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

SHEEN Sharing Benchmarking and Requirements: Introduction and Summary

Full SHEEN Sharing Benchmarking and Requirements Report (Final Public Draft) available here.

This report is primarily the result of a series of workshops with, and a survey of the Employability Co-ordinators’ Network. My thanks for their honesty and enthusiastic participation.

Introduction to SHEEN Sharing Benchmarking and Requirements Report

The SHEEN Sharing Project aims to support the Employability Co-ordinators’ Network as a community of practice, with a particular focus on utilizing online tools to communicate about, share and recommend resources of relevance to their employability work. The project will also support discovery and dissemination of relevant employability resources for stakeholders outwith the ECN, e.g. academics, staff developers, student support departments, funding bodies, national services, etc. Outputs and findings will benefit the wider education community, and the FE and HE funding bodies across the UK, by contributing to sector knowledge and understanding of resource sharing and community support using current Web technologies.

In preparing for the major work of the project Workpackage 4: Trials of Web 2.0 Tools, I gathered ECN requirements and ascertained co-ordinators’ level of awareness and experience with Web 2.0 tools in their work. This exercise, Workpackage 3: Requirements Gathering, was carried out in the first three months of the project from January to March 2009, in parallel with Workpackage 2: Web 2.0 Review; both fed into each other during this period. See also the SHEEN Sharing Review report here.

Executive Summary

1. Who are the Employability Co-ordinators’ Network?

   Etienne Wenger, one of the key educators on communities of practice, notes on his website that:

   “Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope.”

   Looked at as a community of practice, the ECN is:

   • National (across Scotland), and geographically distributed, with some members, particularly in the north of Scotland, less able to attend centrally based meetings;
   • Mostly female (76% female / 24% male);
   • A mix of part-time and full-time (59% full-time / 41% part-time);
   • A mix of professional backgrounds;
   • A mix of institutional situations, in terms of:
     • the type of department they are based in (59% educational/staff development / 41% careers service), some being co-located in different departments;
     • the emphasis required by their institution on employability work (including working at a policy level; working on curriculum and course development; and working directly with academics and students);
     • university type, from red brick to the ancients, including the Open University and the federated UHI Millennium Institute.
   • Temporary: funding for their work will not continue beyond the next couple of years.

   Some implications:

   • There is significant time pressure on many ECN members;
   • There are a range of professional and institutional cultures, priorities and communication styles coming to bear on their ability to participate;
   • There are institutional cultures with different approaches to and support for use of technology (for instance, one institution blocks use of certain Web 2.0 tools on campus; another doesn’t allow use of Flash);
   • There is a sense that the work accomplished must somehow not be lost after the end of the ECN’s funded tenure in this role.

   So, although this is a small group of professionals, it cannot be assumed that they have access to the same resources, have the same work priorities and pressures, or have similar jobs.

   However, despite their differences, it is clear that the ECN has worked from the beginning as a community of practice, engaging in a process of collective learning about their tasks as university employees whose remit is to promote employability for the benefit of students in higher education and their potential employers. Given the affordances Web 2.0 can offer to a distributed community like this, the SHEEN Sharing project could have much to offer in their continued work, learning and professional development.

2. What are the requirements of the ECN?The basic requirements that have emerged are as follows:
   • Communication:
     • Mutual support;
     • Sharing experience, practice and learning.
   • Resource sharing, comprising:
     • Resource discovery, sharing, recommending and rating;
     • Sharing experiences of use of resources;
     • Targeted resource dissemination to all stakeholders.

   During the initial meetings, however, it also became clear that learning new skills in utilising Web 2.0 technologies would be helpful in their roles supporting teachers and students with employability issues, an impression supported strongly by the SHEEN Sharing Review. As noted in the recent report of an independent Committee of Inquiry into the impact on higher education of students’ widespread use of Web 2.0 technologies (entitled ‘Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World’ ):

   “[…] the dispositions developed through engagement with Web 2.0 technologies – to communicate, participate, network, share etc – overlap with what are viewed both as significant 21st century learning skills and 21st century employability skills.”

