SHEEN Sharing Launch: Employability Resources for Higher Education in Scotland

We did it. We launched the Web resource created by the Employability Coordinators’ Network over the last hectic, busy, exciting, challenging, fun year of SHEEN Sharing. The Web resource called Employability Resources for Higher Education in Scotland.

We returned to The Teacher Building, venue of our successful SHEEN Sharing dissemination event in September last year. That is a great venue for stuff like this: they have good tech, and on-the-spot support, and great staff, and delicious catering, and a nice building (it’s all about whisky, not education ).

The day started with a keynote address from Prof. Brent MacGregor, Chair of the SHEEN Steering Group. Cherie Woolmer, SHEEN Sharing’s redoubtable project manager, gave some background from the ECN’s point of view. Then it was over to me for the entire rest of the morning session.

You’ll see my slides at the bottom of this post (which includes links to the relevant resources, including the videos I’ve created to help you use our Netvibes-based site). Gavin McCabe of Edinburgh University got to see himself on the screen as I used the evaluation interview I did with him and Jessica Henderson from Heriot-Watt again. He did get to give his story in full after lunch this time though! I also used audio clips of Fiona Boyle of Queen Margaret University and Gopalakrishnan Premalatha (Prema) from the University of Abertay to present even more voices from the ECN. This was their project, their vision and it is important to hear their voices.

Having shown people the new site, we made some laptops available at lunchtime for people to have a play around with it themselves. The feedback we got was great: people said it looked clean and interesting and was easy to navigate (once they’d seen the short introductory videos). And people reported already finding new resources and ideas, just in that short time.

After lunch, we had a panel presentation from five people from the ECN: Cherie Woolmer (Strathclyde University); Gavin McCabe & Ruth Donnelly (University of Edinburgh); David McCall (UHI Millennium Institute); Jonathan Culley (Stirling University). Each of them presented for about 10 minutes on their learning journey through SHEEN Sharing, and the impact the project has made on their work and their professional development. We finished with questions and discussion about the future: people were keen to disseminate the resource and the learnings from SHEEN Sharing into as many communities as possible.

There was a general vibe that, not only had we created a good place to find quality employability resources, but we’d also found out a lot about harnessing and developing a small community of practice, to ensure their quick growth and dissemination of their work to a wider audience. And we’d done it all on a shoestring, using only free Web-based tools. In fact, there was some suggestions that flying so low under the radar of top management and university policies was what enabled us to do such a good job in such a short time. No worrying about IPR and metadata schemas, even long-term technical sustainability or anything.

So, here are my slides (or here on SlideShare): you’ll see in here how to use our new Web resource, and also how we got here. I’m hoping to convince Cherie Woolmer to do a brief post as well, with her take on the day and what we’ve achieved.

View this document on Scribd

Top hats & trainers: traditional repositories vs. Web 2.0 resource sharing? SHEEN Sharing at EdShare Workshop

Well, I should have blogged on this last year. But our beloved SHEEN Sharing is drawing to its official close, and I’m tidying up some loose ends. I want everything to be available on this blog for future reference.

So, last year, the JISC-funded EdShare project, based at Southampton University, put on a workshop designated “Traditional educational repositories vs. Web 2.0 sharing” and invited some people from relevant projects. Are formal repositories for sharing teaching and learning materials a thing of the past, now that we have so many fabulous Web 2.0 tools to use for resource sharing?

Now, I have a good relationship (I hope!) with some EdShare folks, primarily Debra Morris, who was organising the workshop. I was just drooling over the agenda for the workshop and wondering how I could swing an invitation to present on SHEEN Sharing, when Debra emailed me and invited me to present … on metadata! Well, I am a metadata-phile in my other professional life, but I told her all about what I really wanted to share at this workshop: what I, a repositories “expert”, or at least, very-experienced-person, had discovered about resource sharing while working on SHEEN Sharing. Debra and the other EdShare people were kind enough to say yes when I said “No, I don’t want to present on that, I want to present on this…”.

The slides I presented at this workshop are below. You can also find them on SlideShare, if you prefer, here.

