Alex Little

Have been pretty busy last couple of weeks (hence no postings) and had few days off work here and there too! Much of my time has just been getting MSG ready and installed on our acceptance test servers, ready for the launch of MSG Presence Maps on LabSpace and LearningSpace on 17th May. All seems to be running fine now after a bit of fiddling around.

Have now started to think what we do to get more information into MSG from users’ OpenLearn profiles and what would be the most relevant infomation to show to try and get people chatting to each other. One of the problems I think we’re having with people not using MSG that much is because it’s essentially just a list of names, there’s no way of knowing about that person & whether they’re ‘worth’(!) chatting to or not. So … my thoughts on the aspects we could include…

1. biography info – getting the info/biography info users can enter in Moodle
2. courses in common – using the fact that you are enrolled on the same, say, 5 courses as user X means you’re more likely to want to chat with them than someone who only has one course enrolment in common with you?
3. forum/learning journal postings – finding the number and ratings of other users forums postings to discover their reputation, eg if their forums posting are rated highly you are more likely to want to chat to them?
4. photos – just grab users photo (if they’ve submitted one) from Moodle to show within MSG.

Much of this is guesswork and supposition, until we give it a go we’re not really likely to know what’s going to work. These are based on what may be currently available form the OpenLearn system (rather than things we’d need to first build into Moodle). Also, still not sure whether to just focus on a subset of these or all would be needed to create a useful system.

Any thoughts/comments/suggestions welcome as to whether including and or all of these would be good (or bad!) – or if I’ve missed anything I ought to include