Tagged / collaborate

New Year’s Research Resolution #4 – update your staff profile page

Happy New Year to you all and welcome back to work!

Each day this week we’ll be posting a New Year’s Research Resolution to help you get back into the swing of things. Today’s resolution is to update your staff profile page.

Our staff profile pages provide an excellent opportunity to promote yourself both internally and externally.  Jo Garrad’s post demonstrates that the pages are attracting thousands of views from all over the world.

The easiest way to navigate to your profile is to open the application (or click on the ‘academic profile’ link from the staff portal home page).  Next, click on ‘People’ in the page header and then on the start letter of your surname.  Finally, click on your name.  Your profile will then appear.  You can also search for your name.

You can update your profile page via BRIAN and fields you can add include:

  • photo of yourself
  • biography
  • research interests and keywords
  • teaching profile
  • PhD students supervised
  • invites lectures
  • qualifications
  • memberships
  • honours / awards
  • RKE grants
  • outreach and public engagement activities
Your publications will automatically be pulled through from BRIAN.

Having a complete and professional staff profile page can help to attract potential students and collaborators.  It will raise your profile externally and will ensure your page appears in web searches.

If you have any queries about BRIAN or the Staff Profile Pages then please direct these to BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk

New Year’s Research Resolution #3 – update your staff profile page

Happy New Year to you all and welcome back to work!

Each day this week we’ll be posting a New Year’s Research Resolution to help you get back into the swing of things. Today’s resolution is to update your staff profile page.

Our new staff profile pages went live last October and provide an excellent opportunity to promote yourself both internally and externally.  Jo’s post demonstrates that the pages are attracting thousands of views from all over the world.

The easiest way to navigate to your profile is to open the application (or click on the ‘academic profile’ link from the intranet home page).  Next, click on ‘People’ in the page header and then on the start letter of your surname.  Finally, click on your name.  Your profile will then appear.  You can also search for your name.

You can update your profile page via BRIAN and fields you can add include:

  • photo of yourself
  • biography
  • research interests and keywords
  • teaching profile
  • PhD students supervised
  • invites lectures
  • qualifications
  • memberships
  • honours / awards
  • RKE grants
  • outreach and public engagement activities
Your publications will automatically be pulled through from BRIAN.

Having a complete and professional staff profile page can help to attract potential students and collaborators.  It will raise your profile externally and will ensure your page appears in web searches.

If you have any queries about BRIAN or the Staff Profile Pages then please direct these to BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk

Share posts from the Blog!

If you’d like to share any of the posts on the Blog with colleagues, friends, the public, you can do this quickly and easily via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email (plus many more!) using the Share This function at the end of each Blog post.

Simply:

  1. Click on ‘Click here to share this blog post’ at the end of the post you wish to share
  2. This will open the post in your browser, giving you the option to share the post via Twitter, Email or Facebook (as per the picture below)
  3. To share via Twitter or Facebook simply click on the icon and the post will be added to your Twitter feed / Facebook profile
  4. To share via any other media (such as email, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Delicious, etc) simply hover the cursor over the Email icon and a new window will open displaying all of the ways you can share the post. Clicking on LinkedIn, for example, will share it via LinkedIn! Easy 🙂

Sharing posts this way helps to promote the excellent work going on at BU and can also help you to establish networks with likeminded people.

                                  

‘Competition out, collaboration in’ says Adrian Smith

Research Professional has today reported that Adrian Smith, the government’s director general of knowledge and innovation states funding cuts and increasing international competition will force UK higher education institutions to collaborate rather than compete.
Following cuts of around 40 per cent to the research equipment and infrastructure budget, restricted resources will prompt a “change of emphasis” he told the Science and Innovation 2011 conference in London on 21 June “I think the UK was served well for a few decades by the [Research Assessment Exercise] and things that drive dynamism and competition between institutions [but] to have competition you need at least two of something. Now there may be areas where you can only afford the equivalent of one, and that drives us from competition to collaboration.”
Smith firmly backed a policy of striving for “critical mass”, saying the government would encourage universities and businesses to group in clusters, such as in science parks, and to establish larger PhD training centres. “Analysis [shows] there are real issues of concentration and critical mass if we are trying to leverage the best efficiency,” he said. “This is not true of all topics, not medieval German poetry perhaps, but probably around big physics equipment.”
Smith also cited Scotland’s research pools—which receive large, multi-year grants from the Scottish Funding Council—as a good example. “We’re going to be moving to a system where those who thought of each other as national competitors work together,” he said. This is in spite of recent concerns over the pools’ future once their current funding from the SFC expires [see RF 15/6/11, p4, via link below].
Priority will go to funding streams that leverage further investment from industry and charities, he added. Making the most of limited resources will also mean looking increasingly for alignment “across disciplines, research councils and government departments, and the relevant bits of business and industry”, as with programmes such as Living With Environmental Change, he said.
Smith shrugged off any suggestion that directing research in multi-disciplinary collaborations was a threat to blue skies research, calling the debate “fuzzy nonsense”. “I don’t think you can spend £6 billion and not pay any attention to things people care about,” he said. “There’s a balance between challenges and maintaining national capacity and letting the brightest and best get on with it.”

Using Skype to collaborate!

Skype is a VoIP (voice over IP) application to enables users to collaborate via a computer interface by calling one another. To use Skype you need to download an install a client application which enables your PC to work as a telephone. You can then make free calls to other Skype users on the network via your PC, regardless of location.

The benefits for collaboration via Skype rather than conventional telephone calls are:

  • longer and more frequent interactions
  • free phone calls to other Skype users via computers
  • you can record and archive conversations and interview notes
  • you can engage in multiuser conversations
  • you can make podcasts to share research with others

For information on using Skype check out the Skype website.

If you have used Skype before, comment on this post to let others know about your experiences!