This morning’s session is from Gina Poole, Vice President, Innovation and University Relations at IBM.<\/p>\n
IBM focus on 4 key areas in working with Universities:<\/p>\n
Joint research
\nCreating skills required by IBM, business partners, clients etc.
\nRecruiting
\nProviding solutions for teaching, research and running Universities<\/p>\n
This morning Gina is going to talk about 4 areas:<\/p>\n
Key Driving Forces
\nMarket Environment
\nKey Technologies
\nInnovation in Education<\/p>\n
Apparently we are now in an ‘innovation’ era – this is driven by<\/p>\n
Network Ubiquity (more than a billion internet users)
\nOpen Standards
\nNew Business designs (driven by the other two)<\/p>\n
At the moment performance of IT systems still growing, while costs drop. But this brings complexity as well.<\/p>\n
A shift in where people are employed from agriculture towards services (via manufacturing) – in the US and UK, around 60% of jobs are in the service industry (which includes education of course). In services, the value is not by goods, but by the interaction between the service provider and client\/customer\/consumer.<\/p>\n
China currently has the vast majority of jobs in agriculture – so, presumably we can expect this to change? There is a deliberate attempt by the Chinese government (Gina says) to move a large proportion of workers from manufacturing to ‘knowledge’ sector.<\/p>\n
Gina suggests that we are entering a period where we will face shortfalls of professional skills (due to the baby boomer generation reaching retirement and the growth of demand for professional skills)<\/p>\n
‘Services Science Management and Engineering’ (SSME) – “the marketplace requires innovation that combines people technology, value and clients”. Gina is saying that typically in a University, academic departments work as silos – with their own processes, and systems. There is pressure to move much more towards an inter-disciplinary approach.<\/p>\n
Gina is covering some of the key technologies affecting us – the headlines are
\nComputer Assisted Business Systems<\/b> – transforming industries and the institutions of society – ‘Service Oriented Architecture’ – a framework of incorporating web services across and between enterprises. This is a concept that is talked about a lot by the likes of IBM, but I’m yet to see good practical examples – certainly in UK HE.<\/p>\n
Social Networks, Highly Visual, Interfactive Interfaces<\/b>
\nUsual suspects – Web 2.0, Online Multiplayer games (World of Warcraft, Guildwars), Second Life …<\/p>\n
Gina mentions that her son has started to get involved in the ‘teen’ Second Life – and a drive to start a business led him to develop scripting skills. This is quite interesting, as one of things that I have occaisionally bemoaned is the lack of programming being done by teenagers – when I was at school I got into programming BBC Basic, and many others of my age group had the same experience – but this seems to be lacking now – perhaps we will start to see practical, real world, applications driving these skills in the future?<\/p>\n
Information Integration and Analysis<\/b> – unfortunately Gina leaves us hanging on this one – just saying that there is lots of unstructured information – how do we work with this?<\/p>\n
Innovation in education<\/b><\/p>\n