How Spotify build a product

I've been thinking about website design for a while now, especially in relation to our new University of Bristol Careers Service site (which thankfully will be up and running soon). I bought in some usability expertise from Stuart Church, and a while ago he shared with me a rather grainy photo of a slide, presumably taken from the back of a room at a talk something to do with web usablity. Unfortunatley I couldn't find the orginal source but it was so useful I re-drew it (apologies to the originator). So here it is, just in case it's of use to anyone else (and the title of the slide in question was 'How Spotify build a product')

Not like this...

Like this!

The Government Digital Service desing prinsiples are also really useful - gov.uk/design-principles

How to do the cunning plan

After my slightly tongue-in-cheek Cunning plan post last week I've been mulling it over and think it might actually have some legs. The question is how to do it; how to move students from unrealistic to realistic and unfocussed to focused in their approach to careers and employability. As a Service we are doing lots on this already but I'm just wondering (thanks for the encouragement, Andy) if the model will help students understand what we are trying to do (I'm sure there are models like this in careers theory already, I just haven't read any, so I'm making my own up to help me think it through).

I mentioned that we need to be 'careful not to discourage ambition' and I think that's all about starting early. You can be as ambitious as you like as long as you start early preparing for it. Ashely Hever quoted Paul Redmond in a tweet last week saying that "first year is the new final year at university", and I think he's onto something there.

Focused

This is where advice and guidance is really important - helping people figure out what they are suited to and what they would like to do. During a student's first year it's not unusual for them to be very unsure about what they want to do, and in the first year this is fine. There are loads of opportunities to try things out and figure out what a person likes and is suited to. It's only a problem when someone is in their final year and they are filling in applications to be a teacher, a police officer, an accountant and apply for postgraduate study all at the same time because they don't know what they want to do (you need a back up but you need to have some clue as well!).

Realistic

If someone comes to us at the beginning of their first year and says they want to be an investment banker, that's fine too (as long as they are doing a relevant degree - you have to start even earlier to get that bit right). We'll probably advise them to join the Traders and Investors Society, get some relevant work experience during their vacations, aim to get a relevant internship between their second and third year, that kind of thing. If they come to us in their final year and say they want to be an investment banker and they've done nothing that's relevant up to that point (this happens), then we have a problem.

So, this is just a brain dump for me to come back to and a chance to get some comments from others to check my understanding...

Identifying employability in the curriculum

By andercismo

I've had a couple of snatched conversations with Richard (our Career Development Manager) recently about identifying employability in the curriculum. Academic departments are now much more keen to engage with us (which I'm very pleased about) because they are under increasing pressure to show how they are contributing to students' employability. This has resulted in some departments swinging from one end of the spectrum (we're not interested in employability) to the other (let's have lots of employability), which presents us with a different set of problems (I know, I know, some people are never satisfied!). One department recently approached us with the idea of a full 10 week module on careers skills featuring week 1 - CVs, week 2 - applications, week 3 interviews etc. Which whilst laudable in many ways would a) be stretching the content a bit and b) feel very bolt-on from the students' perspective. Our experience is that the more contextualised and relevant to the course of study the employability content is the better, so Rich has come up with the idea of using competencies to help departments understand what they are already doing in the curriculum that relates to employability but might not realise it.

Rich stumbled across the SHL Universal Competency Framework which identifies eight core competencies (they call them the 'great eight') that they say are crucial for good performance in the workplace. SHL define universal competencies as:

It is a single underlying construct framework that provides a rational, consistent and practical basis for the purpose of understanding people’s behaviours at work and the likelihood of being able to succeed in certain roles and in certain environments.

I know very little about SHL other than they are a commercial company, and there may well be a better list of competencies somewhere, but they seem like a useful starting point for conversations about employability, and indeed learning development, in the curriculum. The eight competencies are:

• Leading and deciding
• Supporting and co-operating
• Interacting and presenting
• Analysing and interpreting
• Creating and conceptualising
• Organising and executing
• Adapting and coping
• Enterprising and performing

You can see the descriptions of these in the table below and I reckon that students are required to do a lot of this stuff as part of their degree.

