The National Centre for Food Manufacture (NCFM) at Holbeach was in the news this week The NCFM hosted one of a series of workshops on PicknPack dissemination. Funded by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme, PicknPack is a flexible robotic system developed to automate food processing and packaging.
The role of food packaging is a thankless one. Designed to be functional and attractive, it ends up in the bin, destined for landfill, but I guess you’re not meant to think of it that way.
Travelling between Lincoln and Holbeach is to journey through a showcase of local production. In spring the fields are full of daffodils and tulips; in September there are leeks, sweetcorn and cabbages, always cabbages. Colours range from wheaten gold to ploughed-earth chocolate brown; all under the broad, deep Lincolnshire skies.
This week two Digital Education Developers joined EDEU and it was a pleasure to include a trip to the NCFM as part of their induction. Chavan Kissoon was e-learning guru for Work Based and Distance Learning in the Business School at the university and Marcus Elliot joins us from Grimsby Institute. Chavan will work with the College of Social Science and Marcus with the College of Science. I’m still waiting for my DED (apologies for the acronym) for the College of Arts. A third Senior Lecturer in Educational Development or SLED (we did slightly better with that one) will also be joining EDEU. By January 2015 we should be complete.
The move to the edge was eased by the facilities at One Campus Way; continual supplies of coffee and a special welcome from EDEU Director Dr Karin Crawford; for picky eaters like me the fruit was welcome 🙂
Week One has been good. The rest of the team, Dan Derricott and the Student Engagers, arrive on Monday. Next week is our first full team Awayday. EDEU is taking shape.
That’s me in the corner. The door to the meeting room is locked making the space into a 3-sided room.
There’s no direct light shining on my screens and I have my own bookcase (already filled with a cunning plan to encourage book returns)
Duck and Spider have arrived. I’ve yet to introduce the wider EDEU team to the phenomena of Rubber Duck Debugging That will come. As for Spider, it’s 14 years old and interesting to reflect on the changes since I first built the Achievers in Excellence website in 2000. In 2014 we weave with modules and plugins from content management systems rather than direct html. I’m left wondering if any other generation has seen so many changes happen so quickly. EDEU are in an excellent place to take the university’s remit for digital education forward.
Picking up on the Rubber Duck Debugging element of your post, which we also discussed in the office, I saw this article in the Wall Street Journal from Steven Pinker (Harvard University) on how “the ‘curse of knowledge’ leads writers to assume their readers know everything they know”.
Something for us bear in mind once our training sessions kick off and instructional documentation gets created.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-cause-of-bad-writing-1411660188?mod=trending_now_1
This is an interesting link Chavan. You are right and supporting the use of educational technology is a good example of where we need to think carefully about language; both spoken and written. Thanks