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David Taylor - http://www.nakedleader.com/
I'm starting to wonder if the sign of a good talk is that I can't blog it effectively. David has been speaking for about 3 minutes, and has already captured the audience - it's fantastic to see, and impossible for me to record effectively.
This is an annual award, and this year the highly commended entries are:
Leeds Metropolitan University - RFID in the library
LSE - video capture and podcasting of lectures
The winner is Sheffield Hallam - server virtualisation.
I need to have a proper read of these, but I'm really happy that RHUL is investing in all of these areas - makes me wonder if we should be entering for an award next year.
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.
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.
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
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)
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...
This came up in Richard Katz talk - defined by Doubletounged as:
"money said to be insignificant when compared to other (planned) expenditures"
which I liked.
Another definition I came across recently was McPee in the Guardian:
"Using the toilet of a restaurant/hotel without eating there."
I don't know how I've managed to date without a word to describe this...
This is being presented by Brian Gilmore.
The JISC Support for Research Committee - fills gap between research councils - can provide service required to support research, which is not research in itself.
Currently Research is often done in 'research council silos' - and at insitutional level usually also done in silos. Often money is spent by the 'principal investigator' - without any reference to others.
Some research has too much infrastructure for a research council, and too much research for JISC.
Much of the time research funding results in the principal investigator, or department, investing in 'local' (rather than institutional) solutions (typified by running research infrastructure on a PC underneath your desk).
So - JSRC started working on the concept of 'E-Infrastructure' - the first element was the 'VRE' - Virtual Research Environment. In 2004, HEFCE GAVE £10M IN 'CAPITAL' MONEY TO THE JISC FOR:
ID Management (UK Federation)
VREs
In 05/06 JISC was awarded a further £81m (by HEFCE and HEFCW) for:
Super Janet5
Digitisation
E-Learning
(plus others ...)
At the same time the OSI (Office of Science and Innvoation) - published report Science and Innovation INvestment - including a national e-infrastructure for report. This will advise the JISC, and Research Councils on forward planning (there are 6 sub-groups, with some reports on the NESC website
JISC now in phase 2 of VRE - 4 bids have been funded
VRE phase 1 - was technology focussed, experimental
VRE phase 2 - is more user and practice focused, looking to move towards 'service'
Looking for Collaboration, Supporting small and large-scale research.
I can't help thinking about this JISC approach compared to the North Carolina Virtual Computing lab described by the previous speaker. To some extent it feels like JISC when challenged to help develop e-infrastructure to support research does it by funding doing Silos on a large scale. This is probably a bit unfair - but where JISC has a real impact on my day-to-day work is where it produces a service, not where is funds projects. In the long term, I know these projects inform my work - but isn't this 'research'? Overall, I feel that JISC is in the situation of both being a service provider, and a funding body - and I don't see why we try to squeeze both roles into a single organisation...
Some interesting stuff on Grid Services and Tools - National Grid Service - which sounds like a real step forward - this does feel much more like a real rationalisation of resource to support research.
Finally some stuff on the Identity Project, in which RHUL is a partner.
HAERVI is a project about access to e-resources for visitors in HE institutions.
If you work in your own institution, then accessing resources is relatively straightforward. However, as soon as you go to another institution, then you have problems - how do you get on to the network, and how do you access e-resources? There are legal, technical and administrative issues to overcome.
What has HAERVI achieved so far?
Interviews with IS and library staff at a range of institutions, a consultation event with a variety of people.
They found that UK Libraries+ and SCONUL Research Extra have widened visitor access to paper based resources in libraries - and these (esp. SRX) have had good take up.
However, a recent survey showed that fewer than 33% allowed visitor walk-in access to electronic resources. Ironically, for visitors, electronic resources have lead to a restriction of access.
However - there is a huge variation between institutions how they deal with walk-in access. This starts with 'how do you get online'? Can you get a guest username? Is there a web kiosk? Will someone login for you?
Where many 'content' licenses allow walk-in access, you may not be able to get online due to network security and JANET AUP.
There is a lot of uncertainty in this area, which has led to ad hoc approaches, and this variation in practice.
The consultation event led to the idea that there should be a 'one stop shop' for visitors (haven't heard 'one stop shop' in a while...). However, the needs of visitors can be a low priority (this rings a bell - we discussed implementing Eduroam recently, and certainly although seen as 'desirable' it was seen as extremely low priority)
At the moment there is no single definitive guide which clarifies which licenses permit walk-in use - HAERVI is working with JISC Collections to improve this for JISC Model Licence materials. Paul Salotti (the speaker) has said that this leads to librarians needing to go back to licenses and contracts to check - which is time-consuming - but for me, this just demonstrates what a poor job we are doing of managing this information at the moment - we should know the answers to this 'up front', and it should be clearly recorded in our systems - why on earth should it be a problem to know this information.
HAERVI has seen some partial solutions suggested - Visitor Portal and a Visitor Proxy - I didn't quite follow how this would work, but it sounded like this would be a (national?) service, with local implementations...
HAERVI is putting together a Toolkit - should be useful.
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