As some Auricle readers will know I’m seconded to the Higher Education Academy where, among other things, I’m helping get the national HE e-learning benchmarking exercise (e-benchmarking) underway. We’ve got twelve UK HEIs taking part in the pilot phase of e-benchmarking and three consultancies supporting the initiative. We are using some interesting, and for some participants, novel, approaches to project communications which Auricle readers may find of interest.
As anyone who has been involved in major projects will know, it takes some time to get underway but we’ve been picking up pace since our January 2006 start. To help make dissemination a more dynamic and continual process (rather than a terminal event:) all participants, including the Academy, are maintaining their own weblogs.
Although weblogs have become a standard part of a communications toolkit for some of us, I’ve been surprised by the apparent lack of penetration into UK HEI provision. Some of our participating HEIs having to work quite hard to make this possible. At times, institutional policies have had to be adjusted to take account of our desire that each pilot site host its own weblog and therefore remain its own information owner. Something which may take 5 minutes to install may require between a few days to a few months of negotiation within systems informed by IT policies which, in the extreme cases, sometimes feel as though they have been setup to inhibit information flow and communications rather than facilitate them. Sometimes, as I’ve indicated in earlier Auricle postings it’s just easier to go off-campus than navigate the tortuous paths of IT policy change. Ultimately, however, if users have to continually do this it will begin to call into question the nature and affordances of institutional e-learning provision.
Nevertheless, thanks to the efforts of our pilot sites we are nearly there and so if you’re interested, all available weblogs and related sites are accessible from the Academy weblog.
We are also using non public weblogs for reporting of progress as close as possible to an event or visit happening. The concept here is of small reflective meals frequently rather than one feast at the end. Having said that, all of this is still a work-in-progress, so for more details you will have to wait until later in the year.
—- Scott Wilson Comment 19 Apr 06 —–
Hi Derek,
You may be interested to see that we’re using weblogs for loose collaboration between teams on a group of related development projects – MINTED, JoinIn, BEWT, and the ES-SDK. So far, so good – take a look at http://enterprisesdk.blogspot.com/ (the others are linked in the sidebar).
One immediate advantage has been that inter-project communications (especially troubleshooting fixes etc) are in the public arena, unlike a traditional email-based approach. This opens up the experiences of the teams to a wider group, where previously the only way at the intelligence generated from the work was by reading the final report or by emailing a former project member.
Early days still, but it looks promising.
-S
