Initial observations and noticings {HH}

I've started the, ever so slightly daunting, task of looking through all the JISC LMS projects so that I can start synthesising with alacrity. I'm starting to get into the habit of logging everything I do on the project website change log and I'm tagging relevant web content on Delicious with a little note to remind myself why I thought it was worth tagging. If there's anything that I think is relevant to a specific project then I'll highlight it to them directly but I'll also try and remember to add those links to Delicious so that it builds into a useful source of information.

Here are the project websites that I've commented on so far:

• http://yocalcat.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/usability-update/#comment-8
• http://enclave.lib.ed.ac.uk/?p=94
• http://covprimo.blogspot.com/2010/07/naming-our-primo-installation.html
• http://lorrainepaterson.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/user-research-and-persona-creation-part-1-data-gathering-methods/

Some very early observations/possible themes I've identified for me to explore over the coming weeks:

• I'm wondering whether the short project descriptions for each project could be stripped back so that they would genuinely be understandable to someone without specialist LMS domain knowledge/an understanding of JISC. If projects can really get to the heart of what their projects mean for users then it will make it easier for them to talk to others about what they're aiming to do.
• There are some good tips for successfully engaging users in surveys and usability studies being captured in the project blogs - I'm interested in distilling some of those tips to share among the projects and the wider world.
• Where a project has some heavy lifting to do in terms of the review and analysis of usability data and additional cataloguing I'm wondering whether co-opting students in a 'citizen scientist' could help by providing the project with additional resources (at the same time as further increasing the engagement of students in the project and giving them a 'living' information literacy learning experience).

In response to a request from Owen Stephens I've been keeping a look out for any projects which are using or planning to use JUICE - I haven't spotted any yet so please let me know if your project is.