Friday 18 September 2009

Reflections on progress to date

The project is moving on apace and we have just had the second meeting of our partners hosted by the Subject Centre for History at the University of Warwick. Personally I have been completely wowed by the enthusiasm and commitment to the project shown by all the partners who attended. I left the meeting exhausted but exhilarated my brain buzzing with ideas and feeling very proud of what we have achieved so far. I know that there is still a long way to go and a lot of work to do before we get to the end of our journey together but if this meeting was a taste of things to come we are really going make vast strides in OER community building.

What I have taken away from the meeting is a personal sense of delight in how everyone is playing their part with energy and considerable skill. In terms of progress with the project I can only repeat that we have made great strides in no time at all and I really feel that the team is taking real ownership of HumBox as a project group and as a community. As for the next stage our key challenges will be to keep going (especially with the beginning of term looming) and to work hard at spreading the word and communicating our enthusisasm to our colleagues and the powers that be!

Please post your thoughts on your personal response to the workshop, your views on progress so far and the key challenges for you over the coming months.
Ali

3 comments:

  1. I agree that the workshop was a great success and enabled us to get to know each other better which helps to foster a sense of community.

    As I've already posted elsewhere, I'v already arranged to brief our librarians about the project and will be speaking here http://elesig.ning.com/events/digital-literacies-elesig using Brett's wonderful slides. Once the new url goes live I'll be arranging meetings with colleagues in the Humanities whilst editting and evaluating existing resources and adding to them.

    I'm also developing my tweeting skills so that I'll be in a position by early 2010 to publicise the Humbox internationally.

    I've also contacted colleagues at Worcester University and be giving a presentation there once the beginning of term chaos has subsided.
    Billy

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  2. The workshop was really helpful and I agree with Billy that the sense of community is tremendous. Thanks again to all.

    I gave a presentation to the Languages and Social Sciences School here at Aston about Humbox yesterday. It provoked interest because I suggested the potential to use the personal profile to flag up related personal research interests, along with teaching materials, and to link to the relevant papers in Eprints.

    I have another workshop planned and a meeting with the staff who have provided materials so far at which I will see if they would also be willing to record a brief video each about what the project means to them and their teaching/research interests to upload to Humbox.

    The key challenge just now for us is to get the materials we have been unable to upload so far into the Humbox, for which we need some technical advice.

    Apologies, but due to the beginning of term chaos too, I am behind on the peer reviewing task just now, but hope to catch up soon!

    Sarah

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  3. Holding a two day workshop at this stage in the project was very helpful in fostering a strong collaboration between all the partners. The constructive discussions enabled us to really tackle the processes and practicalities of choosing, describing and commenting on resources: the focus of resuability was much clearer and I certainly left the workshop with a very clear purpose. We are looking at two whole new ranges of resources from archives and archaeological digs, and I'm working at creating constructive collections of many of the resources that I've uploaded.

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