Staff Conference

This past week was the college’s annual Staff Conference, which sees members of staff attending internal staff development sessions. Being a newbie to the college, I was quite keen to learn as much as possible and attend as many as I could. The selection was quite diverse and I chose sessions on the college’s sustainability policy, a personal fitness MOT and how to perform appraisals. I also learnt about Pacific Institute, which is a programme the college subscribes to promoting positive individual wellbeing amongst staff. I’d never heard of PI before, I wonder where else makes use of it?

Yesterday was the end-of-term Share Fair. I’d never come across this before but it’s quite a good idea. Each department puts on a stall demonstrating their recent activities. The catering dept gave sushi demonstrations – very entertaining! The library stall had a plasma screen showing a loop presentation and various pieces of our loan-able AV equipment on display. By far the most popular were the four iPads we currently have on trial from the local JISC Regional Support Centre. We are hoping to purchase a small number of tablet devices in the not-too-distant future and this was a nice way of promoting them. I quite enjoyed the Share Fair experience. It was a nice way of learning about other departments and I gathered some information about a particular evening course for the next academic year. I staffed the library stall for 30 minutes and was a little nervous in case I was asked any in-depth questions about our service which I may not know the answers to, but in reality I spent most of the time talking about iPads. We had some interesting feedback about them.

With the whole library team attending various staff development sessions, it’s been quite a busy week, and the organisation of the timetable was particularly challenging! I had forgotten that we are a dual site college and booked myself on one session which I couldn’t attend because I was timetabled at a different campus. Oooh well, tis further proof that I am still on that newbie learning curve...