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Originally posted on the eLearning Team Blog on 05/07/21 as part of my role at University of Brighton. A crowdsourced blog post and reflection Back on the 15th of June I facilitated an open discussion as part of Jisc’s Connect More 2021 programme. The discussion, entitled, ‘What makes an online space inclusive?’ invited audience members to reflect on their own experiences in online spaces and their own practice facilitating online lessons, meetings, and events.

Reflecting on designing a watch party for UX Brighton Watch the UX Brighton watch party for yourself using this playlist on YouTube (took place on 13th April 2021) Look at the schedule and information for the event which was provided as a Google Doc Visit the Mural board that I used to guide my design and then reflect on my experiences Check out the video bingo mini challenge (H5P interactive activity) Edited Vlog Transcript Hi folks, I know it’s been a while. So, yeah basically what I can say is I’ve had a couple of really paperwork intensive months. I ran a watch party for UX Brighton because I presented about a few of the challenges I’d found through working on some discovery at my workplace. The suggestion was that perhaps we could do a UX Brighton watch party and that might provide me with an opportunity to experiment to try out some things that I couldn’t try out at work and to get some really helpful critical feedback. So, I’m really delighted to say that I got that opportunity because I really did get amazing feedback and I have since used the learning that I gained from that particular watch party to feed into my professional portfolio, and I’ve also used it to think really critically about how I talk to staff about watch parties how I encourage them to onboard people during watch parties.

What does an inclusive and successful online event look like? Setting a personal challenge \[The short version rather than the 4min vlog\] I work as a Learning Technologist, which means that I help academic staff at a university think about how to use technology to facilitate and augment their teaching and the students’ experience of learning. During the covid-19 pandemic, within the space of days my role as part of a team, was crucial to maintaining delivery of teaching and learning. This has given me the opportunity to experience and continually reflect on the use of online spaces for teaching and learning. Prior to this I have worked with Webinar technologies for 10 years. I have also organised and chaired a range of local and national online events as well as experiencing many as an attendee. Based on all this, I now have a critical mass of experience. From this position, I feel that I can reflect and because my practice is user experience focused, I want to set myself a challenge. To identify the optimal elements when creating inclusive and successful online events. The following factors will be key to this challenge: 

Background This post is a personal reflection in response to a question posed by Tom Langston on Twitter as a retweet of Dr Andy Clegg. Observing that other individuals tagged in the tweet have more involvement in policy and management, I was both humbled and interested in why my opinion might be sought. Deliberately I have chosen not to read the answers of others, such as @jamesclay’s blog post, as I wanted to provide my own perspective. I shall be sure to read that after-the-fact of course and thank you for asking Tom!

From January until May 2019 the eLearning team evaluated the AV1 robot avatar, a telepresence robot manufactured by the company No Isolation, based in Norway. This post aims to provide a brief overview of what we learned during our pilot project.

Why am I here (as in you, at this blog, and reading this now)? I hope you are here because you would like an introduction to using RStudio for data visualisation. I also hope that you are here because you are interested in Jobs-To-Be-Done (abbrev~ JTBD; Ulwick, 2016). This blog provides an example of how to apply one of the approaches that sits under the mantle of JTBD, an Opportunity Landscape (Ulwick, 2016; VIII. Target Hidden Growth Opportunities section).

At the end of my last entry I outlined my discovery that there was an app building company called Bubble, which would likely lead to brand confusion. As a result I decided to go back to some of the ideas on my earlier sketchbook page and consider other possibilities that would tackle some of the same goals. The following company traits need to be suggested by the name:

On this page of my sketchbook I used a dice rolling exercise (Barnard & Briscoe, 2016) to explore different name combinations for the potential company. Initially I gravitated towards BubbleHome as a concept.

Greetings! I have decided that I would like to keep up my reflective writing activities during IDM22. This is due to my recent experience on the web development module and also thinking back to when I took IDM21 (seems so long ago now!). In both cases it was an immensely valuable venture.

Part 1 of my final evaluation. This entry outlines key decisions that I made regarding accessibility towards the end of the development period. I am writing and publishing it retroactively as it as represents a very large amount of thinking and work, which I kept notes about as I went along.