Wednesday, October 10, 2007

MyStuff-Space-Thing update

Just had an e-mail plop its way into my student mailbox and apparently all the information I lovingly and reflectively placed into ePortaro (okay, rammed, shoved, cursed and wedged into that odious system) will magically whizz its way into MyStuffSpace. Hooray! Well, not so hooray for anyone who hasn't spent an entire 30 points' worth of higher degree-level study battling with eportfolios and finally understands their relevance and role in learning... but was left like a limp lettuce leaf after the sheer effort of doing so. I still can't help wondering if students on other courses will independently think 'this is a good idea' and get stuck in with it.  In my experience, unless it's a) going to be assessed or b) going to be assessed and then going to be assessed some more... it's re-e-e-e-e-e-e-eally difficult to convince people of the inherent worth of doing anything in additional to the things that they perceive 'count'.

So - good 'stuff' - not having to re-input a whole load of documents etc.  Bad 'stuff' - it's still going into MyStuffSpace and if I hadn't had the ePotato experience before then I doubt I could muster the enthusiasm to do all that hurdle jumping off my own back.

I do want to like these things, but a combination of free online tools such as Google Notebook, bookmarking from Del.icio.us, a spot of blogging from Blogger and mind mapping from MindMeister... and my own humble computer filing system... I can't see quite where MyStuffSpace fits in.  It'd have to be fairly heftily OU-directed for students to really use it in anything other than a superficial way and I really don't know how it would cope with people who have multiple roles at the OU and hence multiple IDs.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Sarah,
    ePotato!! He He i'd (nearly) forgotten all about it.
    Thanks for this post - i'll go and have a look at Mystuff. I agree with you about the name:o)
    Regards
    Louise

    ReplyDelete

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