I was simultaneously presenting to fellow formal repositories experts, and to a group that I thought was trying to say that Web 2.0 is taking over the role of repositories. So I was nervous. Also, it was the first time I had presented on our work on SHEEN Sharing outwith the employability / HEA / Scottish HE context; in fact, right in the heart of a more long-standing professional community of mine.

But it went great! The other presentations, and the workshop discussions were fascinating and juicy. Everyone had a keen interest in discussing and exploring, and they seemed pleased and fascinated with SHEEN Sharing’s findings. And my key messages were well received (and repeated in other presentations): that repositories and informal Web 2.0 sharing are complementary and serve different but overlapping use cases; and that repositories developers and managers must be mindful of supporting integration with Web 2.0 tools, for the sake of supporting the kind of informal, transient, and non-techie educational communities they serve.

Debra Morris wrote an excellent summary of the day here. You can just see the back of my head in one of the photos. Thanks again Debra and EdShare for this opportunity to allow SHEEN Sharing to contribute to the educational repositories community!

Here are the SHEEN Sharing slides from the day:

View this document on Scribd

Our Netvibes Page Inspires a University Careers Service: Can They Inspire You?

What with SHEEN Sharing having visibility on Twitter and Diigo and the blogosphere, we’ve picked up a few followers from outwith the ECN, which is great.

We got a very kind Tweet today on Twitter from Darren Jones at the University of Sussex Careers and Employability Centre.  BTW: you can see they are already pretty au fait with Web 2.0: they use a blog to update their main page with big news (see under ‘Latest News’), and their Twitter account to give short pithy updates (scroll down a bit to see an embedded Twitter widget from their @sussxunicareers account), both embedded in the page.

Anyway, Darren likes our Netvibes page and is experimenting with using Netvibes to create a student careers page at Sussex.  Here it is.  You’ll notice he’s chosen to divide his tabs by subject area. Check it out!

I’ve bookmarked this in our Diigo Employability Group.

Your Blog Moderator Has Two New Employability Resources Published

Besides SHEEN Sharing, I’ve been working on another project since about May 2009, where I’ve been researching and writing some Web stories about the use of certain data services in undergraduate learning and teaching.  These are real world data services provided to the UK research community by the Mimas at Manchester University.

The thrust of these stories has been about the value of using real world data to teach real world skills to students, as a way of both deepening their understanding of their subject area, and increasing their employability in a number of ways.

The research I’ve done, which has involved interviewing academics at various universities and colleges, will be developed into more detailed case studies later this year and published on the Web.

In the meantime, here are two small taster news items about this research.  I did the research and much of the writing on these, but they have been edited and polished up admirably by the Web authoring team at Mimas.

Census data – from the real world, for the real world

Capturing and collating UK census data, the Census Dissemination Unit (CDU) connects researchers, analysts and decision-makers with high-quality statistical outputs. This real-world data is also of great value in learning and teaching – as students and teachers in human geography at the University of Leeds have discovered …

Helping economics students ‘keep it real’

ESDS International provides real-world economic data for a wide range of researchers, analysts and decision-makers. Today, this data is also being used in learning and teaching, bringing considerable benefits to students, teachers and society as a whole. Here, we focus on how Nick Weaver of The University of Manchester and Paul Turner of Loughborough University are using this data to teach applied econometrics to undergraduates and Masters students …

I’ve bookmarked both of these on Diigo and shared them with the Diigo Employability Group.

Improvements and Updates to Netvibes Site: Feedback Please!

Our Netvibes site is the public face of SHEEN Sharing’s original remit: the one-stop-shop, virtual repository/portal type thing that presents a range of quality employability resources, as planned and hoped for when SHEEN Sharing was originally funded in January 2009.  It displays selected resources by using feeds out of Diigo, from our Diigo groups and tags, and other Web-based feeds and resources.

Now, as it currently stands it is a sandbox / demonstrator site, mainly designed by me with some help from Cherie Woolmer at Strathclyde University.  I am not an employability co-ordinator, so I have used quite a bit of creative licence in trying to imagine the kinds of things the ECN will eventually want to go into the site.  It will be much easier for folk to say “not that, this” than to try and think of things from scratch.  So please keep that in mind when you have a look!

