Have I mentioned this already?
Well, particularly for non-Brighton readers, this is an important feature of the way we've approached things.
Cool, funky & gorgeous is the strap line we use for our VLE (studentcentral).
Tongue-in-cheek - yes but not totally - it goes way beyond an old fart like me trying desperately to be cool amongst 20,000 students who can all be cooler in their sleep. It's actually an ethos - to aspire to be something far more than a system (and group of people) delivering academic material. When thinking through how we were going to implement our VLE it became obvious from the research that had already gone before us that the barriers between social, work and learning were dissolving and:
- In order to engage the students more fully, the service we offered had to go beyond academic material and deliver facilities that supported the social elements of student life
- That the design of the service had to be visually appealing and inspire a sense of fun
- That learning technologies staff aspirations had to go beyond pedagogy and embrace the brave new world where consumer electronics and the boring old PC were merging to form a ubiquotous digital life
So, Cool, funky and gorgeous is something we work towards for our service - safe in the knowledge we'll never achieve it totally but a great aspiration none the less.
Until recently, my own personal assessment of where we were on this scale was, at best, coolish. Personally I thought our lava lamp redesign last year put us into the gorgeous category but not everyone agreed with me :-).
To see more about studentcentral, see the tour.
.... and I do suspect I'm stylistically challenged!!!
Anyway yesterday Katie and I were treated to a sneak preview of the next generation of Elgg - v0.7. I won't say what's new as I'll leave that to Dave & Ben to announce but what I can say with absolutely certainty is that we came away KNOWING that this stuff is totally cool!
Add themes the students can adapt easily and it becomes personally gorgeous.
Add podcasting/vodcasting and it becomes seriously funky.
Rarely have I seen software and thought I've total confidence we've made the right choice but I did here and it's going to be hugely exciting to implement this and see a massive change in the way we deliver online services and the way our staff and students use those services.
Right on Dave and Ben - you deserve the title of visionaries!
Stan
