Funded by JISC
Introduction
Two main questions provide the motivation for the SkillClouds project:
- Can tag clouds help students to engage with the skills that they have acquired and developed during their time at university?
- To what extent can Web 2.0 approaches, such as social bookmarking, support administrative processes like the recording of information from module and programme specifications?
The SkillClouds project will explore how tag clouds might help students visualise their emerging skills set.
We are working closely with undergraduate students who are participating in a Career Development Course. This module introduces students to the fundamental principles of successful, lifelong career development so this group will be well-placed to comment on effective ways of presenting skills information.
Each tag cloud will be formed from two sets of data - the skills recorded by the student that may have been obtained outside the formal curriculum (for example through volunteering schemes or employment) and those acquired from the student's educational experiences. The latter will be drawn from an institutional database and we will examine how a social bookmarking approach might support the administrative task of recording skills data for modules and programmes.
The skillcloud shown on this page is a screen shot from the pilot currently running in Sussex Direct for selected groups of students. It is based on a student within Biology and Environmental Sciences, but many of the skills displayed would be common to students within other programmes.
We will pilot the use of social bookmarking for recording skills (as tags) against modules (as urls) with a small group of curriculum administrators. Whilst the task of defining skills for given courses is different from tagging web sites, our hypothesis is that element of the social bookmarking system's interface would support administrators. In particular, we expect the ease of identifying existing tags afforded by social bookmarking services to be of value.
The two parts of the SkillClouds project are complementary and will provide a thorough grounding for an investigation of the advantages of social bookmarking and tagging approaches to the design of systems to support learning and teaching.
Some background on skills and employment
The ability of graduates to identify skills they have gained while at university is something that employers rate highly in selecting candidates (Yorke, 2006) and all HE and FE degree programmes, and their associated courses or modules, have outcomes that are skills orientated. These skills are, however, often 'hidden' within the curriculum. A key factor underlying this problem is the varieties of taxonomies of 'skills': for example, the Dearing Report emphasises 'key skills'; other terms used in institutional, academic and governmental discourses include 'graduate attributes', 'transferable skills', 'employability skills', 'enterprise skills', 'capabilities', 'personal competences'. Messages communicated to students about the nature of the skills embedded in their study (and the importance of those skills) can, therefore, be poorly expressed or can easily get lost. The challenge as we see it is to address this situation in a dynamic imaginative and student-centred way.