What can a workshop do

Yesterday the Engineering and Physical Sciences Subject Centres held a work shop on peer assessment and in particular the type of assessment that can be carried out using WebPA.

It was an interesting day for the WebPA project. We have managed to gather more interest in the project, but more importantly we have built up our fledgling community. Our JISC mail list has now increased by a 1/3 over night. We managed to capture new members by asking them to allow us to sign them up to the list.

Some of the feedback from the workshop is positive for both the project and peer assessment in general. Below are my favourite feedback responses that where received at the end of the day;

"Peer marking ideas, drawbacks, possibilities, potential of WebPA to do what I currently do long hand."

"I will introduce peer assessment into project work using the WebPA tool next year."

"Will probably seek to persuade [my institution] to join the WebPA project as a pilot institution."

"Peer assessment has to be the way forward in Higher Education, where 'Full Economic Cost' of courses holds much weight and student to staff ratios are rising rapidly."

Hopefully, we can convert attendees into adopters and in the future they may even become contributors, with some support and persuasion. But, what can a workshop do, in this case a lot for the project...

You can view the past events page on the Engineering Subject Centres website

Have I finally stopped talking to myself

Have we a break through, have I finally stopped talking to my self on the JISCmail list? Well it is a possibility, or I have just touched a nurve. For months I have been posting comments and questions to our fledgling community via the JISCmail list I set up for the project as part of the task to develop a CoP (Community of Practise). Unitl reciently everything I posted has gone unanswerd or has been answered off line. That is till I posted something about the feedback mechanism in WebPA.

Although I was aware that the feedback system had been created quickly, and there had been one or two negative experiences with it. However, the community seem to feel strongly about the mechanism and the wording that is used. The conversation is active at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/quicktype.cgi?m so feel free to join in and add your point to the melting pot. I hope that we will get some really good ideas and points from the community that can be added to the project for hopeful inclusion in the open source releases of WebPA.

If you don't want to join the conversation you can email me directly or add your feature request to the source forge [http://sourceforge.net/projects/webpa/] area for the project.

I will let you know how our CoP (community of practice) developes and the tools that we are using, but for the moment I will chalk this down as a sucess!

Consider blogs as a community of practice

I am heading off to ALT-C 2007 tomorrow, as those of you who read this blog will be aware of. Apart from going over my slides and what I will be saying at 5, I have also taken the time to read some of the information on the ALT-C conference amplifier feed.

I have to say that, there are only some people posting about ALT-C, the rest seems to be about what people already have on their blogs. Even though a lot of this information is out of date, some of it is interesting. I have found some one linking to an article about blogs and communities of practice, from 2004. I think that the conference amplification is a form of blogs becoming communities of practice even if for only a short time (ie the time frame for the conference). All we need to do now is to try and maintain that community of practice some where. Even though I like the fluidity of the conference amplification system.

It leads me back to how we can build and maintain a community of practice for WebPA and whether we can organise to get an amplification going for an event that the Subject Centres are hoping to hold. But what are the next steps to holding on to that community of practice...

I have to say that some of the best conference amplification I have seen has been for the @media conferences. You can see the effects at Flickr and on technorati. May be I will be able to find similar examples for ALT-C by tomorrow.

Please let me know if you do blog about WebPA or you intend to mention us somewhere as I will then try to set up a 'feed of feeds' or even a Yahoo! pipe. But again this may be transient, rather than sustained...we need to develop a sustained amplification for our project.