Things they are achangin’

I’ve really been looking forward to this talk by Graham Whitehead, as I’ve never heard him speak, but he has an excellent reputation.

“Don’t think out of the box – think out of your lifetime”

Out of something over 100,000 staff, 77,000 can work from home (although they don’t do it all the time). This relates to a discussion that came up yesterday – why do universities seem to find it so difficult to grapple with home working (immediately it was mentioned yesterday people started saying things like ‘lots of issues’, ‘health and safety’…)

This is a great example of how a good presenter can make material really engaging. A lot of what Graham is saying is not new to me, but I just find his presentation engaging in a way that most of the other talks in this conference just haven’t been.

Graham is giving lots of examples of how ‘always on’ connectivity to the network will change things – cars will communicate with each other about journey times, traffic news, etc. TVs will schedule programmes for you, and by checking your calendar will know when to show it, and when to record it.

There are some issues with what he is saying – he admits some of this kind of thing will rely on great metadata – and my experience is that this is just not there at the moment – but perhaps this will come.

It’s great to hear about the future – and to realise how close some of this is. A great example of ‘video conferencing’ in Cisco – using huge screens to project lifesize avatars, savings millions of dollars in travel costs – they are actively stopping staff from travelling between sites.

Some interesting stuff on micropayments – I hadn’t seen about Visa Wave – coming to the UK this year.

Mentioning Energy problems – vision of oil prices reaching a peak in 2016 with travel becoming antisocial and prohibitively expensive – but other energy sources will come on stream.

Graham dotted through so many things here, I haven’t got them all down – but overwhelmingly the point came through that he believes that in the future everything will be connected all the time – sharing information and acting on it.

Things they are achangin’

I’ve really been looking forward to this talk by Graham Whitehead, as I’ve never heard him speak, but he has an excellent reputation.

“Don’t think out of the box – think out of your lifetime”

Out of something over 100,000 staff, 77,000 can work from home (although they don’t do it all the time). This relates to a discussion that came up yesterday – why do universities seem to find it so difficult to grapple with home working (immediately it was mentioned yesterday people started saying things like ‘lots of issues’, ‘health and safety’…)

This is a great example of how a good presenter can make material really engaging. A lot of what Graham is saying is not new to me, but I just find his presentation engaging in a way that most of the other talks in this conference just haven’t been.

Graham is giving lots of examples of how ‘always on’ connectivity to the network will change things – cars will communicate with each other about journey times, traffic news, etc. TVs will schedule programmes for you, and by checking your calendar will know when to show it, and when to record it.

There are some issues with what he is saying – he admits some of this kind of thing will rely on great metadata – and my experience is that this is just not there at the moment – but perhaps this will come.

It’s great to hear about the future – and to realise how close some of this is. A great example of ‘video conferencing’ in Cisco – using huge screens to project lifesize avatars, savings millions of dollars in travel costs – they are actively stopping staff from travelling between sites.

Some interesting stuff on micropayments – I hadn’t seen about Visa Wave – coming to the UK this year.

Mentioning Energy problems – vision of oil prices reaching a peak in 2016 with travel becoming antisocial and prohibitively expensive – but other energy sources will come on stream.

Graham dotted through so many things here, I haven’t got them all down – but overwhelmingly the point came through that he believes that in the future everything will be connected all the time – sharing information and acting on it.

Teaching the Google-eyed YouTube generation

This mornings agenda looks, on paper, like its going to be interesting. This first talk is being given by Bill Ashraf from the University of Bradford…

Bill is speaking well, covering the change in the UK HE sector – moving from 12% towards 50% of population going through the system, students as customers. An interesting point that in terms of time, Universities could actually have 3 semesters per year, and theoretically this would allow degree programmes to be delivered in 2 years.

m-learning – students forget all kinds of things when they come to class, but they always have their mobile phone with them. Bill decided to leverage this ‘always on’ attitude. Students were already asking him if they could record his lecturers (interestingly one of the A-V team at RHUL was telling me the other day that they had found a mobile left on a lectern, and had assumed it belonged to the lecturer – but it turned out that a student had left it there after using it to record the lecture)

So – Bill decided to try podcasting. He is saying this is now something you can do easily at home – low cost. Search for ‘ashraf’ on iTunes and you will find examples of his lectures online.

Marc Prensky said “Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach”

Bill is saying that if you started from scratch, it is hard to believe that you would decide the lecture was the best way of teaching students complex information.

