Digress.it screencasts

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.

12 month acting-up-iversary

By cleverboy68

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.

Director of Careers post at Leicester

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.

Careers website now live

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:

• Students and Alumni
• Employers
• Staff (this area still needs work)

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:

• included it in the subtitle
• given it its own url - www.le.ac.uk/succeedinyourstudies
• renamed the tab above the crumb trail from 'Careers Services' to 'Learning Development'

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?

What I did on my holidays

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