Draft open day talk

Tomorrow I'm presenting to prospective students and their parents at our University of Leicester Open Day on 'Employability at Leicester'. Here are my draft slides (some of it animates - which I can't replicate in SlideShare). Comments and suggestions welcome - what would you want to know? I have 45 minutes including questions.

Employability at Leicester

View more presentations from Stuart Johnson. (#leicesteropen)

Google Plus and age restrictions

I need some Google help. My 12 year old son has had a Google account for a couple of years. His cousin sent him a link to sign up for Google Plus. He followed the on screen instructions which included entering his date of birth (something that I didn't have to do 2 years ago when I set up the account for him - or if I did there wasn't an age restriction at the time). He can now no longer login to Gmail and gets the following message.

The Google Account for xxx@gmail.com has been disabled.You will not be able to sign in to this account or use it to access any Google products or services.You do not meet the age requirements for a Google Account. This account will be deleted in 27 days unless the birthday you entered was incorrect and you submit proof that you are 13 years old or older. Learn more.If you are 13 years old or older, click here to start the account unlock process.

Any ideas? Or have the Ts&Cs changed since G+ kicked off and now you have to be 13 to even have Gmail?

A great example from Newcastle: ncl+

Newcastle University's ncl+ pages are really well put together - very clear explanation of the opportunities that build graduate skills along with more detail on their specific benefits, skills developed and how to find out more. Nice job Newcastle - we may be borrowing the idea!

Employability strategy principles

At our Careers Advisory Committee last week Bob and I presented (amongst other things) the latest draft of our Employability Strategy. The feedback was OK but I need to sharpen it up a bit. None of the headline stuff is confidential so I thought I'd try and put down the objective and principles of the strategy here to try and clarify my thinking and hopefully generate some useful comments/discussion. So, as it currently stands...

Objective

To ensure our graduates have the extra dimension in order to make them the stand out choice for employers

Principles

• engage the majority of students as opposed to the current minority
• engage with students as early as possible in their undergraduate careers
• ensure students participate in one main intervention to avoid the current situation of a minority of keen students monopolising the places on the majority of interventions
• ensure that each intervention is accompanied by before and after support to ensure that students are appropriately prepared and effectively followed up
• make access to as many opportunities as possible a competitive process (to identify best candidates and simulate selection processes – those unsuccessful can be signposted to alternatives)

And possibly something about our minimum programme provision in years 1, 2 and 3.

It's a work in progress. Any comments?

Anyone got any Google Plus tips?

I should be asking this question on Google Plus but I'm just trying to get back into the blogging habit. I'm determined to get into Google Plus (it really shouldn't be that difficult), so has anyone got any Google Plus tips? Or does anyone fancy joining in the experiment for those of us a bit slow on the uptake? You can find me here.

Switching to Blogger

I've just switched from a hosted WordPress site to Blogger, for various reasons:

• I fancied trying a different platform
• Blogger seems to have got much better recently
• Alan knows best
• it's completely free (though not as flexible as WordPress but flexible enough for my needs)
• it's ad free (unlike the free version of WP)
• I'm also determined to make the most of Google Plus and Blogger seems to integrate much better
• Maybe the novelty of a new platform will get me back into the blogging habit

I need to figure out the gadgets and the table function is poor (non-existent) but it's clean and crisp and simple. I'm looking forward to making the most of it. I haven't yet decided whether to redirect my old site - just exported the old stuff from WP then imported to Blogger (which was very straightforward - though I might do some tidying up later)