Meeting the Reading List Challenge

My blog about Meeting the Reading List Challenge event at Loughborough University can be found at https://blogs.staffs.ac.uk/askteam/2015/04/29/meeting-the-reading-list-challenge/ Better late than never!

Teachmeet Resource Discovery: Enhancing the User Experience Staffordshire University

On the 19th March Staffordshire University's Academic Skills Know-how Team hosted a CILIP sponsored Teachmeet Event. The focus of the event was on resource discovery and the user experience and the presentations and the activities addressed this theme.. My blog on the event can be found at https://blogs.staffs.ac.uk/askteam/2015/04/01/teachmeet-resource-discovery-enhancing-the-user-experience/

Women social networking #IWD15

At the beginning of March I attended an event to celebrate International Women's Day at the Mitchell Memorial in Hanley in Stoke-on-Trent . The event hosted a range of activities, the day was top and tailed by 6 minute lightening talks. These were a very similar format to pechkuchas  I have seen at some of the Higher Education conferences I have attended, in particular eLearning - which is a presentation style in where 20 slides are shown for 20 seconds each - only these presentations were minus the slides, which was not necessarily a bad thing. The talks, which were thought provoking and at times moving, were devoted to a wide range of topics, community breadmaking; encouraging women to vote; encouraging people to claim their entitled benefits; coping with aging; promoting community activities such as street festivals, farmers markets and community radio and promoting health products such as Aloe Vera. The event was punctuated with workshops that gave the attendees the opportunity to have a go at something new - such as belly dancing and singing - not at the same time! there were also musical performances in the cafe through the day by women musicians.

One of the outstanding successes of the day was "Going Through the Change" Anne Marie Sweeney's film made about the National Women Against Pit Closures. As well as reflecting on the events of the miners' strike it also shows the continued work of the NWAPC supporting women standing-up for their rights, not only in this country but across the world in places like Chile.

The organisers of the day had not only used face-to-face meetings to arrange the event but also taken advantage of free technology:

• Eventbrite for attendees to register for the film;
• A facebook group, Women Together in North Staffordshire, to keep organisers and interested parties up-to-date on how the event was shaping, this will continue as social space for women in the local area;
• Google calendar was used to not only publicise the event itself but to also publicise other activities that were take place to celebrate International Women's Day. 

The world of technology was a very different place in the 1980s when the miners' strike took place. Not only was connectivity limited, no internet! but also it was very expensive. Individuals had to rely on generous birthday and christmas presents, for some with a more limited budget technology was completely out of reach. For the miners that spent weeks and months without wages relying on the support of the community, family and friends to provide just the basics they had to be creative with their networking. Communication, was via, newsletters; eye catching placards on picket lines; organised support via political groups; the sympathetic press - think Michael Kerstgens Guardian photos and ads at the back of activist magazines. As we are about to vote in another election the phrase "political complacency" seems to appear regularly in critiques and commentaries, some may say that this is a consequence of the technologically networked world we live in. However, if we reflect on the event hosted on 7th March at the Mitchell Memorial, the use of technology definitely generated interested and impacted on attendance for this event. The footfall for day was about 300. Women from varying cultural backgrounds and ages attended (although it would have been nice to shave some younger women attending) and the technological infrastructure that was created can definitely be repurposed for next year, and as this blog evidences, our technologically networked world has enabled people like me to report on the successful achievements of women in North Staffordshire.