Steering Committee & Reps

[Original post June 2010 in The ETUG News]

This has been another great year for ETUG – on behalf of the Steering Committee, I want to thank everyone who has attended our events (f2f and online), tweeted, blogged, tagged, and shared – this community thrives because of you!

We are at the point in the year where we’re looking back and looking ahead, and I wanted to share some of that with you in our last newsletter before we all race off for summer – here are some of the highlights from the past year:

• We had 2 great f2f events – in October, we had a 2-day workshop at SFU downtown on Learning Design with special guest, Grainne Conole who taught us about the tool “Cloudworks”. Then in June, we gathered at UVic for a great event, “3 Cups of T: Teaching, Technology & Transformation“. This event was a huge success and we were pleased to provide live web streaming of many of the sessions. The finale (technology: revolution or evolution?) was a spiritied debate between the green and orange teams – a great time was had by all. In addition to the web streaming, we also tried out Crowdvine as a way to support organizing and connecting among conference organizers, presenters, and participants before, during, and after the event.
• The Steering Committee works very hard behind the scene to make these events happen. As a group, we meet monthly in Elluminate to move things forward, including the monthly ETUG News
• We were delighted to present this year’s Innovation Award in Ed Technology to SPARCS
• We experiemented with a new type of Award (People’s Choice), which didn’t seem to catch the interest of the ETUG membership, so we let it go and will be reviewing our current Innovation Award process and criteria. We are always seeking ways to celebrate the great work going on in ed tech in BC, and we want to make sure that our awards program (which has been running for over a decade) remains relevant and current. SCETUG members Amanda Coolidge, Gina Bennett and Stephanie Chu will be taking this on, so you can expect to see something new for our awards program this fall.
• This year we started a new series of “e-Vents” – one hour online sessions on high interest topics to the ETUG community. Gina Bennett and I co-facilitated a session on jazzing up online introductory posts, which was well attended, and so we plan to do more – got a topic idea? Better yet, want to partner with us? Let us know!
• Your hardworking Steering Committee will be meeting in the fall to plan the year ahead – here’s a sneak peek at what we have in mind for 2010-2011:
  • Two f2f events – Fall 2010 in the Lower mainland and Spring (June) 2011 outside of the Lower mainland (maybe Prince George?!)
  • Online events
  • Launch new ETUG web community

Have a super summer!

Tracy Roberts, Chair

on behalf of the Steering Committee for ETUG