Back home...

Back home after another great Educause. The sessions were mainly excellent, and if they don't come up to expectations,  you can easily pop out and find another - there's about 15 happening at any one time. The final session was from Edward Ayers, President of Richmond University who spoke passionately about the important of technology to the Humanities - the digital humanities are as important as STEM subjects. He gave some great examples of projects he has been involved in, including The Valley of the Shadow - a digital history of Confederate and Union soldiers during the Civil War which was put together from scanned newspapers from the time. He's also been involved with a similar project looking at the emancipation from slavery in the US.

Other highlights for me were seeing Clay Shirky, networking and exchanging ideas with colleagues from the UK and US, and of course the now traditional (well I've done it for two years), Segway tour. You never know, one day the UK will actually come into this century and follow the rest of the world in allowing their use! But the best was being in the US for the presidential election, and sitting in a bar watching Obama be re-elected.

What makes a great conference session?

First session this morning is how to write a good conference presentation. It had better be good. Started with a slide of how most of us are too busy to think about presenting at conferences. Had a cat on it so good for me.




The notes from the presentation are here if anyone wants to see more detail. There's also links to some good resources.

What makes a great conference session? Quick survey round attendees came up with 11 terms:
Enthusiasm
Interactivity
New take
Great graphics
Clear message
Applicable
Honest
Though provoking
Matches title
Uses humour
Informative

Avoid death by PowerPoint. Most people tend to put everything they want to say on the slide and just read it out. You lose the audience immediately doing this. Another common mistake:



Think of presentation as a story, and you as the storyteller.
Work out what your one big idea is, who your audience is, and deliver with authenticity - bring a human touch to it, a little bit of who you are. Bring yourself into the sessions.

Blueprint your session. Define and thoroughly understand your audience. You need to focus on what matters to them.

One big idea. The one key message you must focus on. Make sure everything you say relates back to it.

To get to give a presentation you have to write a winning proposal, at EDUCAUSE it goes to a programme committee.
Need to research and understand the CFP (Call for proposal). Understand themes and tracks. Connect your one big idea to the conference theme. Have a catchy title and abstract. There's some resources on how to do it in the link above.
Make sure the abstract whets the appetite, make it intriguing and interesting, but has to represent what you'll actually be talking about.

Then you have to design your presentation. Use your one big idea as a filter, and keep the audience in mind. Outline the pretension using story boarding. PowerPoint very linear, prezi makes you think in a different way. Lots of other tools - Google docs can be very powerful. Think about design, very important.

Think about how you might use social media, twitter hashtag, Facebook etc.

Delivering session. Prepare and practice. Memorise as much as possible. Engage with your audience. Read and abide by the TED 10 commandments that all TED presenters get sent to them!





Good session, and the resources are definitely worth looking at.

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Today's Modern Music Marketplace

A conversation with Cary Sherman, Chairman and CEO of Recording Industry Association of America.

I should preface this, with these are his opinions, not necessarily mine!

Bottom line is that music industry has transformed how it does business.
The music industry is now primarily digital. Way ahead of other industries including movies and newspapers
There's new business models, subscription models, free streaming, music bundled with mobile phones, music in the cloud. All types of digital business models are now embraced and licensed by the major music labels.
A major RIAA priority is to make it easier for new services to be licensed.
Historically very few albums have represented majority of sales. Not so any more.
Illegal downloading has hurt the music industry. Vast majority of downloads are illegal. Fewer people today trying to make a living from music. Piracy is a problem for our economy and our culture. Protecting rights can stimulate sales. If you close illegal sites down, users go to legal ones. Also if you go after illegal sites like Megaupload, other illegal sites close down.
Music industry going forward with innovative ideas. Collaborations with ISPs, payment processers, advertisers, search engines. Internet should be open and free but not lawless. (Most of these "innovations" seem to be about closing things down).

DMCA notices to Universities are dropping so they must be taking action. Lot of education of students, policies about file sharing etc.

I'm afraid the cynic in me came out in me during this talk. The music industry was very slow in adopting new technologies, almost to the extent that it put its fingers in its ears and hummed for years, and it could be this that has caused the fall in revenue. He admitted that more music is being consumed now than ever before. Of course, I recognise the need to stay within the law (I'm an IT Director, I have to say that :-)), their criminalisation of some of our young people and their inability to recognise that current copyright law is not fit for purpose in this digital age really annoys me.
Someone from the floor who is a musician said that the decline in the number of musicians is related to many things, including the increase in DJs and electronic music and the decrease in the number of venues and is not necessarily related to digital rights.
Another audience member pointing out that there is something wrong with their business model if more music is being consumed, yet their revenue is going down.


