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Category Archives: Educationau


Budget - Resources - Time

This week the POC2-EDITH team have been struggling with managing the magic project troika of resources, priorities and time.
Each one of us have had competing priorities affecting what we can achieve.  The will and skill are there. Education.au’s experience for Proof of Concept issues has revealed time is our most critical factor in these projects.  […]

Learning lessons at each milestone

This post on learning lessons is a week late. Learning the lessons at the end of each milestone rather than at the end of the project is a key POC characteristic.
The effort put into the Show and Tell 1 paid off. Everyone was engaged with the topic and there were even a few laughs. […]

Deliberately getting it wrong

I have become a fan of getting it wrong. Deliberately.
Ultimately it saves me a lot of time.
To explain: currently we are modelling how education.au intranet could be structured. All my preparations for this - content management, portal home page, security model mock-ups have been put up with the proviso that it’s probably totally wrong (requires […]

Friday night live with EDITH 0.1

The following was the Show and Tell 1 to the staff at education.au.
Edna Proof of Concept 2 Show and Tell 1
Pop Quiz! ..and you thought you didn’t have to do any work!
Q: How many current records are held in the edna collection (that is not including the distributed collections like ABC […]

Whiplashed by The Long Tail effect

Mike’s messing with my mind again. Here I was, innocently prep’ing the POC SnT and he waltzes in and drops another concept like a smart bomb for the collection management proof of concept.
While we’re trying to find authoritative social bookmarking users, we’ll be finding those bookmarkers whose sheer quantity of bookmarks can create a […]

The elves and the shoe maker

Code is being cut. Presentation is being prepared. Speeches are being spun. We have EDITH prepared for display next week.
The mining of http://del.icio.us/ is showing very interesting results with 1000’s of suggested sites based on the authoritative tags and users. Importantly the early indications of quality means the underlying assumptions are working well.
This is […]

Office tips to show off

Have a presentation to give tonight on very simple MS Office tips and tricks. Thought others might find this useful.
The example is simple and can be achieved in lots of other ways - however it’s the thinking that’s important. You can reformat lots of data quickly with creative uses of MS Office tools.
Feel […]

What’s cool about evaluating?

Sarah has got us all thinking about the evaluation in while we prepare for show and tell 1. Hopefully this strategy will help minimise the project slippage.
Evaluation discussion stepped around filtering the SnT-1 discovered resource candidates. The list was fairly straight forward:

Check edna for duplicates
Check SPAM
Check blacklists
Check Scope criteria: language, geographic info.

All very […]

Telling shows and tells

Development time is tight - the SnT-1 delay needs to be two weeks.
Nick pointed out that we don’t need to delay thinking about SnT-2 and in fact we can start on scoping SnT-2 (next post).
But first we need to sort out the SnT-1. I prepared a running sheet for it; & crikey it is boring.
We […]

A POC’s unintended consequences

A serendipitous outcome from today’s meeting were some tips to make our jobs just that little bit easier - totally separate from POC.
With this POC, we’re wrestling in detail with understanding the way an Information Officer works to provide resources for educators.
Our discussion prompted Nick to suggest using Google alerts to monitor websites without RSS […]