Student Ambassador Digital Literacy Surgeries 4 Students: Observations

The technologies for learning surgeries to support the student induction have run their course. This is the first try at this type of support, and I think I'd give it 6 out of 10. We trained up 3 student ambassadors to get people started on using Twitter, Google Docs, Diigo and Mahara. We then provided a range of surgery times. These where promoted through the induction timetable, posters on the 1st floor, and reference during our induction sessions. The outcomes were:

• three student ambassadors trained, and started to explore creating their own portfolios and uses of the technologies


• two of the four sessions were busy, the other two had no visitors

Interestingly, the day's we had people dropping in was when the first year induction sessions ran. The days when we had no visitors was when we ran the returner sessions. A reason for this might be we run different inductions for the two groups. The first year's get a session which focussed very heavily on developing uses. Therefore, they may be more motivated to use the technology, and therefore, more likely to seek support. The returns is a very short session which focussed on changes to institutional systems during the summer. Therefore, there is no awareness of the tools and motivation to attend the surgeries.

In terms of where next, we'll be putting together a programme of drop in surgeries in various buildings across the campus which will be repeated until Christmas. At that stage we'll re-visit the popularity and effectiveness of this model. This will require am appropriate publicity campaign.