Thanks to Lindsay for hosting a slightly depleted action learning set at Kings College London on the 10th July. It was good to meet a few more of the individuals involved in our Transformations strand. Sarah facilitated and Lindsay, Lucy (UCLAN), Claire (Cranfield) and I shared some of the issues (and highlights) of our various projects. The 'action learning' ethos worked well and made for a more interactive and flowing session than our 'virtual' experiences to date. I suspect future virtual sessions will be more productive now we've actually met - perhaps for future programmes the first meeting of an action learning set should be the one where participants actually get together?
I took away a much better understanding of the others' projects, and a few specific actions:
1. Get to grips with the JISC resources we're using in the Keele project and start making better use of them
2. Update the project case study and keep it up to date
3. Do some more work on the evaluation spreadsheet and load it up to the cluster wiki
4. Keep blogging!
One other outcome from the day. Keele has just won further JISC funding under the Transformation programme to develop a virtual student advisor (SAM). From chatting to Lucy at the meeting, it was apparent that UCLAN's TISSUE project is operating in very similar territory (but using a different approach) so I've pointed one of the SAM team at Lucy so the two projects can compare notes.
Sunday 15 July 2012
Monday 9 July 2012
Action learning tomorrow - face-to-face
Off to Kings College London tomorrow for the first face-to-face action learning group. We've already had a couple of action learning sessions via Blackboard Collaborate but it will good to put faces to names. Virtual meetings are very effective, but my experience of action learning is that there are lots of non-verbal cues which make a big difference to how the session flows. The timing of this particular meeting, at around the mid-point of the project, is particularly useful - I'm looking forward to sharing some of the challenges and issues we're working around (plus the good stuff as well of course). A few things I'll be hoping to hear others' experience of: project staff turnover; ever-changing priorities; parallel institutional initiatives.
Progress update
The essence of the Keele Transformations project is to explore better ways of promoting and establishing placement opportunities with external organisations...
The past couple of months have seen some shifts in the time line for the project, as we take advantage of related initiatives and garner project-related information from them. As a key focal point of our analysis of placements activity and information requirements, our Destination Green project is coming into its own. This is a HEIF-funded Keele pilot for an internship+voucher offer for larger companies and is proving a useful test-bed for our systems analysis. The project includes user workshops which we're targeting as part of the Transformations project to get feedback and debate from participants - drawn from companies, Keele's Schools and the interns (graduates) themselves. We'll still be working in the information we're gleaning from the constituent parties individually, but the workshops are a great opportunity to get the different perspectives on information needs aired and shared. We'll then test our findings on SME companies, charities and public sector organisations who have taken placements from us in the past.
The CRM system used elsewhere in Keele that we're hoping to plug into is still a work-in-progress (i.e. we're not on it yet) but a new and welcome development is the introduction of Qlikview at Keele. We haven't started testing its capabilities wrt the Transformations project yet but it may prove a useful route to test-bed the type of dashboard view we're hoping to develop by the end of the project.
The past couple of months have seen some shifts in the time line for the project, as we take advantage of related initiatives and garner project-related information from them. As a key focal point of our analysis of placements activity and information requirements, our Destination Green project is coming into its own. This is a HEIF-funded Keele pilot for an internship+voucher offer for larger companies and is proving a useful test-bed for our systems analysis. The project includes user workshops which we're targeting as part of the Transformations project to get feedback and debate from participants - drawn from companies, Keele's Schools and the interns (graduates) themselves. We'll still be working in the information we're gleaning from the constituent parties individually, but the workshops are a great opportunity to get the different perspectives on information needs aired and shared. We'll then test our findings on SME companies, charities and public sector organisations who have taken placements from us in the past.
The CRM system used elsewhere in Keele that we're hoping to plug into is still a work-in-progress (i.e. we're not on it yet) but a new and welcome development is the introduction of Qlikview at Keele. We haven't started testing its capabilities wrt the Transformations project yet but it may prove a useful route to test-bed the type of dashboard view we're hoping to develop by the end of the project.
EA and Archimate
Having missed the EA workshop earlier in the year, I made it to the second one in London last week. It was a very useful session, with overviews of Enterprise Architecture and Archimate/Archi as a tool for modelling at an enterprise level. Some useful views from the coalface as well, particularly Lucy Nelson's overview of the EA space at UCLAN. The afternoon included some hands-on experience with Archi which I now need to translate into a Keele model to help illuminate the Keele transformations project - of which more shortly...
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