stujohnson

I work in Student Development at the University of Leicester

Historical Studies alumni videos

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Nov 252011
 

Two weeks ago I popped up a quick post on Alumni talking heads experiment. I don’t what to be too premature about this but it seems to have worked a treat! Of the 10 alumni contacts that Professor Roey Sweet (the Head of Department) and Professor Rob Colls (the Careers Tutor) gave me, five said yes to doing the video. And to my surprise – all of them actually did it! What’s more it took very little chivvying from me. Some did webcam straight to YouTube (as I suggested after belatedly realising that was easiest), some used a digital camera and one even used his phone! Four of the five uploaded straight to YouTube and one uploaded to the DropBox folder I shared with them. Only one of the five videos needed significant editing (the one uploaded to DropBox in multiple files), the rest just required topping and tailing. Matt did a fantastic job of the editing in a couple of hours on Tuesday afternoon, and created this page.

I’m really pleased with the end results. They’re not broadcast quality but they are definitley good enough. The alumni did a great job on the content with very little guidance. They talked about how they got to their current role, a bit about what they do and some even offered a bit of advice at the end!

My next job is to try and get some conversation going on it round the department’s Facebook page.

What our graduates say

 Posted by on 25/11/2011 at 09:00  Tagged with: , ,

Alumni talking heads experiment

 Uncategorized  2 Responses »
Nov 102011
 

Recently I’m working with our School of Historical Studies on a Recruitment Boot Camp. It’s designed to offer intensive support (in addition to our general support) to our Historical Studies finalists to help them to find a job on graduating. It will involve face to face sessions, online resources plus videos of Historical Studies alumni describing how their History degree from Leicester has helped them (Chris Willmott has been doing something similar for years to this last bit via his Careers After Biological Sciences project – but the difference here is that I’m trying to do it remotely).

The website will give you an overview of all this but what I’m focusing on at the moment is the alumni videos.

I contacted 10 Historical Studies alumni (via contacts from the department) a week or so ago and within a couple of days 5 had said ‘yes’ to recording a video for me. What surprised me was not just that half of them said ‘yes’ so quickly but also that they didn’t really ask for technical help. The only information I gave them re the video itself was:

I’m hoping you might be able to help by recording a video clip stating who you are and when you studied at Leicester and how you got to the job you are now in. We would then edit the video and send it back to you for approval before posting it on the project website. Historical Studies finalists will then be able to see what some of their predecessors have been able to achieve since graduating, hopefully inspiring and motivating them and giving them some ideas. The video need be no longer than a couple of minutes and would need to be recorded via a webcam or digital camera. I can give you full instructions on how to record and then send us the video file.

Since then though I’ve been thinking I should probably give them a bit more guidance. I had suggested uploading the file to a shared folder within Dropbox but I’m beginning to think that recording straight to YouTube via a webcam will be the best option (didn’t know you could do that, d’oh!), rather than to go to the trouble of creating a file to then upload elsewhere. So, here’s a quick Screenr on how to do it that I’ll be sharing with the intrepid 5.

Obviously they’ll need to create a YouTube account if they don’t have one already, but they can share the file with me unlisted or privately. Also, recording straight from a webcam will probably ensure a nice still image, plus it should be easier to get sound and lighting right.

Am I missing anything? Any suggestions?

PS. More to follow on Boot Camp another time… (but any comments/suggestions on that also appreciated)

 Posted by on 10/11/2011 at 17:21  Tagged with: , , ,

University Council presentation

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Oct 282011
 

Lets’ see if I can remember how to blog…

This afternoon/evening I’m presenting to our University Council on ‘Graduate employability’. I’ve got about 15 minutes to present the content and then there’s an hour for questions and discussion. I have no idea what to expect. Below is the first part of the presentation, I’ve left out the last 6 slides which cover the sections ‘our data’ and ‘our response’ and the ‘over to you’ questions but I’m very happy to share these with any UoL staff if they want the full version. I’ll let you know how it goes…

Council grad empy (edit)

 Posted by on 28/10/2011 at 10:07  Tagged with: ,

Digress.it screencasts

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Aug 312011
 

In an attempt to breathe life back into our beleaguered tagginganna project, Mark, Alex and I met a couple of weeks ago to try and kick start it again. It’s been difficult with each of us doing at least two jobs but we’re hopeful that we can progress things a bit further this semester. One part of the project is to develop some ‘how to’ screencasts for people who might want to use the Digress.it platform for similar purposes, so with that in mind Alex and I recording four rough and ready screencasts to explain how to:

  • registering on Digress.it
  • edit settings
  • create an about page
  • publish and schedule posts

And here they are. Like I say, a bit rough and ready but hopefully useful guidance for someone who wants to start using the platform.