For today’s students ‘new media’ is not ‘new’ – it’s just media. Gartner are predicting that by 2009, 50% courses offered will be a hybrid of face-to-face and online, and more than 80% of students will use mobile technology as a tool for learning.

Bill is mentioning ‘Rate my Professors‘ website. I’ve not looked at this before, but if you teach, you may want to check if you are on there (current 7 lecturers from RHUL on there)

Bill has setup a website iTutorsmart. Bill does weekely 5 minute video podcasts as well as lectures as audio podcasts – he is saying how easy this is to do using his Macbook – Apple clearly delivering a compelling package here.

Bill is showing how he did a video podcast from Red Square with a basic camera. He finds that whiles students don’t check email, they will view the podcast – so he can literally tell them what he needs to.

Bill has also published his calendar online – so that students can find him and book appoints.

Bill found that at the end of his lectures he would say ‘are there any questions’ – and wasn’t getting any response – but when he gave out a mobile number, and let people text him questions, they came flooding in – this is a great example – I love this idea.

Bill scrapped lectures for some of his Year 1 Biochemistry – and he has substituted this with podcasts followed up by smaller tutorial. He believes strongly in blended learning. He makes the point that in science many of the basic courses don’t change year on year.

One of the great things about Bill’s approach is that it is so based around the technology being invisible – he has said several times ‘I don’t know how this happens, but…’ – this is just so key to getting people to use the technology – make sure they don’t ever have to think about it.

Finally, there is a Guardian article about the work that Bill is doing.

Teaching the Google-eyed YouTube generation

This mornings agenda looks, on paper, like its going to be interesting. This first talk is being given by Bill Ashraf from the University of Bradford…

Bill is speaking well, covering the change in the UK HE sector – moving from 12% towards 50% of population going through the system, students as customers. An interesting point that in terms of time, Universities could actually have 3 semesters per year, and theoretically this would allow degree programmes to be delivered in 2 years.

m-learning – students forget all kinds of things when they come to class, but they always have their mobile phone with them. Bill decided to leverage this ‘always on’ attitude. Students were already asking him if they could record his lecturers (interestingly one of the A-V team at RHUL was telling me the other day that they had found a mobile left on a lectern, and had assumed it belonged to the lecturer – but it turned out that a student had left it there after using it to record the lecture)

So – Bill decided to try podcasting. He is saying this is now something you can do easily at home – low cost. Search for ‘ashraf’ on iTunes and you will find examples of his lectures online.

Marc Prensky said “Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach”

Bill is saying that if you started from scratch, it is hard to believe that you would decide the lecture was the best way of teaching students complex information.

For today’s students ‘new media’ is not ‘new’ – it’s just media. Gartner are predicting that by 2009, 50% courses offered will be a hybrid of face-to-face and online, and more than 80% of students will use mobile technology as a tool for learning.

Bill is mentioning ‘Rate my Professors‘ website. I’ve not looked at this before, but if you teach, you may want to check if you are on there (current 7 lecturers from RHUL on there)

Bill has setup a website iTutorsmart. Bill does weekely 5 minute video podcasts as well as lectures as audio podcasts – he is saying how easy this is to do using his Macbook – Apple clearly delivering a compelling package here.

Bill is showing how he did a video podcast from Red Square with a basic camera. He finds that whiles students don’t check email, they will view the podcast – so he can literally tell them what he needs to.

Bill has also published his calendar online – so that students can find him and book appoints.

Bill found that at the end of his lectures he would say ‘are there any questions’ – and wasn’t getting any response – but when he gave out a mobile number, and let people text him questions, they came flooding in – this is a great example – I love this idea.

Bill scrapped lectures for some of his Year 1 Biochemistry – and he has substituted this with podcasts followed up by smaller tutorial. He believes strongly in blended learning. He makes the point that in science many of the basic courses don’t change year on year.

One of the great things about Bill’s approach is that it is so based around the technology being invisible – he has said several times ‘I don’t know how this happens, but…’ – this is just so key to getting people to use the technology – make sure they don’t ever have to think about it.

Finally, there is a Guardian article about the work that Bill is doing.

Are you a Dedicated Follower of Fashion? (Designing technology rich learning spaces for the future)

When I saw the programme, this was one of the talks that caught my eye, so I’m hoping it lives up to expectations – unfortunately so far none of the talks at the conference have been very inspiring, so I’m now dreading this a bit…

Starting with Gill Ferrell. The first point is that IT is challenged to keep up all the time – and while we have started to design our infrastructures to be flexible and responsive, our learning spaces are still very much fixed and static.