Even with this in mind, I have learned a lot since January 2009, and received a lot of feedback.  So, before we even get to the bit of the project extension where the ECN sits down and hashes out what it wants its Netvibes to look like, I have made a range of improvements and updates, as follows:

Google Scholar Resources Gone

I had to remove all the fabulous Google Scholar feeds.  We used a wonderful Yahoo Pipe that enabled me to do a search in Google Scholar (e.g. “employability AND eportfolios”, resources published after 2006) and create a feed in Netvibes that showed the up-to-date results of that search.  Google Scholar of course only lists peer-reviewed publications, so this was a very rich resource.  However, Google does not allow this kind of feed and they have now blocked this Pipe and others like it from working.  Boo!  However, I have added a Google Scholar search box here.

EvidenceNet Searches: A Holding Pattern Until They Get Their Feeds Sorted

We are waiting with baited breath for the awesome HEA EvidenceNet repository to start providing feeds of specific searches so we can pop some of these into our Netvibes tabs.  So, we hope to be able to search for resources, or events, in EvidenceNet, e.g. with the topic “personal development planning”, get a feed for that search result, put it into Netvibes and thereby always see the most up-to-date list of evidence-based UK resources or events.  We know they are going to provide this, they just haven’t yet.  In the meantime, I’ve worked out that you can just use the URL of a search results page, and put that into Netvibes as a Web page, and get a rather clunky but still usable display of said search.  See here and here and here and here and here.

Delicious Feeds on Work Related Learning: Thanks Glasgow Caledonian!

I discovered some juicy resources tagged on Delicious with “work_related_learning”, so, in the absence of anything immediate on Diigo, I added a feed for that Delicious tag here (along with an above-mentioned EvidenceNet search page).  Shout out to Allison Littlejohn and team at Glasgow Caledonian for many of these!

New Version of Diigo Allows Group Tag Feeds: Cocurriculum Resources Tagged by Employability Group

Felt much joy when I realised Diigo had fixed a previous problem in their new version: I now have an example of a Diigo feed for a specific group tag (resources tagged “cocurriculum” by the Employability Group) here.  This will be great when we come to adding tag dictionaries to our Google Groups.

New Voluntary Sector Tab with Reflective Student Blogs from SHEEN Placements

Created a new Voluntary Sector tab, which has the feed from the SHEEN Placements blog in it (it’s still there under “Student Resources” too, Fiona, don’t worry!).  It also has the project’s Twitter feed, and individual feeds from the two student blogs accompanying the Samaritans placements set up by the project.

Some Content for International Students Tab

Added a couple of EvidenceNet search pages under the International Students tab, which was previously empty.

Small but Significant: You Can Read the Page Title Now!

Changed the colour of the title text to a much more harmonious and readable shade!

Moving Forward: Netvibes Day in November

Still have some empty tabs, and would like some new and exciting ideas from the ECN about what they’d like to see in the Netvibes page.  We’ll be having a day-long workshop session to hash it all out and make decisions in November, so please keep an eye on emails on the ECN JISCmail list if you want to take part in that.  We’ll use that day to train keen development group members in keeping Netvibes up-to-date after I go, too.

Launch in 2010

And, we’ll be running a launch event in January or February 2010!  So please help us make it as good as we can!

Improvements to This Blog: Feedback Still Welcome!

During the course of SHEEN Sharing’s initial nine month phase, we received quite a bit of feedback re this blog.

Some of this arose from the original ambiguity about the blog’s purpose.  While we were getting started, this blog was both a dissemination tool for the project, and a sandbox/demonstrator for the ECN to see how different Web 2.0 tools worked.  So, we had not only project news, documents and postings about how to use Web 2.0 tools, but also various feeds and widgets in the right-hand columns demonstrating how other tools and tags could be used to enrich the content here.  Some ECN members were very keen at the start, and tried using the blog to post about things they wanted to discuss with the rest of the network, or employability resources they were interested in.

