The Proof of the Pudding

We just had our first Key Skills verification and standardisation meeting since starting the blog project.

In general all was very positive.  The IV liked the work we’d done on the blogs and thought it a good use of IT and a bit different.

There were some issues with printing out, since by their nature blogs are designed to be looked at on-screen and never look as good printed out. Something like BlogPrinting might be a workaround for that, in conjunction with screenprints to show the design and layout aspects.

I found it a bit irritating that that was an issue, since all the current buzz is about “online portfolios” and so forth, but it’s hard to change overnight I suppose and we’ll continue to look for a usable “fudge” for now.

Trainee spelling and grammar was an issue but as trainers we were reluctant to moderate every post before displaying it, as we felt it took away a lot of the spontaneity and immediacy of blogging, which is sort of the point and a big part of the motivation.  Trainees are expected to correct errors using the edit function once they are identified however.

Most of us thought it was slightly harder to demonstrate level 2 skills in the blog, although graphs etc can be uploaded as images. Our IV also expressed a concern that since the blogs were worked on partly as a group the same topic could be used for both a level 1 and level 2 trainee, and clear distinction needs to be made between the levels.

As there is no specific guidance, we thought that compiling a list of what they considered “level 2 Features” of the blogging software would be useful. I think the “combining information” bit could be the same as the printed work — a graph, timeline, captioned images etc — the only difference is the need to upload it.

Other things we thought might distinguish between a “Level 1″ and “Level 2″ effort, were:

• Text based embedded hyperlinks (e.g. linked text not just pasted web address)
• Images with hyperlinks attached
• Use of the “more tag” to split posts (so you get a “teaser” and click through to the longer article)
• Categories & tags
• The advanced paste features:
• Paste From Word (converts tables and fancy formatting into something Wordpress can cope with.)
• Paste As Plain text
• Remove Formatting
• Styles
• Insert Special Character
• The AnswerLinks to insert hyperlinked definitions of technical terms (built in feature)
• Passworded private posts.
• Widgets
• Custom Headers
• Pages, and subpages

Is there any one else out there using blogs as part of Key Skills with other ideas?

We also thought that the groupwork elements of the blogging might generate good evidence for the Working With Others Key Skill if we ever find the time!