Team building day

By Alesa Dam

My boss is good at organising team building days, not least because she doesn't take them too seriously. Her approach is to find something we can all do, that's off site, that's a bit different and is a bit of fun. Last year we had a drumming workshop, the year before that we did something on creativity, and the year before that we did an art workshop. Each time it's been relaxed and enjoyable with no contrived analogies to work situations - like I said, just a bit of fun. But in my opinion they really work, and I've been wondering why.

Years ago I read a book called The R Factor (looks like it's out of print and funny that you can buy '20 used from £0.01'!). It was written for a very specific audience and I seem to remember it had a rather contrived ending, but the thing I remember most, and thought seemed useful, was what it called the 'dimensions of relational proximity'. They said that the factors influencing the closeness of a relationship (in any context) could be assessed in terms of:

• directness - the quality of communication
• continuity - the frequency, regularity and amount of contact, and length of relationship
• multiplexity - the variety of context of meetings
• parity - mutual respect and fairness in the relationship
• commonality - shared goals, values and experience

I think the authors have given fancy names to something that is essentially common sense but I do think that it's a useful framework. The reason I think our team building days have worked in the past is because I think they enable many of these things to take place - certainly multiplexity (we see each other in a different context), parity (everyone's on a level playing field) and commonality (we work on something together to achieve a shared goal).

Well, it's that time of year again and tomorrow we're doing a community project at All Saint's Primary School in Wigston - you can read more about the project in this news article, but in brief Student Development will be:

swapping their pens for shovels to spend the day at All Saints Primary School in Wigston on Wednesday 30th June 2010 to give the school a well deserved garden make-over

which not only should help facilitate the building of relationships in our team, but will also make a valuable contribution to the community: win, win! And probably be a good laugh too: win, win, win!

I'll let you know how we get on...

Networks get things done

I've had several noteworthy positive Twitter experiences, including Twitter and maths homework and Twitter fixed my dishwasher. I had another one yesterday.

I'd been asked by Registry to help them with a data problem (they'd asked IT Services and for some reason they said ask me). My response was that I didn't know enough about Excel so couldn't help - but they replied to say that they were really stuck and didn't have anyone else to ask as the member of staff who'd been responsible for it in previous years had left, so I agreed to have a look. The problem involved allocating guests to seats for graduation ceremonies. On the sample data I was given there were nearly 500 graduands each requiring seats for between zero and four guests. They wanted the name of the graduand repeating the same number of times as they'd requested seats for their guests (here's a sample of similar data). I sent out a quick tweet as follows...

...and very quickly I had a number of helpful responses (several from Leicester, one from Macclesfield and one from Milton Keynes)

But not having fixed the problem I put up a quick blog post on Can you help with an Excel problem? To which I got more responses from Leicester plus Plymouth, and Hamilton, New Zealand. But I got more than just tweets - four people very kindly emailed me Excel spreadsheets or links to Google spreadsheets showing how I could tackle the problem - including staff at Leicester (thanks Rick and Hazel) a friend who's a teacher (thanks Chris) and a member of staff from Imperial College London (thanks Moira). I was overwhelmed with people's helpfulness!

Most suggested solutions involved list functions like =IF($C1>1,$A1,"") which did the job of repeating the surnames the required number of times but then would have involved me converting the columns to rows.

The most comprehensive and elegant solution (within three hours of my original tweet) came from a third year computer science student at Leicester, Chris Bunney, who went to the trouble of writing the following macro using visual basic.

 Sub InsertSurnames()

    Dim LastRow As Long
    Dim r As Long
    Dim surname As String
    Dim tickets As Integer

    Dim surnameCol As Integer
    Dim ticketCol As Integer
    Dim targetCol As Integer

    surnameCol = 1
    ticketCol = 3
    targetCol = 4
    LastRow = ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Rows(ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Rows.Count).Row
    r = 1

    Do While r <= LastRow

        surname = Cells(r, surnameCol).Value
        tickets = Cells(r, ticketCol).Value

        If (Not (Len(surname) = 0)) Then

            Cells(r, targetCol).Value = surname

            For x = 1 To tickets - 1

                Cells(r + x, 1).EntireRow.Insert
                Cells(r + x, targetCol).Value = surname

            Next x

            LastRow = LastRow + tickets - 1

        End If

        r = r + 1
    Loop

End Sub

And it worked an absolute treat. So thanks everyone for your contributions - I really appreciate them. Another good example of the power of networks. And by the way, Chris Bunney, having graduated, is currently looking for jobs...

