NB. posted in annoyance!

A while ago I took the time to fill in the survey on the Glow Futures home page, and had a quick look at the forums. Like most other folk in education I am quite busy but intended to add my 2 pence worth. I’ve revisited the site a few times but quite often it loads slowly or just show me a blank page.

Today as I am on holiday I though I’d take the time to add something to the debate. After a frustration half hour I though it worth posting my experience here, as I doubt many folk will have the patience to read about it on the forum if their experience is anything like mine.

On the forum I again found I have to frequently refresh the page after looking at a blank one while browsing the forum. This is quite off putting. I did find a topic that I though I could add to: How can Glow become more appealing?. As I went through the process of posting my post changed to become a log of the process I had to go through to post to the forum (too much recursion?). Here is what I posted:

Alex Duff said:

What needs to change in Glow so that it becomes more appealing to more teachers?

Usability.

Although this forum is not in glow it feels glow like to me:

1. Arrive on forum page (often need to refresh to see anything)
2. Click login
3. Taken to a login page which advises I login via glow
4. Click glow login button
5. shibboleth page appears
6. redirect to glow
7. login
8. shibboleth page appears
9. redirected to my profile
10. click forum
11. Read a post & click quote to reply
12. quote doesn’t appear
13. Switch browsers and repeat steps 1 to 11

I’ve forgotten what I was going to type.

Admittedly this is a worst case picture, but not unlike the number of clicks needed to do something in glow.

Trying to explain to primary 3 that they need to click and hold the back button to skip past shibboleth so that they can add their purple mash creation to the glow group that they started from is not always easy.

Just resized the text field I am typing in, now can’t scroll field have to use arrow keys to go back up and check what I typed.

On the blog issue I am happy enough with wordpress, I don’t think you can run tumbler on your own server so it could not be part of glow. But everyone will have their favourite blog platform, mine is posterous

This session most of my day to day work has involved glow, I’ve been creating content in glow, training staff and worked in classrooms with glow in demonstration lessons and team teaching. I still love the idea of glow, the conceit (in a good way) of having a national intranet providing a fantastic toolkit for teaching and learning is wonderful indeed. I am quite familiar with a lot of the glow groups tools and have been able to bend them to my needs fairly successfully, I’ve seen teachers create great learning opportunities with glow but…

A lot of folk I talk to have experience with glow similar to mine with the forum, things are hard to use, this will put off the less technophile. If I’d not had a bit of time on my hands I’d have given up on contributing to the future of glow on the forum. As it was due to my difficulty with the usability of the forum my contribution is pretty inarticulate and fragmentary. I wonder how many valuable contributors have been put off?