Tag: JISC Advance

Back in 2009 when I was Director of e-Learning of The Northumberland Church of England Academy I started tracking my own activities.

Using a private WordPress-powered blog with the P2 theme, I quickly logged what I was up to, adding tags as I went. Below is the tag cloud after one month of using the system as a Senior Leader in an newly-minted Academy:

As you can see, the following tags were prevalent (I don’t think I included teaching in there for some reason!):

• Google Apps (I was responsible for deploying it across the 9-site Academy)
• Elearning (obviously)
• Meetings (lots and lots of these)
• Email (a necessary evil)
• Dan Brooks (an M.Ed. student from an Australian university whom I mentored during extended teaching practice)
• Training (I led plenty of sessions)

The above screenshot is from yesterday, soon after finishing my two-year stint as Researcher/Analyst at JISC infoNet. Apart from changing my avatar and tweaking the colour scheme, what’s changed?

• The email tag is much larger in this cloud. I was working in an office rather than a school, after all.
• JISC, JISC Advance and JISC infoNet unsurprisingly figure a lot.
• Google Apps remains there as I implemented and supported the system for the 19 JISC Advance services.
• Mobile Learning infoKit is there as it was a major piece of work for me during my time at JISC infoNet.
• Digital literacies features due to my work in the area and programme support for the JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme.
• Patrick Bellis was my boss at JISC infoNet and Sarah Knight the JISC programme manager with whom I had the most dealings.
• Other people’s names feature as well – interestingly Dan Brooks (M.Ed. student at the Academy) is still there three years later. Just goes to show how intense that period was!

Finally, you can see that wiki and Skype are small but significant in the tag cloud. I’ve never worked for an organisation that had better knowledge management and procedures than JISC infoNet. The internal wiki had everything you needed to work effectively and was an active, living repository of information. Skype is used extensively throughout JISC, sometimes for calls, sometimes for ‘backchanneling’.

If you’d done something similar which tags would YOU expect to show up?