Thoughts of a foundation student

The Student Voice Festival began this week and it has been brilliant. I even facilitated an event myself, which was fun (and a learning experience!). I had forgotten how difficult I find it to encourage discussion in a way that feels natural. We had a dozen people in the forum each day, and a handful of posts throughout the week.

I met some students on all courses. My favourite event so far was the student panel on Tuesday. I knew Tricia Burton was speaking, and she happens to be the owner of my favourite learning log Growing Beautiful. The staff and students were from the Creative Arts and Fine Arts department, and spoke about their interdisciplinary work and their experience in OCA. 

The session was so engaging that I felt sad when it was over. I would have liked to listen to the group for another hour because we only just started talking about AI. I had two key thoughts when I left that session; I need to socialise more and maybe I should look into applying to Creative Arts. One of the tutors, Rachel Smith, spoke about book arts which is an area that interests me.

AI is a theme that also came up in the Assessments Q&A. I have not been formally assessed yet so I did not have any questions, but it was useful to know what to expect. One of the students in the session spoke about their experience of preparing for submission, particularly around deciding which pieces of work to select. This echoed similar comments I have heard as part of the learning logs focus group.

After I left the Assessments Q&A I went straight into a meeting with some local college library colleagues, and we were discussing AI in the workplace. The panelists included Libraries Hacked (I am a big fan!) and staff from Open Fifth. It was gratifying to be talking about library data with other people in the sector. 

The final event I attended in the week was a session on Gemini and NotebookLM. The speaker gave an overview on both, and recommended other resources where we can learn about Google Workspace. I am definitely going to have to make time to look at grow.google and complete a few more Google for Education Learning Centre courses.

The Student Voice Festival schedule for next week looks even better. I am especially looking forward to the AI Roundtable. I hope to see you there.