This blog is a (much!) less-than-formal outlining of recent travels, events, happenings, thoughts and comments which tend to have some occupational relevance, but are on occasion nothing more than a means of passing the time while waiting for trains, planes & automobiles...

Thursday 9 July 2009

Enhancing the Student Experience conference

After the "star billing" of Monday, today was the rather more usual relegation to "support act" on the "Enhancing the Student Experience" conference bill at Nottingham's Basford Hall. First up was HEFCE who told us that times are hard, there's no money, and their continued role in UK education is not guaranteed etc.
The delegates then chose from many workshops: by me (3 times: "Involving students in Assessment"), Wendy Stubbs from QAA, JISC RSC, Confetti Institute, Nottingham Law School, Trent Uni, Castle College, Leicester College etc and also heard from the NUS about what students want (subject knowedge that will get them a job, social experiences so they're not alone, feedback so they can improve, etc : no surprises, although one did say that their degree certificate would make a good table mat if it was laminated, but while unlaminated served no other purpose! Times are hard apparently.....).

Tuesday 7 July 2009

RSC Tour

No, nothing to do with the Royal Shakespeare Company, it's three JISC Regional Support Centre conferences.

June 23rd: For the third time in only 5 days, I had the pleasure of visiting Leicester, on this occasion for the local JISC RSC's annual conference held in the Walkers' Stadium where the keynote outlined how difficult it is to find what you want on the web.
Lots of page returns from Google searches apparently...

The second date on my one-week summer tour of JISC Regional Support Centre conferences was out on the west coast (Southport) where I witnessed a wonderful presentation/lecture/demonstration by Russell Prue, an "ICT evangelist & corporate trainer" who agreed in principle to be part of PWL3 (dates permitting).

The third (& last) date on my summer tour of JISC RSC conferences was at the newly built (completed just before the LSC started pulling the plug on construction developments) Epping Forest college, which for some unknown reason is not in Epping, but in Loughton 7/8 miles away. On the way there, my taxi driver kindly pointed out local features of interest ("Jade Goody's buried in that cemetery", "Jade Goody used to live there", "Jade Goody went to that school" - you get the idea by now I'm sure!) while I tried not to make jokes just in case he was a relative or an acolyte of some religious sect that I'm not yet aware of (called maybe the Goodies? - oh no that's been done).

Monday 6 July 2009

Seren atynfa daledig i mewn gwin!

After spending most of Sunday on trains (6 of them: 5 connections) travelling to North Wales I had the honour of being keynote speaker (or as the facillitator described me, the "star attraction") at today's "Best Practice in Higher Education" conference.
A memorable two days out, not least because following my 30 minute presentation, I'm now better off by a crate of wine. Yep. 12 bottles. Not exactly easy to carry across country, but they had assumed I'd go by car & I didn't want to offend them by refusing: after all it is another country & I am unfamiliar with local customs....
Free bottle to the first person to guess what the heading says (there are clues in the text) and convince me you've worked it out & not simply copied it into a translation site (which is what I did in case you're wondering).