Alex Little

Apologies to those of you who I didn’t get to see when I went up to the OU a couple of days ago, but hopefully I’ll be up again soon (maybe for the open unlimited day in couple of weeks), here is a very brief summary of the days FAQs (in hindsight I should probably just have done presentation at the OU!):

How am I feeling?
Good, although not yet 100%

What’s wrong with me?
Not yet sure, doctor has a few ideas, but nothing confirmed until I get my blood test results back sometime next week – if they say anything at all.

When am I going back?
Hopefully soon, as soon as I can get medical clearance to return. All is going to depend on when the docs find out what’s wrong and how quickly it can be sorted.

Have I made a difference?
Difficult to tell, probably better asking my colleagues, obviously I hope that I have, but maybe it’ll take a little while for anything to show.

Am I enjoying it?
Certainly, despite getting ill, I’m very keen to get back asap.

When am I coming back to UK?
Unsure yet, my contract is due to finish in Sept, but I’ve requested an extension to my contract, so might not be until March 2010 (if my extension is approved)

What am I going to do when I come back?
hmmm… not sure yet!

Sorry for the rather succinct answers, but you probably don’t want the full ins & outs, ups & downs of my illness!

Finally, I found this map the other day and found it quite amusing:

[Image from: GraphJam]

After over 7½ years at the OU, today is my last day. Still hasn’t quite yet sunk in that I’m leaving, or that in only 2 weeks time I’ll be beginning my placement in Ethiopia.

I’ve really enjoyed working here, in IET, KMi and on the OpenLearn team, have learnt loads and have met lots of great people.

Also thanks for all your generosity in donating to VSO to help with the work they’re doing – very close to reaching my fundraising target now

I’ll be making sure that I keep my blog up to date so you’ll be able to keep track of how things are going, so keep in touch and there’s an open invitation if you fancy a holiday in Ethiopia!

Found out this morning that the OU are going to be trialling unified messaging with MS Office Communicator. Up until now we’ve basically used email (and occasionally the phone!) to get in touch with colleagues, but we’ve never had any actual presence information alongside this  – so you’re not sure if someone is actually in the office or away on holiday (people don’t always turn on their out-of-office auto-replies).

Some of us use MSG for getting presence info to see if people are around and available and having quick chats, but there hasn’t been a big take up in the organisation for using instant messaging (well, not for work anyway!). So I wonder how much the instant messaging aspects of Office Communicator will actually get used. I guess the integration with Outlook/Exchange would have a big bearing on this. If you know that someone is in the office and free you might just call or IM them instead – so maybe we’ll see a reduction in the number of emails flying around?

Not sure what all of this means for MSG and FlashMeeting (Office Communicator also has video-calling) – though I’m sure they’ll live on, especially for communicating with people outside the organisation.

The OU SocialLearn project has been running a little ‘behind the scenes’ for the last few months and I’ve kept broadly up to date with what’s going on, but I’ve not been deeply involved (and OK, I’m still not sure what variation of the words ‘social’ and ‘learn’ make up the proper project title). Rather than me explaining it all here, Martin has posted an overview.

The SocialLearn API is now available (though I don’t think it’s public yet), so I had a catch up with my colleagues Liam and Nick, who have each been building applications using the API. Liam’s work has been on ‘Microlearner’ which links up Twitter to the SocialLearn API, so you can post learning goals to Twitter and they’ll magically be available in your SocialLearn profile. 2Learner is Nicks application, which allows you to search for resources.

From chatting to Liam and Nick it seems there’s still a way to go with the API (unsurprising as it’s a work in progress), for example, there’s currently no way to relate a resource to a learning goals, but I think this may change in the future.

The API has much in common with the Facebook API, in that there is a core set of functions and associated data on the SocialLearn server, then any applications can build upon these, but these applications are siloed, (i.e. applications can’t share any other data than that available through the API). While this might be fine for Facebook, and is entirely appropriate for that (especially with all the privacy issues involved), I’m not sure if this approach may restrict the range of applications that may be developed with the API – I’m assuming throwing buns and being bitten by vampires are not top priorities for SocialLearn.

We had a think about how we can get Cohere talking to the SocialLearn API, and what makes sense as a demonstration using the 2 existing applications. What we came up with was the ability to import your learning goals into Cohere, and then be able to organise then in a more structured way, but additionally to allow you to push out any ideas you enter into Cohere as goals in SocialLearn. Each of these will be fairly trivial to do, albeit in a not very clever way… so best get on with it ready to demo next week.

I’ve just submitted my assignment for the OUs Effective Leadership Skills course (GB003). It’s only a short course (approx 20 hours), and non-credit bearing but it’s taken me little while to get through. It’s different from most of the other OU courses as there are no fixed start and end dates, which I think the OU should probably be doing more of – though I know there are plenty of reasons as to why the OU still has fixed start/end dates for the vast majority of it’s courses (including tutor workload planning and exam timing). But there have been lots of times when I thought about doing a particular course, only to find it’s not running for another 6 months.

This course content is pretty much what I’d expected, though there was less reading than I thought there would be – especially compared to the Law course (W200) I took couple of years ago. My feeling is that most of these types of courses (e.g. effective time management etc) generally contain common sense approaches to work that you should probably know anyway – but sometimes they just need to be reinforced.

The assignment itself was very reflective and making you look at how you going to apply what you’ve learnt directly to your work, which is the whole point of doing the course in the first place, though I generally find these types of reflective activity quite hard!

Only had a couple of little niggles about the course and these are totally related to how the course delivery software (Moodle) forces content to be given to users (rather than anything to do with the course content). Firstly, that the navigation was quite poor, once you were on a content page, there was effectively only 3 links to navigate the content – (a) return to course homepage, (b) go to next page or (c) go to previous page. There was no quick way to jump back to a particular page in another section that you wanted to refer to. This is also a problem I’ve had with course content in OpenLearn (but we’re working on that one).

The second problem was that there was no search facility on the site, so the only way to try and find the page that I’d read about ‘virtual leadership’ on was to just scan through all the pages. Not a huge problem for this course (not too many pages), but frustrating nonetheless, but this would be infuriating for much bigger courses. I had a similar issue with the law course, in that we were provided with the course manuals in paper form and I asked to have the manuals in pdf format too, basically for ease of searching and for taking away with me (didn’t want to be lugging around heavy course material when I’d already got my laptop). My request for this was rejected (on what I thought was a fairly lame excuse), even though I know the manuals are produced in pdf format to send to the printers!

Hopefully as Moodle (sorry, OU VLE!) is rolled out and more courses have their full content online, this search issue will be sorted out!