Public Services UsPaCe Induction
September 22nd, 2008 by Rob StillwellToday Neil and I went to City College Plymouth and ran a student induction for 12 Public Services Students. They worked in a number of different areas including Police, Fire Service, ETC.
We split the induction into 2 sections, firstly a short presentation discussing the background to the project and how we got to where we are now. We showed some screenshots of the system and discussed the basic functionality.
Next we worked on getting the students signed up to the 3 services, The UsPaCe Community (ELGG), Google and Del.icio.us. There were initially problems logging on for a couple of students who hadn’t had their IT accounts set up yet but for the majority it was smooth sailing.
We found that the college installation of Internet Explorer wasn’t working very well so we then had everyone using FireFox.
Overall the session was a success with the students giving us positive feedback on the tools and how they could use them. Registering for these services was always going to be the biggest hurdle and it went well.
We did find a few interesting outcomes however:
Caching – The college computers don’t have a deep freeze setup so if users check the “remember me” box on websites others could get into their accounts. Having spoken to someone at the college about this they stated this was an issue they have with their College Moodle installation too.
Captcha – I would say on average users were taking 2-3 attempts to sign up to Google and slightly less to Del.icio.us (the captcha letters were more legible) due to the captcha system they use where you have to type the letters you see in a picture.
Internet Explorer – I don’t know what was up with it but it didn’t like some of the urls we were using, even though I’ve never had a problem using IE in work (I tend to use both IE and Firefox)
