Start date: 1 February 2008
End date: 30 April 2009
Funding programme: Users & Innovation: Personalising Technologies
Project website:
http://www.bloomsbury.ac.uk/apt
JISC theme(s): Information environment, e-Administration
Committees: JISC Integrated Information Environment committee
Overview
New web technologies present exciting opportunities to enrich teaching, learning and research. To move beyond the “early adopters” and to get the majority of users using these innovative technologies effectively, it is necessary to identify current users’ needs and capabilities and to meet their requirements in a way that supports gradual development of their competence and confidence.
This project aims to develop students’, teachers’, administrators’ and researchers’ technological capabilities to support collaborative learning and working. These diverse groups of users will come together through a simple step-by-step approach to adopting technology which, based on experience and research within the Bloomsbury Colleges consortium, has been shown to bridge the gaps between different user constituencies.
Aims and objectives
The overall aim is to address how to bridge the technological gap between different user groups experience in the adoption of Web 2.0 tools.
Objectives:
- Research – deriving a comprehensive overview of existing practice and the impact of new technologies across the consortium;
- Development – adapting existing collaborative web technologies to ensure they meet the needs of project stakeholders;
- Implementation – introducing and trialling collaborative online tools in a range of different HE scenarios;
- Evaluation – using established JISC procedures to monitor impact, benefits and lessons learnt during the project;
- Dissemination – making the results of the research and development available both internally and externally.
Project methodology
The project consists of five principle phases – research, development, implementation, evaluation and evaluation. These are derived from the Users and Innovation Development Model (UIDM) and are intended to ensure a rapid and agile development process in the relatively short project time scale.
Anticipated outputs and outcomes
Outputs:
- Analysis and publication of data on the use of new web technologies based on existing work and at least five project demonstrators.
- Academic-led and student-led Bloomsbury showcases demonstrating the technologies to a local academic audience;
- A final open workshop to present outcomes to the wider education community;
- Production of project website, publicity material, e-newsletters; user guides, development documentation;
Outcomes:
- Empowering users to work and support each other using appropriate and practical technologies to bridge the “gap”.
- Institutions moving beyond the PowerPoint and VLE model of e-learning to more progressive uses of technologies such as Google Apps, wikis and blogs.
- Identification of technical and organizational issues relating to the use of collaborative learning.
- Application of the UIDM to support rapid development of e-learning tools.
Technology / Standards used
- Authentication/Authorisation Layer: LDAP, FAM (Shibboleth), OpenID
- Transport Layer: SOAP, ReST, WSDL, WADL, OSID
- Object Layer: Atom Publishing Protocol, GData
Overall, the project will attempt to use a lightweight approach when possible (ReST), however due to legacy system integration, often heavyweight standards will be required (WS*). In addition, when bridging lightweight and heavyweight protocols hybrid API wrappers such as OSID could also be implemented. All documentation and reports will be published under a Creative Commons license. Any code will be published as an Open Source BSD license.
Lead Institution
Project partners