Technology and task
After talking to individuals in the department over several months we finally arranged our first wide scale events open to all departmental staff.
To try and move away from suggesting how we thought they might use technology and to keep the focus on what they would really find useful, we started by asking them to identify challenges around specific tasks and only then moved onto thinking about using technology to support these. These were mapped against a matrix of “things you want to do” versus “things you have to do” and “student’s pastoral/administrative experience” to “students academic experience”. In a couple of the groups we worked with there was a diagonal sweep (see below)
with required tasks more on the administrative side and aspirational tasks more academic, as might be expected, but others were far more mixed. As has been a continuous theme in this project an overwhelming impression was how much we do as a department. More specifically it proved a useful addition to our attempts to rein in the scope of the project from its original, far too broad starting point to the more manageable place that we find ourselves today.