Posts Tagged ‘online support’

#StaffsPGR Support Group

Wednesday, July 15th, 2015

I’m a member of a few facebook interest groups – and there’s a few I’ve set up myself. The latest of which is one for the Postgraduate students of Staffs Uni – born out of a few conversations at the 3rd annual conference about how alone many of us felt.

The key thing I’ve learn’t so far from other groups I’m members of is that Australians are having a lot more fun with their phd’s then we are. Thesis Haiku competitions, Dance your PHD’s – even the #3MT (Three Mniute Thesis) idea hails from sunny Down Under. I hope a little that we can create a support network within the university – cross faculty and maybe aligned with this mythical graduate school we keep hearing mention of. Maybe we can inject some fun into it as well, even just to let off some steam.

Who knows, I might even try and form it into a proper post grad society at some point in the future (once we’re moved to Stoke I suspect)

On-line Support in Action

Friday, November 25th, 2011

Stu has done some excellent work in setting up chat rooms on the Digital Academy Forums, replacing using a lab to help with questions on design documentation. We tried to use Sococo for this last year but while it works great for so many things, and we are working on some more uni type stuff with them, this appears to be working rather well . As I type this there’s 2 tutors and 9 students (admittedly the class has 140+ registered – I’m not sure it would work if they ALL turned up) – but we’re starting to sort out conventions, and the tricks of the chatroom.

A Screenshot of the On-line Support in action

It does rather remind me of my misspent youth spent in Compuserve and AOL chatooms, but I’m sure it will pass – but until it does, I’ve built a collaborative Spotify playlist to transport me back to the times of 56.6 K modems…