Intro session

Staff Introduction Meeting 1 - Getting to know each other - Thursday 8th November, 1 - 2pm GMT (8-9am) A get together for new staff members
Details	Participants
Date: Thursday 8th November Time: 1-2pm (8-9am) Venue: Newcomer's Centre Max: 15 Organiser: Euphloozie Phlox Overview: With lots of new staff members arriving, we thought it would be nice to schedule a few sessions where they could meet each other, existing staff members and students just to chat, ask any questions and generally get the feel of things. Fairly unstructured. I've scheduled this first one over a lunchtime in case some people find it easier to attend during the day, but will schedule another in the early evening. Fox and Euphloozie will both be there. All welcome. Meet in the the newcomers’ area, sitting on the comfy chairs.	1 Euphloozie Phlox 2 Fox Phlox 3 Amba SParker 4 Rough Bounds Sparker 5 Darkwolf Schomer 6 Please edit to add your name 7 Please edit to add your name
Notes from the meeting
Notes from meeting Roughbounds, Amba, Darkwoolf, Fox and Euphloozie met and chatted for an hour about the experiences of being a new staff member. We began by talking about practicalities of chatlogging. To display the chatlog sign over your head, you need be a member of the group Schome Park Mentors and select that group as your active group. To check your membership of groups, right-click your avatar and select groups. This will show you which groups you belong to. To actually turn on chatlogging (and you should do this even before you are able to display the chat logging sign) select Edit>Preferences and click the Communicate tab. You can then browse to the location on your disk you want to save your chatlog. Remember to rename the chatlog with yourname and the date each time you leave Schome Park, and email the log to Schome-SL-help@open.ac.uk. If you don't rename it, each chatlog is appended to the end of the previous one. We moved onto a discussion of the experience of being a new staff member, which can feel quite isolating, and about the overall purpose and ethos of schome. As a new staff member, it can be difficult to workout your "place" in the overall scheme and feelings of uncertainty and of being an outsider can make it hard to feel positive about what you are contributing. We discussed ways to help this, and came up with the suggestion that regular weekly staff meetings inworld would help. We decided to run them alternate weeks - lunchtime one week, evening the next, to make it easy for as many people as possible to come alone. Darkwolf is a student and it was good having her there as she was keen to help and able to offer her perspective as a new student. Integration of students was also discussed, as new students may find it difficult to feel at home in such a different environment which already has an established group. It is not that the existing members are unwelcoming - it is more that the area is already designed, already has procedures and processes, and already has people who know each other and are familiar with how things work. It was also pointed out that it is easy for staff to concentrate on existing students because they already know them. We must take great care that new students do not come once and then get put off and never bother coming back. We discussed ways to improve the introduction of new students and staff. We tossed the idea of an orientation area similar to the main grid. The buddying system a nice idea, but it can be difficult for buddy and newbie to be inworld at the same time. We also discussed ideas of putting together teams consisting of new and existing members all with a shared goal - for example the creation of a float for the carnival. The size and overwhelmingness of the wiki was also identified as an offputting factor for newcomers. We discussed having some sort of in-world introduction or button for newcomers to looka t, participate in or press to join an induction group.
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