Competency	Description
Leading and deciding	Takes control and exercises leadership. Initiates action, gives direction and takes responsibility.
Supporting and co-operating	Supports others and shows respect and positive regard for them in social situations. Puts people first, working effectively with individuals and teams, clients and staff. Behaves consistently with clear personal values that complement those of the organisation.
Interacting and presenting	Communicates and networks effectively. Successfully persuades and influences others. Relates to others in a confident and relaxed manner.
Analysing and interpreting	Shows evidence of clear analytical thinking. Gets to the heart of complex problems and issues. Applies own expertise effectively. Quickly learns new technology. Communicates well in writing.
Creating and conceptualising	Open to new ideas and experiences. Seeks out learning opportunities. Handles situations and problems with innovation and creativity. Thinks broadly and strategically. Supports and drives organisational change.
Organising and executing	Plans ahead and works in a systematic and organised way. Follows directions and procedures. Focuses on customer satisfaction and delivers a quality service or product to the agreed standards.
Adapting and coping	Adapts and responds well to change. Manages pressure effectively and copes with setbacks.
Enterprising and performing	Focuses on results and achieving personal work objectives. Works best when work is related closely to results and the impact of personal efforts is obvious. Shows an understanding of business, commerce and finance. Seeks opportunities for self-development and career advancement.

So, for instance, a useful exploratory question when talking to an academic from a department could be: what are your students already doing in the curriculum that involves analytical thinking or solving complex problems, or learning  new technology, or communicating in writing (Competency: analysing and interpreting)? Presumably quite a lot. Or how about what are they doing that involves planing ahead and working in a systematic and organised way, or following directions and procedures (Competency: Organising and executing). Some competencies will be easier to identify in the curriculum than others. For instance, 'Leading and deciding: takes control and exercises leadership. Initiates action, gives direction and takes responsibility.' This is probably easier to identify outside the curriculum, perhaps in involvement in clubs and societies, but even this one you could identify some elements of in lab work and fieldwork.

Clearly these competencies were written for a different context; the workplace. But if we need to identify how students are beginning to develop workplace skills then it seems like a good place to start. Once existing employability-related elements in the curriculum are identifying we could then work to supplement these with more traditional but contextualised careers skills. It would also help us when talking to employers to articulate our students' skills in a language they understand.

What do you think - are using competencies a good idea or not? What are the disadvantages? Have you tried it already? How will academics react? Is there a more appropriate set of competencies somewhere? Do you think the idea has legs? And if it has someone must have already done this somewhere else. As I'm new to this careers stuff I could do with some help.

Inspired by Shirky

I'm sure other people have written reviews on Shirky's brilliant Here Comes Everybody (not least this interesting page on Wikipedia) so rather than attempt a review I'm just going to try and think about an application of one of his ideas in the book that I found particularly striking.

For a while now I've been thinking about how I could develop more academic skills resources for students here at Leicester (and anyone else who would find them useful for that matter) and I've come to the conclusion that I can't. At least not at the scale I'd like to. My job involves various aspects including teaching, student consultations, managing the website, overseeing our helpdesk, and resource development. The resource development bit just gets squeezed into the gaps around all the other stuff. However, without wanting to blow my own trumpet (okay, maybe just a little bit), many of the resources I've developed have been well received - having more than 50,000 views (yup, fifty thousand) and lots of good feedback. The resources are:

• the plagiarism tutorials that I started to develop in April 2007 (there are now 17 versions for different disciplines) and they've had more than 32,000 views;
• a tutorial on designing academic posters that I published in April 2009, which has had more than 18,000 views;
• and in September 2009, with Steve, the What it means to be a critical student tutorial, with more than 1,600 views.

You'll see I've tried a number of formats; the flash-based tutorial using Adobe presenter (inspired by the Vaughan Library tutorials), I once also tried to ape (briefly) the CommonCraft in Plain English videos (though you can't call your own creations that) but they were deceptively difficult to produce. The critical student one was inspired by Steve Boneham's Overview of microblogging from JISC web2practice. What I really like about this last format is:

• you don't need much technical skill (other than a good working knowledge of PowerPoint animation) to create them;
• other than PowerPoint the tools you can create them with are free (I used Screenr to do the screen capture and audio);
• neither do the tools require any installation (useful when working in an environment that restricts such things);
• when published on YouTube you can add closed captions (useful for accessibility reasons);
• it's embeddable;
• and the format is even suitable for mobile devices (like the iPhone).

