Summary of the morning of day 1

08 September 2009

By Victoria Wilby

We’ve had a successful morning here in Warwick on the first day of the Vitae Conference.  There was a distinct flavour to the conversations prior to the opening speeches, as participants were variously excited, nervous or clueless about twittering!

The opening plenary session was held in the ‘big space’: a vast posh circus tent.  The format of the opening plenary was in the traditional style, with introductions and three keynote speakers, but participants were seated at tables of ten, with a facilitator and laptop for posting tweets.

After introductions and scene-setting from Ellen Pearce and Janet Metcalfe, Professor Ian Diamond from RCUK spoke about the challenging environment in which we are operating, paying homage to the groundbreaking work of Sir Gareth Roberts in 2002, asking whether we would be working in skills training if we didn’t have the funding, and suggesting that we need to look at further ways to evaluate our effectiveness to justify further funding.

Professor Brigid Heywood from Open University then talked about emerging technologies and how they are changing the world of research, suggesting that this creates a global research community, raising new questions about intellectual property.

Finally Professor Alexandre Quintanilha from the Institute for Biomedical Engineering, Porto described the need for curious and imaginative professionals, encouraging interdisciplinarity.

There followed a short period for table discussions and twittering, before Janet Metcalfe posed a series of questions to the panel, based on emerging themes from the messages on twitter.  The volume of twitter traffic was such that #Vitae09 became a ‘trending topic’, at one point in the day ranking at number 5 in the world!

Afterwards we enjoyed a networking lunch and exhibition in the gallery of Warwick Arts Centre, with small bowls of food appearing at regular intervals, before participants dispersed to their workshops.

Here is the Wordle generated from the tweets posted during the morning plenary.