Further to I’m looking for more careers tweeters, after attending the AGCAS Heads of Service Conference last week I’ve found a few more. Coming from a background in learning development and learning technology I’m increasingly finding that I need more careers people in my professional network (it could be just me but there seem to be far fewer careers people on twitter?). So I’m making lists. I have two:
Who have I missed?
I spent the second half of last week at AGCAS‘s new heads of service training and then the AGCAS Heads of Service conference in Dublin. This is an annual event for heads of higher education careers services. Just like last year it was an enjoyable conference. It was good to meet people, some of whom I had met last year but most of whom were new to me. I found a few more heads of service on twitter this year, but most seem to use LinkedIn so I’ve connected with them on their instead.
The opening address from Kate Dodd was a useful starting point, in particular her challenge for careers services to develop universal provision, i.e. engaging all students not just the keen or desperate few (I’m exaggerating slightly there). Also her summary of what senior managers expect from their Careers Service, that the service will:
I attended a really useful workshop on ‘Is the virtual careers service inevitable?’ with Michael Clark and Marc Lintern (I’m hopping their slides will be available somewhere soon?). I also attended a less than useful workshop on ‘Is the career guidance interview a necessity or a luxury we can no longer afford?’, which I thought would be really interesting but unfortunately the panel was made up only of people in the necessity camp so wasn’t very useful (IMHO).
It was also a good chance to catch up with Bob Athwal, who was there in his AGR capacity but starts with us on 16 January :)
January 2011 was the first time I attended the AGCAS Heads of Service conference. I was very new to careers stuff then (still am!) and it was a really useful chance to meet people. I’m looking forward to the conference this January, not least because I’m attending an additional day on 4 January for deputies and new heads. Our soon-to-be Director of Careers, Bob Athwal (you’ll need to scroll down a bit) will also be there so it will be a good opportunity to spend some time with him too. What I’d also really like is to find some other careers tweeters. My network is mostly made up of learning development and e-learning people (which I love!), but I need to find some good careers tweeters too. Last year on the conference there were only 4 of us tweeting (to my knowledge) but only 2 of us are still current (on careers stuff at least. So, does anyone know any more? They don’t have to be heads of service, or even in HE, just people who say useful stuff about careers and employability on twitter.
(Couldn’t leave that hot water post at the top of the list for long).
Since Easter I’ve been drinking hot water instead of tea (never liked coffee), and I’ve rather taken to it. So here are a list of reasons why:
Another interesting post from me there.
Oh, and happy Christmas :)
I’ve had a busy 16 months. Maria left for sunny Bangor in August 2010 and then Paul left in April 2011. This left all of the Head of Student Development role and most of the Director of SSDS role to be covered (whilst still doing bits of my old job). I’ve not covered the roles perfectly but I have been able to keep relatively on top of things (all things considered). There have been a number of things that have kept me sane; my wife, my kids, my faith, my daily cycle, supportive colleagues, but the one that this post is about is my task management system (exciting, eh?), which is getting things done using remember the milk.
A while back I explained how I set up the system, and after nearly 2 years of use I can say that it’s still working. I’ve not changed it much other than adding meetings tags (e.g. m_teamleaders), which strictly speaking are really contexts but I was finding I was having so many meetings it was useful to give them a prefix of their own. The tags I use the most are:
These combined with Remember the milk’s smart lists, e.g. “NOT(due:never OR due:today) AND NOT (list:zzz)” for my ‘tickler list’ ((if this isn’t making any sense you need to read that previous post) make it a really powerful and scalable system.
I try and have a review each week where I try to cover this kind of stuff. It’s often difficult to keep up but the great thing about the system is that it doesn’t take long to get back on the wagon once you’ve fallen off. It’s not a perfect system (despite what the GTD publicity might say) but it is a good system. And being able to access Remember the milk from phone, iPad or Desktop (and all these other services) means that it’s easy to capture everything and then process it accordingly (see below – NOT creative commons).
What a dull post that was.
Years ago (when I did a different job) I developed these plagiarism tutorials. There are now 17 of them and between them they’ve had tens of thousands of views. A while back I made them creative commons so that other people could make their own. Over time I’ve collected more than 1,000 responses to the questions that formed a survey at the end of the tutorial (the survey is currently bust and I need to fix it, but that’s another story). The questions I asked were:
Is this data of use to anyone? I don’t have time to analyse it but there might be some interesting stuff in it. Let me know if you want it.
