Final IRET meeting

Yesterday, Verity Allan and I ventured to Birmingham for the final IRET programme meeting. It was great to have a focus for our thoughts on institutionalisation of software and the issues around communicating our project outputs. The venue (the Studio in Cannon Street) was unusual but pleasant, with good snacks and paper with aeroplane folding instructions which I personally enjoyed - after the event! (On the other hand, we have no positive memories of the Pallisades NCP car park, other than that we did eventually escape...)

You can spot us in a couple of Josie Fraser's great pictures on Flickr - here and here.

Many thanks to Rob Bristow for doing a great job of shepherding us through the programme!

intersections of talks and networking

Over at CARET's JISC Academic Networking project, things have been very busy lately, with an intensive six-week user-centric design sprint to create, prototype, test and refine concepts to support academics with communications around teaching and learning. The project is all about bringing some of the affordances of consumer social networking tools to academia, using commercial-style user-centric research and design methods.

Without scooping our sister project's results, I can say that interestingly, "events" turned out to be a very strong paradigm behind one of the concept strands. This is very exciting from an EGRET point of view, and we're following the parallel work closely to see what it might bring for Talks.cam in the future and looking out for opportunities together.

Looking forward to meeting everyone again in Birmingham tomorrow! (And for those of you who track these things carefully, yes, I have been to Fitzbillies today...)