Monday 7 September 2009

Learn how to use uSpace



For members of staff and students at ScHARR, we are running a few short one hour sessions on how to get started with The University's new collaborative, document creating, blogging tool; uSpace. The question you want to ask yourself is:
Do you want to work in new ways?

Do you want better collaboration with your colleagues?
Do you want to teach using discussion forums, blogs, videos and images?
Do you want to work on shared documents, complete with hyperlinks?

The dates of these sessions are:
15th September 3-4
18th September 10-11
25th September 10-11
25th September 2-3
28th September 10-11

Each session is limited to six participants – first come first served.
You can book on one of the courses here

more about uSpace

uSpace is the University’s own social web service. It offers a collection of social web tools for communication and collaboration amongst students and staff. uSpace is available through MUSE and hosted at the University so there are no difficult security or intellectual property issues.

Students are casually using a variety of social web services to interact with each other. Staff have also been quick to use different social web services to engage students and collaborate in research. CiCS has implemented uSpace to bring the two communities

together with a common set of social web tools, available from a single University environment.

uSpace is similar to students’ social environment so it seems familiar and allows them to

capitalise on their existing skills. However, as it is clearly a University service, separate from their social environment, students can begin to develop more sophisticated social web skills, evaluating and citing information in accordance with academic practice.

Staff can also experiment with a range of secure social web tools based at the University. Staff can use these tools to collaborate, develop ideas, and jointly author papers free from the difficult questions of intellectual property often associated with external services.

Taken from the latest issue of myCICSnews

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