Monday 9 March 2009

Back to work, briefly

Back from IUISC in Galway - had a great time, a very useful and interesting conference, and like the rest of Ireland, very friendly. Spent Saturday driving round County Clare where my father's family is from getting very wet. Someone told me you can get 4 seasons in a day in Ireland, and they're right - we had snow, sunshine, rain and wind in almost equal measure. Lovely place, and I will go back. Flew back with Aer Arron, and whilst I'm very impressed with them as a company and the way they've embraced new technologies, I hate the way those small planes get blown about in the wind - it was a very bumpy descent. I'm sure very safe, but I was terrified. I'm just a wimp when it comes to flying.

Back to work for one day today as I leave tomorrow for the UCISA Management Conference in Liverpool. We've got some good speakers planned, and I'll post about as many of them as I can.

Had a good meeting this morning looking at our next service review which will be on our portal, MUSE (My University of Sheffield Environment, in case you're interested). We're trying to carry out about 6 a year using simple web surveys. Because the University needs to ensure that we don't send our students too many and induce survey fatigue, we need to coordinate them across the University, and that can cause delays in our programme. To get round that we might be asking for students to volunteers for a feedback list - that way we can send surveys out whenever we like. Also difficult to decide what questions to ask - how to separate the portal from the services it gives access to in a way users understand.

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