Now we're talking: how tag clouds can improve skill conversations at university

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Now we're talking how tag clouds can improve
skill conversations at university
Carol Shergold, John Davies Stuart Lamour
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(No Transcript)
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The University
The Sussex experience will produce graduates who
typically are able to display effective and
sophisticated cognitive, analytical and
problem-solving skills and willing to engage with
unfamiliar problems and articulate solutions
Graduate employability (Destination of Leavers in
Higher Education Survey) for Sussex will be at
or better than the 94 Group average
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The students
I think its quite hard to think about yourself
in terms of your skills, especially when writing
a CV and trying to sell yourself  to employers
if someone asks what skills youve got - I dont
know! Like Im friendly and can write an essay!
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The staff
When filling out course forms, I tend to cut
and paste the same generic skills from one form
to another lecturers are asked to provide a set
of generic skills which don't "go anywhere" as it
were there is no requirement for the skills to
be mapped onto the course assessments, nor do
they appear on the course web page.
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Narrowing the gap?
http//www.flickr.com/photos//j_hlmn
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Research
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Personalisation
oh it is personalised I only just noticed I
wasnt quite expecting it to be that
personalised..its come up with all my courses,
and comments from my tutorsits really good
actually, I wasnt expecting it but I do like it
a lot
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The skills voice
This looks exciting keywords ..this is going
to let me .. put in all those words you feel
stupid for using like team work but then you
know thats what they want and this kind of gives
you licence to use them because someone has said
these are the words they are probably looking
for
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• I'm not massively keen on the concept. I think
  it is like allowing jobs and business to
  overshadow your degree which a lot of things are
  doing at the moment. So I probably disagree with
  the conceptfor what it is, it's pretty well laid
  out. If I liked the concept then this would be
  how I would want it to be done. But I think the
  concept is quite flawed

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Sometimes you are able to something, but you
dont realise its a skill. Using Skillclouds
with my academic advisor will help me to identify
these skills
It will be really usefulwhen writing references
for students and in designing courses
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www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds