Incidents and Awards

Highlight of today was a demonstration of our new Incident Contacts System. For use principally by our Control Centre, it stores  details of staff who might need to be contacted in an emergency. Sounds simple enough but there's a lot of data in there which needs to be easily entered and  searched by  campus zones, buildings, rooms, departments, specialist facilities etc. Not to mention all of the different staff roles we have including building and facilities managers, safety officers, duty managers. It is extremely elegant and easy for individuals to enter their own data, with automatic reminders if you've not updated it in a specified time. A read only copy will be kept off site in case the incident involves access to our services! Developed by our colleagues at epiGenesys, it will be ready for piloting very soon.

Another excellent piece of news today was that a group of our students and their teacher, Gary Wood have won a competition to create an outstanding on-line resource for learning and teaching using Google Apps. The competition was run jointly by ALT (the Association for Learning Technology) and Google, and was announced last night at the ALT conference. It was chosen from hundreds of entries and was judged by an international panel of judges.

AllAboutLinguistics.com was designed, built, and launched using Google Apps such as Sites, Docs, Google+, Maps, YouTube, and Calendar. The project was also a major piece of assessed coursework, through which students deepened their understanding of linguistics alongside gaining skills in project management, team working, use of web-based systems, and communication and collaboration tools.
Great stuff - well done to Gary and the team.