3. Benchmarking the ECN

   ECN members communicate less frequently than they would like, largely due to time constraints and issues of information overload, with all forms of communication tending to occur monthly or less. The ability to communicate privately and in a targeted way is valued, as are opportunities to meet in person, or to utilise tools which simulate the informality and support of face-to-face meetings.ECN members use bookmarking as the primary method of saving resources they have found, which points to social bookmarking as a possible way forward for SHEEN Sharing. They tend to rely on Web searching to find resources again, and email to share resources with colleagues. However, a considerable number of ECN members have low confidence in their own efficiency and effectiveness with finding, sharing, disseminating and re-discovering resources; un-surprising given their desire for the SHEEN Sharing project to help with this.

   To date, ECN members have some experience in their personal lives with social networking tools, but not much enthusiasm for them, and less experience with the main resource sharing and dissemination tools required for SHEEN Sharing. However, they strongly support the major aims of the project: sharing opinions, practice tips and ideas around resources with ECN colleagues and other stakeholders, and improving their own efficiency and effectiveness in sharing resources.

Diigo Training Dates and Venues

Look here (and save this URL) for details re our upcoming Diigo training days. I’ll update this page as soon as possible with further details such as maps, exact times and parking instructions. If you haven’t already done so, please email me your RSVP regarding which training day you want to attend.

*** IMPORTANT ***

*** All participants: please download and follow these instructions before coming to your Diigo training session. The instructions are to get you a Diigo account, get the Diigo Toolbar installed on your computer, and get your existing bookmarks and favorites imported into Diigo before we start ***

************************************************************

29 June, 12-3pm, Aberdeen, Robert Gordon University.

*** Update: read my reflections on the first training day here ***

Contact our kind host James Dunphy re parking or other venue queries.

Please bring a wifi-enabled laptop if you have one!

Venue details: Room A52 in the St Andrews Street Building (Aberdeen AB25 1HG). This building is around 15mins walk from the train station:

21 July, 12-4pm, Glasgow, Strathclyde University.

Contact our kind host Cherie Woolmer re parking or other venue enquiries.  Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

Please bring a wifi-enabled laptop if you have one!

Venue details: Computer Lab Room 6.34, 6th Floor, Graham Hills Building, 50 George Street, Glasgow G1 1QE.

We’ll meet for lunch at 12 midday in the Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement (CAPLE) in the Graham Hills Building, after which Cherie and I will take you upstairs to the main venue.

Maps from Strathclyde website in various formats here – make sure you go into Graham Hills at the 50 George Street entrance, not the 40 George Street entrance.  It’s about a 10 minute walk from Glasgow Queen Street Station, and is the same place where we’ve met with Cherie many times.  Come to CAPLE on the 2nd floor.

23 July, 10am-1pm, Edinburgh University (King’s Buildings, a wee bit out of city centre).

Contact our kind host Ruth Donnelly re parking.  Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

Venue: James Clerk Maxwell Building (rear entrance), King’s Buildings, Edinburgh EH9 3JF (adjacent to the
Michael Swann Building).

However, it’s difficult to find the correct entrance so we will meet Ruth Donnelly and Gavin McCabe at the Michael Swann Building and they will take us to the venue.

Directions and map for the venue available here.

Full circle: JISCmail announce Diigo (and other tools) support

SHEEN Sharing started up largely because members of Scotland’s Employability Co-ordinators’ Network (ECN) were finding sharing resources about employability in a useful, sustainable way tricky. They mostly communicated via their closed JISCmail list, including sending links and resources they thought would be of interest to others. But it was hard to contextualise these resources, expose them easily to other stakeholders, or even find them again.

As a result, this project is getting the ECN set up on fabulous social bookmarking site Diigo to share resources, with Netvibes as an external dissemination route. We just had a meeting about it yesterday in fact. See previous discussions here.

Today I opened my email to find the following from the JISCmail List-Owners email group:

From Tuesday 16th June, every list homepage
(https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/yourlistname) and every posting stored on
the JISCMail online archives will include a bookmark/share button
which will have links to a selection of social bookmarking/sharing sites.

