User Group

CiCS User Group this morning - always a good attendance. About 60 people from departments, a good mix of academics, technical support staff and professional service staff. We use it as a way of disseminating what we're doing to a wier group of staff than our own people. Sometimes if we feel a presentation is on a subject that might not be well know to the wider department we repeat it at a departmental meeting.

Today's meeting had 5 presentations.  First on the eLearning strategy which I mentioned yesterday and is being consulted on at the moment. One of the drivers for this is student demand for technology enhanced learning, they are looking for us to be leaders in the filed. We also have to be aware of the global market for students, and TEL could enhance our competitive edge. The strategy proposes an enhanced eLearning environment,an audit of digital resources, an online environment for public facing materials, a network of eLearning academic champions, more flexible teaching spaces and the provision of appropriate technology.  if you're interested in this area then I can strongly recommend our Learning Technologies blog which is excellent.

The second presentation was on our creative media facilities which I've blogged about before, and I think was new to many people in the room. We also gave them an update on where we are with the managed desktop, and this provoked an interesting discussion about what a staff managed desktop should look like, or even whether we should have one.

Switching to research, we then talked about the new N8 HPC facility which is obviously of interest to many researchers in the University.  Finally we told them about how our ICT support team had been making improvements to their services over the past year. Lots of very good stuff, and they got a well deserved compliment form a member of the group.

No blogging for a couple of weeks now - I'm off somewhere hot!