Now, we are much clearer about what we want to achieve and which tools we want to use for which purpose.  We are using our Netvibes page as our one-stop-shop site, kind of a virtual “repository”, for disseminating quality employability resources to the ECN’s stakeholders.  We are using Diigo for two purposes: one is for co-ordinators to save, share, discuss and disseminate their favourite employability resources, the other is to use Diigo’s excellent social networking tools to provide safe online group discussion spaces.  You can see how using Diigo to save and share resources can feed directly into our Netvibes page with no additional work by the ECN by looking at this tab and this tab.

We are using this blog, plus our Twitter account, to disseminate the SHEEN Sharing project itself.  It will stand as a record of the proecess we went through and what we achieved.

With this in mind, I have removed several of the “sandbox” widgets with feeds from the right-hand columns, and also re-arranged and re-configured the remaining items there in a way that I hope will make the blog easier to find your way around.  Please do have a look and feed back to me if you can suggest any improvements.

I’ve also updated the SHEEN Sharing Project page and several of the Scottish Employability Projects’ pages, to indicate progress made.  In particular, check out the pages:

Sharing Student Experiences Trial Group

and

Voluntary Sector Project Trial Group: SHEEN Placements

SHEEN Sharing Extension to February 2010

Good news: SHEEN Sharing has officially been extended until February 2010.  Our thanks to the SHEEN Steering Group for this validation of the hard work everyone involved has put in so far.

You’ll be seeing some new blog posts coming out here updating you on many different aspects of SHEEN Sharing’s progress.

We’ve been extended to really capitalise on the first nine months of the project.  Now that the ECN are starting a new academic year, and have had tasters of all the cool Web 2.0 things they can do, we want to really start embedding the chosen trial tools and new practices in their work.

When SHEEN Sharing started, the core idea was to end up with a one-stop-shop on the Web to share and find and disseminate and discuss good quality employability resources with a range of stakeholders in and around the ECN.

Our One-Stop-Shop: Netvibes
Our one-stop-shop is the virtual repository for employability we have created using Netvibes: http://www.netvibes.com/Employability

This repository is still in a “sandbox” phase: the next four months of SHEEN Sharing will be dedicated in part to turning this into a resource the ECN can use, contribute to and be proud to send to other stakeholders.

Contributing Your Favourite Resources: Diigo
The way for ECN members to contribute their favourite resources to the Netvibes repository is through bookmarking and sharing them on Diigo.

This has the added benefit of allowing them to access their own bookmarks from any computer on the Web, and to link in with each other and a wider international community to discuss and share resources.

Catching up on Netvibes and Diigo: Flashmeeting Webinar Later This Month
With the extension of the SHEEN Sharing project until Jan/Feb 2010, we will be having some more Flashmeeting webinars.

I will be hosting monthly webinars, with open drop-in support from 9:00-10:30, and presentations / discussions on particular topics from 10:30-12:00.  The first webinar this month will be for a recap/catchup on Netvibes and Diigo (including an overview of new features in Diigo v4, released late last month).

In addition, Cherie Woolmer and the project development group will be organising a series of employability co-ordinator led webinars to show-and-tell tools and practices that have changed their jobs and lives for the better through SHEEN Sharing.

Further Diigo Trainings: Introductions, Recaps and Diigo-ing Deeper
We will also be running two more Diigo Training days, in November 2009.  Each day will consist of a morning session recapping the original introductory workshop for those who haven’t been able to attend, which can also serve as a refresher for those who would like one.  Each afternoon will be a chance to dig a bit deeper into Diigo for those who have already been using it.  Those who attend in the morning will also be welcome to stay for the afternoon.

NB: Diigo recently released an all-new and shiny version 4.  This includes one amazing new feature: the ability to save an archived copy of a resource you have bookmarked, so if the resource ever disappears you have a copy of it to use in future.  It also includes the feature we’d been eagerly waiting and hoping for: the ability to set up a working feed from a Diigo Group by individual tag (e.g. a feed just for resources tagged “cocurriculum” by the Employability Group).  We’ll cover all this and more for those who want to see it at the afternoon trainings.

