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!

Higher Education Academy: EvidenceNet, Employability and SHEEN Sharing

On June 9th, Cherie Woolmer (SHEEN Sharing project lead at the University of Strathclyde) and I went to York to have a chat with the Higher Education Academy’s EvidenceNet folks, and also some of their employability experts.

We started with a very nice lunch (thanks HEA!) and then I gave them an up-to-the-minute presentation outlining SHEEN Sharing’s work, which you can see embedded at the end of this post. We showed them this blog, our Twitter feed, and most importantly, our prototype Employability Netvibes site, and talked about how we are going to use Diigo to share and discuss resources, and disseminate those resources and discussions.

We then heard from the Heather Fotheringham and Sarah Heaton about EvidenceNet – which is to be a new repository for evidence in support of good teaching and learning practice, including resources, events and “networks” (in other words you can search EvidenceNet to find groups and organisations of interest). The plans sounded excellent- good sound repository development for Phase 1, and some exciting plans for Phase 2 in supporting communities of practice using EvidenceNet with Web 2.0 / social software applications.

We were lucky enough to have arrived on the day that Sarah was presenting the near-final launch version of EvidenceNet to the whole Academy group involved in it, and, I guess we impressed enough with our enthusiasm for both repositories and Web 2.0 that we were invited to this meeting. I can say that so far it looks great- a really nice, clean, attractive and usable interface (this is based on sitting in a presentation for 15 minutes you understand) and a lot of good clear thinking gone into how the repository will work for users.

They’ve built the thing from scratch, BTW- well, by “from scratch” I mean they’ve harnessed some existing technologies like a commercial CMS and a search engine and so forth, rather than using an existing off-the-shelf repository tool like intraLibrary or ePrints. (It would certainly be interesting from this point of view to get them involved in the various repositories communities to share the different perspective this must have wrought).

They’ve been brave enough to try to create a faceted search interface: it’s never easy to do this in a usable way for people who aren’t librarians or post-doc researchers! But from what I saw it’s looking pretty good. So you can filter your search by resource type, discipline and pedagogic themes.

However, they’ve also made adding vocabulary terms for these facets a mandatory metadata element. Be interesting to see how that goes: one of the more annoying and time-consuming parts of metadata creation even for cataloguers, never mind non-professionals. There are always resources which don’t fit any of your vocabulary terms, too. Still, I suppose you’ve got to aim for the thing you want and see how it goes. They do have people checking metadata quality as well, which was music to my ears.

Some concerns I had before going down were a little allayed- like how were they going to make sure they got lots of current, useful content into the repository? They’ve been working with the HEA Subject Centres, some of the CETLs, and I think other groups as a trial for getting specific communities of practice involved in contributing content- and they say they have some fancy metadata migration tools that help people create metadata simultaneously for their local repository and in EvidenceNet. It’s looking like they will have ca 3000 resource records already in Phase 1. They are looking at all sorts of stuff around where content should be hosted, how metadata should be shared, etc. There was a fair bit of discussion around the pain of metadata creation: Jane Kettle, an HEA employability adviser, found herself spending more time than she thought possible on creating metadata for employability resources! Cherie was quick to empathise after spending a good few hours tagging her bookmarks in Diigo for SHEEN Sharing.

They are trying to keep their remit very clearly defined: it’s about evidence for good teaching and learning practice, not learning objects, for instance (so they are complementary to Jorum). They are for teaching practitioners as well, so they do not intend to compete with services that support researchers, although inevitably there will be some overlap in both LOs and research.

One great concern for them and us was making sure they utilise the possibilities of Web 2.0 as fully as possible during their Phase 2 roll-out later this year. Probably the worst thing would be some kind of half-way house approach that is a bit Web 2.0y but doesn’t fully engage with how this stuff can really power your resource sharing, sharing of teaching and learning practice, and dissemination. A lot of people will be watching and waiting to see what they achieve; whether it can be of use to educators. They have been, and will continue to seek out the ideas and feedback of the UK HE community.

I harped on mostly about how they needed to have lots of juicy feeds capability to enable people to grab, display, disseminate or just remain informed of resources in all kinds of flexible ways. When I showed them the different feeds and Yahoo pipes we make available in our Netvibes site, they were gratifyingly enthused, so I hope they take that on board! Given that intraLibrary has been offering feeds based on searches (simple and advanced), browse terms, colleactions, tags, etc., for some time now, I don’t think there is any excuse for a repository not to be offering this.

I’d also quite like them to have the ability to ingest things in various ways (feeds, SWORD) so that relevant content can be pulled in or viewed in ways that work for how the different communities using EvidenceNet share. For instance, SHEEN Sharing is sharing resources (with tags, descriptions, discussions) using Diigo- wouldn’t it be great if EvidenceNet could just pull that stuff into its catalogue without much further effort?

This leads into the main reason SHEEN Sharing was there: how might EvidenceNet support our exit strategy and sustainability? Well, we got as far as offering to stay in touch, to host them in a return visit soon, and possibly engage the ECN as another community who might contribute resources. We’ve also given them our literature review, and benchmarking / requirements reports, to help support their own requirements gathering for Phase 2.

We also had some discussion about the employability agenda north and south of the border and how the differences impact the work employability staff do in England and Scotland. But that’s more Cherie’s area- I’ll wait and see if she wants to say anything.

Here are the slides I showed them re SHEEN Sharing- have a look for an up-to-date summary:

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