Agenda for online project - a starter list

Hi John, Cath and Mark R.
I like the plan of action done by John, seems pretty comprehensive. I have lots of ideas for the different sections. Learners section, Tutors section and News section. Well the news section would have all the literacy related topics that would interest learners and tutors, this is where i feel podcasting could be used as they would be updated when new news comes online. For example, there is the Ullapool Book Festival this weekend. this would be something that would go into the news section with date, time and a little bit of information on it from an ABE perspective (how it might benefit and be interesting to emergent readers). Of course for more information then there would be a link to the actual website itself.
For download and try, i was thinking about offering little online courses, like "learn how to make  posters with microsoft Word" sort of thing. just little IT tasters aimed at a specific IT skill. i would be happy to start setting up and uploading that.

My ideas for the learners and tutors sections are more general. links to literacy games and practise, probably using skillswise.
A Learners Hobbies section where they could discuss and upload things of interest to them.
some might put up recipes to share with eachother, with the ability to leave comments below. or car maintenance advice, good for working with car vocabulary. Of course sections on learners activities involving ABE projects, musuem visits or an area where they could suggest what they would like to do next.

Anyway, this is just some of the ideas i have that might work and shouldnt be too difficult to setup. even if we start putting stuff up and it ends up being rubbish, we can always take it off. i think once stuff starts going up and we all take an active working interest in getting going with it, it will take on a life of it's own.

So if we can start setting up who does what, and if each of us has the right admin rights to do it, we can start uploading and filling the website up.
Anyway i got to go i have just had a learner arrive in office.

Interesting stuff mark.  I like the podcast idea. 
johnc

Well that's me joined up now so I'm quite pleased with myself at that. Good to see lots of ideas from Mark "Gudgie-Coff" Newman. I think we should let our ideas sprawl around a while before we decide on which ones to go with. I guess my thoughts at the moment are around the blended, rather than online, learning bit of it. How does this opportunity best give aded value to the face to face work that is going on.

I think that its about further germination of the "signs of life" that John C promotes. Are we already doing this within jc links though? I like the idea of just doing what we are doing here really with a topic starter and a time span and we end up with learners' thoughts, feelings, opinions, their voice I guess, on any given topic. Where that then goes is an interesting one. As a starter we should look at learner voice influencing our provision but perhaps it could go into other arenas too, community planning etc. 

Could a theme on this be for a set of submissions rather than a developing discussion, say everyone puts up a piece of creative writing about a given starter or gives their comment on something in a a letters to the editor kind of style. I think this could knit in with face to face well, group could come back together with lots ready to discuss and develop. It's a bit like a written word version of what Cath is doing in the Newspaper discussion group.       

I think we are trying to improve the range and intensity of what we can offer by using blended learning. I am initially more interested in what it offers to learners already in our community rather than using online learning to attract new learners, although I do admit that is another worthy and huge thing but perhaps not one for just now.       

"I like the idea of just doing what we are doing here really with a topic starter and a time span and we end up with learners' thoughts, feelings, opinions" Markc
Now you come to mention it - see this link for a wee plan i put to John McG a few weeks ago.  It's the 'wiki' idea that I like:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgg6gz3w_166g2sxx4gw 
John

Hi all
here's a link to the doc link I sent out about a plan for the seminar in June.  
 http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgg6gz3w_171gz5tjdfm

Not sure if the editing rights thing will work.  If you can then you are doing your first wiki, albeit not in Moodle as i'd planned.  But i reckon we can get a Moodle wiki going in the next week. 
JohnC

I have been out of the saddle with the blended learning project for a while as other things have called for my attention. Its quite challenging being a puppet leader on this project. We all know I'm not really leading much but from LC perspectives I feel I should at least be kind of on top of things. Geting access to stuff with all the websense blocks here doesn't encourage the quick dipping in and contributing to online forums. Good intentions to access at home haven't come to much. Can we get a face to face meeting organised soon? Impressed with L who seems quite happy to edit pages and submit materials to the site now and is doing aso at home between sessions from that point of view do we now have learners involved in some participative and learner led blended learning?

I enjoyed looking at the video links on the spectrum circle story project too. A nice new experience for me to be able to see learning in action that I wasn't at, great new evidence tool for us too. A large part of me still likes the idea of people doing their own thing being at the heart of this and using our site as a front end, a gallery space for activity.

I'll be in touch to organise a meeting asap for conference and project progress/direction. Waffle mostlty just want to get involved in sbmitting again. Keep BL in my consciousness and perhaps that's the trick. Are the ITALL guys using their space. I'll go and have a look.