 Posted by on 31/08/2011 at 11:29  Tagged with: ,

12 month acting-up-iversary

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Aug 162011
 
1 year cake

By cleverboy68 (click image for Flickr link)

Well, today is my 12 month acting-up-ivesary. I reflected on the start of it here and the six month-er here. In many ways not much has changed since the six month mark, in other ways a lot has. The main change has been that Paul Jackson, the previous Director of Student Support and Development, left in the middle of April – so I’ve picked up elements of his role as well as the Head of Student Development (now Careers) role that I was already acting up into. I miss Paul but my new boss has been incredibly supportive and is great to work with (and occasionally she reads this – but I mean it – honest!). I’ve been asked to carry on acting-up for a further 12 months, after that, who knows what will happen?! I’m very pleased that the Director of Careers role has now been advertised and am looking forward to us getting someone *really* good.

 Posted by on 16/08/2011 at 10:01  Tagged with:

Director of Careers post at Leicester

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Aug 122011
 

Keep meaning to mention this… our Director of Careers role is now advertised. If you’re brilliant – please apply. More details here. Please RT, re-post etc. Closing date is 12 September.

 Posted by on 12/08/2011 at 10:06  Tagged with: , ,

Careers website now live

 Uncategorized  1 Response »
Aug 092011
 

I’ve written a few recently posts about revamping the website and I’m pleased to say it’s finally done (it’s never finished but you know what I mean). The changes went live just before I went on holiday. We now have a front page that:

  • clearly signposts to our different audiences
  • makes our social media links more prominent
  • allows us adequate advertising space for featured items
  • uses white space more effectively

We also have three new sub-pages for:

Thanks especially to Matt for all his work on this. One thing I’m still not happy with though is the links to Learning Development. Because of the name change we’ll need to work hard on making clear where the Learning Development aspect of our service is. To this end I’ve:

And because Plone’s pages work on index numbers all the old links will still work (clever Plone). However, I still got an email yesterday expressing the very legitimate concern…

There seems to have been change to the Student Development website so that now when I go to access it, the Careers Service site comes up. It’s difficult to see from here how to get to the section of the Student Development site that has the downloadable guides on. We refer our students to these quite a lot, so it now seems more awkward to do this. Is this is permanent change to the website do you know?

Any suggestions?

 Posted by on 09/08/2011 at 13:44  Tagged with:

What I did on my holidays

 Uncategorized  4 Responses »
Aug 092011
 

I’ve just come back from two weeks of lovely camping with my lovely family. Things I enjoyed:

  • playing with my kids
  • being with my wife
  • cooking mussels that we’d picked
  • not being at work
  • not wearing a watch
  • forgetting what day it was
  • growing a beard
  • not having any technology with me
  • toasting marshmallows at the beach
  • trying to learn to surf (unsuccessfully)
  • watching my boys learn to surf (successfully)
  • being entertained by my daughter
 Posted by on 09/08/2011 at 09:24  Tagged with:

Google+ and Google contacts on mobile device

 Uncategorized  2 Responses »
Jul 212011
 

Snappy title, eh?

Last night Jane was commenting on Google+ how much she liked Google+ when I noticed that I could see her full home address on her profile.

Which, clearly was a bit worrying. But after a bit of digging around Jane figured out that it was because I was viewing the mobile site and Google was taking the personal information I hold in my Google contacts on my iPad and merging them into Jane’s Google+ profile.

Which I confirmed by taking a screenshot of her profile with the original contact information (don’t worry Jane – I’ve blurred the details!).

…and then changing Jane’s address in my Google contacts and then opening the mobile page again.

Add it worked. As you can imagine, Jane was very relieved.

Phew!

By the way, while I’m here can I link up my blog to automatically publish to Google plus? After a quick search I can’t see how to do it.

 Posted by on 21/07/2011 at 09:30  Tagged with: , ,

Careers website updates nearly done

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Jul 212011
 

I blogged a few weeks ago about the progress on our front pages revamp for www.le.ac.uk/careers and I’m pleased to say that we’ve now completed the main structural changes. Matt and I have been working on it off and on for a few weeks (Matt mostly on, me mostly off) with help from Vic and #Stephaniewhosnotontwitter. We’ve still got work to do but the main front page is now active…

…as are new pages for each of the three main audiences:

I think it’s both cleaner and clearer but your comments will be much more useful than mine…

 Posted by on 21/07/2011 at 09:00  Tagged with: ,
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