October meeting

We had our monthly DIVAS meeting this week. Ben is moving along with the xml schema, he has had a meeting with Sam to discuss Hive, collections in Hive and retrieval and searchability issues. The details are in his blog so I won't repeat them here.

Chris hasn't been able to get the list of plan 1's yet but we should have them next week when Chris and I can decide which to target then approach them and see if they'll work with us.

The main topic discussed in the meeting was the Community of Practice and ideas to liven it up, to start off the process Helen Walmsley spent some time with Sue and Hamza to give them the benefit of her experience.

We started a private group in NING so we can discuss how to make this community more active. Discussions went from a topical theme eg. having a Halloween "Nightmare validations" to a structured programme following a logical course over a period of a few months. For example, we could focus of Market research for awards one month, focus on foundation degrees the next, focus on administration the month before people start gathering documents for the glut of validations in spring., etc. Lots of ideas were non-starters for various reasons but hopefully we should be able to pick out the ones that will work.

We all agreed that members should only be sent 1 email a week from the Validation Support Network (VSN) with details of what was happening this week, Fri lunch time sounded like a good idea, so Sue sent out the following this lunchtime:

Welcome to the first of the Validation Support Network’s weekly bulletins. We regularly update the contents so make sure you logon as often as you can.

Coming next week................

Get involved with Market Research!

Our featured theme for the coming week concerns the very beginning of the process of producing a new module or award - Market Research. On Monday morning we will be opening a new forum for those involved with, or interested in, exploring demand for and validity of proposed new courses. Please join in with the forum discussion and share your experiences, concerns and queries on this subject.

Introduction to the project, NING and how to make friends...

If you would like to know more about the project that our NING online community is part of and discuss why we are building an online community, how it might benefit us and what we hope to achieve from its use then please come along to a one hour face-to-face session.

The sessions will include practical advice and help on using the Validation Support Network, contributing to discussions, jazzing up your profile, creating blog entries and making friends etc.

We also agreed that even if we just changed the welcome photo every week it would help, and we all thought we should make more of an effort going in ourselves and posting.

I am slightly worried that the workload is getting a bit heavy in some areas of the project but I suspect that this will ease as the project changes direction. We start looking at models in more depth soon and how we may map them to validations.