Once you have enough reputation on the site, you can add clouds and cloudscapes as favourites by clicking on the star near the title of the cloud or cloudscape. You can then see your list of favourites so you can use this to bookmark clouds and cloudscape if you like. You can also see other people's lists of favourites and who has favourited any cloud or cloudscape.

As well as adding clouds and cloudscapes as favourites, you can recommend links on clouds, with the links with the most recommendations displaying at the top.We'll probably extend this system of recommendations to other types of content on clouds at some point.

Your reputation on the site is currently the number of your items (clouds, cloudscape and links) that have been either favourited or recommended. At the moment, you can start adding favourites and recommendations as soon as you have a reputation of 5. This is partly to give us a chance to sort out any bugs or problems before too many people are using it, and also because with any site like this, you are fighting a constant battle against spam. We'll review how useful this is as time goes on. 

It's early days with all of this and there are still lots of things we want to do including letting you see who has favourited which of your items and using the information from favourites to make it easier to find interesting and useful content on the site. For the time being, here is a sneak preview of the most popular clouds and cloudscapes. We will probably also use the reputation system to give extra powers to users on the site with high reputation in a similar way to on Stack Overflow if you are familiar with that site.

We'd love to hear your opinions on how the favourites and recommendations are working. Please tell us if you have any ideas for improvements!

Events listing

We now have an events diary. If you want to add a conference or similiar event to it, create a cloudscape for the event and add the dates and location of the event and it will appear in the list.

User tags

If you edit your profile, you can now add tags to yourself. Users tagged with a particular term will then appear on the page for the tag. Here is an example with the cloudworks tag page.

FAQ

Rebecca has written a great new FAQ for the site.

We've still got work to do on these.  Providing a way to get data about events out of the site and a better way to add single-session events spring to mind. Let us know if you have any comments or ideas for improvement. Also if you spot any bugs, please drop us an e-mail at cloudworks@open.ac.uk.

Coming soon, we're doing finally testing on sections for cloudscapes, so that you can divide up the clouds into cloudscapes into categories. See the Learn About Fair Cloudscape for an example. We're hopefully going to make it a bit less painful to upload pictures for cloudscapes and also provide a way for people to 'vote up' their favourite clouds and cloudscapes.

Rebecca Galley has set up a cloudscape with all the posters from the workshop and a summary of the discussions.

There are two major features we have planned for the site in this period. Firstly we are going to improve how the site handles clouds and cloudscapes for events such as conferences. In particular, we'd like to have a diary section of the site. The second feature is to introduce a way to 'vote' for particular clouds and items on clouds to make it easier for people to find useful information on the site.

As well as this, Nick is working on internationalisation of the site so that we can translate the interface into different languages. As well as this, he will be fixing some legacy character encoding issues resulting from the fact that the original site used Drupal.This will make it easier to have content in different languages on the site.

There are lots of smaller features you might see too. For example, we've introduced pictures to cloudscapes thanks to some work of Nick's and users should soon be able to tag themselves to, so if you search for a particular tag, you'll find users with that tag as well as clouds and cloudscapes. In addition to all this, I have been doing lots of bug-fixing and polishing parts of the site. If you have any suggestions, do let us know either in the comments below or by e-mail. 

After this stint on the site, I'll be back working on it again in the late Spring / early Summer hopefully for the rest of the year. Nick will be supporting the site in the interim.I am hoping that in the summer, I can concentrate on the Cloudworks API and plugins for other sites and on making the code open-source.

Because I want to get as much done as I can in these two months - and because the number of people using the site is growing and the more people we have using the site, the more difficult it is going to be to make changes, the site may be down for maintenance briefly on occasions without much notice. If you want to use the site at a specific event, do drop us a line and I'll make sure we avoid those dates and times.

I have also set up a provocative cloud listing some grand challenges that I think we face in educational technology.

Today I am presenting on some of our work around applying learning design and pedagogical pattterns methodologies to the design and reuse of Open Educational Resources. I also have a poster on our X-Delia project where we have developed a design and evaluation framework. Gill Clough our researcher has done a great poster which has just about survived the journey from the UK. Tomorrow I am doing a keynote where I want to explore issues around how we can better use web 2.0 practices to support a vibrant international debate on learning and teaching ideas.

I've set up a conference cloudscape and have incoorporated the Twitter #ascilite09 tweet stream (along with a twapper keeper archive for it). Feel free to add to the cloudscape stuff on the presentations at the conference. If you click on 'follow' for the cloudscape latest activities associated with it will appear in your personal cloudstream (available from the drop down red box with your name on it on the home page).

I am really looking forward to meeting people here. As someone who works in the centre I feel I don't have enough contact with ALs. I found my experience of being an OU student over the past two years invaluable, it gave me an insight into the university in a way that working centrally can't. I would love to have the opporunity to be an AL as well, as clearly they have a unique perspective on our courses - only trouble is finding the time!!!

I am facilitating a session today at the conference on assessment, and I have set up a cloud for this with my slides, a positional paper about assessment at the OU and a set of useful links.

Discover a new island on web 2.0 world....

• Come and take a virtual fieldtrip of the cloudworks island
• Learn about the islands history and culture
• Join the intrepid expedition team as they explore the island's terrain, swimming in the blue lagoon, trecking along the islands trails through the jungle, climbing the central mountains.
• Meet the islands tribes, get to know the character of 'cloudworkers'
• Reflect on islands future, as it begins to make connections with other countries on web 2.0 world.

All welcome!