George's posterous

Our little HEA Teaching Development Grant Project group met today for
the first working meeting after the grant was awarded. The project is
called "Internationalisation and Promoting Assessment Diversity
(IPAD)". Mary Deane is the PI and project manager. I am CoI and tech
adviser. We are going to get 12 iPads and recruit 6 "home" students
and 6 "overseas" students to be peer mentors in academic writing.
There are a lot of variables and a small cohort but we will be
investigating the use of technology-enhanced peer-led support for
international students in British universities. Home and international
students will be trained to mentor each other via iPads, and the
rationale is that by supporting each other’s production of assignments
using this popular technology, all students will engage more fully
with the scholarly conventions they need to employ in British academia
(Trowler and Trowler 2010:2; Borg and Deane 2011). In particular,
participants will be trained to give and receive feedback on written
assessments via iPads (Deane 2010; Temos 2011; Borg and Deane 2011).
Tablet computers have been relatively neglected in UK HE for
peer-to-peer support for international students, although they are
widely used by diverse students groups in North American universities,
and increasingly in British schools. iPads revolutionise the models
of online interaction that have been developed through the Internet,
and using the iPad’s multimedia collaborative features, participants
in this project will gain experience of both sides in a diverse range
of assessment types.

Well, that is what we said. For now we have some tasks to get done:
Mary is going to recruit the participants, write the ethics proposal
and kick off the Lit review; I am going to do the workplan, develop
the technical inception workshop; Caroline is going to purchase the
kit.

Oh, and we will be using the OCSLD blog for on-going reporting.

Lots of people follow lots of Twitter accounts.
You need to be a "want to know" as well as a "need to know". Twitter is not the preferred need-to-know channel.
That means being interesting, fun, provocative as well as informative. You need to invite people to put your account on one of their "lists" that they actually read.
You should also use a simple hashtag with your tweets so that people can follow the hashtag without actually following the account.
Twitter and your blog should be seen as an integrated package with Twitter pointing people to more full information on the blog. But, don't only tweet about your blog.
You should also use good old e-mail.
Make sure the blog has an easy and obvious RSS link so that people can read it in Google Reader or Flipboard.
You should also have a Facebook page. There is debate about duplicate posting to Twitter and Facebook, but if it is a post to a page wall people will only see it in their newsfeed if they have opted in. I think it is worth it.
Make sure the blog is mobile friendly so that it can be read on iPhones and Android phones so that when people click through from twitter on the phone they can actually read it, too.
There are bound to be more useful tips , but that's my starters