Student Essay Competition

Win £300 and have your work published

"'Flexible learning' is a current buzz phrase; how do you envisage the perfect flexible learning course?"

The Higher Education Academy's Information and Computer Science Subject Centre, is inviting students the chance to submit their opinions and experiences in an essay or podcast/vidcast form. This opportunity is open to anyone studying Computing or Library and Information Science as part of their higher education course. International students studying at a UK institution are more than welcome to enter. However, UK or non-UK students studying at institutions outside of the UK are unfortunately not eligible for the award.

The competition asks if students can express their views and write a 1,000-word essay or record a five-minute podcast/vidcast on: "'Flexible learning' is a current buzz phrase; how do you envisage the perfect flexible learning course?".

Further details can be found at the following url: http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/student_central/competition_essay_details11.htm

Deadline for entries is Thursday 31st March 2011

You might have noticed that the twitter feed on the frontpage of RedGloo has stopped updating, showing some old tweets.

This is due to a change in Twitter authentication, so that they only authenticate against the oauth method. This is probably a good change - unfortunately - it isn't the one we used. I need to change this, which I will do once I have time, probably taking me into next week.

The code, which we have produced, is open source and can be found at: http://code.google.com/p/asset-feedback/

Hi again!

Just to let you all know that the team at Reading are in the process of developing a set of new promotional materials, which will primarily focus on the use of video for feedback, rather than on the ASSET project. This will include a series of A5 flyers, an A4 'how to' guide (for Reading staff), a new banner, poster, postcards and we are also investigating USB drives and pens.PDFs of all of these will be made available on the website when they are finalised.

I will be updating the website so that it is 'complete' by the end of the project, so please let me know if you think of anything that should be made available on there or you would like to see on there

Robyn

This afternoon we have experienced a on/off downtime, as in random uptime. This stems from the Twitter feed, which seemed to be getting random access errors from twitter this afternoon. The error wasn't dealt with appropriately, thus randomly killing RedGloo.

I think I've dealt with it now, but if you do experience it, please contact me...

Hey everyone!

Sorry for the long silense...I just realised that the last update I made was in April!

As you can see from Karstens last post, we are making progress with the new 'framework'...videos play fine in Redgloo, and Karsten has now got them working pretty much OK in Blackboard too. We are meeting with the CDoTL team tomorrow to discuss the best way to provide help aand support for this new system. After this Karsten and I will be setting to work creating the videos and support documents for staff and students.

We had 2 focus groups back in April with a total of 5 people attending - I will send the mp3 and rough transcripts to those who want them - just email me! Although unfortunately the audio recording quality isn't brilliant...

Today we sent out a case study pro-forma to 5 staff memebers who used ASSET, so I hope to have their videos up on the website sometime in July.

We are now starting to prepare for a meeting with pilot staff and others involved int he project to give them an update on where we are with the new Blackboard framework, and also to tell them about how the project has gone, and show them some of the data we have collected, I will try and let you all know how it went...

I think that's about it for now...

Robyn

With the start of the new term we decided to have one last go at recruiting students for two focus groups (one yesterday and one on Tuesday next week), and have been successful! We had 4 student sattend yesterday, and are expecting 3 students to attent the one on Tuesday!

I will be emailing the team a copy of the mp3 from these next week, so hopefully we will be able to gather some richer data from these two meetings.

Just another quick update on what we've been upto...

The website has been undergoing a bit of a transformation, as we've been working hard to update it with everything thatthe team has been doing in the last 18 months - I've pretty much finished this now...with the team photo taken at today's meeting being added to the Project team page!

We have also now closed the student survey, and have just started to look at this data - initial impressions are good...and more about this will go up on the website as and when we have it! The staff survey is still open at the moment, and we will be trying to get the last few responses for this before too long...

I just wanted to post a quick update on the website. I have now finished most of the pages, although there are still a few that I'm working on, and will hopefully have these finished in the next couple of weeks. You may see that there are now a lot more documents online, this was initially needed for the final report to JISC, but I hope that this will provide useful to visitors to the site as well.

Please let me know if there is anything else that I should add (or if you spot a mistake!)