Spotlight on…University of Glamorgan October 26, 2009
Posted by Jacquie Kelly in : Collaborative Tools, Trials, BCE , add a commentUniversity of Glamorgan
The University of Glamorgan recently held their launch event on 22nd July for the “G-Blog” http://g-blog.glam.ac.uk/ and was attended by 50 people. The ten local businesses recruited for the trial project were involved and one of the guest speakers highlighted some Web 2.0 networking tools for businesses. The trial project has invited ten SME’s to join with them in the hope of creating a vibrant and useful blog.
The local Rhondda Cynon Taf (RCT) Business Club had been very proactive in publicising the project and given great support towards the launch. In spite of the RCT Business Club having an almost complete change of personnel, the result has been close co-operation and a very successful partnership.
The trial project also took part in an Elluminate session with the BCE project team and found it very useful. As a result they are now considering using it as a permanent communication tool within the project.
Looking further over the months ahead, the ten businesses will be given their login details and make their first posts and G-Blog activity will be monitored with interaction from Academics from the Business School. The trial project will also look to recruit additional 15 SME’s to participate and recruit more academics from across all faculties.
Spotlight on…. Northumbria University October 19, 2009
Posted by Jacquie Kelly in : Collaborative Tools, Trials, BCE , add a commentNorthumbria University
Since February 2009 The Open ICT Tools trial project has been working on a number of outcomes, commencing with the detailed planning of stage one and establishing evaluation criteria. They also attended the start-up meeting along with the other trial projects and have dedicated time and effort developing a risk assessment tool. The project website has been launched with publicity across Northumbria University.
Alongside these achievements the trial project has visited three potential project partners as well as moving collaborative tools onto a new server hosted by Northumbria University. This server has been commissioned to facilitate collaborative work with external business and community partners. For this project, Plone has been installed. Another development initiated by the project was a trial of VoIP such as Skype on the main Northumbria University network.
The pilot phase has already begun, earlier than scheduled. 70 students are involved from Northumbria with four people involved from Intel ( based at Oregon, Portland (USA), San Francisco, California (USA) and London (UK)). There are 11 groups, each with its own space on Plone. Students from two different courses are involved; ‘Interactive multimedia design (IMD) + design for industry (DfI) ’ exploring ‘Future of mobile computing’. It will be interesting to review how each uses the available space on Plone; the IMD group may well stretch the system!
A successful teleconference was held re. ‘Working with Intel, Portland, Oregon’. Further remote events are planned. Each group will have teleconference (10 minutes each) with Intel, after which they will develop the group project brief. Additionally two staff from Intel will visit Newcastle to work with the students on their briefs. Finally 9 students will be chosen to travel to the States to present their work.
There are various areas of work planned over the next six months and one of the core areas is working with key stakeholders to undertake an evaluation of stage 1 of the project and plan preparation of recommendations for stage 2 delivery. Following this there will be dissemination of the 1st stage project outcomes on the project website.
Spotlight on…. University of the Arts London October 13, 2009
Posted by Jacquie Kelly in : Collaborative Tools, Trials, BCE , add a commentUniversity of the Arts London
The University of the Arts London have been developing their project titled: OPEN-i: Developing an Online Community of Practice for Photojournalists and they have achieved much since the projects inception in March 2009. One of the first tasks was to recruit a Project Administrator and set up and initial editorial board for the project. The OPEN-i community website launched on the Ning platform at the end of June 2009 and had been a great success. As of 11 October 2009 membership stood at 409 with a variety of members from academic, industry, practitioner and student levels. They have now held 2 very successful webinars with 100 attendees in total plus a substantial number of people who have viewed them in the archive, 15 other events and 29 discussions.
Another of their activities was the setting up of project management wiki, which has proved to be a very powerful tool for running the project and communicating/collaborating between the project team who are not based at the same location. The project director has attended major industry events and conferences to help disseminate concept of OPEN-I and gather assets for the network such as video interviews. This has been instrumental in raising the profile of the project.
Over the next six months the project will continue to develop and maintain the network allowing for membership to determine the agenda and direction as well as holding regular webinars and attend industry events and conferences to promote network and gather more assets for it.
Spotlight on…. New College Swindon October 6, 2009
Posted by Jacquie Kelly in : CRM, Collaborative Tools, Trials, BCE , 1 comment so farNew College Swindon
The title of New College Swindon’s project is: Using CRM and Collaborative Tools with Business and Community Enterprise and the project commenced in December 2008. They have faced a number of challenges since it inception, one of which was the establishment of project team to include members of Business Services. This was made more difficult as the main contact of Business Services left the college and it took some time to employ a replacement. This increased the pressure on other members of that team and resulted in a delay in re-establishing a project representative. The problem was overcome by sharing the responsibility of this project across three members of the team.
Initial contact has now been made with local small businesses and a list of Training Providers have been supplied. There was also an initial investigation into the use of the NING platform carried out by the team.
Further ahead the project hopes to finalise the online conferencing tool and either purchase or download for use as well as evaluating Facebook vs Ning and setup accounts for use with partners. They will also be looking at organising an ‘online’ conference for partners and present the advantages of using social networking in business.
