Emerging themes: Web2_0 tools


Below you will find excerpts from conversations during project meetings and responses to reflexive tasks which discuss various tools used to develop the cascade framework.

 

Excerpt from discussions at the 20 October 2011 partner meeting

 

Project wiki:

We used some time during the meeting to explore the project wiki. The aim of the wiki is to facilitate our work as a distributed group and to offer space for sharing ideas and resources. Importantly, the wiki can only be read and edited by project participants, and it cannot be accessed by the general public (unlike the blog – everything we publish to the blog will be publically available. We discussed some of the wiki tools: “share this page” tool (to let others know that the content of the page has been changed, for instance, a new document has been uploaded), “enable notifications” tool (this allows the user to decide how frequently they would like to receive automatic updates whenever the content of the wiki changes), we also looked at the page history function and ways in which previous versions of the page can be restored. Finally, we discussed the function of the “personal pages” – we see it as a space for partners to store any documents they produce in the course of the project, through these pages partners will also be able to enter into dialogue with others (for instance, through commenting directly on the personal pages, adding links, comments etc.) and discuss approaches towards OERs.

 

Pilot phase toolkit:

During the meeting, we spent some time going over the toolkit developed in the pilot project and ways in which we could use the toolkit in the cascade project to help partners map their practice. We demonstrated the functionalities of the toolkit – the mapping, diagnostic and generative tool and suggested that current partners use the toolkit to map one of their modules. As mentioned above, this might become one of project tasks, details to follow – Darren and Anna will create a voicethread-based tutorial to help partners familiarise themselves with the toolkit. Also, when using the toolkit for mapping modules, it is important to go for the fully functional download version (not the online one, as it won’t save your work).