The 'SkillCity' Web Site
SkillCity is a web site devoted to the dissemination of teaching materials
on teamwork, groupwork, presentation skills, writing development, and
the range of professional communication skills for university students.
Research indicates that communication skills are the abilities that employers
desire most. The Australian government is funding this project in recognition
of the need for development of students' communication skills to be incorporated
consciously into the teaching of more lecturers.
The SkillCity web site is part of a process to help lecturers rapidly
access handouts, assignment guidelines, and plans for class activities.
Flexible delivery of needed materials and approaches, peer reviews of
such materials, and a support network of lecturers are key elements in
assisting lecturers to develop new methods of teaching communication skills
to their students.
More information.....
Take a brief tour of our new & developing city
Visit our first version of SkillCity.....
Top
CUTSD CommSkill project and IAAF
The CUTSD grant
The 'SkillCity' web site grew out of a project at the University of Wollongong
launched in 1997 to share communication skill materials across faculties.
The 'SkillCity' site was produced by the Comm Skills Project team, involving
staff from more than a dozen universities, who are funded by a major grant
from the Commonwealth government through what is now the Australian Universities
Teaching Committee.
The Project was inspired by the realisation that, although communication
skills are strongly desired by employers, very few lecturers focus systematically
on enhancing these skills. A main aim of the Project is the development
of a web site and peer network that will provide lecturers with easy access
to an abundance of materials on communication skills that are tested and
tailored to be suitable for each discipline and student level.
The initial focus has been on materials emphasising team work and group
work in Commerce and Business. Now that we have garnered the role as hosts
of the Communication Skills in University Education 2002 conference, we
are expanding the site to include materials covering all generic skills
across disciplines.
The IAAF - http://www.iaaf.uwa.edu.au
The SkillCity website was crafted by the Image Acquisition and Analysis
Facility (IAAF), which is funded by the Lotteries Commission to support
medical research for the good of the people of Western Australia. It also
provides facilities & other services for university and industry requiring
cutting-edge multimedia, graphics, Web Development, image acquisition,
and analysis. For more information contact: info@iaaf.uwa.edu.au
Top
Development team
Initially, ten universities were involved in the Comm Skills Project. Now,
staff members at sixteen Australian universities are involved, with forty
names on our e-mail list.
Team members have divided the 'building' efforts into sub-projects, which
have been initiated mainly by academics working in the area of staff development.
The sub-projects involve, for example, getting a team of lecturers together
to supply and/or review materials for submission to SkillCity.
The SkillCity web site has been online since early 2001, assisting in
gaining feedback from lecturers on how we can tailor the site to their
needs. Recently, in response to lecturer feedback, and to get the site
ready for the CSUE 2002 conference, we redeveloped
the site to make it simpler and easier to use. The site you are visiting
now is the all-new SkillCity II website.
Top
How Can You Help Build 'SkillCity'?
SkillCity is both the materials and the community of users…
- You can help by submitting materials directly to the SkillCity site,
by using the materials and adding reviews, or simply by e-mailing us your feedback
on the site so that we can further tailor the site to your needs.
- Workshops at your university related to generic skills or 'graduate attributes'
could employ SkillCity for displaying and/or sharing relevant materials.
- You could organise a 20-minute session at your university where participants visit
and provide reviews for materials on SkillCity, making an alternative to ordinary workshop handouts.
- SkillCity can also be introduced as a shortcut to online resources, in general.
- You can also attend the CSUE conference 2002 on the 3rd and 4th October at UNSW to talk
about issues that concern you in teaching communication skills in universities.
For more information on becoming involved e-mail us: willrifkin@unsw.edu.au
Top
News and events
Top
Links
If you would like to add web addresses to this section, please send them
to Emma Beacham
Teaching and Learning Centre, University of New England.
http://www.une.edu.au/dec/
This site introduces you to the Teaching and Learning Centre at the University
of New England. It has information and assistance for students as well
as programs and services for staff.
The Learning Centre, University of New South Wales
http://www.lc.unsw.edu.au/
This site gives the reader a useful introduction to the activities of
the Learning Centre at the University of New South Wales. The Learning
Centre provides a wide range of academic support services to students
enrolled at UNSW, and it also offers services to staff. It has some excellent
on-line resources for improving generic skills.
LEAP: The Learning and Teaching Development Unit, University of Adelaide
http://www.adelaide.edu.au/ltdu/leap
LEAP provides information about learning and teaching initiatives at the
University of Adelaide and comprises case studies and staff development
files. There are also resources pages, appropriate for academic staff,
referencing a wide range of print and online sources of information on
various aspects of learning and teaching.
HERDSA- The Higher Education Research & Development Society of
Australasia http://www.iaaf.uwa.edu.au/herdsa/index.html
The Higher Education Research & Development Society of Australasia
Inc. (HERDSA) is Australasia's leading professional society in the area
of higher education. Formed in 1972, HERDSA promotes and informs discussion
on all issues relating to higher education.
Scientific Skills
http://www.iaaf.uwa.edu.au/hb309/default.htm
This is a course outline of the Department of Anatomy and Human Biology
prepared by Assoc. Prof. Stuart Bunt of the University of Western Australia.
