What is Windows onto Learning and WonderWOL

Windows onto Learning (WoL) is a project at Heriot Watt university in Edinburgh, Scotland to introduce space where student's work can be shown. It includes showcasing of student's projects in the university buildings, and maybe also on the Internet. Read more about WoL on Judy Robertson's blog.

WonderWOL project aims to create technical solution to make WoL possible. It would include creating software system for showcases to be uploaded, tagged, graded and validated by other users. Later web application that would generate visually appealing visualisations of those project showcases would be designed. WonderWOL software platform program could be used both on individual PC's or on large displays, or even lab screen savers.

Student's role

Students take a crucial part in this project as they will be the ones benefiting of WoL and involved in it. Students will create digital posters, presentations or adverts of their projects and agree to publish them on WonderWOL. It is also Students who will be moderating each others posters, and finally watching them on displays on university grounds.

Another possible facility would be for staff to point out student work they thought was particularly good. Or indeed, to have an automatic tool which record "feeds" of live work from a class e.g. snap shots of the Second Life island. We'd need student permission for this, of course.

Benefits of the WoL project include students gaining transferable skills of advertising their own work, marketing, preparing presentations and separating the essence and the most important part of their work from unimportant details. Possibly students can later use showcases created for WoL as a set of portfolio projects when looking for a job or further education.

Current Work

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Currently Pawel Orzechowski 4th Computer Science student supervised by Judy Robertson and Mike Chantler is trying to discover needs for this sort of application and identify possible solutions. They are talking with students and creating initial designs and sketches of WoL.

We would like students not only to participate in WOL project, but rather to create it themselves. Ideally WonderWOL would be mentored by student as well as and teachers and we need student's ideas to contribute to the creating of WoL and WonderWOL platform.

How can you Collaborate

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Anyone can collaborate at this stage by contacting Pawel, Judy or Mike or directly writing into this Wiki. Rough ideas, sketches, diagrams and any thoughts and suggestions are more than welcome!