Great session today with Philip Plowden, Dean of Northumbria U. Law School, and around 16 members of staff from Northumbria U. At his invitation Michael Hughes and I travelled down to Newcastle and spent most of the day with staff from the Law School, Built Environment and Business School demonstrating the SIMPLE platform, showing the tools, using them with staff, discussing simulation design, and much else.
What was so welcome, as Michael remarked later, was not just the enthusiasm of staff for the software or the constellation of educational ideas that surround it. It was that they were actively contributing to the discussion of how the application could be further developed. They pushed our own thinking. For instance one member of staff pointed out that it would be useful not just to have a Sent, Received and Drafts file, but to have another view entirely, which would splice the other views into an integrated file that would appear, in chronological order, as if it were a paper file. We discussed this a while back (in fact I think it was in the specification list for the original SIMPLE build, but a low priority), Michael says it’s clearly possible, and it’s something we’ll be doing in the near future.
What this revealed to us yet again is how important the community of practice is to the development of the SIMPLE concept and software. The curriculum discussion was so exciting because we were learning by sharing opportunities, resources, ideas… the cultural capital of education practice.
Anyone want to know more about such sessions, contact us at info@simplecommunity.org.