From a recent post on Joss Winn’s blog; with no apologies for the cut-and-paste job:
“In January, I [Joss] wrote about how I had written a paper for the university about the role of technology in the context of Student as Producer. The paper included a recommendation that a new team be convened to “further the research, development and support of technology” at the university [...] This was approved.
“I was pleased with the outcome as it means that our current work is being recognised as well as the strategic direction we wish to go in. In terms of resourcing, we will have at least one more full-time (Intern) post and hold a £20K annual budget which will be used to provide grants and bursaries to staff and students, pay for hardware and software as needed and pay for participants to go to conferences to discuss their work and learn from the EdTech community at large. This doesn’t include any external income that we hope to generate.”
The new, as yet unnamed group will include staff from CERD, ICT, the Library, and elsewhere, and will act as a locus for development and support for the use of technology in teaching and learning. We have a timetable for development over this summer (I’ll be writing about that development here). By September…
“…we’ll have a website that offers clear information on what we do, what we’re working on, how to get involved and the ways we can support staff and students at the university. The site will allow you to review all aspects of our projects as well as propose new projects which can be voted up and down according to staff and students’ priority. There will be an application form for you to apply for funding from us and a number of ways for you discuss your ideas on and offline. We’ll be continuing our current provision of staff training, but will be looking to re-develop the sessions into short courses that are useful to both staff and students.”
An important(ish) aspect of the work of the new group will be the way we organise our own work, and the tools we’ll use to plan, manage and document projects in a distributed environment where most of us work in different parts of the university campuses.
“For the Geeks, you might be interested to know that we’ve decided upon a set of tools for managing our work online in a distributed environment where most of us work in different parts of the university campuses [...] We won’t be prescriptive with the tools we adopt, using whatever is appropriate, but with an emphasis on those that offer decent APIs, data portability and good usability.”