A great picture of a PC lab – looks exactly like one of ours – and that’s not a good thing!

At this point my battery gave out, which was a real shame, as this was by far the most interesting session of the conference so far.

I did take some paper notes, and I’ll try to put these together into a post later, but for now I’ll point you towards the JISC Infokit

Are you a Dedicated Follower of Fashion? (Designing technology rich learning spaces for the future)

When I saw the programme, this was one of the talks that caught my eye, so I’m hoping it lives up to expectations – unfortunately so far none of the talks at the conference have been very inspiring, so I’m now dreading this a bit…

Starting with Gill Ferrell. The first point is that IT is challenged to keep up all the time – and while we have started to design our infrastructures to be flexible and responsive, our learning spaces are still very much fixed and static.

A great picture of a PC lab – looks exactly like one of ours – and that’s not a good thing!

At this point my battery gave out, which was a real shame, as this was by far the most interesting session of the conference so far.

I did take some paper notes, and I’ll try to put these together into a post later, but for now I’ll point you towards the JISC Infokit

Building intelligence

This presentation by Gary Bark from ‘Converged Building Solutions Ltd’.

What is an ‘Intelligent Building’ – a building is only intelligent when it plays an active part in meeting the objectives set for it – but very few buildings have objectives set for them over and above form, plus basic environmental and accommodation functions – so this results in a lack of intelligent buildings.

So – what might be the objectives for a building:

Manage itself as part of a wide area estate
Contribute to the occupant experience
Contribute to the visitor experience
Contribute to corporate responsibility policy
Contribute to the corporate brand
Contribute a revenue stream

… starting to doubt that any of this is meaningful – either something that is going over my head, or just a load of rubbish!

Just had a concrete example – if you have access control on buildings you can (for example) see if a student is using the library, and if they are, take some action. The problem with this is that it is pretty simplistic – many of our library resources can be used online, so physical presence is really not relevant. Also, the question isn’t if someone is using the library, but how they are performing academically – and so we need to measure performance not library visits.

So – first sensible thing in this talk – that the way Estates and IT work together is key, and this is a challenge in many (all?) institutions.

To a large extent the basic message seems to be that you need clear objectives when building, and joined up thinking between Estates and IT in terms of delivering. This seems pretty non-contraversial – but the latter seems easy to say, and harder to acheive.

I’m afraid I lost interest at this point – seemed to go on for ages, and just didn’t grab my interest (sorry)

America uncovered!: ICT in US higher education

This talk by Richard Katz (Vice President of EDUCAUSE)

Richard has been working with (or building?) ‘ECAR’ – the Educause Centre for Applied Research – and is planning to expand it’s activity to Europe and Australasia. I’ve not come across before – but it sounds interesting, as again it comes up against this question about who does research into supplying computing services to HE – I need to try to put my thoughts about this together a bit, but it relates to my thoughts on how JISC is caught between providing services and doing research.

Anyway, Richard summarises some stats for the HE sector in the US. He says there is negligible growth in HE (which is an interesting contrast to the figures yesterday from HEFCE about rising numbers) – and he is outlining impending enrolment declines – so very unsettled sector at the moment.

ECAR has been carrying out research about ‘top concerns’ (as with the UCISA top concerns, which are modelled on the EDCAUSE methodology). So – ECAR has been looking into those issues appearing in these lists:

ICT Funding – high fixed costs, low investment in innovation, few new funds, private universities outperform publics. Overall, lots of similarities here with UK HE, apart from the private/public issue (although it would be interesting to see if there is any similar 2 tier resourcing in the UK)

Infrastructure – network now seen as strategic, wireless catching up with wired. I wonder if we are going get some backlash here – currently we are likely to have finished rolling out 802.11g when 802.11n or WiMax stuff is coming on stream – are we going to have to replace our wireless infrastructure in the next 2 years? If so – where is the funding?

IT Security – being taken more seriously – lots more control now. With increase in this being raised at the highest management level within HE institutions.

Identity Management – Wide awareness of issue by CIOs – not well understood by Senior Management (this sounds extremely similar). With effort being funded internally by IT organisations there is only slow progress (see Budget Dust)

Richard finishes by asking “What should we be tracking” – that is, there is a load of stuff that is falling outside our lists of ‘top concerns’ – which are mired in ‘keeping the show on the road’ – but we aren’t looking beyond the next curve…