Publications and presentations on the SkillClouds project
Making It Personal 2009
We have submitted an abstract to the 7th E-learning Greenwich conference Making It Personal 2009. Our proposed report would focus on the personalisation aspects of SkillClouds and would explore the ways in which the SkillClouds tool has helped to encourage a skills dialogue at the University.
Read the abstract here.
Blended Learning Conference 2009
We will be presenting a paper at the Hertfordshire University Blended Learning Conference 2009. The paper will explore the ways that different students had access to an understanding of skills and of how to articulate their skills to employers. Some of the students we interviewed talked about the fears they had of being seen as 'boasting' or 'arrogant'. Other students talked with confidence about how their parents had helped them to understand the skills they were acquiring.
We will explore these ideas in the context of the 'hidden curriculum' and in terms of inequities in higher education.
Read the BLU 2009 abstract here.
ALT-C 2009: In dreams begins responsibility
We have submitted an abstract to the ALT-C 2009 conference which focuses on the issue of personalisation. Personalisation emerged from our interviews with students as an extremely important factor in gaining engagement. In the abstract we talk about the various options we had for building some personalisation into SkillClouds, and how successful these were.
Read the ALT-C 2009 abstract here.
UCISA 2009 Conference
We took a poster up to the UCISA 2009 conference in Liverpool as part of their poster session. UCISA represents higher and further education institutions in terms of their information systems, so we felt this was an important group to engage with. Our poster gave a general overview of the SkillClouds project and how it could help students to engage with skills.
Read the UCISA 2009 abstract here.
View the poster here.
Presentation to school and department management teams, October 2008
This presentation describes the rationale and approach of the SkillClouds project and outlines our key findings. It contains a brief demo of the SkillClouds tool that is available for groups of students for evaluation purposes during Autumn term 2008.
Read a pdf of the presentation
Read a one-page summary of the key points
ALT-C 2008: Rethinking the digital divide
On 10th September 2008, we presented at ALT-C on work to date with the SkillClouds project. We focused in particular on the user-centred design work we've done with students, and on the analysis of the skills user journey that has emerged from this.
Read a short paper based on the talk.
Shock of the Old 2008
On 3rd April 2008, we attended the "Shock of the Old 2008: The Connected Future" conference at Oxford and presented a paper about the SkillClouds project.
We reported on the background of the SkillClouds project, and described in some detail an experiment we had recently carried out in which we invited undergraduate students to search for three local services such as plumbers using a web page that contained both a tag cloud and a text entry search box. 89% of our sample of 116 students used the tag cloud for at least one of their searches and 65% of our sample used the tag cloud for all three of their searches. We reported on themes emerging from the interviews that we carried out with all the participants.
Download the presentation as a powerpoint file.
Read a short paper covering the findings in greater detail.