Engage, Amber Miro award winners

University showcase from Oxford University who won the Amber Miro award for innovative use of Social Media.

Engage project. Collaboration between IT Services and the Bodleian Libraries.

Had an increased demand for training and guidance in digital technologies. Increased awareness of social media. Some job adverts say show imagination in disseminating results of research.
Researchers required to have a portfolio of modern research skills.

So, increased demand, but no budget.

Came up with umbrella a term, " Engage". Under that, training and workshops, seminars, online resources, community support and guidance.

Online resources, labelled 23 things for research. Picked 23 things over 9 weeks. Self directed course, exposed to rampage of digital tools, on line support provided, reflections recorded in blogs. All available under Creative Commons here.

Series of training workshops and courses. Flagged existing courses eg course on how to use twitter, podcasting etc. Ran new ones on Wikipedia, copyright, developing LinkedIn presence, advanced workshop on your online presence.

Seminar programme showcased experience and expertise of academics. Tried to inspire academics to experiment and try new things with social media tools.
Lunchtime seminar programme was recorded, all as podcasts.

Coordinators of the project used Facebook and Twitter, as well as VLE to interact and collect feedback.

Tried to engage academics on live twitter, 3pm to 4pm, follow hash tag and have a conversation. Put into Storify so could be read later.

Programme was open, so reached beyond the University. 740 course bookings, 17,000 website hits. 41 people went all way through course with direct support. Lot of podcast downloads.

Going to run it again, doing evaluation at moment to see how it can be improved.

Spin off benefits:
Raised awareness of services, and workshops and consultancy being sort latter on a paid basis.
Raised profile of public engagement projects and expertise within the University.






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