Well - it's down to me then

First congratulations to Fleur and her brand new baby boy Ewan!

With Fleur off on maternity leave for while, Sam and I are moving on as best we can. Sam is working hard on the External Examiner mini-project (and the ENABLE spoke TRANSAPEL) and of course carrying on with the Enterprise mapping work. Sadly, as well losing Fleur for a bit, Jenny Yorke, Learning Development Coordination Manager, and a Strategic Manager for ENABLE, has been off with ill-health for some months now - she is sorely missed and I wish her a successful recovery.

Since Fleur had her happy event (somewhat unexpectedly) a couple of weeks back, I've had some meetings with our senior management about the whole area of EA and particularly Course Related Information, and we are lucky to have Prof Mark Stubbs coming next week to talk to us about what he is doing at MMU. Hopefully this will help emphasise the importance of the work and findings of ENABLE at Staffordshire.

In late July I attend the JISC Innovations Forum at Royal Holloway. This was an excellent event. I attended a really interesting session (honest!) on the pros and cons of Prince 2 and Agile approaches to project management and another on organisational change. I also met up with Prof Peter Hartley from Bradford - as well as it being nice to see him again, he was very intersted in our EA work at Staffs and offered to discuss his own institutions work on mobile technologies as a "knowledge exchange" - I hope to progress this soon.

The TRANSAPEL work has being going really well - seeing a group of academics agree a definition of something as contentious as "a competence" in a very short time during a meeting highlighted how much everyone is "up for" the projects goals...

I've had a good meeting with Sheila Dexter who updated me on progress in the area of Academic Planning and another with colleagues from Information Services about on-going work on Study Skills - an important area at the moment. (They commented on the interesting perception issues between some teaching staff and professional staff based in services....)

Work on rolling out the OER work and getting our Hive repository on a "service footing" still proceeds, and I had an excellent meeting with Information Services which made real progress on the issues around process ownership and roles as we move the repository into wider use...

I'm now wrestling with the list of jobs Fleur left me - along with very precise instructions ;)