..)

There's a lot more in Pete's email, which I'll return to in further posts.

SkillClouds activity for Feb and March 2008

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

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.