Changes within our Educational Development Unit

Well I thought I better blog on some changes going on within the department and how that is going to influence the University.  The department now sits at a healthy 7 developers two co-ordinators and one manager, for us this is a big step up with regards to the services that we can offer.  

Without going into to much detail the teams where split with 4 in one department and 4 in another.  This caused direction problems which we are no trying to fix.  

We have setup several roles within the team which will focus on certain aspects of the development.

Software / System / Application developer

Courseware / Interaction / Graphics developer

Server / Database administrator

Project / Service / Resource Manager

Business Analyst / Customer Advisor / Solution architect

and

Split these roles into 

Bespoke Content Development

LMS

END User Tools

Assessment

All developers where allowed to choose where they wanted to place their skills and were most evenly distributed, this resulted in an empowerment of the developer and refreshes the interest and focus of the team.

Automatic Classifying Personality Traits based on Writing styles

In one of my feeds today from http://www.readwriteweb.com/ I came across a very useful and quirky tool that is available from http://www.uclassify.com/browse/.

These guys seem to have created an api to classify traits on written text, it is quite fun to have a play with and since they created an api, it could also be useful in adding this to our peer review/essay marking programs, as another benefit to the student.

With regards to this post I am

1. happy (99.6 %)
2. upset (0.4 %)

Heh