Where have I been?

It's been a long time, since I've blogged, but there has been so much happening that I should have been blogging about.

There have been four big things that I have been working on since I last posted in January. The biggest has been preparing the SRDS participation data reports for departments. Although this takes quite a long time, SRDS participation is still at a high level (88%).

The second big piece of work is to help make sure that SRDS conversations are as useful and productive as possible. As a team, we have revised the content of the SRDS skills for reviewers learning event, to focus more closely on key skills for reviews. I have also put together a set of webpages, for reviewers and reviewees to use, providing links to web resources and top tips to help get the best out of SRDS.

I have also been working on the Learning Management System replacement project, with colleagues from around the University, and we are in the process of putting together proposals. There will be more to report soon.

The final big thing we have been working on is a presentation for the Staff Development Forum spring conference. We were fortunate enough to be invited to deliver a presentation on Development Everywhere, and the story of how we came up with it. This was a great opportunity to share what we have learnt and ideas with colleagues from universities across the University. Here's an action shot, and hopefully we will have our presentation recorded so we can share it on the Staff development at the University of Sheffield Google+ community.

Dan's talking about impact and measures at the moment pic.twitter.com/pGpKGZhisc
— Staff Development (@UniShefStaffDev) April 10, 2014

 So what have I learnt from all this? There has been a lot of bits of learning along the way associated with all these activities (such as how many times my computer will crash whilst generating reports from Access using visual basic - four. I must be doing something wrong!), but the key thing has been around how to capture all this learning. I had intended this blog to be a way to do this, but as I've already said, I haven't done very well at this. But, I have been using Twitter and Google+ to share things that I have learnt, both widely and within smaller networks I am part of. It has reinforced the importance of sharing learning, not only to spread knowledge, but also to consolidate my own learning.