Peanut Northumbria

NESTA have an interesting idea for "institutionlising serendipitity via productice coffee breaks", which is not dissimilar to our own Tooltime sessions.
http://www.nesta.org.uk/home1/assets/blog_entries/institutionalising_serendipity_via_productive_coffee_breaks

Institutionalising Serendipity via Productive Coffee Breaks - Nesta Nesta promotes innovation in the UK. We help people and organisations bring great ideas to life by providing investments and grants and mobilising research, networks and skills.

On the subject of innovation and summer quiet times, I should mention that we'll be running some free, hour long 'Tool Time' sessions over the summer. It will be a chance to catch up, and have a go at some new tools. We'll do a quick poll via email, to see which days and dates are best for people. Please 'Like' this post if you're interested in coming along.

Hard to believe given the weather, but summer is almost here and we're about to enter those funny few weeks when not many people are about and work is a bit flat. So why don't you switch off your computer and do some reading instead (Honestly, who has time these days to read stuff). Here's an inspiring report on Innovation which re-inforces much of what we cover on our Peanut PA courses.

http://www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/sites/default/files/UploadedFiles/Sustainable_Funding/Publications/innova

Just a quick reminder that we are running our 2 Day Essential PA Training next month, on 5th and 6th July. Which is a great introduction to participatory approaches. We are also taking bookings for our September 2012 and January 2013 Essential Training courses. The full cost is £245 for the two days including all course materials, with some concessionary rates.
More information can be found on the Peanut web pages or you can just drop me or Ross a line.

Its been a busy start to 2012. We've been piloting a new set of "bite sized" half day themed courses in the voluntary sector over the past few weeks. The courses have been developed by Straightfoward Training (thanks Ross!) and will be delivered via Peanut. So far feedback has been very positive. We'll be adding more details, including prices and dates to our web pages soon.

We delivered our Essential Training to the lovely people at JISC Infonet recently. As they are very much a technology based organisation we were curious as to what they'd make of our Tools and Techniques. Glad to say it went down very well! A post course feedback session with cake (which we'll do more of in future) was a great way of finding out how they're planning to use PA. So watch this space for some interesting Case Studies!

JISC infoNet - The Team Contact details for the JISC infoNet Team.

Home - The Byker Centre A WebsiteBuilder Website

I spotted in the local press this week that work was starting on the communty garden at St Michael's Church and the Byker Centre with a £450,000 grant from the lottery-funded Changing Spaces programme. Peanut carried out the community consultation work for this project, so its brilliant to see it all coming together. Its probably got the best views in Newcastle, so well worth a visit.

We've just taken delivery of our fabulous new marketing materials; stationery, leaflets and a big banner (with some nice photos from our very first 'Tool Time'). Now we just need an opportunity to show it off! If you've got a conference you're planning or an event coming up and would like Peanut to do a short participatory workshop, then let us know.

Tomorrow it's 'Tool Time'. Every month we are going to run a short (one hour max) informal session to demonstrate some participatory activities. It's a chance to have a refresher if you've already been involved in our training or to find out how participatory approaches work if you haven't. Come along at 12 Noon to Room A114, Ellison Building in the City Campus....we'd love to see you.

Spent an enjoyable few minutes watching the spectacle of Ross trying to hang up 3 A0 size sheets of our visual report of Student and Lecturer perspectives of 'Assessment and Feedback'. A job we did recently for Dr Mike Jeffries at the Uni. Er, it's not quite straight Ross... We used Xmind open source mind mapping software.

XMind - Mind Mapping and Storming The best Mind mapping, Brainstorming Software, A great productivity tool with ease-to-use features, friendly UI, and human design. A free and open source mind map software, awarded as the best Project for Academia.

For anyone interested in reading more about the Regional Refugee Forum, here's the link (and up here because we still haven't quite got to grips with Facebook yet).

Regional Refugee Forum The objects of the Association are the advancement of education and the relief of poverty, distress and sickness amongst asylum seekers and refugees in the North East of England and to that end to provide a mechanism for hearing the voice of asylum seekers and refugees by bringing together in counci