So, how does this all relate to Shirky? Well, it comes back to the point that I can't develop online resources as much as I'd like too. So how about I try and demystify the process a bit and try and get others more involved (either other learning development professionals or subject academics interested in academic skills). The last chapter of Shirky's book is called Promise, Tool, Bargain, in it he says this (p.260).

Every story in this book relies on a successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users. The promise is the basic "why" for anyone to join or contribute to a group. The tool helps with the "how" - how will the difficulties of coordination be overcome, or at least be held to manageable levels? And the bargain sets the rules of the road: if you are interested in the promise and adopt the tools, what can you expect, and what will be expected of you?

Although he does say in the next sentence...

[...] the interaction of promise, tool, and bargain cannot be used as a recipe, because the interactions among the different components is too complex.

But even though he says it can't be used as a recipe, I still think it's worth a go. I could apply for funding for this but there's little of it about in higher education at the moment, in any case, I'd like to see if it can be done without funding. So...

Promise

Or why would anyone want to be involved in this project? Well, I think it's a good opportunity to contribute some valuable creative commons, open educational resources and learn some valuable new skills.

Tool

We'd need a space to discuss and collaborate on the development of the resources. It could be Twitter, it could be this blog, or it could be a space we set up especially for the purpose (as long as it was public and not a walled garden like Ning). In terms of developing the tutorials themselves I guess people could use whatever tools they liked but I think it's important that the final output should be in YouTube with closed captions for reasons of both consistency and accessibility. My recent experience, as mentioned above, has been with PowerPoint and Screenr, but people could use whatever animation (I'd love to see it done with Open Ofiice's Presentation tool) and screen capture software they were most familiar with.

Bargain

Shirky says this is difficult to pin down at an early stage, but it would include receiving feedback, comment and support from me and whoever else joins.

It might not work of course. This whole idea also relates to another of Shirky's chapters, Lowering the cost of failure, but that's probably the subject of another post. If between us we could make 5 or 10 decent tutorials I think it would be a worthwhile project.

What have I missed? If there's enough interest this post will need a part two, which will be more of a how-to, including the original template files. Who'd like to help?

We need a venue

By photonooner

After chatting to Alan and Jo on Friday I've decided that I might possibly try and organise an unconference/TeachMeet type of thing for those of us at UoL involved in teaching. I started to think about it last week and I'm thinking it might be a useful thing to do. If I was to organise one (with all those people who have offered to help) then these are some of the things we'd need from a venue (here come those nasty 'X' bullets again):

• plenty of space to break out into groups
• close to University of Leicester campus
• good wifi coverage
• facilities for/room to use digital projection
• available early evening (we thought this might be worth a go)
• refreshments - hopefully a bar

Some questions:

1. What else do you think we'd need from a venue?
2. Do you know of a suitable venue?
3. Would you be interested in coming if it was to go ahead?

Thinking about a teachmeet

Since a rather uninspiring meeting on Friday I've been wondering whether I should organise a teachmeet (www.teachmeet.org.uk)

Wikipedia says...

A TeachMeet is an organised (but informal) meeting (in the style of an unconference) for teachers to share good practice, practical innovations and personal insights in teaching with technology. These events are often organised to coincide with other educational events like the Scottish Learning Festival and the British Educational Technology and Training Show BETT.

Participants volunteer (via the TeachMeet website) to demonstrate good practice they've delivered over the past year, or discuss a product that enhances classroom practice.

TeachMeet events are open to all and do not charge an entry fee.

Do you think a TeachMeet could work in a higher education context? Do you have any experience you could share (in addition to the Organise your own advice on the TeachMeet wiki)? And do you want to help me organise one?

How to tag anna

I wrote a few weeks ago about our tagginganna project. Well, it's moving along nicely (slowly but nicely). I mentioned that we were either going to use Diigo or digress.it. If you're interested you can join our Diigo tagginganna group and then comment on our copy of Anton Chekhov.s Ward No. 6. We'd also like you to comment using digress.it which you can do at http://stujohnson.digress.it/

And if you need a bit of guidance...

Diigo

This is how you comment to our tagginganna group in Diigo

digress.it

This is how you comment via digress.it

Over to you!

