I should mention that mySite was available for some time before I became aware of it and, I and others only became aware of it when we received an email from ICT directing us to this obscure link at the top right of the portal.

I don’t know how much progress with uptake and use they’ve made since.

Your experience that your fellow students in the latter years of your course made no use of the SharePoint MySites is an interesting one. One of the things I would like to find out during this research project is the extent to which students and staff in UK Universities make use MySites (where they are made available), and the extent to which they find them useful.

Nils Petersen provided an interesting link in his comment on this post to some very good uses by Washington State University students of MySites as e-portfolios. I would be interested to know whether this experience has been repeated elsewhere, or whether WSU are a special case, because of their distinctive open learning philosophy. Nils and his colleagues encouraged students to break out of the confines of their course and of their University, by using their ‘MySite’ as a public record of their learning in tackling a particular problem, and as a way to get feedback and engagement from other people interested in the problem. I believe that Nils and his colleagues were happy for students to use alternative tools, such as a web-hosted blog, if they preferred.

MySites are the nearest thing in SharePoint to the profile page familiar from web 2.0 applications such as Facebook, and to blogs. As such they will be directly competing with web 2.0 applications for the time and attention of students and of staff.

Your post is pretty much consistent with my latter year experience at Uni. SharePoint was used as the portal interface, mySite was this small link thing no one ever clicked on at the top right of the portal. And something called WebCT was used as the VLE (horrible thing that it was).

All the best and do keep posting updates on how you’re getting along with this.

Shooresh

The SharePoint MySite is quite a powerful tool and its use is spreading among our students. Our ePortfolio contest http://ctlt.wsu.edu/contest07/gallery shows some of the things students did. That has been complicated by an adoption this summer of Live@EDU for student email. That system also has some collaboration tools which compete for mind space with MySites.

We learned a variety of things from the contest, the first of several posts on the topic are here: http://wsuctlt.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/case-studies-of-electronic-portfolios-for-learning/

These explorations led us to begin to think about student portfolios in the cloud — and to ask why the university should set up a garden for students, walled or not.

That led to a series of ideas summed up in the term Harvesting Gradebook. That work has blossomed in several directions, a recent theme is here http://communitylearning.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/harvesting-feedback-on-a-course-assignment/ but you can follow it back to some of the earlier posts.

Thanks for your interest

I am very interested in your explorations of different ways to use technology to support open learning. My understanding is that you gave students SharePoint ‘my sites’ and encouraged them to use their ‘my site’ to record and display their work, and to engage with people inside and outside the university who are interested in the topics they are investigating/ learning about. You also developed a very neat way of allowing visitors to a students ‘my site’ to give them feedback and to assess their work against defined criteria.

How well did you find SharePoint ‘my sites’ suited the learners who used it, and suited the type of open learning model you are seeking to encourage?

Explorations of SharePoint were only that, explorations. They have not been implemented centrally. Further, the exploration moved our thinking toward open content, as seen here http://communitylearning.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/blackboard-angel-reason-for-open-learning/ The references to Leslie will lead you to some interesting thinking in this domain. The other contribution I think we are making to this open learning conversation is in the area a “Harvesting Gradebook” To explore that idea, I’ll refer you to this recent post http://communitylearning.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/harvesting-feedback-on-a-course-assignment/ and the readings it references.