SocialLearn Director

Starting in September I am going to be the Director for the SocialLearn project here at the Open University, for 6 months at least. The Vice Chancellor and senior management have agreed to fund us so we are pushing ahead on a punishing development schedule to have something usable by next February (with releases along the way).

Taking on the responsibility of director is a double-edged sword. On the one hand I can influence the project more and make decisions. On the other hand, I can't blame anyone else.

I am also using the project to explore different approaches to management. My starting rules are:

i) No regular, formal meetings. We have informal, impromptu meetings as we need them with the people who need to be there, rather than everyone coming to meetings which are scheduled.
ii) Alternative forms of output - I want us to go beyond the standard report or paper that nobody really reads, and ends up being the focus of the project itself.
iii) Openness - we will hopefully let you know how it goes as we go along and encourage input.

This last one will be particularly interesting for me - it's easy to be a blogger when you don't have much responsibility, but it strikes me that the as your official responsibility increases so the the amount of stuff you can happily blog about decreases proportionally. So, for the sake of the project I may find that I can say less and less about it. But I hope not, and my default position is to be open as we go along.

So, watch this space and see either a) a successful project come to fruition or b) a Professor unravel before your eyes. Either one should be entertaining.

Comments

[Laura]

Good luck! Let me know when you need people to test the beta as I could recruit some people at BathCamp in a few weeks time. I'll be talking about OU and Social Web there.

[John Connell]

Congrats, Martin!
John

[Scott Leslie]

Congrats Martin, this is great news!

[Gary Lewis]

Hi Martin - Best wishes with SocialLearn. I hope it's a tremendous success. ... Gary

[Sarah]

Congratulations, Martin! Am looking forward to seeing the project developing. Interesting times ahead!

[George Siemens]

Congrats Martin! it's great to see projects such as SocialLearn get funding and support from an organizational perspective. Just think, ten years, when everyone's "doing it", you can sit back and say "I remember when..."

Looking forward to watching the project unfold.

George

[Michael]

It'd be good to see some open ongoing blogging. The centre haven't been great at telling the regions about SL in any depth.

I reckon you'd be hard-pressed to find someone talking daily to students in a regional centre who could answer a student asking, 'So, what's this SocialLearn all about? Tell me something concrete.' And that includes me.