Sub InsertSurnames()

Dim LastRow As Long

Dim r As Long

Dim surname As String

Dim tickets As Integer

Dim surnameCol As Integer

Dim ticketCol As Integer

Dim targetCol As Integer

surnameCol = 1

ticketCol = 3

targetCol = 4

LastRow = ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Rows(ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Rows.Count).Row

r = 1

Do While r <= LastRow

surname = Cells(r, surnameCol).Value

tickets = Cells(r, ticketCol).Value

If (Not (Len(surname) = 0)) Then

Cells(r, targetCol).Value = surname

For x = 1 To tickets - 1

Cells(r + x, 1).EntireRow.Insert

Cells(r + x, targetCol).Value = surname

Next x

LastRow = LastRow + tickets - 1

End If

r = r + 1

Loop

End Sub

Can you help with an Excel problem?

I somehow got roped into trying to help the people who organise the degree ceremonies with a data problem. They have a spreadsheet of guests and a spreadsheet of seat numbers. Each guest has requested a certain number of seats - between 0 and 4. The guest name needs repeating the same number of times as the number of guests. The guests then need to be allocated to seats. At least this is the way they've framed the problem - there might be a much better way of doing it. I've had a few responses from Twitter (thanks Alan, Frances, Jake and Stuart) and I've Googled it, but still no joy. I have discovered the repeat (=REPT) function which does repeat text by a specified number - but then joins it into a continuous string. If you have better Excel knowledge than me (not that difficult) and are willing to look at it I'd really appreciate it. Here's the file (I've changed the names to protect identify <cue A-team music>. There are >1,500 names on the actual sheet.

University of Bournemouth's First Year Experience Special Interest Group

I'm going down to the University of Bournemouth on Wednesday to talk to their First Year Experience Special Interest Group about our experience of using Facebook and Twitter to try to facilitate student engagement with student development issues. Here are my slides. You'll notice an uncanny resemblance to a previous presentation - but I have moved it on a bit with the Trying to get beyond likes thinking - and I'm hoping that in discussing it with the group in Bournemouth my thinking will be moved on a bit more. And while I'm on the train I'm going to read this paper, this paper and this paper - it's about time I read some papers on the subject (thanks to Michael Seery for the useful summary)!

Here I come sunny Bournemouth!

Engaging without invading - bournemouth

View more presentations from Stuart Johnson.

We need a new front page

Our current Student Development front page has served us well for nearly a year now. When I wrote about the plans for it a year ago I explained the criteria for the design and the proposed structure. Since then the structure of the front page has remained largely unchanged but there are now reasons to update it, here are the three main ones:

1. we are running out of front page space, especially as more and more of our work involves more than one of our teams (for example, the Leicester Award);
2. we need to give certain themes of our work more prominence - principally careers and support for postgraduate researchers;
3. we need to make it easier for visitors to find what they are looking for (pushing out information to Facebook and Twitter has helped a lot in this regard but we need to make the front page itself more immediately self-explanatory)

I intend to stick with the same folder structure underneath the front page as it reflects our team structure and makes the administration of the site much easier to manage. The different teams that make up Student Development are as follows:

• Learning Development
• Career Development
• Volunteering
• Work-related Learning (including Business and Enterprise Learning)
• Research Student team
• Employer Liaison

But the front page I propose to change to reflect three main themes (that Matt, Fran and I came up with last week) under which we think the work that each of the teams do should fit. The suggested themes are as follows.

Succeeding in your studies

To include academic skills development for undergraduates and support for research postgraduates (the latter's web pages we will be restructuring over the summer - I blogged about some ideas last week)

Gaining experience

To include work placements, volunteering and business and enterprise opportunities - for undergraduates and research postgraduates.

Planning for a career

To include the support offered by the career development team (whose web pages we will also be restructuring over the summer) and the Research Student team - for undergraduates and research postgraduates.

I'm hoping these headings will simplify things and so help us address the three reasons mentioned above. In terms of how it might look on the page here's a mock up (I'll figure out the relative sizes of the columns later) - click on the image to enlarge it.

I'm really interested to hear your comments; staff and especially students. Some questions to consider:

• do the themed areas cover everything?
• are the themed areas termed correctly?
• will the proposed changes address the reasons for change (1-3)?
• does the draft layout make sense?
• do you have any other ideas or suggestions?

