Wow, it's already the end of December and things are hectic around here. The SPLASH project has had a new life injected into it with version 0.2 beta, better coded widgets (for load and cache purposes), messaging service (almost like threaded conversations) and a wide variety of user settings to control who sees your blogs/messages/profile and widgets...
Meanwhile, the dialogue opening up within SPLASH has started to explode quite rapidly over a very short period. Remember the earlier discussion on the Case Studies and some of the people who would be involved in the dissemination of SPLASH?
Here is the on-going work we are currently getting stuck into:
History departmentDr. Lucy Robinson is championing a very interesting way forward of how SPLASH could be used for her students within both the BA/MA courses in the department. January 2009 and the beginning of Semester 2 at the University sees the
'Video Documetary in Contemporary History' commencing for the MA students. Lucy is also looking to use the site as a means in which to get Year 1 students of the course involved.
Lucy sees using SPLASH as follows:
1. Blogs specific to courses/groups/communities, including the incorporating of pre-designed blog templates that are either brought into the site OR are readily available from within SPLASH/Study Direct
2. Messaging service to induce conversation & debate within contextual areas, (tracking progress of discussions)
3. Utilising the profile area to publicise latest discussions, current projects and any other work on-going that is relevant to students
Lucy wants a very clear strand within SPLASH for her students:
Students -------------->Year Group (within a course)
Students -------------->Personal Reflection
These 2 avenues will be sit side-by-side within SPLASH and be easily reachable by all users of the site. The idea is to incorporate the site into the constant tracking of students work, thoughts, ideas and suggestions throughout their relevant subjects. Lucy uses Study Direct vastly for her documentation and week-by-week schedule, which is extremely valuable for all of her students. I have seen first hand how she has adopted Study direct to act as a one stop shop, whereby relevant documents, lecture notes and guidance notes on coursework can be obtained.
Within this, Lucy wants to adopt the power of SPLASH v0.2 in being able to publish information to specific groups, whether it be regarding course updates, interesting research material or commencing discussion around critical theory. This essentially will take SPLASH into a very different arena than what it was originally intended for and am I therefore really excited to see where this could take us in the coming months, particularly directly after the upcoming holidays...
Research DepartmentSo, the Research department contacted us a little while back and came to us with this problem:
"Currently, our Research students are unable to search for subjects that others are researching, in order for individuals (DPhil students) to come together and converse on their respective areas, possibly to share resources and act as a way in which to build our Research community".
We knew that SPLASH could help in this way. How?
PROFILES!
All Research students are able to use SPLASH as they are affiliated with the University and therefore can go straight into building their profile and associate their presence with 'tags'. The tags would list all of their Research specialisms and areas of interest, that become instantly searchable through 'User tags' within the Search area on the site.
We are working with Gail Barrett and Kathleen Fincham to facilitate workshops from January 2009 for both the Research Students and Staff to show them how to use SPLASH to create their presence and also how to interact with the functions on the site to blog, message and set up their individual profiles.
-----------------------------
The facilitation of a 'Showcase' event on the 20th January, 2009 at the InQbate creativity zone has been discussed with Diane Brewster, (facilitator of the space) in inviting Product Design students to see how the SPLASH site works and continue the 2nd part of dissemination that occured earlier this year in Summer.
Recently, the InQbate centre hosted a 3 day event: 'The Big picture' that has been initially documentated by means of a blog on the SPLASH site, which I will talk about later this week here in the tech blog...
Social Work department and Cath Holmstrom are also on board in rolling out some interactivity with her Year 1 students and this will become more apparant from January 2009 also. This is predominantly in relation to her students who spend a considerable amount of time off-campus, either as part-time or for students who are working within their placements.
Usability TestsThe last 2 weeks also saw us working in unison with CDEC in order to bring together five different students from different academic disciplines for usability tests on v0.2 beta. Screen recording software was used to document their sue of the site and heavy transcription of their questions, thoughts, opinions and responses to the site was recorded for later dissemintation. These results will be published online later in a detailed breakdown...
Initial viewing of the results shows SPLASH to have been accepted well, both in terms of intuitive interface as well as access to information. I'm very excited about that and how JISC will react to what we have to show them.
Alongside this, a task-based questionnaire was put together for students who are based predominantly off-campus. This questionnaire is open until the end of January 2009 and will add to the usability results for the site. Further details on this due in a later blog.
It's all go and a lot of paperwork heaps to be filed early next year. Parallel projects are all running alongside the dissemination of the site, but we hope to package all of the case studies and results in a manageable form for viewing by all next year..
Right, back to my emails...
