Cathy Lewin and Nic Whitton the co-directors of TIPL (Technology, Innovation and Play for Learning) convened the research group’s termly meeting to bring together all the academics and researchers across MMU to build relationships, meet fellow travellers and plot future research, on 19th November at ESRI. Research meetings sometimes get lost beneath the endless personal introductions and individual discussions of research interests that get mixed up and lost as more and more people take their turn. 
Not at TIPL. We played person snap as an icebreaker and then we used post-it notes to create a word cloud of research interests. Next came the playing cards and we were off into groups to discuss key activities to develop the research group:
- Hands-on play sessions: game making, exploring new technologies,
- Reading group
- Themed ‘show and tell’ sessions around, for example, innovative research methodologies
- Help and advice writing research proposals
- Networking to develop collaborative funding proposals
- Support writing publications and conference presentations
- Hosting seminars and discussions around emerging research interests such as augmented reality
- Developing relationships between emerging and more established researchers
- Writing ‘dates’ where you meet another researcher and share your ideas (5 minutes each) and then you go off and write for 45 minutes
- Using Lino It as a light touch approach to sharing opportunities and ideas across the research group
Developing networks and relationships beyond MMU, especially around interdisciplinary groups and research projects
So watch this space for news on developments or if you would like more information, TIPL is going to keep in contact through a Google doc and a group mailing list. If you want to join the list, email Cathy or Nic.