On the 30th October, Laura J, Sophia, Emmy and myself facilitated the IBL cafe held weekly in the IC. We decided to take as our subject the ambassador-champions meeting of a few weeks ago, trying to expand on and discuss some of the points raised. With this in mind, we focused on three main ares:

• Cross-department collaboration
• The use of network technologies such as MOLE and Facebook
• The role of the SAN

When it comes to the idea of cross-department collaboration it was agreed that this was a fantastic idea, and would definitely contribute to best practice in the institution, but would work best on a small scale, i.e. joint seminars or small projects rather than whole modules produced in collaboration. The discussion was particularly pertinent considering the forthcoming move of the English, History and Music departments to closer proximity.

Theliveliest part of the discussion was probably our discussion of technology such as MOLE. The main problem seems to be that different departments use different technologies to different extents, and so what would work in one department would not necessarily work in others. There is also a problem in that staff may currently see setting up things like modules on MOLE to be time-consuming and work intensive. We discussed other technologies like Facebook – but it was considered that many staff would be reluctant to use it for fear of it being misused, and students themsleves may not want to see their tutors infringing on their social networking space. An interesting idea was that of GoogleDocs, which Laura and Sophia did some research on, and which is already being used in the History Department. It has many similar features to MOLE but may be seen as more accessible and easy to use, particularly by departments that do not habitually use MOLE.

Finally we discussed the role of the SAN, and the main focus seemed to be the ambassador-champion relationships. We agreed that this year got off to a great start with the ambassador-champions meeting, and people were keen for more of the same. It was clear that the meeting was inspirational for both students and the champions, as they could see what other departments were doing. To further foster good relations, an away day was suggested, as well as more similar meetings in the future.

All in all it was lively and helpful discussion, and helped us even further along in the ‘dream’ stage of our Appreciative Inquiry!

Ali

Hi!

I’m Alice and I’m this year’s student ambassador for Germanic Studies. Now that I have finally got to grips with the meanings of acronyms such as CILASS, IBL and MOLE, I feel that it is time for my first blog.

So, what are my impressions of CILASS? I must admit that I didn’t contribute all that much to the discussions in the first couple of meetings and, for those of you who attended the combined meeting with our academic champions, you may have noticed that we were rather quiet. We were, however, listening hard!

My champion and I felt that we were maybe falling a little way behind a couple of the other depatments in terms of IBL (perhaps the reason why we didn’t have all that much to say), but this meeting really helped us get some great ideas and inspiration for how the Germanic Studies department could benefit from all of your IBL-based comments.

I am pleased to say that for us, the ‘Appreciative Inquiry’ approach has already had some success. We ‘discovered’ that certain departments use MUSE and MOLE a lot more than us, and learnt that other ambassadors considered these online tools effective and helpful. We then ‘dreamt’ that we could create an online learning environment for students in our department, ‘designed’ this environment by chosing to create groups for several modules, and we are now in the ‘destiny’ stage – living the changes!

The level one Dutch class now has a very active group in MUSE and other members of staff are attempting to liven up their (previously somewhat neglected) groups and are encouraging students to use them. Additionally, after just a little push from my champion and I, a whole module about media in Germany and Austria has been put on MOLE, which is an absolutely fantastic outcome! As the famous Audi advertising slogan goes, we are (at least in my opinion) well on the way to achieving our own mini ‘Vorsprung durch Technik‘ (progress through technology) in the Germanic Studies department.

We also took your comments about (the lack of?) study skills for level one students into consideration, and as a result, my champion and I have decided that it would be useful for me to have a quick talk with the level one students in one of their lectures next week.

It is all getting very exciting in the Germanic Studies department (another task is also coming my way) and maybe we will not be so quiet in future, as we might just have something interesting to report!

See you all soon!

Alice