Alison Lowe, WBL and mobile technologies, briefing

Met with Alison today who is CEO of Touchstone a local charity and a member of Volition and more importantly, a lovely lady. She has indicated that there are lots of voluntary secotr organisations which would really benefit from students doing real work based projects for them and that these would suit multidiscplinary teams involved in business development, marketing, finance etc They have capacity to mentor student teams and currently take a lot of post graduate and undergraduate health students on the service sector side.

We discussed PUPPS and she was very interested in the use of web technologies to support students via social networks etc in a work based context - she said the Finance Director was desperate for help/assistance from accounting/finance students - there has been lots of encouragement about my proposed project from people involved in Employability.

I have submitted a bid to ELESIG (http://elesig.ning.com/) to fund the activity day - so I will be awaiting a decision sometime in December! I am trying to get the SCEPTrE wiki working which is frustrating and slow - I am really too busy to keep trying to resolve the issues but it is important..

I STILL havent sent the employer questionnaire out - time is making things really tough for me at the moment - I have written 2,800 words of the book chapter on WBL and mobile technologies (the research and theories on it are fascinating) but I have to write a proposal paper about the module that I am writing - I am so passionate about what I am doing but I have so much to do and am hoping that when I get some PhD hours this will free up some time so that I dont have to do so much out of work....my husband is getting annoyed as I have no work life balance at the moment and it is all work, work, work..

Anyway - hopefully I am going to create something of real value and worth for students at a time when employability is a big issue - I am really thinking about a CBI bid but I have so much on at the mo'!