The time has come to release bluecloud (formerly known as the Student Learning Community 2.0) on an unsuspecting public. We’ve created a space for the community on the University’s new uSpace social networking platform and seeded it with a few interesting ideas, but what we’d really love is to get more students in reading, writing, chatting and generally making themselves at home. Any suggestions how to do that?
Because uSpace is still in its pilot phase and CICS would like to keep the numbers down for now, we’ve only officially made an announcement to the postgraduate research student mailing list, but hopefully the news will gradually trickle out. Particularly, if you already know where to access uSpace (it’s available to anyone with a UoS login), feel free to drop by the bluecloud space and see how it’s going. As soon as possible we’ll announce it to undergrads and taught postgrads as well.
The launch is accompanied by a questionnaire on the use of social web tools to get some intelligence on how best to develop the project. The data will also contribute to my second assignment for the University of Sheffield’s Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education. I’ll make a link to that questionnaire available here in due course. If anyone would like to give us their views, feel free to leave a comment here. You can also now follow bluecloud on Twitter as @bluecloud_uos (and if you like, follow me: @jezcope).