A staff mobility week is like an Erasmus but for university staff, and only one week. This is an UE program and every European university can apply for this program. When I knew that I apply for this program and lucky me I was chosen and between 12 and 16 of May I went to Bergen to participate in the Staff Mobility Week (SMW-14). The organizer of this week was University of Bergen (UiB).
A staff mobility week is like an Erasmus but for university staff, and only one week. This is an UE program and every European university can apply for this program. When I knew that I apply for this program and lucky me I was chosen and between 12 and 16 of May I went to Bergen to participate in the Staff Mobility Week (SMW-14). The organizer of this week was University of Bergen (UiB). There were more than 250 applications for this week, but only 48 were chosen . They divided all participants in 4 groups: Administration, Communication, IT, and Library. In each group there were 12 participants. I was on the IT group.
During this week I participated in a lot of activities, some of them institutional, some of them IT and other cultural ones. There were some activities that we did all together and some activities that we did it with our specific group.
The Institutional activities consisted of an a opening, a closing ceremony and a complimentary dinner on Thursday evening. There were two speeches in the opening ceremony; in the first one, the Vice-Rector of International Affair gave us an institutional welcome and some info about UiB. The second one, the Vice-Rector of Education introduced the main goal of the week: DigUiB. They want to digitalize UiB at all levels: apply, register, subjects, exams, courses…. and as this is a big project, UiB wanted to discuss the solutions they had adopted and compare those with ours (if anyone has taken any).
The Closing Ceremony was a speech by the Director of UiB and after that, every group summarized the work to all assistants.
The complementary dinner was at mount FlØyen. At the top of the mount FlØyen there is a restaurant with a great view of Bergen, but that day was a foggy day and we couldn't see anything. At the restaurant we ate some traditional Norwegian dishes.
The IT activities were: a guided tour at the IT department, some presentations and discussions at IT department. We had very nice presentations with a great diversity of topics, such as the cloud, security, open data, video notes, digital exams, e-learning, ITIL or communications and development. The best part of IT activities was the discussions, after each presentation we discussed a bit, it was amazing because we were almost twenty people, from thirteen different universities, nine different countries and some different kinds of jobs (support, development, system administration,…) so there were many different points of view, and all these things made discussions very rich and interesting. If someone is interested in any of these topics please ask me and I will give you a more extended explanation.
Cultural activities were funny and social. For example we went on a guided tour in Bergen city, a guided tour at Eduard Munch exhibition, hike a mountain or visit mount Ulrike, but the most interesting activity was the tour to Hardanger fjord. This tour was an all-day trip and it was on Wednesday. We went from Bergen to TØrvikbygd by bus then we crossed the fjord by ferry to Jondal. We stopped in Jondal, we enjoyed the landscape and walked around the village. After that we went from Jondal to Odda by bus. In Odda we had lunch and then we went to guided tour to the city. After the city tour we went by bus from Odda to Utne it was a nice trip because we traveled next to fjord all time. At Utne we visited a folk museum (traditional Norwegian costume, houses and music), we had dinner at the museum, and after that we went by ferry again till Kvanndal and then we returned to Bergen. This trip was amazing, by the landscapes, and the weather because the fjords have a microclimate and are warmer than the rest of Norway.
Furthermore activities I did networking with some colleagues, I improved my English, I met nice people, I visited some amazing landscapes, I visited a different country, and I has a very nice and different week. In summary I think this is a very interesting, nice, and funny experience and I encourage everyone to do it.