Social Bookmarking allows you to share, store, organise, search, tag
and manage webpages you would like to be able to revisit in the
future, or share with others. For example if a posting is made to a
JISCMail list that you know will be of interest to someone else you can
email a link to that person using our button. Alternatively you can
choose one of the social networking sites you are registered with, e.g.
Twitter or Facebook, to share the link with a group of people. You
might use the sharing button to bookmark a link to your list homepage
or a particular posting on a list that you can revisit at a later date on a
site such as Delicious.

I e-mailed them immediately to ask that Diigo be included in the available buttons in JISCmail. Turns out: they were doing that anyway! So let’s have a look on June 16th and see how we can make that work for us. There must be old links and postings in the ECN archives that we can bookmark in Diigo via JISCmail’s new tool. And some of us will keep sending links to the list, or receiving and sending links via other JISCMail lists, so it should be helpful into the future!

Next phase under way: a community ECN site plus a lovely resource sharing tool

SHEEN Sharing to date: many tools, little time
Since we kicked off in January this year, SHEEN Sharing has shown Scotland’s employability co-ordinators a lot of Web 2.0 stuff, possibly to the point of overwhelm at times. This phase has been necessary just to make sure folk start getting a glimpse of what’s out there; you can’t elicit decent requirements from people if they don’t know what’s possible. We’ve also been doing a lot of listening to the ECN’s priorities, and thinking hard about ways to meet them in the short time available. We’re now ready to recommend a couple of tools, only one of which the ECN will need to “learn”.

Priority One: sharing and recommending employability resources
While our plan to work with small groups of co-ordinators and other stakeholders in trialling different social media and other Web 2.0 tools is still burbling away in the background, the most important priority is the one that brought this project into being in the first place. The Employability Coordinators’ Network want a way to share, discuss and recommend good quality employability resources, and a way to make sure those resources (and discussion on their quality and use) can be made available to current and future stakeholders. We knew we didn’t have the resource for a formal, sustainable repository, so we’ve been investigating the freely available tools out there currently which make resource sharing and recommending, and community building, easy.

A one-stop shop for employability resources: Netvibes
We’ve now established that Netvibes will let us set up a project site for free, which will allow a place for the ECN and other stakeholders to come and find resources that the ECN has shared and discussed. Netvibes does this without us having to build a website; it pulls in stuff from anywhere on the Web using newsfeeds and widgets, and presents them in any structure you like. It can also have a public face (for stuff you want to push out to different stakeholders) and a private face (just for those with logins).

I can set up the Netvibes page; we don’t need ECN folks to do anything but feed back on how that’s looking.

A place for a community to share and discuss resources, and build a wider network of interested people
We’ve also found the wonderful social bookmarking site Diigo, which does a lot more than store your bookmarks. It meets most of our requirements, for both private and public group activities around sharing, discussing, recommending and commenting on resources.

I can set up Netvibes to make public the results of this resource sharing and discussion on Diigo (only those bits we want to be public of course!). This can be done in as fine-grained a way or as broad a way as possible. For instance, we can have a section on our Netvibes pages just for “anything related to employability”, and one on some narrow topic of interest, such as PDP for international post-grads. We could have a feed out of Diigo, appearing in the Netvibes page, just for our own group discussions on third-sector voluntary placements, alongside a feed listing everything being discussed around the world on Diigo by anyone on this topic, and some individual feeds from prominent blogs and websites in this domain. The possibilities are many and varied.

Both Cherie and I have been playing with Diigo’s numerous features in the past few weeks, and we’ve both used the words “falling in love” to describe our reaction to this very cool free tool. And don’t worry: as previously mentioned, if you are already using Delicious for your Web-based social bookmarking, it couldn’t be easier to use them both with no extra effort, or to swap over to Diigo.

The next ECN meeting
We’d like to use our slot at the next ECN meeting on June 1st to show you Netvibes and Diigo properly, with some prototype stuff set up so you can get a feel for them. We’ll be taking feedback and suggestions at this point.

