BU Research Blog

I am proud to have been part of the first two Festivals both as an event owner and working during the event as part of the Research and Knowledge Exchange team.  As the third Festival of Learning (FoL) is on the horizon (11^th – 17^th July 2015), I wanted to bring this remarkable event to your attention.

FoL is a fantastic opportunity to you to share your research with the public and run activities to showcase your research to different audiences.  Who knows what you might get out of it!

An example of an academic who engaged with the Festival last year is Raian Ali, Senior Lecturer in Computing, SciTech.  As a group effort with his colleagues, they ran three events during FoL 2014 to engage audiences in their areas of research and expertise.  As a direct result of each event, they received new collaborations with business. This included a match-funded PhD on the topic of Digital Addiction and 4 final year Computing projects in the areas of Crowdsourcing and Gamification where the students can work closely with businesses who attended these events to address their needs. This could be developed in the future to larger scale collaborations such as KTP projects. 

These new collaborations demonstrate the benefit of sharing research to external audiences, so what can your research area offer the public?  It could be an hour lecture, 2 hour workshop, full day event…why not try something different and host a chat show style event?  We are looking for proposals that showcase the fantastic research that we do here at Bournemouth University.

The closing date for proposals is Friday 19^th December and further information about proposals can be found here.  If you would like to speak to someone about your proposal before submitting, please contact the Festival of Learning team on 01202 961342 or email fol@bournemouth.ac.uk

Try it!  See what happens…