Meeting with the Finance Team

Ning by default adds adverts to its pages; these can be removed by paying $19.99 a month. Sue L mentioned in previous meeting that there is a budget so we can remove these adverts in order that COP will look neater and more professional.

I arranged a meeting with Tracey Proctor from Finance Department to arrange a monthly payment to Ning but this was not a straightforward process. She entered the credit card details into the online purchase form then after Ning asked us to confirm the purchase process by entering a password. I presumed this would be my Ning password, but it did not work. I had to contact the Ning support team to investigate this as shown below:

After that I arranged another meeting with Tracey Proctor and the transaction was then processed smoothly and the adverts disappeared.

Two meeting were held on the 2nd week of Sep.

Meeting with the Development Team

I had a one-to-one meeting with Sam Rowley discussing the gadget development on Ning.

I have demonstrated my initial experiment with Ning on how an XML file can be linked from an external server to Ning using the gadget feature. This triggered an idea by Sam R about the possibility of integrating a webpage into Ning and indeed we managed to incorporate a wiki webpage residing on Hive into Ning using a text box feature. This will enable the user to search documents throughout the webpage. This step was a real success and the picture became clearer for the development team on what can be implemented. We came to the conclusion that the developers need to create a webpage which will be an interface for searching queries from HIVE and this webpage will be embedded into Ning.

The meeting was held on Friday 5th Sep

Brain Storming Sub-Meeting - 2nd Sep

After the meeting on 2nd September Chris Gray, Sue K and I had a follow-up meeting. We discussed the structure of our forthcoming activities for this month

I went through DIVAS COP on Ning with them and we agreed on the interface of Ning. We decided to keep the interface simple, clear and concise and we removed some features like video and music player as Ning only has a 10 Gb storage capacity. We have to pay for any extra space needed. We can always link these files (video & audio) if needed from HIVE once the linkage between Hive and Ning is up and running,

Chris G thought that Gadget feature can be removed as well because the 59 built-in Ning gadgets are not relevant to our community. These gadgets vary between games, igoogle gadgets, small flash programs, etc….

We decided on the date of launching our COP which will be 15th Sep and we will be asking award leaders to input their comments and views under New user & Expert User forums.

Expert Users:
* What advice/tips you would like to tell the new users of validation process?
* What pitfalls to avoid?

New Users:
* What matters concern you about the validation process?
* What information you would like to know?

This will be followed by an online event on Thursday 25th Sep for 2 hours in the afternoon “Ask the Experts: Validation Process” and supervised by 3 of us.

We agreed to have another face-to-face event “Introduction to Divas” in mid October in Stoke Campus to introduce the project to the stakeholders; this will be presented by Sue L, Chris Gray and myself.

First Online Event

Well, we still have new members joining up and now have a total of 57 members in the Validation Support Network NING community.

We held our first online Ask The Expert event last Thursday where we had Chris Gray, Quality Improvement Officer in the Academic Development Institute, available in a specially created community forum from 2pm to 4pm to answer community members queries reagrding the validation process.

An active discussion took place between about half a dozen members of the community. Discussion covered the issues of induction of staff new to validation, validation of online awards vs validation of traditional awards and also the issue of planning and designing awards where more emphasis and support may be needed prior to the validation process.

With the support of Chris, we have kept the forum open for members to submit questions as some members were unable to attend, due to other work commitments, and others are new to the community since Thursday's event closed.

We are planning to hold some face-to-face events soon - a couple of introductory events to introduce members to the workings of NING in addition to giving them a broader view of the project. This will hopefully encourage more members to become actively involved and become competent with the system.

The Launch

What was it I said at the end of my previous post? -

"... all we now have to do is: 1. Export the DIVAS Contacts folder from Microsoft Outlook into a .csv file. 2. Use the csv file to batch invite the contacts in Ning which will allow us to select invitees from a csv file."

Well, you'd think it could not be simpler! Word of advice - never start a sentence with, " all we have to do now is..."!

NING did not like our csv file - it did not like it due to the strange content of the e-mail field and also the way in which the names/email addresses were exported, i.e. NAME (email address) - it wanted the NAME and brackets part removing. So, following a bit of editing, we eventually got NING to accept and use our csv file. However, this took some time as NING did not inform us that there was a problem - it actually looked like the mailing of the invitations had worked successfully. We became concerned when we noticed nobody was joining up and a couple of potential members had called to ask how they should sign up!

We have now sent out in excess of 300 invitations to academic and adminstrative staff, deans of faculties - basically anyone within the University who may have an interest and/or involvement in validation. The NING invitation is preceded by an email providing a brief explanation of what the community is for and why the recipient might wish to join. NING has a 200 character limit on invitation text so it was thought sensible to send a first email with explanation and instructions which also notifies the recipient that a NING invitation will be on its way.

We have had a good response to the invitations and now have 42 members (including ourselves). Many members have already contributed to the forums, introducing themselves to the Community (13 replies), some telling us about their validation experiences (4 replies) and their expectations of the community (3 replies).

It's early days yet, but people seem enthusiastic, and I have just sent out a second wave of 93 invitations).

Getting a list of Contacts

Compiling an initial list of University staff to invite to join the DIVAS community has been quite a long and laborious process.

It was decided to compile a list of Award leaders as a starting point by possibly consulting the University prospectus's. These did not prove too fruitfull except for the Faculty of Health. I thus decided to consult the University email address book where I was able to locate PAMs (Programme Area Managers) and other likely contacts from their role titles.

