Visiting another university

Today we are off to another UK university to introduce WebPA to a number of teaching staff there, in hope that they will be able to get the system installed at their institution.

However, we are going to change the format after doing three or four of these workshops. Rather than 'death by over texted PowerPoint' we are going to try having less information on the presentation. I have been against the use of tight text on power point presentations for a long time. The presentation should be a que for the presenters next point or points, rather that the time honored read the text out. This however, will be new for the project researcher, but I think that they will be fine and make a great success of this method.

As for my bit, the demonstration, we are going to try and encourage the participants to interupt and discuss the software more. Hopefully, this will encourage the prospective users to think about how they would use WebPA in their teaching, thus providing us with more potential models of use and new elements that maybe added to the system in future releases.

The reason for the change is due to a meeting that we attended last week. Rather than provide the standard presentation, an over view sheet was provided, just to give some basic information about the project. The rest of the time, we had more informal conversation, including through the demonstration.

But today, we are also going to provide the participants with time and logon information, so that they to can have a go in a safe and secure environment, without feeling that the information will be seen by real students.