Publicity channels

Part of my role in Student Development involves overseeing publicity. When I started in the role 18 months ago we were using only traditional forms of media to communicate with students; flyers, posters, emails and our website (all broadcast media that allow little or no two-way communication and simply pushes information to recipients). Since last summer I’ve been developing our networks on Facebook and Twitter (social media that does allow two-way communication and recipients select to ‘pull’ information towards themselves) to supplement the traditional methods. So we now have a range of publicity options available to us that I thought it would be helpful to outline – and if you have any suggestions or comments I’d be really pleased to hear them.

Website

Our website is our primary means of communication. I’m concious that we need to reorganise our front page (the subject of a future post) because we’re running out of space to put stuff, but that aside, here are elements I use within the site for publicity purposes.

News items (within Plone) are vital as they keep the website dynamic and also populate RSS feeds which I use to push out to Facebook and Twitter (see how here).

Event items also add a dynamic element to our site and populate RSS feeds in the same was as the news items do.

Top level portlets at the Student Development level of the website to highlight services that we want to give a particular push to at any given time. At the moment we’re doing this with our Graduate Success Programme (but we only have room to display one item like this at a time – which is one of the reasons we need to redesign the front page).

Team level portlets at the relevant team level – in the case of the Graduate Success Programme that’s in Career Development.

Mini sites to create an uncluttered site focussing on a particular event. In order to de-clutter an area I block the portlets above in the folder structure and start the navigation at the relevant level. If the event is to be a regular one Ialso request a specific URL, for example (again) www.le.ac.uk/graduatesuccess.

Social media

As already described I’ve been using social media to try and engage with students for some time now. More recently my focus has switched from Twitter to Facebook and in particular how to encourage interaction not just ‘Likes’. To this end I’ve been trying the following:

• extra Facebook and Twitter updates (as per Helpdesk Hollie’s advice) in addition to our automated RSS outputs
• a specific Facebook push – like we tried recently with Revision and exam skills (which seemed to work)

Digital signage

There are various plasma screens around campus which make up the University’s digital signage one of which is in the Student Development Zone. The screens generally operate on a 10 second cycle; scrolling through the notices set to display. The images and text displayed on these screens, therefore, have to convey information quickly and simply.

More important than our own screen (the traffic that it gets is limited given our location) are the other screens around campus – in particular in the Help Zone on the Ground floor of the Library, the Graduate School Reading Room, the Library Cafe and (especially) the screens in the Students’ Union.

Newsletters

Because not everyone looks at our website or joins our social media networks we also send out a monthly newsletter to all students. This comprises of just a few highlights plus a link to further highlights of the month’s news from our news feeds. Click here for the June edition.

Print

And for completeness I thought I should mention print. Although for publicity purposes we’re beginning to move away from print because it’s usually high cost for a relatively low impact.

Any suggestions? Have I missed anything?

Postgraduate research student pages

We need to restructure the research postgraduate's pages of our website, in particular the resources section. We've known this for some time but haven't had the time to devote to it. A couple of weeks ago Matt and I had a meeting with the Research Student Team to begin to talk about the restructure and last week we met with Duncan to decide on some headings under which to organise content. We looked at the Joint Skills Statement of Skills Training Requirements (JSS) and the headings that Vitae use in the Postgraduate researchers section of their website. The headings we've come up with are a combination of both of these and are as follows.

• Managing your research (Vitae = 'Managing your research project', JSS = A: research skills and techniques, C: research management)
• Managing yourself (Vitae = 'Managing your yourself', JSS = D: personal effectiveness)
• Communicating your research (Vitae = 'Raising your profile', JSS = E: communication skills)
• Developing your career (Vitae = 'Developing your career', JSS = G: career management)
• Supervision and key relationships (Vitae = 'Supervision and key relationships', JSS = B: research environment, F: teamworking and networking skills)
• Completing your doctorate (Vitae = 'Completing your doctorate', JSS = B: research environment)

I'd be interested to know whether people think that this is a sensible structure and whether you have any recommendations for external content to go under these headings to supplement our own. I think we'll start applying these headings to our resources section and then apply them to the rest of the site in due course.

In a minor update last week I changed the front page of the research postgraduate pages to be a summary view of the latest news items in order to make this page as up to date and dynamic as possible. I think the way Plone renders images attached to news items in the summary view works pretty well.