Communication or engagement

As we are in the process of writing a new communication strategy, I was interested to read these thoughts from Andrea Di Maio, a VP at Gartner specialising in e-government, particularly
"In essence, an effective communication strategy is likely to be almost the exact opposite of an effective engagement strategy"

I'd always assumed good communication had to include some engagement, but I can see his point about the difference between communication where you are in control, and 'real' engagement where you have less control. Though whether you should have two separate strategies, I'm not sure. I'd be very interested to read other people's thoughts on this.

Sue

Hello from Angela!

I have successfully created my google account and am now sending my first blog.

I enjoyed meeting you all last week and look forward to contributing to the group.

Communication Strategy

Today marks the start for my team and I working on the new CiCS 3 year communication strategy 2010 - 2013 at the University of Sheffield.

The strategy will cover both internal and external communication and rather than write it in isolation we are holding small discussion groups with staff in the department to gather their views and input.

In order to get representation from across the whole of the department we have worked to a 25% representation rate across all teams. This has resulted in approximately 50 people taking part in the discussions and as we have tried to keep groups small, over the next 2 weeks we will be facilitating 6 group discussions.

Each discussion group will be together for 90 minutes going through some structured areas to consider. In advance all attendees have been asked to consider the following

- What are the problems with communication in CiCS and what actions can you suggest to remedy them?

- Who is responsible for communication and how can we get students, staff & CiCS staff engaged in what we have to say?

- In three years time what might CiCS communication be like, in cultural and technological terms?

The sessions should be interesting, and hopefully provided us with a full range of issues to consider in our new communication strategy. The aim is to publish the strategy early 2010.

Virtual chat

Recently I attend a residential for a distance learning course I’m doing. Day to day the course is supported with a website, online lectures (audio/video as well as slides), resources to download and through a VLE (Moodle).

Everybody there commented how important these face-to-face sessions were, and many said how isolated they had begun to feel, particularly as posts to Moodle had dwindled to nothing in the weeks before the residential. Someone commented they had wondered at one point if anyone else was still doing the course, but that they didn’t feel they could just send an ‘anybody there’ post to Moodle. It made me wonder why, since social chat was the first thing people did when meeting face to face. Interestingly, after the residential there was also a brief flurry of 'chat' posts, before silence one again fell on Moodle.

I'm a very quiet person - always sat at the back of lectures and hoped not to be noticed - but other people on the course are much more outgoing, so I don't think personality explains the difficulties of keeping the site active. It is a fairly small group though, so perhaps there is a 'critical mass' required.

At the Innovation and Communication' event back in 2008, Oxford University showed how they had successfully used Facebook to support central and distributed IT Support Staff. However, they had a very large number of staff (around 600), and about 20% joined the Facebook group, and discussion was still relatively limited.

I wonder what you would regard as successful for this kind of group? Given that they use very few resources to maintain, is any discussion a win, even if it is very sporadic, or should we be putting more effort in to promoting their use?

EDUCAUSE

I've just returned from the Educause 2009 conference in Denver, Colorado.  I'll blog about some of the sessions I attended elsewhere, but I wanted to highlight in this post a couple of things which Educause (the organisation, not the conference) is doing on the topic of "communications".

The Educause Review magazine often has interesting and useful articles, and in the Nov/Dec 2009 issue there's an excellent article entitled "Good Communication: The Other Social Network for Successful IT Organizations" by Lisa Trubitt and Jeff Overholtzer.  I think this paper captures rather well both the relationship management and the information dissemination aspects of IT services' communications agenda, and certainly is well worth reading - particularly if you need to persuade your IT department's senior management of the value and importance of these activities!

Educause have an ITCOMM  Constituent Group, rather like UCISA's own Communications Group.  They have a mailing list, a wiki, and a number of resources (mainly presentation slides) built up over the last couple of conferences.  They did have a group meeting in Denver, which I (alas) did not hear about until too late.  The meeting notes point to some interesting and relevant material.

Of course, the US environment is different from the UK environment.  One of the main differences is the size of the UK community (very much smaller than the US) and another is the scale of institutional resources available (US institutions are in general much richer thanks to the generosity of their alumni).  Nevertheless, there are significant similarities, and we can both learn from and contribute to the US community.

We do of course have our own wiki and mailing list - please use  tham!

Presentations with Prezi

A few weeks ago I started tinkering with a piece of software called Prezi which is available free (you can also upgrade at a cost), and is a tool to create presentations.

I was looking to create a way of pulling all the presentations together for the CiCS Departmental meeting.

I did find it frustrating at times, but after a few hours I had actually produced something I was reasonably happy with which can be seen here. The compromise was that it didn't encompass the presentations people were making except for a hyperlink - however time didn't allow me to look at moving other peoples presentations into Prezi.

In the end I chose not to use this at the departmental meeting as there was a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong, however its an interesting way of producing presentations once you get your head round it.

A number of other people within the University have started to use Prezi, another example of a presentation using it can be seen here.

Over time we will look and see if we will use Prezi, it does however provide an interesting alternative to PowerPoint (for now).

Video meetings

We had a really productive group meeting at the end of last week, especially rewarding because we did it via video-conferencing: with the four of us who could attend hailing from Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds and Sheffield, it meant we could achieve in two hours what would have taken at least three of us a complete day (and more) if we'd gone for a face-to-face meeting at one of our institutions. Three institutions would also of course have had to pay out for traveliing expenses and another for a buffet lunch, so in these hard times video meetings are also very cost-effective. Whilst we do recognise the social value of meeting up in person every so often (which we tend to do at events anyway), using video means we can of course 'meet' more frequently. The only negative in my view is the slight time delay you get when someone speaks, so frequently you find that two or people end up speaking at the same time - not a big enough negative in my view to outweight the advantages and in fact this can be quite amusing when it happens. Our next meeting will be in December - via video.