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Innovation Station

Fostering Innovation and a culture of openness through crowd sourced idea generation. Davenport University, Michigan.

What is innovation and why do it?
The act of introducing something new. New services or repurposing existing things to provide new and better services. Continuous improvement to services. Can be big changes, or small changes which have a big impact.
Continuous improvements over time give big strategic benefits.

In Davenport's mission statement it says " we will develop a culture that encourages innovation from all employees and will implement a process that allows all ideas to be vetted so the best ones become reality".

They needed a system which could harness the features of social media, including community based discussions.
Used a tool called Ideascale. Allows rating and ranking of ideas, comments and discussion, different communities ( eg staff and students) and collaboration.
Called Innovation Station. People can vote on ideas, comment on them etc.
But this is only part of a larger process.
From the ideas you have to research and experiment possible solutions. Report progress back to the community through Ideascale.

To keep discussions focused they have campaigns, eg how we can improve x. Also moderated to close questions that have already been answered, reply to off topic questions etc.

Need a culture of innovation to make it work. "If you build it they will come". No, they won't . They use gamification, scores, badges etc. You can see most popular ideas, and the people who've contributed most.
There is an innovation fund for new ideas to be experimented.
Provides visibility and openness on how things work. Has increased synergy between academics, professional services and IT.
Also visibility on why things are stopped or not taken forward.

They pick pick top 5 ideas to fund each cycle. Ideas which are not funded are often taken forward in other ways, for example using systems and processes already in place, coming up with cost neutral solution or finding other funding.

I really like this idea. I can see it promoting discussions across the University, especially been central staff and those in academic departments.





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Changing models of education

Keynote session now. Blueprint for change in an area of rapid reinvention.
Great opening video about how higher education is critical to economic development, but that one size of education cannot fit all. Different models can serve different needs.
Then video from Student Experience Lab about student experiences. Some key points they've found:
Many students unprepared for University experience.
Drowning in bureaucracy
Pressures of HE can be daunting
Want to work on their own
Learners want more than a piece of paper at the end, they want to achieve something outside of the classroom.

Director of Student Experience Lab talking about new models of education.
Not all students are the same.
Competency based learning. Task based. They are piloting an online system where students perform a series of tasks and demonstrate a set of competencies.
Service based learning. Students need to get credit for some of the work based learning they do.
Put students at heart of the redesign of education. Involve them in the R and D process, that's what the Student Experience Lab is doing.

Now Elliott Maisie. Apparently he invented the phrase eLearning.
We're in the world of personalisation. Look at how TV has developed, most of us watch it on demand, with tablet on knee. Music personalisation was a game changer.
People want to learn in a very personal way. Learn what they want, when they want, how they want, where they want.
Social and collaborative learning important to some people, but not everyone is social.
Need real research and evidence base to design different education models.

Now talking about MOOCs. Most too easy. Everyone passes. No credentials attached to them.
They will develop.

e in eLearning is for experience

Collaboration will be key to developing different models.
We will be operating in a global society. Need to understand how that affects how we operate.

Never been a better time to rethink the rules.


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Helpdesk FAQs

A very practical session now, from the University of Maryland (UMBC) about how good Helpdesk FAQs can change the culture of IT support. Obviously popular, the room is packed, and people stating at the back!

Problem: not enough self support. Knowledge base used infrequently, too much pressure on Helpdesk staff. Most vendors encourage self support before calling support desk. Users want a consistent, high quality support environment available 24/7.

So, they decided to revamp their FAQs. They analysed common requests.
Used "show and tell" screencasts of key IT tasks.
Prominently displayed FAQs on portal
Encouraged users to suggest and correct FAQs
Identify and eliminate dead wood
Created an FAQ on FAQs
All support staff encouraged to recommend FAQs

Their site is here
Is a wiki.
Good example here.

Show first, tell later. Encourage comments, can email page to a friend, rate page etc. Can see date it was updated and by whom.

Visits to site in 2011 were 1100, in 2012 45,000. More queries are resolved, and quicker. Number of calls to Helpdesk has reduced.
Helpdesk manager grades all "tickets" every week. To get an A you have to have either referred to an FAQ or written/suggested one.
Have implemented self reset of passwords with a security question.

