Getting back after a holiday

I have had some time off to have a holiday and have returned this week, kind of minus the jet lag! This means for me though, jumping straight back into the frying pan of meetings, events and the day to day work load that I have. We have also had the engCETL away day to break the week up. But my main emphasis this week has been in organising a demo area of WebPA to trial a workshop with.

Next Monday we are running our first ever workshop with some of the support staff here at Loughborough. The whole concept of the workshop has been two fold. Firstly we need to get some of the staff who support the lecturers here up to speed and confident. From this we hope that they will be able to support the lecturers in learning to use WebPA and also to help us improve the support documentation, as well as building the community of users.

So far I think that we are almost as ready as possible. I have little packs of information for all of the participants. These packs include a guide to WebPA for academics and a two page over view for students. There is also a supplementary information document with further information about peer and self assessment. To cap the information pack off we have copies of the tasks that need to be done in the workshop and a feedback form. Hopefully everyone in attendance will provide us with positive feedback, as on the 2 July we are going to re run the workshop up at the University of Derby.

The 2 July is the first of a number of days over the summer when we will be out and about trying to build the WebPA community. In this process we hope to get more institutions to host WebPA for their academics. From this we hope to build a community of users. If you would like to know more about getting us to come and talk about WebPA or would just like to keep up to date with what is happening then you will need to join or mailing list.

Also talking about building communities the WebPA team are going to be attending the OSS Watch workshop next Wednesdays(20 June) to try and learn more on how we can build our community and to learn from those who are looking to achieve the same thing or have achieved our goal.