Anne Fox :: Blog :: VITAE kicks off

So finally the time for the VITAE kick-off meeting in Manchester arrived last week. I knew I had a strong team but of course did not know how everyone was going to get on until it actually happened as I was the common link between most people. Helen Keegan made sure that everything ran smoothly and had a dedicated Flickr group up and running while I was still in the air returning home.

The only person I had not met before in the flesh was Cristina Costa, a fellow Webhead, which was a sort of guarantee that I would like her and that we could work together.  And so it proved to be.

The project is an attempt to embed ICT in adult learning where it is appropriate. And in classrooms where little ICT is used that means a lot more than at present. Unfortunately this means that it is too easy to see us, and people with similar agendas, as simply trying to recommend ICT every step of the way which is simply not the case. However in a world where the amount of information is exploding and cheaper to access, it would be odd to ignore ICT altogether and odd not to use more rather than less.

As project coordinator I saw one of my primary tasks during this meeting as presenting the vision of this project. The image I ended up with was a 3 layered cake with the top layer being the train the trainers course divided into 4 quarters:

1. Update yourself (personal learning environment)

2. Skill swap and upgrade (introduction to some useful Web 2.0 tools according to educational need)

3. Mentoring colleagues (sharing expertise both inside and outside your own institution.

4. Getting management support

We have decided to refer to our course participants as VITAE mentors and in fact the fourth quadrant will not be their responsibility but will be the responsibility of the course organiser to ensure that the support network the mentors will need on their return will in fact be in place.

The remaining layers of the cake will be our theoretical basis which is experiential learning and story telling and the final layer of the cake will be the wider community of practice including access to resources, VITAE conferences and a community of practice.

This last item is not easy to promote and we have decided that we will approach the task by creating dedicated spaces on existing communities as well as promoting a disaggregated community through blogging, such as this post for example.

My view is that it will not be that difficult to devise what most people would recognise as a course and as long as we put learning first and technology a close second we should be OK. The difficult part is management buy-in and dissemination and sharing with colleagues. For that reason it was great that we could get Ewan McIntosh to visit us so that he could explain how they have achieved widespread acceptance of such an approach in Scotland. One of Ewan's main contentions is that it is not a question of deciding whether or not to use ICT to meet certain learning needs but that advances in technology have changed learning needs themselves. One prime example is how to cope with the avalanche of information. Ewan's influence is already visible in the fact that we have decided that our face to face conference will take the form of an unconference.

The project task is a large one and some of the issues include:

1. The degree to which we should introduce participants to new tools. Should we go for depth in a few tools or give breadth by tackling more tools more superficially?

2. I wrestled with how much I should come with ready prepared and how much should be decided from scratch through discussion.

3. There was certainly much more to discuss than there was time available to discuss it in. Some topics will be held over until a future face to face, some topics will be dealt with in a series of monthly online meetings starting in February and some topics such as web design I will decide unilaterally with the guarantee that I am open to discussion if someone comes with a much better proposal.

Now that I am back home I feel that we made a good start and that is also borne out by the evaluation I carried out before everybody left. But the meeting has also brought into sharp perspective the enormity of what we have contracted to do. Now that we have had a chance to work together face to face I am confident that we can deliver something worthwhile within the lifetime of the project.