One of my rules is never to do any work after I get home on a Friday evening.  However, as this is my self-designated 'blogging week' for January I am breaking that and have come back to the computer to complete my task for this month.

A good part of this morning was taken up with a Steering Group meeting relating to CILASS - the Centre for Inquiry-Based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences.  This has been a project funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the Higher Education Academy (HEA) over the last five years and it is now coming to an end.  It has been hugely successful, not just in encouraging more activity to link research and teaching but also in the way it has explored ideas for the improvement of student experiences.  Something I learned about this morning and want to hear more on is the way in which the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health has set up schemes for undergraduates to undertake research projects on themes related to their curricula but which are not actually part of the assessed requirements - and (here's the best bit) be supervised by research students and postdocs in doing so, thus giving other more 'senior' students their first experience of supervision.  One of the great innovations across the university in the last 5 years has been the development of  a variety of student ambassador networks (sometimes known by other names) which now exist at Faculty level (in MDH and in Science, for example), within our outreach activities, within the Enterprise Zone, and not least within CILASS itself where the most fully developed model has been worked out.  In my opinion it is essential that we seek to maintain such networks and resource the support for them even in the current difficult financial climate.

Coming to the end of my first week's blogging leads me to reflect on the process of sitting down every evening and trying to interest others in what I've been doing.  Part of my motivation to do so has been the fact that I've just taken on the role of mentoring three senior women academics who have ambitions to learn more about the university and to enhance their role within it.  Each of them wants to know more about what I do, and a blog seemed to me to be a way of helping that understanding.  But blogging seems to me intrinsically narcissitic, and based on a premise that the world out there is really interested in what the blogger is saying and doing.   In a world with an excess of information I'm not at all sure that that is true in my case.  I don't feel that it is naturally part of me to push myself forward in quite this way.  And perhaps I should challenge the idea that people out there MIGHT be interested in the life of a PVC - which is inevitably quite a long way removed from the lives of most people in the university, even though it intersects with theirs in many small ways.  I know of only two people who have been reading these posts - one of them being Dave Speake from CiCs who kindly responded on Wednesday to my bleat about the temporary non-availability of uSpace.  Maybe others will discover this series of reflections over the course of the next three weeks and indicate that in some way what I've said has been of interest.  Maybe people will tell me to stop completely - or to approach the task in a different way.   Any suggestions will be welcomed - even if it means that this could be the 'last post.'  Otherwise I intend to come back to the file in the second half of February.