Keeping Up-To-Date on SHEEN Sharing
Further information on the above and more will continue to be disseminated via the SHEEN Sharing blog and Twitter account.  Please note that the blog is now totally dedicated to dissemination of SHEEN Sharing as a project: sharing of employability resources by the ECN will continue via Diigo.

The SHEEN Sharing blog can be visited here: http://sheensharing.wordpress.com/
You can subscribe to updates from the blog using the RSS feed here: http://sheensharing.wordpress.com/feed/
Or, you can look at the blog updates on the Employability Netvibes page, in the first tab which is currently devoted to SHEEN Sharing as a project:
http://www.netvibes.com/Employability#Welcome (see the section in the bottom right: “SHEEN Sharing Blog updates”).

To follow us on Twitter for even more pithy updates, go here: http://twitter.com/sheensharing

Winners of Evaluation Survey Prize Draw!

Well, we had a very successful and useful evaluation meeting yesterday.  You’ll be hearing more about it soon.  But most importantly, Alison Cook of the Scottish Funding Council not only gave us her time and highly pertinent and useful questions and comments, she also drew the prizewinning names from the hat.

We had offered two £25 Amazon vouchers as prizes, with winners to be drawn from all the employability co-ordinators who filled in the SHEEN Sharing Evaluation Survey.

Well, the rainbow’s end must have touched down over the Highlands yesterday, because the winners are:

David McCall (UHI Millennium Institute)

and

Jonathan Culley (University of Stirling).

Congratulations guys (you’ll be hearing from me soon) and thanks to everyone who completed the survey- sorry we couldn’t afford to give you all a voucher!

SHEEN Sharing Evaluation Event, 16th September 2009

The SHEEN Sharing project is having an end-of-project event in Glasgow on Wednesday September 16th, at The Teacher Building.  The Teacher Building is in St Enoch Square in Glasgow, which means it’s about a 10 minute walk from Queen Street Station (map here).  The venue also offers car parking at £5 a day at the nearby Thistle Carpark: please contact them directly for information: 0141 5661871.

The following documents may be of interest to participants, for reading prior to the meeting, or to keep on hand during the meeting:

SHEEN Sharing Benchmarking and Requirements Report

SHEEN Sharing Review

SHEEN Sharing Web 2.0 Tools Handout

All public project documents are available on the Scribd SHEEN Sharing Project Documents Group Page.

This event will include a morning of looking at what the project has discovered and achieved so far, including presentations from employability co-ordinators on their personal experiences, and a video of two co-ordinators discussing how SHEEN Sharing has impacted on their work and professional development.  We’ve invited interested stakeholders to the morning session (and lunch) to catch up on where we are, and to give their input.

Over lunch, Heather Fotheringham of the HEA’s EvidenceNet service will offer an informal presentation on that work for those that are interested.

In the afternoon, the Employability Coordinators’ Network will workshop detailed plans for their future use of the tools introduced and trialled during the project.

In preparation for this evaluation event, we will be running a survey to follow up on the initial survey carried out at the start.  This will include opportunities for ECN members to reflect on and evaluate their use of the tools and resources introduced by SHEEN Sharing to date, even if they can’t make the September event.  Everyone who completes a survey will go into a draw for one of two Amazon vouchers.

Please bookmark this page as further details of the event’s agenda, timings and so on will be posted here.

*** Update, 10 September 2009 ***

Final Agenda

10:30 – 11:00 Registration and refreshments

11:00 – 11:45 Overview of the SHEEN Sharing project to date

11:00 – 11:10 Cherie Woolmer (Strathclyde University): Welcome & housekeeping; Why SHEEN Sharing?;  SHEEN Sharing and the ECN.

11:10 – 11:35 Sarah Currier (Project Consultant): SHEEN Sharing, January to September 2009:

- The SHEEN Sharing Review and Benchmarking Reports: What we discovered about the ECN as a Community of Practice; What are the ECN requirements and how Web 2.0 might support them

- The SHEEN Sharing tools: Blog and Twitter account for dissemination; Scribd group for sharing project documents; regular drop-in FlashMeeting webinars for support and discussion; and an informal community “repository” bringing together Diigo and Netvibes.

