Updates to ELGG and Student Info Cards
July 24th, 2008 by Rob StillwellIt’s been a bit quiet on here but we have been working hard…honest! I’ve just updated ELGG to allow users to self register but they also need to supply a keycode to prevent registration outside our pilot groups but still allow the users to sign up using their prefered email addresses. This was flagged a serious issue in the pilot earlier in the year.
I have also been working on Student Info Cards. These little cards allow the students to make a note of their usernames and on the back it lists all the important addresses they may need on the back. See the images below.
UsPaCe Poster & Update
June 20th, 2008 by Rob StillwellA brief update of where we are with UsPaCe. I’ve recently finished a poster for the first phase of UsPaCe. Click the icon below to open it.
In addition to this we have been redesigning our rollout for our September pilots including a few big changes which I will detail later on. Much progress has also been made on the sister project UPlaCe where we are working on a repository which will integrate with UsPaCe.
Going Live….
May 14th, 2008 by Rob StillwellThis week I have been busy setting up everything for our first UsPaCe Pilot.
We have 11 courses across 3 institutions with around 150 students taking part in this first pilot.
Initially we have used Google Calendars for the tutors and course staff to provide a resource containing term dates, deadlines, etc for students. An RSS feed of this is included in an I-Google page including numerous other gadgets including:
1- a community sign in gadget
2- uspace help gadget
3- RSS feed viewer (including the calendar)
4- Sticky note gadget
5- Google Docs gadget
6- Question & comments feedback gadget
7- Days until reminder
Each course has it’s own I-Google tab. All of the courses also have their own group on our ELGG installation we have called “My Community”. Over the last two days these have been set up and all the students added to system. Now we shall see what happens….
Preparing for Pilot 1
May 7th, 2008 by Rob StillwellWe have been particularly busy this last few weeks preparing for our first pilot of UsPaCe.
Tutors have been introduced to the community and are currently setting up Google Calendars. These will then be linked to via RSS in each of the course I-Google tabs we have developed. We are hoping to get the students onto the system during the next week or so.
In addition to this activity for the pilot we have been busy on a number of other things such as reports, collating information from the focus groups and designing a poster documenting our progress so far.
Another ELGG Patch – Inviting people to your community or group
April 16th, 2008 by Rob StillwellToday whilst running through our support materials I found a bug.
When you invite someone to a community they received a request within the system but an email wasn’t sent out. Once again the ELGG forum came up trumps and I found a code patch. After backing up the site, testing the patch in our sandbox install and then updating the sytem we’ve sorted that bug.
Code can be found here
JISC Conference 2008
April 16th, 2008 by Rob StillwellYesterday myself, Neil, Anne and Ali Press (Cornwall) went along to the annual JISC conference 2008.
This was my first visit to this conference and I found it to be an interesting experience. A majority of projects I saw seemed to be based around Web2.0 technologies. It definitely felt like UsPaCe is very much on the cutting edge of what everyone is working on at present which I hope means what we are doing will prove to be relevant to others. I managed to get a some quick snaps from the conference on my phone. I must admit I was really impressed the by venue too (ICC Birmingham).
I probably should have been blogging live from the event using twitter / elgg voices or something but its not really my thing if i’m honest.
Overall it was a really good trip, lots of useful information, interesting people and great to see what others are doing. We also had time before getting the train back to check out a certain donut manufacturer and sample their wares!
Focus Group #5 – Community Health Studies – (Cambourne College)
April 11th, 2008 by Rob StillwellYesterday we travelled to Camborne for the fifth of our focus groups. As with all the groups, the students and tutors were a friendly and enthusiastic bunch which always makes these sessions enjoyable.
These students were mostly full time with a few part time. They will be going on placement at some point during the year too which will be useful for us in finding out how they get on with the system outside of College. There are also other areas of interest with mentions of using shared computers and public computers. Also there is a broad range of computer skills but a real enthusiasm for having a go which has been great to see.
Finally the buffet was worth a mention too, excellent as usual with Neil highlighting the mini ring donuts as a particularly special!
Where have we been?????
April 3rd, 2008 by Rob StillwellI just realised it’s been a while since I last blogged so thought it was time for an update. Neil and Anne had some time off last week so I have been holding the fort. Most of our time at the moment has been spent putting together support materials for the different parts of the project. The support site is coming together so hopefully I can post a link to it soon. We have lots coming up over the next week including some presentations at conferences and another focus group. Details will be posted soon I’m sure!
New I-Google Skins
March 19th, 2008 by Rob StillwellThis is something I meant to blog about earlier in the week but didn’t get around to it. We have now got I-Google skins for each of the colleges involved in our pilots. It was suprisingly easy to do this and only involved creating a new header image and a new css file. I have some screengrabs below. 
Focus Group #4 Public Services Foundation Degree – (Plymouth College of Further Education)
March 19th, 2008 by Rob StillwellToday we visited a very bright and enthuastic group of students studying Public Services Foundation Degree. We had an updated presentation incorperating a lot of the changes we had taken on board from the 3 previous groups. Unlike the other groups, these students were full time which is great as now we have a good mix of groups.
The presentation went particularly well today and for the first time we were able to provide the students with an official UsPaCe 2GB pendrive as a thank you for taking part in the focus group. You can see a photo of mine on the right(apologies for quality, it was taken on my camera phone).
It seems like we are getting closer and closer towards the tools the students (and the tutors) would like to have available. It also appears to be the same concerns being raised with regards to information privacy, support and number of accounts needed. I think we have covered nearly all of these concerns now. With our first set of support materials nearly finished the next couple of weeks for me will be focused on creating high quality, concise, training materials to make it as quick and easy for the learners to get up and running with our systems.
