Sorghum crop recently grazed by cattle, Paysandu, Uruguay
'Meetings were 'calzon quitao' – 'with underpants removed'. Sometimes there emerged some truths or criticisms which were very painful, and this is what I think helped many to come to terms with reality.'
Nicholas Kent
In 1985 I visited my uncle Kent in Mercedes, Uruguay. He showed me the "log book" from what was, in effect, a "community of practice" that he and a group of 7 other local small farmers had established. The basic approach was that participants paid each other facilitated exchange visits at which they reviewed and critiqued each other's farming practices. For some reason, what he showed me stuck in my mind.
Nearly 20 years later this simple model was built into a small scale project (with a focus on e-learning rather than agriculture) involving 2 English Universities (Greenwich and Staffordshire) and 2 English Further Education Colleges (Loughborough and Leeds College of Technology). The project, called CAMEL, was funded by the HEFCE Leadership, Governance and Management programme, and jointly run by ALT (for which I work half time as Executive Secretary) and JISCinfonet (a JISC service), with the support of JISC and the Higher Education Academy. A 30 page project report is now available. This tries and largely succeeds in getting to the heart of how to establish and sustain an inter-institutional collaboration, whether or not that collaboration is about e-learning. You can order its as a hard copy or download it as a PDF from the JISCinfonet web site. [A CD-based toolkit for organisations wanting to apply the same approach can also be ordered from the same URL, and will eventually be published as a web resource.]
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