A rather short week for me, as taking some leave. This week started for me on Wednesday as we had a bank holiday here in England and I took some additional leave.
I was off to London again, this time for an internal meeting about the Intelligent Campus, in which I provided some insights into the work I did on the project over the last few years. It reminded me about how much I enjoyed working on that project and the sheer quantity of ideas, use cases, blog posts I created and wrote over that time.
It also reminded me of how the presentation I created for the project evolved and developed over the life of the project.
When I ran the first community event at Sheffield Hallam in March 2018 the presentation was very wordy.
When I spoke about the Intelligent Campus in March 2019 at Digifest, the presentation was nearly all images.
I delivered variations of the presentation many times in that twelve month period, including a keynote in France, as well as versions at events and at meetings with universities. The more confident I got with the content and the details, meant I reduced the words and replaced them with images.
I have also been working on the assessment criteria for the Learning Technologist Technical Career Pathway using the SIFA framework.
I think it needs more work and some extra non-SIFA units to make it more aligned to the Learning Technologist role within Jisc.
I was only working two days this week, and Friday I was back in the office for more meetings and tying up loose ends from my growing inbox.
We have moved to a self-service model for booking travel and accommodation, which means for me less back and forth when booking hotels in cities I don’t know or have not stayed in before. Having booked a hotel for a trip to Leeds, my next booking will be for a meeting in Edinburgh.
I did find this article from Wonkhe interesting and insightful
We’re failing black students if we don’t talk about recruitment bias
I remember a long time ago, getting a job, not just because I matched the criteria and did a good interview, but because the panel felt that I was someone they could drink coffee with first thing in the morning. In other words I fitted their expectations of a colleague they could both work with, but also fit into their culture.
I doubt back then “unconscious bias” was even thought about, let alone even considered as an issue. Did the other candidates make them feel uncomfortable? Did they even understand why that was?
Interesting it was in that job, that I started to realise as white middle class male that I had privileges that came to me just because of my gender and ethnicity. I started to recognise that when working with people that they had different backgrounds, cultures and challenges, that were nothing like mine, so I had to ensure I didn’t let this impact on the decisions I was making.
My top tweet this week was this one.
For breakfast this morning I had some toast and a coffee. What did you have? #thisiswhattwitterwascreatedfor
— James Clay (@jamesclay) August 25, 2019