Of course, no clever alerting services needed.

This post appears in the track backs on the original post

http://events.jiscinvolve.org/guest-post-from-david-lammy-mp/

What I wasn’t expecting was a reply hours later on the same day (at 10:30 at night) and a second before 9am the next morning. Impressed.

I very much welcome trying new tools, some will no doubt fail (i.e. not get used) where others will prove successful. But that’s how it should be and there’s nothing worse than the ‘risk adverse’ mentality (unfortunately our national papers and trade press like to pick up on the failures which doesn’t help). Web2.0 have a fairly low cost of entry which helps try out experiments like this.

Using web2.0 tools to reach out to students is something Universities are a lot now. I run a twitter account for our department (as well as accounts on facebook, youtube, etc) and what surprised me was how many other libraries and universities are now following us.

Do I have any suggestions?

I’m thinking about how DIUS can really engage with the HE community. The two are quite separate. Students deal with University lectures, who deal with University Management, who deal with HEFCE, who are funded via DIUS. There’s quite a separation there.

How to go about this of course depends on who you are aiming at, students, academics, others (IT, admin, Library). Learning or Research, or both?

I think we tend to listen more to those we know. For example I’m on various jiscmail email lists, and I tend to listen to advice/opinion from those I know more than those I’ve never heard off (not intentionally I should add). I’ve seen announcements about large projects sent to lists which produce no response or interest because they come out of the blue. Likewise, I’m more likely to think about opinions in blog posts from those I frequently read and value their opinion, than those I simple come across on the web.

With that in mind, getting well known people to talk about or advocate using your discussion tools might help take up. For example in the Web/Library world, Brian Kelly at UKOLN is read by a lot of people: http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/

Again, it depends who in the HE community you want to focus on.

There are events as the recent Mashed-Libraries http://mashedlibrary.ning.com/
and the very successful JISC dev8d ( http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org/ ), maybe something those involved in web2.0 stuff could attend? (I wasn’t at dev8d so apologies if you were). I guess what I’m trying to say is that mingling and – more importantly – drinking beer with us is probably a good way of helping engagement

How to engage with students is a different question, and one I think many struggle with (including those who work with them!).

Like Robert says, all this can take time, but looks like it’s the right direction (for what my opinion is worth), so good luck and I’ll look forward to seeing how it pans out.

Thanks also for the heads up on Monitter which I will check out.

Steph has already replied to you so I won’t add much but to say that in our own small way we are keen to support the work of Steph in tying to big some of these approaches adopted in departments like DIUS – it will take time so bear with it!

One of our biggest challenges is to make sure the feedback we collect through them can be used effectively within the organisation to improve policymaking and delivery. Increasingly, we’re trying to blend online with offline approaches (the Yoosk example is a process which started as a series of meetings with students, which we’re now taking online).

If you have any suggestions or feedback, do let us know.