Just back from the start up meeting held at the excellent National College for Leadership Conference Centre in Nottingham. Very interesting architecture and beautiful grounds with lots of water and wildfowl. Food was very good too. However we weren’t there just to admire the surroundings and stuff our faces.
The two day session was very well designed with a good mix of presentations, workshops and time to get to know colleagues and our JISC project managers. I came away feeling enthused and much more confident about what we might achieve with the EAT-PDP project.
We learned which projects we were to be ‘clustered’ with – the DePCEA project from University of Wales Insititute in Cardiff and the SAVE project from the University of Glasgow. The acronym from the Cardiff group came in for some light hearted flak from the facilitators for being fairly unpronounceable but it shall be the ‘DeepSea’ project to me. Not difficult at all. I will not unpick the acronyms here but will post links to the respective project websites when I have them.
I am really looking forward to sharing experiences and swapping notes with both these teams. I think the clustering is an excellent idea as working on a JISC project can sometimes feel a little lonely. The mutual support will be invaluable.
The Skype delivered Service Design workshop from Lauren Currie of Snook was fun and thought provoking – though sadly it came to a sudden end when the fire alarms starting ringing in Strathclyde. One thing I had not expected to have to do at this meeting was draw! Made me realise that dropping Art in the third form at school was probably the correct decision.
Once back in the office I couldn’t wait to see how our focus group members had got on with building their e-folios…… hmmmmmm. Well congratulations and well done to those few who have made a start – I think some of the others might need a bit of prodding.
Now where did I put that e-stick.