Engagement

This has come out of my head following a meeting with some new JISC e-learning projects.

I'm also haunted by a comment made at the last e-fw conference, "It seems as if JISC is good at talking about the e-Framework, less good about doing it". This writing is mainly about that. I think this is probably all UK specific, because I am seeing submissions from Australasia. What have you done differently down there?

The Issue

How do we envisage users to actually use the e-Framework? We have so far been focussed on getting the content in; and the sales message of 'benefits' have been high level. We can show people lists of genres, we can explain what they do, but often we are met with looks of confusion at best. Tupically, the sales message has been addressed to three main categories of user.

• Developers - use the eFramework as an aid to interoperability. Use the code that at a service description points to. If you know that an institution you wish to search uses this search expression, your life is easier.

• Institutions - use the eFramework to move away from needing to buy an expensive monolithic system when all you need is a searching service. By the way, here's what search means and here's some work that other insititutions have done.

• Funders - use the eFramework so that you can see where you need to invest the research monies.

Now all of this is very well, but if I am a new JISC project, how do I actually use the thing?

Well, here are some thoughts from the EmergeProject on UserCentredDevelopment.

Aggregation Example

At the same meeting, many of the projects were looking to provide aggregations. They planned to go off to sites such as myspace, livejournal and facebook, suck out the wonderful social networking stuff and do something educational with it. How would the eFramework help these people? They could arguably look at the list of genre names, they might look at service expressions for something like RSS. One of the projects, when confronted with the list of genre names asked perfectly correctly, "Where's aggregation?". We'd probably point them to syndication. Are we going to solve this with some interesting search functionality? How about Frema's semantic wiki?

Projects felt that they'd need to read all of the genres to get our view of the world; then, and only then, would the framework be useful.

I think projects developing services are probably up for contributing content, so I'm less worried about that than I once was - but I'm still unclear how we can present the information in a manner that is useful.

Barriers to Entry

I'm also worried about barriers to entry when contributing. There's a lot of new stuff in the e-framework; we're introducing beginner audiences to services, and then we're saying that the services can work together, and then we're saying that we can document the ideas behind the service. At this stage, things rapidly get more complex. This complexity, and the complexity of our examples are putting people off. Of course, if we use simple examples, we'll get simple content coming in.

Oh, and if one of these things takes more than a day or two to put in, we've lost them.

Bringing New Projects in

When I'm asked to present the e-framework in the UK, I always ask for some details on the audience. Usually it's developers, always it's projects "that are new to the e-fw, although some of them have been around for a while and know how it works".

In this case, I'd much sooner get the new ones up to speed, even if it means boring the old hands. What is the best way to do this? I can talk about genres and stuff, but you lose them so fast. We need some learning material perhaps? We need a case study or something that they can work through with me, tutorial style? But again, I'd like this to be centered more on how we see them as consumers of the e-fw, as then they might use it...

Institutions and Funders

Can we show what's been in it for them? Can I stand in a room with an Institution and say "The E-fw is great becuase of... and here's how the uni down the road used it to save a million dollars ... "

Guides?

Feels like all of our effort has gone into producing content, and guides on how to produce content. Don't we need some guides on how the e-Fw has been useful to our target audiences?

Mirror the wiki / website

It's really slow from the UK...