Sheffield meeting

On Monday 12th November, Emmy (UK Partner for Dilemma), Digby and myself (UK Partner and Researcher for Sheffield) met in ScHARR to discuss the CEP project. We were joined by Julie Foers and Steve Preston from the Finance department here in ScHARR. It was really helpful to go through the work packages and remind ourselves of what we are committed to doing for CEP. It was also very helpful to have the support of Julie and Steve who will be looking after the finances for the University of Sheffield, and ensuring that we record our project activity and spending in the right way.

In the meeting, we looked at the work that Dilemma Training have done in preparing a new Moodle site which will contain the course materials, and enable the partners to start customising them for their own students' needs. So although the partnership has been a little slow to take off, it is brilliant to see that so much progress has already been made on the course materials and their new home.

We hope to make telephone contact this week with the French and Belgian partners to move forward on the arrangements for meeting up face-to-face.

Emmy's new book

Good news- our UK partner from Dilemma Consultancy Ltd., Emmy van Deurzen, has a new book called "Psychotherapy and the Quest for Happiness" being published shortly by Sage. This book has been informed in part by Emmy's work as a partner on the previous SEPTIMUS project, along with her lifelong experience as a psychotherapy practitioner and teacher (Emmy is Director of the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling in London. I am sure it will be required reading for the students who enroll on the CEP courses in the future.

Planning for the partner meeting

We have been trying to organise our first partner meeting, but it has proved difficult to contact partners to find a time when everyone can attend in Sheffield. We had scheduled a meeting in Sheffield for Monday 10th November, but our Belgian partner may not now be able to travel. So we will either rearrange the meeting for the coming weeks in Leuven, Belgium, or we will hold a smaller meeting here in Sheffield as scheduled, possibly with the French partner, possibly just with the UK staff.

Internet TV interview

Chris Blackmore was interviewed today by Ian Benson of UK Future TV, an internet TV company.

In order to disseminate the work on the CEP project, Chris spoke about various aspects of his work in eLearning and Psychotherapy, including the current new funding, the previous Leonardo project SEPTIMUS and the work of ECOTEC in overseeing Leonardo projects.

We will post up the link to the video once it has been made available to the public.

First virtual meeting

We held our first virtual meeting, in the SEPTIMUS chatroom, on Monday 29th September 2009. Present were Prof Digby Tantam and Chris Blackmore (University of Sheffield), Prof Emmy van Deurzen (Dilemma Consultancy in Human Relations ltd.) and Prof Mia Leijssen (University of Leuven). Our French partner, Prof Marc Auriacombe, was not able to join us on this occasion.

Leonardo Start-up seminar

On 18th September 2008, Chris Blackmore (Researcher for the University of Sheffield) attended the Leonardo "Start-up Seminar" at the Thinktank Conference Centre, Millennium Point, Birmingham.

Chris was accompanied by Steve Preston, a colleague from ScHARR, who will be helping with the financial administration of the CEP project from Sheffield.

The day was a very useful introduction to how best to oversee the Adminstrative and Financial aspects of a Leonardo project, how to monitor a project's activities and progress, and how to work with transnational partners. We were introduced to ADAM, the new project and product portal for Leonardo da Vinci.

Chris and Steve were also able to meet Helen Metcalfe, who is the ECOTEC project officer for the CEP project.

Success!

On 5th August 2008, we were notified here at the University of Sheffield by ECOTEC that we had been given funding for our project CEP- Continuing Education in Psychotherapy. The project is a collaboration between the following partners:

University of Sheffield (Co-ordinator)
Dilemma Consultancy in Human Relations ltd.
University of Leuven, Belgium
University of Bordeaux, France

The project is designed to extend the results of the previous project by porting the SEPTIMUS materials (online theoretical training for the continuing professional development of psychologists, medical practitioners, and counsellors) onto Moodle, an "open source" learning environment, providing them bilingually, and transferring our expertise in online tutorial support.

The Leonardo da Vinci programme is part of the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning Programme and aims to build a skilled workforce across Europe. This project comes under the title of "Transfer of Innovation".