I subsequently sent out many emails to PAMs, administration staff, coordinators such as Foundation Degree Coordinator, asking for Award Leader lists and any other possibly interested staff. As a result of this, and including contacts we already knew would have an interest, I now have a list of over 200 staff to receive invitations to the DIVAS Ning Community.

Hamza has compiled an invitation which includes a brief description, instructions on logging in to the community, notification of forthcoming events and a line or two to apologise to invitees who have no interest in validation and ask them to ask colleagues who may have an interest to contact us.

I have compiled a contacts folder in Microsoft Outlook with name and email details of all of the staff who we will be inviting at the beginning of next week. This took about a day to compile - extracting details from emails, attached Word documents etc., looking up emails in the directory and saving them all into a new address folder called DIVAS Contacts. I have done it this way as all we now have to do is:

1. Export the DIVAS Contacts folder from Microsoft Outlook into a .csv file.
2. Use the csv file to batch invite the contacts in Ning which will allow us to select invitees from a csv file.

Experimenting with Gadgets

One of DIVAS project objectives is to have a link between DIVAS community of practice and HIVE repository to enable the documents to be searched using Ning platform.

While I was looking into Ning I noticed a new function called “Gadget”. OpenSocial gadgets are applications written for OpenSocial which should work equally well on all compliant social networks. Thus, instead of writing one application for MySpace and another for Ning, you can write the application once and deploy it on many different networks.

I thought this could be the start towards the linkage between HIVE and Ning

I recognised that Ning allows us to import OpenSocial gadgets from its library. It also enables the devlopers to create their own gadgets, I have created my first gadget as shown below

I have saved the file as an .xml and uploaded it to a web server

I Then copied the URL of my file and went to the Gadget area in My Page on Ning, named the gadget Hamza’s gadget and pasted the URL link in the URL text box

The outcome is simple at this stage. However it shows that information can be transferred or linked from an XML file residing on an external web server to Ning Platform.

Adding Documentation tab on Ning

As a start I thought it would be useful to have a specific tab on DIVAS so validation documents can be displayed on that page and I called it Documentation.

This required investigation through Ning Developers Community on how to implement a new tab on Ning. I have uploaded the validation documents’ links that I have received from Chris Gray.

Hectic Work in August

I had a busy period in August, organising our activities and tasks liaising with Quality Improvement Services in order to have everything completed before the launch of the community of Practice

At present DIVAS COP support team consists of Chris Gray, Sue Kneill and myself. We have agreed to complete our action points before the next DIVAS meeting in September.

Chris Gray has not decided on the online event‘s name for September. However he found out the meeting date of Teaching and Learning Enhancement Committee (LTEC) which will be 13th October. We can demo DIVAS project to senior managers to raise the awareness at this meeting. He sent me links of validation documents of The Quality Improvement Service website to be posted onto the main page of DIVAS COP.

Sue Kneill has got a list of names of award leaders and is still looking for an online live presentation software to be used in our online events.

I have created a guide for new users of DIVAS Community of Practice on how to get into Forum discussion. Sue Kneill and I decided to attach this guide in the invitation which will be sent on 15th September, to ensure that all users are getting smoothly into DIVAS social network and avoiding any frustration and wastage of time.

I have edited a brief introduction to DIVAS project to be included in the invitation email which informs staff about the project and next online event. This should be included with the invitation

I have produced an initial presentation of the DIVAS project. The slides will demonstrate the aims and objectives of the project and the approaches and techniques that will be used to implement the system. Chris Gray and I originally thought about presenting these slides in a face-to-face event in October, however Sue Lee being the project manager, decided to create the presentation by herself and asked me and Chris Gray to present it with her.

I have not had the chance to shoot an introduction video of DIVAS project as we gave this task a low priority.

Few questions I thought of to be appeared on the registry page e.g. Could you please introduce yourself (i.e. brief idea about your role), What is your expectation of DIVAS community of practice?. This will help us to know more details about our clients’ requirements and expectations.

Launching Approach of Community of Practice

As a team we have talked about how to launch DIVAS community of practice to the stakeholders but we do not know what is going to happen or whether it will succeed. There was a concern about the approach we should adopt to develop and support the community. To announce it to our award leaders is likely to cause problems if the initiative fails to gain support.

It was agreed with the project manager to start approaching the existing in-house communities creators .I had a meeting with Helen Walmsley (E-learning Models Co-ordinator) who runs and supports Models of Best Practice online community. We discussed how to develop a successful community of practice; I took notes of several helpful tips and advice from her.

To be familiar with this subject I looked into relevant books in the library (e.g. Cultivating Communities of Practices) and online articles. I came to the decision for the prevalent approach in getting the community started:

1. Identify the domain of the people, who will have an interest in this community, they are award leaders in this case

2. Arrange a face-to-face meeting with them where we can have the opportunity to explain about the project and introduce DIVAS community of practice and give them a chance to login to the system. The most important activity will be getting to know them more closely, capturing their expectations and requirements of the community and establishing good relationships with them.

3. Let them know about the next online meeting’s subject and date.

However, the plan was slightly changed. It was recognised that September can be a hectic time for award leaders to physically attend meetings because of their involvement with students enrolments and they need to prepare their learning materials for the new academic year, hence the project manager recommended to start with an online event in late September followed by a face-to –face event in Late October.