Training on Diigo
From there, if folk are happy with the approach we are recommending, and with the support of the SHEEN Sharing Development Group, we’d like to set up some training sessions to get folk started on using Diigo to share, recommend and discuss resources. Our hope is that this wonderful site will take over from the ECN JISCmail list as the place to go when discussing and sharing resources with other employability co-ordinators. And of course, finding resources again that you’ve previously heard about or saved.

Finally, Cherie has noted to me that one of the things she finds exciting about Diigo is the way it allows you to find other resources out there that you hadn’t previously known of, and indeed to come across other networks of people with similar interests who may be of use to you in your work.

So, ECN members: see you on June 1st! And don’t forget to drop into one of our weekly Wednesday SHEEN Sharing webinars if you’d like a preview, a taster, or any other help with anything SHEEN Sharing related!

Planning SHEEN Sharing Trials Reprise: All the Info for Those Attending

SHEEN Sharing Tools Trials Planning Meeting at St Andrews University on Monday 6th April

This post contains all the relevant information about the meeting venue, plus some ideas about the agenda. If anyone would like to come and hasn’t yet let me know, please do, just so I can check catering numbers and also know when everyone has arrived on the day. My thanks to Pam Andrew and Pamela Small at St Andrews University for their excellent help in getting this organised.

Date: Monday 6th April 2009

Time:
10:30-11:00 Arrival, registration and tea/coffee/biscuits to refresh you after your journey (we’ll get started as soon as everyone arrives).
Lunch will be provided: let me know ASAP if you have any special dietary requirements (vegetarians have already been catered for).
Finish between 15:30-16:00 depending on how much time we need to finish all the work that needs doing.

Venue: St Andrews University
Lochnagar Room, Mansefield Building (Chaplaincy), 3 St Mary’s Place, St Andrews KY16 9UY
Please see maps: Map of main roads into St Andrews | Map showing location of meeting venue: Mansefield Building, St Andrews University | Map showing location of free car parks at St Andrews University

Transport:
– Travelling by rail:
St Andrews University is a 20-25min taxi journey from Dundee Railway Station. Cherie Woolmer and I will be getting the 08:41 train from Glasgow Queen Street which arrives at 09:59 in Dundee. We’ll then get a taxi to St Andrews. If anyone would like to share this taxi, let us know, and please give us your estimated arrival time at the station, and a mobile number if possible.

– Travelling by car:
There is no car parking available immediately adjacent to the venue, and street parking there is for a maximum of 2 hours (and you can’t just run out and add another parking ticket apparently). However, there is a free car park at the entrance to the town (Petherum Bridge Car Park). From there it’s only about 5 minutes on foot through the Bus Station to the St Andrews University Careers Centre. Please see map showing location of free car parks at St Andrews University.

Agenda:
At this meeting the SHEEN Sharing Development Group and other interested ECN folk will catch up on the project outcomes so far, namely: the requirements gathering and benchmarking exercise (introductory meetings and survey); and the Web 2.0 review (tools, review of literature and projects, expert advice). We will use this information to make decisions about how to conduct the trials period of the project from April to August 2009. Issues will include:

– Trial groups based around interests / projects / goals (what groups; who should be in them; what are particular needs of each group; should each group have a named “champion” from the Development Group?).
– How can training and support best be achieved? Initial training groups / ongoing Webinar clinics / materials?
– How will we evaluate the trials (formative and summative?). How and when will we record evaluations? What facets need to be evaluated (e.g. efficacy of our communities of practice; engagement of academics; pushing resources out to appropriate places; sustainability of solutions selected; are trialled tools sufficient or should we look at others, etc.?).
– Should we be engaging non-ECN stakeholders in some groups (e.g. academics, students, other support staff)?
– Picking up on key issues around technical barriers and IPR issues.

We’d like to invite participants to come with ideas about interest groups and projects they may like to be involved with or organise, and resources that can constitute examples of what they might like to share. Examples of Web2.0-type tools and resources folk have been involved with before may also prove useful, if you have them. But most important is to bring yourself so we can get stuff happening!

Oh, and I threw those agenda ideas together just to get you started thinking- I will come up with a more organised plan before Monday, so if you have any ideas about the day, let us know via Comments here!

