After attending the SCA Wales forum last month, I was fortunate enough to attend the SCA audience analysis workshop in London which was focused on the report put together by Chris Batt as part of the SCAs program of work.

The SCA are a JISC funded body who are looking at the opportunities and indeed need to share content across public bodies to aid its use and, presumably cut costs.

The workshop was (well) attended and drew some interesting discussions and presentations from Dylan Edgar at the London HUB and Professor David Nicholas, CIBER UCL who introduced his work on deep log analysis, which is all good.

The need to share content is huge, we (everyone) needs to know that, when we get anything from any public body resource it is up to date and factually correct. I don’t need several different sources for the same info. Too many sites throw too much information at the user and expect then to find what they are looking for. And there lies my first minor issue with the SCA activities, whilst they are still only 18months in to a 24month programmed of work; I have yet to see any consideration into how the users will be able to find this shared content.

If I am on site a looking for some information that is shared (syndicated) across many sites, do know that and (more specifically) how do I find it? It’s an important consideration, shared content is useful, extremely important and very worthwhile, but only if people can find it.

during the workshop there where many questions asked, notably around what language is to be used, what do we mean by content, if a school has a collection of learning objects for a module in a particular course, what is the 'content being delivered, the collection the individual Learning objects in the collection, the course?

Who are the audience, teachers, students, VLE admin, school heads?

What is value, how do you measure it and how do you persuade those that control the money the access to digitized content will yield a good ROI

Whilst there was much agreement that these and other discussion need to be asked, there did not seem to be any direction as to who will answer them, or by when. But then that may be the project manager in me

the SCA's work is very worthwhile and defiantly to be supported, and I will be keeping involved as much as I am able to see how it goes forward and integrates with other actives (eGIF for instance)