11:35 – 11:45 Questions and discussion.

11:45 – 12:45 SHEEN Sharing and the ECN:

- Fiona Boyle from Queen Margaret University will talk about SHEEN Sharing’s support of the SHEEN Placements project in utilising a blog and Twitter account;

- Cherie Woolmer of Strathclyde University will talk about how SHEEN Sharing impacted on her work as a member of the ECN community, as and individual, and internally within her institution;

- Gavin McCabe at Edinburgh University and Jessica Henderson at Heriot Watt University discussing, on video, a broad range of issues around the impact and potential of SHEEN Sharing;

- Sarah Currier, Project Consultant, will show examples from other ECN members, and give examples of their feedback.

12:45 – 13:00 Where to from here?  A brief look at the results of the end-of-project survey, with discussion.

13:00 – 13:45 Lunch for all.  Heather Fotheringham from the Higher Education Academy will be available to show folk the EvidenceNet repository.

13:45 onwards: ECN members only: evaluation and planning

13:45 – 14:25 Breakout Session 1

- Two breakout groups will look at, respectively, ways forward for Tools and for the ECN Community.

14:25 – 14:35 Grab a tea/coffee/biscuit.

14:35 – 15:15 Breakout Session 2 (as above; groups switch topics).

15:15 – 15:30 Closing session: report back from breakout groups; set priorities and assign tasks for the future.

NB: We have the venue booked for the whole day, so if any participants want to arrange to use the space to meet with colleagues before or after the event starts (between 09:30 and 17:00) please contact Cherie Woolmer or Sarah Currier and let us know.

Reflections on the first SHEEN Sharing Diigo Training Day

Trepidatious no more
I’m sitting on the train home to Glasgow from Aberdeen after our first SHEEN Sharing Diigo training day. It was a gorgeous blazing hot sunny day. I approached this training with some trepidation. It felt a bit like Cherie and I had gone out on a limb in recommending Diigo as the tool of choice for the Scottish Employability Co-ordinators’ Network. On paper (and in my experience) it looked very close to meeting all of the ECN’s requirements, but getting people to try a new tool is something different. Didn’t feel we had much of a fall-back position if they didn’t like it, or if they found it too hard to bother learning to use.

Stoked by the chaos and keenness
Anyway, I’m absolutely stoked. I remember when I used to run training sessions on the Stòr Cùram repository, and I’d have my slides and lesson plan and handouts lined up. Then they’d see the first slide, log onto the repository, and proceed to ignore me for the rest of the session except to call out questions in a chaotic manner while digging hell-for-leather into the software. It was a bit like that today. You know it’s gonna work when they get on with it without you.

Getting started on Diigo: a community of practice in miniature
In true community of practice fashion, James (Robert Gordon University) ended up practically training Joy (Aberdeen University) under my nose, because he had already not only imported his bookmarks from Firefox, he’d installed the Diigo Toolbar and pretty much taught himself to do the bookmarking, highlighting and annotating of Web resources that is the key to Diigo’s goodness. I’d not wanted to burden participants overly before the session, and had felt guilty about even asking them to get Diigo user accounts and import their bookmarks. I wasn’t sure about how the latter would succeed, at home or in their offices with different OS/browser setups. I’ve found that Diigo can be slow and buggy when importing bookmarks from file from browsers or other bookmarking services. I also hadn’t wanted to get involved in trying to get folk to install the Diigo Toolbar until we got into the training session. The thing is, once you have the Diigo Toolbar installed, you can import your browser bookmarks in a couple of clicks, without going through the export file / import file palaver. Which James worked out for himself.

Look out future Diigo trainees: you’ll need to prepare!
Pam (St Andrews University) had also got herself a user account and imported her Delicious bookmarks (with tags intact) in preparation for the training day. She’d installed the Diigo Toolbar without realising she’d done it. It’s that quick and easy. So I have fewer qualms about asking folk to do this before the next two training sessions. I’m further pushed to this by the fact that university computer labs won’t let you install new software in the training session, so my original idea of showing them how to do it is moot anyway.

University computer labs not the best places for Web 2.0 training sessions?
Speaking of university computer labs: we had planned a 3-hour training session, of which I thought we needed every minute. Lucky we didn’t need every minute, because it took us an hour to get sorted out so we could start. First off, I’d asked those that had them to bring wifi-enabled laptops (by no means a given in the ECN)- luckily all three of today’s participants had them. Otherwise we would’ve had to let some folk use the computer lab PCs, on which they couldn’t have the Diigo Toolbar installed, which was no use at all. However, the next fly in the ointment was that the wifi signal wasn’t strong enough in the lab! So we had to go to another room, get everyone on the wifi there, after much faffing. In the end though, James and Pam were so far ahead of where I’d expected them to be, and the group was so small, we still managed to get through everything I’d wanted to cover in two hours. The next two training groups are bigger though, so I’ll need to be on the ball about making sure we have adequate technical support beforehand.

Joy of Joy: and getting quick help from Diigo
We even managed to get Joy up to speed right there in the session, even though she hadn’t had time to do any prep. It helped that she doesn’t bookmark much anyway (she relies on browser history, and Google, which I can related to!) so we didn’t have to install any prior bookmarks. She was the only one using IE though and we found that the edit bookmark popup wouldn’t appear for her when she tried to edit tags for a bookmark. I was off straight away Tweeting @diigo for help- and they responded really quickly. We didn’t get that problem solved by the end of the session but it was impressive and comforting to see how on-the-ball they were- for the participants as well as for me. We pretty much ganged up on Joy and told her to get Firefox anyway.

Sharing student experiences via Diigo Webslides and MediaWiki
Pam had asked if she could speak with me after the training to get some support and ideas around her idea for a SHEEN Sharing Student Experiences Group. She wants to better be able to both encourage students to share case studies of their work placement experiences for the St Andrews Careers wiki (e.g. see their School of Modern Languages page, with some student experiences at the bottom), and to find a better way of presenting said case studies. Well, I am certain she’s already doing a good job extracting the case studies from students, however, we both thought a little added bribe of offering a draw for an iPod or an Amazon voucher might help; I didn’t really think offering a more Web2.0ish method than the wiki form she’s already set up would help. What we did come up with was using Diigo’s Lists and Webslides feature, which lets you set up a live Web slideshow of links you have bookmarked*, to showcase the case studies (the main problem being the gnarly wiki structure which made it difficult for Pam to provide easy access to them). We examined how you can publish a Webslides List slideshow to many and varied places, and also how you can get an iFrames widget and embed it straight into a site, including, if you have the correct extension installed, into a MediaWiki page. However, we don’t yet know if her university’s IT manager will allow the latter, so she’ll be happy with the former, and just make a link in the wiki (and anywhere else she can think of). They’ve had a few issues with students not wanting their personal stories and pictures being too widely publicised, so she’ll just be keeping it on St Andrews Careers site, and she’ll be creating different Webslides shows for different subject and discipline areas. We also decided to start using the Diigo Groups feature to start an ECN discussion about collecting and disseminating student experiences.

The Twitter open plan office
Pam also mentioned that she misses working in an open plan office- she enjoyed the face to face chatting, laughing and immediacy of ideas and help today. She’s already trying Twitter: I know Cherie and I think Twitter would work much better as a virtual open plan office for the ECN (distributed as they are around Scotland) if more joined, but one thing I promised was to send her the blog post about setting up TwitterFox so she can have it at least sitting in the corner of the Web while working.

A SHEEN Sharing case study for Diigo?
Maggie Tsai at Diigo had emailed me a week or so ago asking if I could submit a case study of our use of Diigo in SHEEN Sharing. I’ve held off responding until now because I just wasn’t sure how well it would go down with the ECN group. But I’m feeling more confident now. I’ll be emailing her back this week.

* For an example of a Webslides slideshow, here’s one showcasing four examples of Netvibes and Pageflakes used for projects that I put together as a List of links on Diigo: http://slides.diigo.com/list/morageyrie/sheen-sharing-examples