Planning our trials of Web 2.0 tools

The SHEEN Sharing Development Group is having a one-day workshop to plan the SHEEN Sharing trials of Web 2.0 tools. We now have a date and venue:

St Andrews University, April 6th 2009.

Many thanks to Pam Andrew for organising this so quickly. I’ll have more details about exact venue, directions, maps etc. soon: watch this space.

Re transport: anyone who is coming by train can meet Cherie and I at Dundee Station and we’ll share a taxi to St Andrews. I’d also like to hear from people re what they think is a good start time, so folk can get there easily from all around the country. Just had our ECN Northern Co-ordinators’ Meeting today in Aberdeen and am thus very aware of travel distances and making things easy on folk.

A few further notes:

Employability Co-ordinators who aren’t formally part of the SHEEN Sharing Development Group are welcome to come: please RSVP to me: sarah.currier [at] gmail.com

It would be great if folk could come for the whole day so we have time to really explore the best options for this most important part of the SHEEN Sharing Project. However, you are welcome to attend for only half the day if that’s all you can manage. Again, let me know; it’ll be important for catering lunch if nothing else.

More details to follow. A few ideas that have emerged now that I’ve had three of the four geographical introductory meetings with Coordinators:

We will probably try to do the training/kickoff sessions for the trials face-to-face again with me travelling to relevant locations, but after that we might like to look at trialling some webinar or webconferencing tool to have regular check-ins, clinics and evaluation meetings throughout the trials. Ideas of favourite tools welcome.

We will look at appropriate groupings or interests around which to build different trial groups. For instance, I’ll be meeting with Fiona Boyle about using the Volunteering Project as one group to trial some stuff, and talking with Joy Perkins at Aberdeen University about doing the same with the International PDP Project (sorry Joy, don’t have the exact project name to hand!). Any other ideas?

We could have a look at involving interested people who aren’t formally designated Employability Co-ordinators but who have a keen interest in the work, e.g. James Dunphy at Robert Gordon University has some local academic contacts he think might be interested.

I’ll be reporting back on the results of my Web 2.0 review and requirements gathering work very soon. The final ECN Coordinators’ Introductory Meeting is this Friday in Glasgow, after which I’ll be asking the Coordinators who haven’t managed to make one of the meetings to fill in the survey online.

I’ve also interviewed folk from similar projects around the UK to glean their experience, alongside reading project outputs and things. I’ve had some great ideas from them as well as a lot of validation that our approach is sound. Thanks to George Roberts of the JISC EMERGE project, Richard Hall of the De Montfort University Learning Exchanges project, and Sheila MacNeill of JISC CETIS, a veteran of supporting Web2.0y projects and programmes.

We may get some feedback at the SHEEN Steering Group meeting on Friday as well, where they will be reviewing our Project Plan and progress to date. Busy day for Cherie and I, Friday- bit of running to the train station between meetings! Looking forward to seeing the West of Scotland Coordinators (plus one Edinburgher who couldn’t make the Edinburgh meeting). If anyone else wants to come please let me know.

Welcome to the new SHEEN Sharing Project Blog

Welcome to the first posting on the SHEEN Sharing Project Blog.  I’m Sarah Currier (my username on this blog, and in many other Web spaces: morageyrie), and I’ve been employed by the project as an external consultant to help develop resource sharing, resource dissemination, and community building for the SHEEN Employability Co-ordinators’ Network (ECN).

This blog is a place for the ECN and other interested people to find out what’s going on in the project.  It’s also a collaborative space for the ECN to share resources, tips & tricks, and their own ideas and activities related to the SHEEN Sharing Project.  As such, it’s both a sandbox for learning about Web2.0, and a resource in its own right.

To start with, the SHEEN Sharing Project Development Group will have author accounts which will allow them to post to the blog, contributing to its content.  Anyone can comment on postings, and suggest resources to be included in the various widgets in the right-hand columns.  I’ll be visiting and supporting the whole ECN over the next few months; eventually, we hope that all the employability co-ordinators will feel confident to post to the blog themselves.