Tagginganna

A  few weeks ago Mark Rawlinson (@nosnilwar) in the School of English put a project idea to me. Months ago he got me reading Anna Karenina (because I'd never heard of it!) and since then he's been thinking about a project related to it. As most other people in the world seem to know (I didn't), Anna Karenina is quite a long book, more than 900 pages, the problem that Mark commonly experiences in tutorials is where students can't quite remember where they read something. They have experienced reading a book (often a very long book) but they can't pinpoint in the text where a particular theme, or idea, or event can be found. It therefore usually relies on the expertise and knowledge of the tutor to remember key sections for them. Mark's suggestion was to task students with reading a paper copy of a book in the conventional way but then ask them to tag or comment on an online version of the book. The tagging and commenting would need to be visible to a defined group and, importantly, searchable.

Rather than test the project out on 900 pages of Tolstoy, Mark suggested that we start with a short story, so we're using Ward no. 6 by Anton Chekhov (both this and Anna Karenina, and many others are available via Project Gutenberg).

Alan blogged about the project after an early meeting a few weeks ago, since then I've been thinking more about what tools to use for the tagging and commenting bit. Two tools seem like they might work:

1. http://www.diigo.com
2. http://digress.it

Diigo

Diigo's strap line is 'Highlight and Share the Web!' and describes itself as 'a powerful research tool and a knowledge-sharing community'. Alan didn't like diigo but it's growing on me (not least since I connected it up to my delicious account, but that's another post). The groups feature is the bit that looks like it's going to be the most useful for this project, and I've created a tagginganna group (which you can request to join if I haven't invited you already) and put the text of Ward no. 6 on a Wordpress site (am I allowed to do that?). I haven't tested it yet because no one has yet joined the Diigo group - so come and join in the fun!

Digress.it

Digress.it 'is a plugin for WordPress that lets you comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text'. The blurb looks great (although I've had some issues with dodgy script):


I don't have WordPress downloaded and hosted so I'm using Digress.it to host the project instead. You can find it here and, once you have a digress.it account (which looks confusingly similar to a WordPress account but is actually different), you can start commenting.

So, please help!

Student Devlopment on Twitter

I recently created a Twitter account for Student Development here at the University of Leicester (http://twitter.com/uolsd). I now need to decide what I'm going to do with it. As you'll see I've already tweeted from it a couple of times, but I need to know what students will find most useful and what the etiquette should be for a more institutional type account. So here are some questions.

1. What kind of things should I tweet about? Forthcoming events, relevant resources, different services we offer - anything else?
2. How often should I tweet from it (I don't want to annoy people)? I was thinking maybe once a day?
3. If students follow me (it) should I (it) follow them? Is that the polite thing to do or might some consider that snooping?
4. What about a picture - currently it's just :)
5. How do I explain it to students who don't currently use Twitter? I was thinking a direct link from our website for those who do and a link to an information page about how it might be useful for those who don't (plus an RSS feed in of tweets).

Is there anything else I need to bear in mind?

How to boil an egg

Every now and then our team shares ideas about their teaching - things that have worked and things that haven't. One of the problems I'm often faced with is wanting to make learning experiential but being limited by teaching large numbers of students (50+), in a short space of time (1 hour) in an inappropriate teaching space for experiential learning (a lecture theatre).

One of my particular frustrations was (is) trying to teach presentation skills by telling rather than by doing (because of the limitations mentioned above). This isn't anything ground breaking  but here are a couple of slides I've used recently to try and get students experiencing what it's like to present from a text heavy slide versus a visual slide. I get them to pair up and have a go and then take feedback on how they found it.

Does anyone else have any bright ideas?

IT peer support

Well, the IT peers support paper has been sent to our Student Experience Enhancement Committee and we'll wait and see what they say about it on 8 May. The paper requests funding for a 12 month 0.5 post to coordinate an IT peer support scheme. The costs of the project don't include the cost of paying students to do the peer support because we're asking for volunteers to join an IT peer support programme validated by the Leicester Award. We're hoping it will prove an innovative and helpful way of extending the IT peer support available to both campus-based students and distance learners alike. Do you know anyone else who is doing something similar? Does anyone have any advice.