My secondment to the Scottish Government to work on Glow has ended, I’ll be returning to my substantive post on Monday.
\nThanks to all who tweeted nice messages last week. I hope to post some more on the whole experience but for now some blog thoughts.<\/p>\n
Back in July I posted Glow Blogs 558 days in<\/a> doing a bit of self assessment on progress on Glow Blogs. I’d didn’t score myself too highly and hoped to do better on the following fronts:<\/p>\n You can see the progress we have reported on the Releases page on Glow Blog Help<\/a>.<\/p>\n 1<\/strong> e-Portfolios, here we nailed it I think. Before summer we had hope to release the plugin early in October but by September we announced a bit of a delay<\/a>. As it turned out we released the 1.0 version of the plugin<\/a> on the 10 of November. so I think full marks on number 1 as far as the first phase of the e-portfolios goes, two more phases in the works.<\/p>\n In my opinion the plugin is great, we have taken a 108 step setup down to 2 clicks, 2 fields and a popup button. We have gone from 60 themes in need of maintenance to one plugin. The creation of a profile from posts is to my mind elegant. In an earlier post<\/a> I’ve given a brief account of how the development process worked. This shows what a great team I have been lucky enough to work with.<\/p>\n 2<\/strong> In August<\/a> we had a release that added five themes, a couple of plugins some fixes and a couple of additions. Along with the e-portfolio release we added the ability to embed sway content to a Glow Blog by pasting in the URL. This later was developed by our developer Stephen Harris<\/a> in short order. Stephen’s work in general has saved a deal of time in testing rounds. The tester team have sent back few bugs for fixing.<\/p>\n Themes and plugins have been a feature quite a few folk have asked about. I am not much of a theme user myself so am interested in getting suggestions of themes for evaluation.<\/p>\n The retiral of the Suffusion theme<\/a> disappointed asome users, a lot of sites still are using it. I’de be very keen for these folk to identify a theme that would be a suitable replacement.<\/p>\n 3<\/strong> We are now at WordPress 4.1.8 so have made small updates. We have fallen a bit behind our aim of staying within a point of the main release but I expect<\/em> that an upgrade will happen in the new year. WordPress 4.2 did not bring much of interest to glow<\/em> users, the 4.3 and upcoming 4.4 versions will be solid improvements.<\/p>\n 4<\/strong> This is the trickiest one! There are conflicts in developing at a national scale between budget. The added requirements of working in the Government (procurement, security, data protection) all add to time and cost. I think we have managed to show steady progress since the switch over in October 2014. I believe this demonstrates that it can be done. Anecdotally the Glow Blogs service has been well received.<\/p>\n I had hoped that before the end of my secondment that we would have some process for getting things on a to-do list would be in place and visible. I think the need for this is well understood but not formally up and running. We have a backlog of ideas for future development. On these points I think I’ve moved from what I though of a generous C to perhaps scraping a B. I also said:<\/p>\n More important I hope I see an increase in the use of blogs by pupils that actively impacts their learning.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This one is a bit harder to judge, there are certainly new blogs created all the time. Through the bootcamp, twitter and just poking around I’ve seen some nice posts. I feel quite positive that Glow Blogs lower the entry for classes to start blogging. There no need to get permission, set up accounts ect, so the benefits should follow.<\/p>\n There is has been a lot of good feedback and commentary on twitter. For example:<\/p>\n Some great new reflective posts from MA education students & staff at @dundeeuni<\/a> on UoDEdushare #uodedu<\/a> #glowblogs<\/a> https:\/\/t.co\/VgIl0pBMBd<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Derek P Robertson (@derekrobertson) October 1, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
\nThe backlog consists of work left over from previous phases and feature requests from users.<\/p>\n\n