Brad’s Ve-learning project

The boss was looking at social software as a forum appropriate to meetings & issues for senior staff (IMC).  She has her concerns re the lack of security on basic blogs & wikis.  She suggested I meet with Leona Norris, formerly involved with the veLearning project http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/course/enrol.php?id=771 incl the eMentoring exercise, particularly in the techie side of things, including the Edna groups area.

We discussed setting up an Edna site as a secure option of IMC, & it looks quite promising.  We also discussed a heap of other stuff, including useful blogs, VOX as a blogsite (looks interesting), Elgg as an educator’s MySpace & Protopage (mentioned by Leigh Blackall last week in the elluminate session). 

We seem to be spending a considerable amount of time looking at the educational use of social software, with eLearning being urged on by our most Senior Departmental staff.   At the management end I suspect that there is minimal, if any, use of such software.  Yet the corporates, from some reports, are playing with blogs & wikis etc.

The earlier attempt at a Del.icio.us account for our library was not specifically educational in intent, but administrative.  Such a common weblinks approach could easily be duplicated in any admin area of the organisation.  And our Director-General’s message comes by email – why not blog ?

From an email exchange with Val Evans I made this point We also keep looking at the teaching opportunities. These will get nowhere unless they are also effectively used by the educational administrators themselves i.e. at the top end, on the corporate side.”   Her response: “absolutely agree and your point is definitely backing up some of our early findings. Two great examples of social software being modelled … is its use at a project management level by the  eLearning Creative Community Partnership project managers and NSW LearnScope. Check their stories out at http://elearnala.wikispaces.com/research and http://nswlearnscope.wikispaces.com/research  respectively. By being modelled at this level we can see it being used by projects under their umbrellas and then at the next level with students at the frontline. Some great stories coming through demonstrating this at all three levels. How to get senior managers to use it is another challenge but we are also finding great stories of that happening in corporations external to VTE – check out Nigel Paine’s story of its use with the BBC through a http://www.datarchive.co.uk/dpx_demo2/dpx.php?cmd=autoplay&type=autofocus&pres=2255&media=wm&dpxuser=ambient

I was very impressed with Nigel’s presentation !

So lets look right across the organisation !