Brad’s Ve-learning project

Back to Horticulture…  Spent much of the day working on the wiki, seeing how the links work out.  As with pb, I also ran into a few formatting problems with Wikispaces.  There is limited functionality as far as I can see.  My attempts to remove underlines & links kept failing to be accepted.   As an HTML novice, the easiest solution was to clear the section & format it in Word, then cut & paste.  It worked, but I am concerned that attempts at changes could result in unintended consequences.

I have to do a presentation on this project next week.  Late yesterday - Tues 28th Nov – I sent an email out to the Hort SPIG & teachers, as well as Library contacts, to test the water with the Del.icio.us weblinks, rough though they may be.  Some feedback already, we’ll see how we go from here…

OK, so I’ve spent a fair amount of time working through the lists provided by the Hort teachers.  Some of these also led elsewhere, so I’ve added a few extras along the way.

I have also looked at our previous subject links for Horticulture.  There were plenty, so I’ve added most of these that weren’t already included. 

Due to a past life in NSW TAFE I have also gone to its subject links for Horticulture, & again pillaged anything that I thought useful.

At this stage it should be a reasonably scoped list, though how comprehensive will be a job for the road testing phase.  For example

• CALM could use a host of links from all over the place, but I have kept it clean at this stage & will look to feedback. 
• I have also not included Turf to date, but I now note that it is taught up here so will keep it in mind for the future.
• I should also go through The NMIT archive emails & newsletters as it is a wealth of info.

 In the interim, however, I think I’d best concentrate on covering the original scope of the project by the presentation date!

Well the bremertafe Delicious account seems to be working reasonably well.  Time & feedback will tell (in the longer term tagged browsing should help further, when IE7 is up & running).

So now to the main point of the exercise – getting something working in an educational context.  Here the focus is on putting together & making accessible a set of subject links for Horticulture.  This has been raised with the SPIG.  To date, I have a list of sites from our own people (thanks Nick), plus a couple of lists submitted by other Hort teachers (Carol Cameron & Peter Brock).  As I have been impressed with the Delicious exercise I thought I might try to start with a similar arrangement for Hort, then look at WIKI alternative, & test both with the delivery staff to see their preferences.  We cannot quite begin with the social sharing as previously.  The first efforts were to use the info provided from these three sources & to build a set of weblinks from these.  Two of these were very similar, but together enabled the creation of a substantial number of links & the creation of a significant number of basic tags.  Theoretically, this should cover most of the needs of teachers in the area, or at least allow for the creation of some tags that will then enable identification of the other links needed to fill an area out.

An account has been created at http://del.icio.us/horticulture – now to populate it!