A busy week with travel and stuff.

Tuesday I headed off to Cheltenham to run the first drop in session on our sector strategy. These sessions are about supporting staff at Jisc to see how their work supports the delivery of the strategy.

I was reminded on a mailing list of the “Short and Sweet” sessions I use to run at Gloucestershire College.

Someone was asking about TEL staff development and getting staff involved, and engaged. Often they would not attend staff development sessions.

Back in the day, when I worked at Gloucestershire College I faced similar problems. The solution for me was to take the staff development sessions, shorten them to 15 minutes and take them to the practitioners. These sessions were then delivered in their team meetings. I kept to time and also made a note of requests for further follow up training sessions.

Short and Sweet” sessions lasting fifteen minutes were  not the only model of development we delivered, there were also sessions lasting an hour, half a day and the odd whole day development. They were a little techno-centric, but they could cover anything, so as well as technology they could be pedagogy as well. It worked really well and many other teams started to use the term, saying things like “should we “short and sweet” this training?”

I am aware of a couple of universities that “borrowed” the concept for their own training, for example the University of Oxford.

Also there is this week note of mine which reminisces on the concept.

On Wednesday and Thursday it was off to Birmingham for a lunchtime to lunchtime away day for our leadership team. This was the first time we had all met in-person as a leadership team.

We were looking at our priorities for the next year (and beyond) and how we would work together.

I was on leave on Friday and off to London for the day.

My top tweet this week was this one.

What is happening? #Eurovision whatever happened to nil points?

— James Clay (@jamesclay) May 14, 2022