JISC Conference

Bit late this week with the blogging as it was the JISC Conference on Tues and Wed at Keele. The sessions I went to were probably a little too techy for me but I did get some useful pointers and they did make me think about how to apply the lessons learnt by the technical developers to the project in general. For example, some of the principles from the Engage project about identifying the community and understanding their values seemed very pertinent. And the sentiment "better not perfect" though being applied to software development summed up a lot about how I think we need to respond to get things done. So rather than go into detail about sessions (you should be able to read about them on their website ) I thought I'd blog about meeting the other projects who come under the same bid.

We had a short meeting, us, Ravensbourne, Manchester Met, Cambridge & Kingston a team from Netskills and Rob Bristow. It was good to meet everyone and hear a quick 30 sec resume of each project. Essentially Manchester are looking at mobile technology and SMS texting, Cambridge, linking up administrative systems using social networking tools, Kingston timetabling and Ravensbourne are looking at quality issues. For fuller descriptions there is a JISC website you can go to. I'm hoping we'll be able to work quite closely with the Ravensbourne project as the projects have common ground. It's being led by Cathryn Smith who is their head of quality so it should be interesting working with her.

Things to do: Holidays are coming up for a lot of the team so I'm hoping that things can keep moving. There are no major tasks in the plan to start until Sept but we need to make sure we're ready. I will probably spend a lot of time over the next week sending email reminders!