Blog
IRISS's bimonthly data visualisation and infographic meetup was held on Wednesday 20th April 2011.
The evening’s two presenters, Ben Lyons and Hoss Gifford, shared their enthusiasm and knowledge of data visualisation.
Ben presented the results of his recent practical experience using Scraperwiki at the BBC's Hacks and Hackers day, a one-day project which has turned hitherto impenetrable fire service data into a live updated map and a Twitter feed.
I was lucky enough to grab a place at Ewan McIntosh’s ‘Thinking Differently’ leadership masterclass on Tuesday, 1st March at the Scottish Youth Theatre, which was organised by the Learning Network West. Ewan McIntosh is a teacher and expert on digital media for public services. There’s plenty more information on his work at: http://edu.blogs.com/
I was really pleased to be involved (along with many of my colleagues) in the learning technologies conference (#emtech11), which was held at the Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh on Friday, 25th February. Despite Scotrail let-downs which prevented a number of people from attending, there was a great turn out – over 100 people – to what shaped up to be a very informative day.
While quite a bit of my time at IRISS involves delivering information literacy and social networking training to social services staff across Scotland, I managed to attend events in Edinburgh and Aberdeen last week, which involved me being on the receiving end of new nuggets of social media/knowledge management gold.
The JSWEC planning group has announced that its one-day conference, entitled Social work under pressure: solutions, sustainability and social justice, will be held on Thursday 14th July 2011, at the University of Manchester.
It will include presentations of recent work undertaken in both education and research, as well as provide the opportunity for the sharing of ideas and experiences of current issues, including social work reforms through plenary sessions.
The planning group is currently calling for Expressions of Interest, which are invited from:
NHS Education for Scotland (NES) and the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) are running a series of Engagement Events for people with a strategic, clinical or operational management role in relation to the delivery of services for people with dementia, their carers and families.
The events will run from 10am to 3pm and places are limited to 40 at each event.
The subject of social media, and how blocks to accessing social networking sites in local authorities is negatively affecting social work practice, is a topical one, and a bit of a hot potato as regards how to, and who is, responsible for tackling it.
We've just uploaded some images from our first IRISS Forum to Flickr. Over the days and weeks ahead we'll be uploading more content from the Forum, including podcasts, videos, slides and a few other exciting goodies.
IRISS has recently published a report on using social media in social services, which was put together by Focused on Learning, a consultancy and training service specialising in e-learning, web communications and publishing for the public, academic and not-for-profit sectors.
On 7th and 8th October, IRISS held its first Champions event at the New Lanark Mill Hotel, which brought together staff from IRISS and Champions from the local authorities across Scotland. The objective of the event was to provide an opportunity to develop a network, meet with key colleagues in other local authorities, share ideas, gain new knowledge and skills, and represent local authority needs to help shape IRISS’s work.