Finding the value (Distilling)

Recording the 'value' found in the validation documents is quite difficult. One of the main problems is knowing what the value really is. On one level - the validation documents, particularly the reports, are full of text-based information that are context specific, so the issue here is one of qualifying the information and quantifying how it should be represented.

Reviewing selected 'authentic' documents

I have received some selected validation documents to review. These documents include validation report documents and the originally submitted material. From my initial assessment, it would appear that most have issues very specific to the validation process that would be difficult to categorise for the casual reviewer. However, in terms of some broad themes, these come under the following headings/categories:

• Student Handbook Revisions
• Module Handbook Revisions
• Module Descriptors Revisions
• Some specific Blackboard VLE issues to resolve

It appears that most of the validation reports reviewed would reference most (if not all) of these headings/categories.

In terms of where to go next - the question is how to collect 'keywords' or headings that would be helpful in identifying the validation report as something which has some specific issues of interest. This could be done by 'atomising' these headings into some sub-keywords/sub-headings - but this wuold require creating some numerous metadata fields to complete.

In terms of value - the community of practice social site would be useful in 're-purposing' and presenting these documents, and thus may offer more of a value-adding exercise than relying on keywords etc - which are in essence only valuable in respect to findability and 'marking-up' the documents for interest to the user (to investigate further - drilldown).

Work continues.....