Departmental meeting today - about 160 of the department got together first thing this morning, and we were very lucky to have a visit from our Vice Chancellor. He spoke about a number of issues affecting the University at the moment including the financial climate, the effect a change of government might have, the possibility of changes to student fees and consequent changes to the funding mechanisms. As a University we're in a much better financial position now as we've saved a lot of staff costs over the past few weeks, but there are still challenging times ahead. He also (very kindly and with no prompting from me) told the staff what a good job he thought they were doing and how much our services are respected and appreciated. Excellent start to the day.
We also had presentations on CampusM (blogged about last week), and the use of Web 2.0 technologies. We're pushing the latter a bit at the moment because we're already starting to see the effects of the changing attitudes to using technologies that we don't supply. So for example, we've just launched a major collaborative space with blogs, wikis, discussion boards etc, and one of our research groups has just launched their own based on a piece of free open source software. What do we do? Ours is secure, authenticated, backed up, supported etc. There's doesn't link to any of our systems, and probably isn't as secure. How do we broach it with them? Should we?
We also looked at students' use of technology and how easy it is for them to create content using relatively simple tools, like this video which won a recent MMUBS Podcast Competition:
Of course another great example is the IC Girls video, filmed surreptitiously in the IC and edited in someone's bedroom on iMovie - a great piece of film!
3 comments:
"We don't provide the systems anymore"
I think this is spot on, but most haven't woken up to it yet. I see our new role as trusted guides instead - setting standards, finding ways through, providing advice, integrating.
You can read the discussion between me, Martin King, & Robert Moores about this at http://fote-conference.com/2009/09/29/google-apps-and-the-cloud-at-leeds-met/
"As a University we're in a much better financial position now as we've saved a lot of staff costs over the past few weeks, but there are still challenging times ahead."
Another way of viewing this is that there are a lot of University staff who feel that their workloads have now increased with no increase in remuneration. The bottom rung are certainly not pleased...
"free open source software"
It could also be said that the following factors aren't free:
-Staff Costs - installation and support
-Hardware Purchasing
-Energy to run the servers
Innovation or re-inventing the wheel?
Is it that people are unaware of the services already being offered?
Surely it'd make more sense to pool resources rather than working in isolation and duplicating effort?
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