@smiths now has wiki space at a cost of around £2000 for the software licenses (1).

Wiki’s, along with blogs, are a prominent feature of the contemporary easy to read, easy to edit web. The term wiki is derived from the Hawaiian word for quick. Wiki’s are websites that are quick and easy to contribute to and to edit. The software purchased, Confluence, is merely an implementation of the wiki idea, corporatised, privatised and packaged up as an ‘enterprise level collaboration tool’.

Apparently the free software Media Wiki (it’s open source, don’t you know), the software that built wikipedia the software that spawned a thousand clones, isn’t good enough for Goldsmiths. I don’t understand the rational behind the purchasing a proprietary implementation of generic software, when one of the original and best pieces of software out there, the code behind the biggest wiki on the planet, is available for free.

Has the success of Moodle, the free software code that powers the VLE, not sufficiently demonstrated the strengths of open source to Goldsmiths IT purchasers? A couple thousand pounds have been spent on software that could have been obtained for free. The savings made by adopting a free software alternative could have been spent on developing the skills of the IT services team so that they could support and maintain the software.

1. Assuming a New Academic Unlimited User License. Costs estimated from Atlassian website.

I should be I should be writing about Appadurai’s theory of globalisation, but I wanted to write about the student staff forum meeting I attended today more…

The program monitoring program at goldsmiths has recently changed to a new model. This arrangement uses online tools to compliment the traditional Course Rep role to set an agenda for a number of meetings over the course of the college year between the academic staff and the students. As a Program Monitoring Rep I was at the first of the meetings today.

There was an agenda. These are my reflections on that meeting. Disclaimer. I would probably say all of the following again. But that doesn’t make it anything more than my opinion. The official minutes may more accurately reflect actual events. Mileage may vary. Terms and Conditions Apply. Offers not available to those outside the EU.

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Goldsmiths SU has successfully campaigned for changes in the opening hours of the colleges library and ICT facilities. I’m interested in exploring what other ways the information that is stored in the library building can opened up to the benefit of students and staff alike. I’m not so much speaking about new things that the library can do, rather I am interested in ways in which existing services and resources could be linked up, extending their use.

Currently recommendations for reading / viewing / listening are distributed to students as files to download from learn.gold.ac.uk (which we usually print) or in hard copy (which we then annotate). Students then navigate to the library website to find out whether a given publication is even available, and what its shelfmark is.

However, there is the potential to make the process of recommending, finding, borrowing and even commenting on the value and relevance of a particular library resource more seamless by linking-up the library website and learn.gold site.

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I’ve invested a lot of time in researching and testing tools to support my studies. i wanted to to break away from so-called ‘productivity tools’, as in all my years of using software like Visio, Word, Outlook, I’ve never really been productive: too much of my time and effort has been wasted in taming the application, or repeated manually generating my desired formatting - perhaps counter-productivity tools would be more accurate.

I’m in my third year of studying for a BA. I’m researching my subjects and my ideas, reading lots, annotating my reading, working on assignments, editing and revising my work. I work in different locations and at different times and I want access to my work where and whenever I am. As such, a piece of hardware, a laptop or a pda is not the whole answer to these needs, I need software to support my study too.
bring on the tools.
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Towards the end of term at Goldsmiths I participated in a huge number of half-baked surveys and poorly designed questionnaires. Still, that’s my own fault for saying ‘Yes’ to all the last minute BA Sociology / Psychology students, desperate to get some data to evaluate for their assignments. The E-benchmarking survey for CELT, on the other hand, was a focused piece of qualitative research using interviews with students to benchmark e-learning activity at Goldsmiths.

I’ve posted the full transcript of the interview on my wiki if you’d like to read it.

My key messages to CELT were:

• more bandwidth on campus and in halls of residence as the disconnection of students is lamentable
• more student participation on learn.gold so that we can originate content
• less (hopefully no!) attachments on learn.gold - I hate downloading PDFs and word documents to read some text that could have been displayed in the web page… especially when the download is not something I am going to edit, like, say, a reading list or a course timetable.
• working and useful interfaces to resources such as the library catalogue

I await the complete report from CELT to see what other feedback there has been and to see what recommendations have been picked up.