It is highly innovative in its presentation and in the way it incorporates
study skills
You and Engineering
http://cleo.eng.monash.edu.au/teaching/learning/centre/index.html
This innovative site, prepared by Assoc. Prof. Roger Hadgraft of RMIT
University, is a very creative site going through skills for engineers.
It has sections on problem solving, teamwork, communication strategies,
and information skills.
Curtin University of Technology Subject Guide to Online Learning
http://lisweb.curtin.edu.au/guides/subjects/subjectonline.html
This web page indicates available resources about online learning, both
in the theoretical and practical sense.
Cooperative and Collaborative learning
http://www.lgu.ac.uk/deliberations/collab.learning/index.html
In cooperative and collaborative learning, students generally work together
in groups of two or more. These are usually face-to-face groups but, with
the rapid expansion and availability of communication and information
technologies such as e-mail, this can also be done effectively at a distance.
Sites that deal specifically with the issues involved and technology available
for online collaborative learning can be found on this site in a section
of external links.
UltiBASE: A World Wide Web Service for Tertiary Educators
http://ultibase.rmit.edu.au/index.htm
UltiBASE is a peer-reviewed e-journal and resource for tertiary teachers.
Its aim is to promote teaching best practice in the Humanities, Social
Sciences, and Education in all tertiary settings.
The Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, Oxford Brookes
University, UK
http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsd/index.html
This site has a range of useful materials aimed at the development of
teaching and learning in higher education.
MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching)
http://www.merlot.org/Home.po
MERLOT is a free and open resource designed primarily for faculty and
students of higher education. Links to online learning materials are collected
here along with annotations, such as peer reviews and instructions for
assignments.
Top
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
What is the intellectual property status of material on SkillCity,
and who owns the SkillCity site?
- Our research on intellectual property reveals that the author owns
the copyright of material on SkillCity. The federal government (through
AUTC) is funding development of the site, but that does not give them
copyright of the material on the site.
- What has been interesting is that those individuals who have contributed
most to the site have said that they just want their material used.
They express no concern about being given credit. Noted authors, Graham
Gibbs (UK), Baden Eunson (Melbourne), Barbara Millis (US), and Isa Engleberg
(US) readily and enthusiastically offered free use of their published
material for SkillCity (though we will still need to negotiate with
their publishers).
- For those who need to keep track of where their material goes, websites
do record 'hits' for each page and downloads. Commonly available software
makes this data digestable for those of us who are not computer experts.
So, in the future, we could send each author/donor (and each reviewer,
too) a record every year of how many times their submission has been
looked at and how many times it has been downloaded. This mechanism
would provide much more precise information on use than one might get
from traditional printed forms of dissemination.
Most of the material on SkillCity seems to be about teamwork? What
about other communication skill areas?
- Material prepared for SkillCity over the last couple of years has
centred on teamwork to give the development team a focus in configuring
the site and establishing submission methods and formats.
- Team members urged this groupwork/teamwork focus when we originally
applied to CUTSD (AUTC's predecessor) in 1999, even though the Wollongong-based
seed project covered five communication skill categories. Now that we
feel that we have sorted many bugs out of the technological and organisational
aspects of this process, we are ready to accept material from other
communication skill areas. You will see additional categories listed
on SkillCity II.
- We will also be eliciting submissions from the National Communication
Association in the US, which has 7000 members. Their vice president,
Prof. Isa Engleberg, has expressed keen interest in the Project. We
have also begun negotiations with the meta-data site, MERLOT, whose
chief executive officer acknowledges the need for addressing generic
skills and not just disciplinary teaching materials.
Using the CSUE 2002 conference to both fill SkillCity with teaching
materials and get them reviewed sounds like a great approach. How can
I get people at my university - who are not attending CSUE 2002 -- involved
in SkillCity?
- Thank you for your support. Employing a conference as a kind of 'barn
raising' to fill a website and introduce a community to sharing materials
online has been used in recent years with some apparent success. MERLOT
has had at least one developers' conference. A site for case study material
for problem-based teaching in science now has a hundred entries, and
it grew out of a
National Science Foundation-funded conference specifically for developing content
for the site. A major purpose of any conference is to share developments
in the field. The SkillCity website is meant to facilitate precisely
that. We are glad that you are considering joining us in this undertaking!
- Workshops at your university related to generic skills or 'graduate
attributes' could employ SkillCity for displaying and/or sharing relevant
materials. Or, you could have a 20-minute session where participants
visit and provide reviews for materials on SkillCity. That might make
a nice alternative to ordinary workshop handouts, which too often gather
dust on lecturers' bookshelves. SkillCity can also be introduced as
a shortcut to online resources, in general. Few lecturers have the time
for the sort of concerted search that is needed to find - and search
within -- a range of valuable university and conference websites. SkillCity
was funded to provide those links and thereby model means to share generic
skills/graduate attributes material online. Our hope is that creative
use of SkillCity in your university setting will help to build a community
of academic staff who attend to graduate attributes by employing, reviewing,
and even donating materials.
Top
Contact us
If you would like more information about the project, or have any questions
regarding submissions, reviews, or any aspect of the website please contact
Emma Beacham, e-mail willrifkin@unsw.edu.au.
The CUTSD Comm Skills project is managed by Dr Will Rifkin, Director, Science
Communication Program, UNSW, e-mail willrifkin@unsw.edu.au,
Ph (02) 9385 2748.
Top
|
