ELECTRICCHALK

Today the Netskills team are off en masse (pretty much, anyway) to the JISC Conference 2010.

It’s my first big chance to get a feel for JISC as a wider organisation and help with my transition from 5-16 education to HE.

I have a number of things to achieve:

• Get to know the Netskills team better (the tools for which I suspect will be coffee, food and a little alcohol – not all at the same time)

• Sit in on some of the Netskills sessions to get a flavour of what the rest of the team is up to. This is what we’re up to on the Ning.

• Attending sessions.I’m down for:
  • What is the place of technology in research-led teaching? – suspect there may be interesting difference with school-based teaching
  • Managing Curriculum Change – interested from an MSc point of view
  • Eportfolios – not just another buzzword

• Meet Lisa Gray to discuss ePortfolios. My first formal project will be to look at our offering on this subject and Lisa will be a key contact.

• Meet anybody else who might be interesting. Come say hi if you can find me.

• Tweet. I might also try doing some AudioBoo summaries just for a bit of variety.

Netskills is going through a period of quite radical change, reassessing it’s traditional approach to development (running workshops, providing training materials) into something that better fits new styles of learning and the types of technology we’re encouraging people to use. We’ve been working on our story so that when someone asks “what exactly is Netskills, anyway?” we’ve got a credible (and meaningful) response.

So, hoping to learn lots, make new friends and have a bit of fun. I’ll post a review once it has all settled in my brain.