Knowledge Media has the longest history of all the Iriss programmes and has set the foundations for the other two: Evidence-informed Practice and Innovation and Improvement.
Knowledge Media was set up over ten years ago as the Learning Technology Team, which became the Scottish Institute for Excellence in Social Work Education (SIESWE), a collaboration of Neil Ballantyne, then social work lecturer at the University of Strathclyde, and a group at Dundee University.
SIESWE set out to improve knowledge exchange in social work practice and to improve the quality of social work education more generally. This was in response to Changing Lives: Report of the 21st Century Social Work Review.
In 2008, SIESWE evolved into Iriss and grew its Evidence-informed Practice and Innovation and Improvement arms. Ian Watson (who was Head of Knowledge Media) from 2008 until 2016 recently retired from Iriss. Before he departed we gathered the Knowledge Media team together for a chat about the programme’s work over the last ten years years. We hear from Ian Watson (Head of Knowledge Media), Ian Phillip (Interactive Designer), Lesley Duff (Integration Developer) and Ellen Daly (Project Manager). Enjoy listening.
Hello all – one of the original Stòr Cùram team here. Trip down memory lane!
We were originally the Stòr Cùram Project: A Storehouse of Learning Resources for Social Care, and we were a collaboration across all the 9 Scottish universities that taught social work courses. I was the repository manager who built the storehouse from scratch, using intraLibrary software. Also worked with Jenny Niven (nee Blair) and Gráinne Hamilton (both based at Robert Gordon University) whose role was to ensure Scottish social work academics created good quality learning resources, used the store, and improved teaching and learning practice in the sector. One innovative thing we did was get the academics directly involved in a social work taxonomy for Scotland.
Some history is here: http://www.storcuram.ac.uk/
Now I work on another national project working with cutting edge resources – the Urban Big Data Centre (http://ubdc.ac.uk ) – and Gráinne works with Jisc on Open Badges and other innovations (http://grainnehamilton.com/ ), while Jenny is still sharing her wisdom at RGU. The learning of the original project has spread far and wide.
Thanks for your comments Sarah. Really nice to hear more of the history and what you are all up to now. I’ll share with the team.
Thanks