Week of the Symposium

It might be raining in Galway at the moment, but that's just because it's a bank holiday Monday! The sun is predicted to reappear as the 8th Galway Symposium on Higher Education begins on Thursday. This event sees an action-packed programme of keynotes, workshops and, importantly, huddled chattering on the stairs, in the foyer, bar and restaurant. Over 200 participants have registered, filling the venue and using up all the conference packs we could muster. Great to see such interest and I hope that all will find it worthwhile. We have a fascinating mix of speakers from near and far, with visual artists, theatre producers, business consultants, educational researchers and psychologists adding to the academic milieu.

On Thursday evening, once again the Symposium dinner is in honour of those colleagues who have been nominated for the President's Award for Teaching Excellence and we are delighted that so many have accepted our invitation.

We've tried to introduce a number of moderately innovative approaches this year with, for example, more Pecha Kucha (20 slides x 20 seconds) and an 'unconference', which is basically a room set aside for self-organised discussions based around some key questions on the theme of creativity. The keynotes will be recorded both in video and by means of our 'visual scribe'. An 'ideas board' will start off blank - but we expect it to fill as the days progress! And we'll be using the latest of technologies to beam in live discussion from across the Atlantic.

So, if you've booked your ticket, come along and join in and if you haven't, don't worry, we'll let you know how things went via this blog.

Oh, and by the way, whilst we were organising the symposium we also decided to host TEDxGalway (http://www.tedxgalway.ie) on the Friday afternoon!

Time is ticking....