The aim is to hone my current geek skill set, but also develop the business side as well. This means I get to apply it all on my own website idea during 10% time. So far my quest to get down to the syrupy essence of it has seen me fighting with the five forces, and poking PEST, which is rather reminiscent of Uni. On the techie end I’m working on the presentation side of things by improving my CSS starting with the Blueprint project and then I shall investigate unobstrusive Javascript.

http://flickr.com/photos/jessflickr/163006527/

Scrum is an agile methodology that aims to empower the developers and also be flexible enough to realise that specifications change over time and creates a framework that can evolve with that but also regularly deliver solid outcomes.  At Jiva I am going to take the role of Product Owner for Beanbag, which after some background reading seems to suit me fine.  As far as I can tell the role of the Product Owner is to act as the voice of the user/customer and set priorities for each “sprint” (a short, in our case 3 week, period of work with deliverables at the end), then to get out of the way and let the developers do their work.  To maintain the rugby theme its kind of a scrum half role, pointing the guys who do the hard graft in the right direction but leaving them to do the nitty gritty then grab the glory at the end!

Pete is going to take the role of Scrum Master - the main feature of this role as far as I can tell is to keep the Product Owner and any other stakeholders off the backs of the developers during the ’sprint’. The role has many more features but that was the one that struck me the most as I know how hard it can be trying to act as a firewall to protect a team from pressures from above and give them the space to get on and do what they were hired for.

I’m looking forward to seeing how it all works out and getting more directly involved in the evolution of Beanbag.

[this post was recycled and remixed from my personal blog if there is any deja vu occuring!]

Hobo means something a bit different in the Jiva office as it is at the core of Beanbag and the upcoming Advisr.

To quote HoboCentral.net “Hobo is a plugin for Ruby on Rails that brings a number of extensions, some small some large, to Rails application development. The common theme to these extensions is rapid development.”

The Jiva team have been lucky enough to work with Tom Locke who is responsible for Hobo on much of the development of Beanbag and it really does enable a rapid development cycle that allows us to iterate quickly and keep improving the Beanbag site.

If Ruby on Rails is your thing or you are just interested in rapid development its well worth popping over to HoboCentral.net for a nose around.

So I was very interested to come across a couple of videos where Shirky is interviewed about how these ideas can work with education.  With much of my work here at Jiva focused on Beanbag Learning at the moment this is a topic close to my heart.

You can find the videos here on Will Richardsons’ blog - http://weblogg-ed.com/2008/clay-shirky-interview/ - the interviewer was Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach a prominent edublogger in the States. The content is obviously a very US take but no less interesting for that.

One of the final parts of the Q and A is especially interesting for our work at Beanbag and I’ll quote it here:

Q: What would happen if there was no public education? Would society still value taking responsibility for individual learning?

A: Home schooling is growing for every economic class except the very well-off. Create some social model for learning, organized online? Coordination of problems; find others struggling with the same issues. When you are diagnosed with a disease, you go online to read about it and find a group. Similar approach to education could work. Go online to find others who have kids who are having problems with a particular issue.

Apparently Jiva in Hinduism and Jainism is a ‘living being’. Now that makes us ‘Living Being Technology’ which given our focus on the concept of People Search with Beanbag and Advisr I think its a nice fit.  Kevin and or Jon are probably going to tell me this was always the plan but I’m going to take a bit of convincing!

Theo joins us from web hosting company Krystal as a developer and apart from briefly killing the wifi on his second day is settling in and itching to get his hands dirty.  He is a graduate of Southampton Uni and greatly brings down the average age in the office!

The other newcomer is myself. I’m Matt and have joined Jiva as a community manager and blogger mainly for Beanbag but I’ll also pop up on other Jiva projects from time to time and this website regularly. I come from a background managing websites and other digital communications projects mainly in and around higher education and am looking forward to this new challenge.

Feel free to let us know what you think..

It was a freezing February morning when I filmed Jennifer Mactaggart presenting her first ever video-tutorial. Just two weeks previously we’d decided to pool her talents as a tutor and mine as a film-maker to create educational videos for GCSE students. So here we now were on Bristol’s floating harbour, filming the introduction to ‘Shakespeare’ and conducting vox pops for ‘English — non-fiction text’.

Throughout the day we worked closely to our script. This detailed the shot number, location, props, costume and, of course, the words. It meant we could jump from programme to programme and scene to scene, making maximum use of every location. For example we managed to persuade the owners of the replica of John Cabot’s ship, The Matthew, to let us film on board. It was a perfect location for the opening of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. A quick costume change and we did a section for ‘non-fiction text’ on the use of persuasive language in brochures for tourist attractions.

It was very demanding filming sequences out of order, but it was the most efficient use of time and location. At the end of the day I recorded Jennifer reading the whole script through, so that I knew we had everything, even if it had to be used as voice over.

Jennifer then went back to face to face tutoring, whilst I entered a darkened edit suite. When it came to digitising all the rushes, I simply used the same number from the script to name each shot, which made it a relatively straight-forward process of editing by numbers. The final stage was then the graphics and music, before encoding the file as a QuickTime movie to load on to the Beanbag site.

So, if you’re thinking of having a go at podcasting yourself, here’s a few words of advice:

• Plan carefully
• Work on interesting and visual ways to present your ideas
• Get permission to film at all your locations
• Remember the importance of good quality sound
• Give yourself lots of time for the editing

From Sharing to Cooperation to Collective Action

For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state , directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market. This debate was based on the universal and unspoken supposition that people couldn’t simply self-assemble; the choice between markets and managed effort assumed that there was no third alternative. Now there is.

The Web is enabling people with shared interests and common goals to come together to tackle old problems in new ways and to challenge the status quo. It allows large numbers of people with wildly varying levels of time, energy and commitment to all contribute meaningfully to a collaborative effort without the overhead traditionally associated with building an organisation. A group can be much more fluid and correspondingly more efficient at realising its goals.

The DCSF campaign to get teachers working outside of the classroom has been boosted this week with the launch of the Teaching Outside of the Classroom website. The aim is for trainee teachers to go on placements during their training at non-school educational sites, such as adventure centres and museums. The manifesto for this was launched about 6 months ago and the website is intended as a mechanism to allow interested organisations etc to sign up to be involved.

Via Ben Williamson on the Flux blog.

The first two of the seven points which make up the manifesto give a good flavour of what it’s all about:

1. We will provide all young people with a wide range of experiences outside the classroom, including extended school activities and one or more residential visits.

2. We will make a strong case for learning outside the classroom, so there is widespread appreciation of the unique contribution these experiences make to young people’s lives.

but the one which really struck me is the last, but hopefully by no means least:

7. We will identify ways of engaging parents, carers and the wider community in learning outside the classroom.