Capturing important conversations

The first week of May proved hectic for the ITEAM project. With a visit from our critical friend (Peter Bullen), a meeting with one of the Vice Presidents of the Student Union (Yasmin Bastow), a meeting with representatives from three Schools about the pilot of the Student Dashboard, several meetings with School representatives and finally UH's very own brilliant Learning and Teaching conference, the week was packed with useful conversations.

Q: How to distil all those useful conversations and condense into one blog?
A: Don't even try! The notes of the meetings are on the ITEAM's project page on the Design Studio here http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/46228936/ITEAM%20project

So, here instead we will try to record some of the bits of conversations (paraphrased) that most struck us last week:
Peter Bullen "why not revisit your success criteria as outlined in the baseline report? Perhaps re-consider them as a team and then use as a starting point to develop your evaluation strategy..." Yes - definitely!

Yasmin Bastow "many student find public release of results (common across many Universities) really humiliating...so why do Schools do it?"
and "different ways of giving feedback are confusing e.g. annotated scripts and tickbox... consistency helps as do tutorial groups to explain what went well or not" (some general feedback on feedback, pass it on)

Dashboard pilot group "how will we evaluate the success or progress of the dashboard pilot?" (good point, we've not thought about this in any detail yet)
and "will using a red, amber and green alert system be a problem for anyone with colour blindness?"  (another good point, could be very misleading)

L&T conference: actually so many good conversations here it is impossible to pick one.
From seeing a Head of School present his own work with EVS on his first year module, to hearing from the dietician about her plans to use EVS as a method of peer review in a meal preparation class to meeting the academic in the School of Education who is studying the use of EVS in small groups as a Masters project.

What did occur to us was that the conference programme was in itself evidence of the use of EVS across the institution as at least three sessions explored its use in some way.

So these are just some of the snippets of conversations captured from last week. I think they show just how the project team are trying to listen to the people around them and catch the good ideas as they pop up in conversation, just like the nuggets of gold from the student last week, these conversations are little jewels to be treasured for the future.

Julie