Two weeks ago I popped up a quick post on Alumni talking heads experiment. I don’t what to be too premature about this but it seems to have worked a treat! Of the 10 alumni contacts that Professor Roey Sweet (the Head of Department) and Professor Rob Colls (the Careers Tutor) gave me, five said yes to doing the video. And to my surprise – all of them actually did it! What’s more it took very little chivvying from me. Some did webcam straight to YouTube (as I suggested after belatedly realising that was easiest), some used a digital camera and one even used his phone! Four of the five uploaded straight to YouTube and one uploaded to the DropBox folder I shared with them. Only one of the five videos needed significant editing (the one uploaded to DropBox in multiple files), the rest just required topping and tailing. Matt did a fantastic job of the editing in a couple of hours on Tuesday afternoon, and created this page.
I’m really pleased with the end results. They’re not broadcast quality but they are definitley good enough. The alumni did a great job on the content with very little guidance. They talked about how they got to their current role, a bit about what they do and some even offered a bit of advice at the end!
My next job is to try and get some conversation going on it round the department’s Facebook page.
Recently I’m working with our School of Historical Studies on a Recruitment Boot Camp. It’s designed to offer intensive support (in addition to our general support) to our Historical Studies finalists to help them to find a job on graduating. It will involve face to face sessions, online resources plus videos of Historical Studies alumni describing how their History degree from Leicester has helped them (Chris Willmott has been doing something similar for years to this last bit via his Careers After Biological Sciences project – but the difference here is that I’m trying to do it remotely).
The website will give you an overview of all this but what I’m focusing on at the moment is the alumni videos.
I contacted 10 Historical Studies alumni (via contacts from the department) a week or so ago and within a couple of days 5 had said ‘yes’ to recording a video for me. What surprised me was not just that half of them said ‘yes’ so quickly but also that they didn’t really ask for technical help. The only information I gave them re the video itself was:
I’m hoping you might be able to help by recording a video clip stating who you are and when you studied at Leicester and how you got to the job you are now in. We would then edit the video and send it back to you for approval before posting it on the project website. Historical Studies finalists will then be able to see what some of their predecessors have been able to achieve since graduating, hopefully inspiring and motivating them and giving them some ideas. The video need be no longer than a couple of minutes and would need to be recorded via a webcam or digital camera. I can give you full instructions on how to record and then send us the video file.
Since then though I’ve been thinking I should probably give them a bit more guidance. I had suggested uploading the file to a shared folder within Dropbox but I’m beginning to think that recording straight to YouTube via a webcam will be the best option (didn’t know you could do that, d’oh!), rather than to go to the trouble of creating a file to then upload elsewhere. So, here’s a quick Screenr on how to do it that I’ll be sharing with the intrepid 5.
Obviously they’ll need to create a YouTube account if they don’t have one already, but they can share the file with me unlisted or privately. Also, recording straight from a webcam will probably ensure a nice still image, plus it should be easier to get sound and lighting right.
Am I missing anything? Any suggestions?
PS. More to follow on Boot Camp another time… (but any comments/suggestions on that also appreciated)
Lets’ see if I can remember how to blog…
This afternoon/evening I’m presenting to our University Council on ‘Graduate employability’. I’ve got about 15 minutes to present the content and then there’s an hour for questions and discussion. I have no idea what to expect. Below is the first part of the presentation, I’ve left out the last 6 slides which cover the sections ‘our data’ and ‘our response’ and the ‘over to you’ questions but I’m very happy to share these with any UoL staff if they want the full version. I’ll let you know how it goes…
In an attempt to breathe life back into our beleaguered tagginganna project, Mark, Alex and I met a couple of weeks ago to try and kick start it again. It’s been difficult with each of us doing at least two jobs but we’re hopeful that we can progress things a bit further this semester. One part of the project is to develop some ‘how to’ screencasts for people who might want to use the Digress.it platform for similar purposes, so with that in mind Alex and I recording four rough and ready screencasts to explain how to:
And here they are. Like I say, a bit rough and ready but hopefully useful guidance for someone who wants to start using the platform.
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