The Skopje project has expanded somewhat. The first series of lectures will be augmented by another round in September, which will be delivered by the head of the LSJ, Professor John Tulloch, and Professors Brian Winston and Richard Keeble.

We also now know a little more about our students. We don’t have any names or profiles yet, but we do know they are all working journalists. This is excellent for us – I’m sure we’re hoping to learn a lot from them about the media landscape in the Balkans, and it will be good to have them as colleagues.

The timetable is now pretty much set up. I’ll try to sort out a calendar next week.

Technical issues
The technical issues are still a little in the air, but we have made progress.Some of our colleagues from our network service (ICT) have come on board. They’ve given us some excellent advice, and they’ve highlighted some resources and systems we might use.

They’ve also helped us focus on the detailed questions we need to ask our colleagues in Skopje.

To sum up:

• we have a videoconferencing set-up called Lifesize installed at three sites in Lincoln.
• our colleagues from Macedonia have sent us a helpful presentation on Wiziq, the virtual classroom system they use, and they seemed to think we can hook up to that and use it for our lectures.
• it turns out that we use Sharepoint for our intranet at Lincoln, which is helpful if that forms part of the project.
• we’ve more or less dropped the idea of using open-source software and social media to deliver the lectures.
• Skype is very much a fall-back for this round, though we’ll almost certainly use it for the next round. The colleagues involved then are unlikely to be on-site.
• we still need to nail down all the connection details – what they need, what we need, what’s compatible, etc.

Meetings
We’re meeting our Macedonian colleagues next week, when they’re over for a three-day visit, and the plan is to sort out as many of those details as we can then, and to pass on questions for those we can’t.

More later …