Now mining search terms customers are using on web site. Top term is "meal plan" , not an IT term. Students searching it for other things. So, now going to other departments eg student services, to get their information into knowledge base. That's where the FAQ on FAQs is useful, tells staff how to create the content.








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From IT Silos to IT Alliance

Despite the free beer and cocktails last night, I'm in the 8am session. It's from the University of Minnesota about a training programme they have run for IT leaders. It's a very distributed University with 5 campuses and many research centres spread across the state. They have a highly distributed IT structure, with about about a third of IT staff in a central IT department, a third in colleges and campuses and a third in admin offices.

They wanted to build a community of leaders, and implemented a leadership programme. Took 30 people from across all IT departments for a couple of days a month for 8 months. They used active learning concepts and applied their learning to real issues. They spent a lot of time investing in relationships to build trust across the institution and developing personal networks.

Taught to look at issues through three lenses, strategic, political and cultural. Consider that feedback is a gift. Get rid of defensiveness, and thank people for it.
Develop leadership skills, important to coach staff. Don't solve their problems but get them to a stage where they can solve their own problems.

Programme was a success, and led to real initiatives, including development of a service catalogue, consolidating Helpdesks ( they had 73!), virtualising servers and implementing Google Apps across the whole University.

Trust has been established, and there's a shared commitment to the institutions goals. Formal and informal communities of practice have been established.

Interesting session, and a good example of how disparate groups were brought together. Hopefully our own leadership programme is having the same effect,


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Obama, light sabres and podcasts

Spent lunch in the exhibition area talking to suppliers, and catching up on some new technologies. Suspect I've also ended up on lots of mailing lists. Of course, we also collected one or two (a bagful) of freebies, the best so far being a light sabre! The exhibition is enormous, and I think I've only seen about a third of it so far. Lots of technologies around wireless, social networking, and managing iPads and other mobile devices. Some exhibitors have certainly scaled down, others have grown. Lots of our suppliers here, and it's good to chat with them.

It was interesting to be over here during the election. The Brit crowd spent last night in a bar watching the results come in, and luckily we had someone with us who understood it, and had a map which he coloured in as states were "called". So much is done on the basis of predictions, states can be called when as few as 29% of votes have been counted. Because of the time difference, some East Coast states were called before West Coast ones had finished voting. Obama was declared president very early, just after 9pm I think, to much cheering in the bar.

This afternoon I went to a panel session on eLearning and Distance Learning which wasn't really relevant to a UK audience, but reasonably interesting.

I was also interviewed for a podcast, EDUCAUSE is making a series of them during the conference. I talked about our values and mission in CiCS, what challenges we face, what I could see coming up in the future, and what I thought the US could learn for the UK in HE IT. I'll post a link when it's up.


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Next session is from Kansas University and is about a change programme they've just run. They have a ten year strategic plan, and they're two years in. Lots of change, including in the curriculum, in research and has an efficiency agenda. 70 different initiatives, many involve IT.

Used experts in change management from across the University, many in academic departments. Developed an organisational change workshop for all staff, everyone from Deans to cleaners went on it, delivered 40 times. So, everyone on campus understood why the changes were being made, and how it was being done. Very important to understand the campus culture and climate.
Workshops looked at the different stages of change, and categorised people into 3 categories:
Denial. Not going to happen to me. Left out of workshop.
Judgement. Why are we doing this, not a good idea. 44%
Acceptance. Ok, it's going to affect me, better see how. Not necessarily agreement. 36%
Transformation. Hey, this is exciting, it's going to be great. 20%.
Most in this latter stage had been involved in planning the changes and were usually in leadership roles. So, lot of work to do in bringing everyone forward.

Task, Relationship, Identity are all important components of change. Lot of effort normally put into task, ie what is the change, implementing it. But, relationships and identity are just as important.

Resistance from three main places:
Thought based resistance, do people understand the change
Fear based, understand it but fearful of impact
Capacity based resistance. People worried that they might not have skills to to cope with new regime.
Good leaders understand these, and recognise that resistance can be positive.

Framework for communicating:
Initiative, explaining change
Understanding, make sure everyone understands it
Performance, where does everyone fit
Closure, celebrating success.

KU trained 15 volunteers from across academic and professional staff to act as facilitators to groups discussing the changes and implementing them. They helped the change leaders plan meetings, anticipate problems, have a clear focus, and held debriefings. Lot of good feedback from all areas.

Change doesn't happen by itself. Change needs to be facilitated. Change can be managed by acquiring skills and using a common language across campus. Change must fit the culture.



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Location:Managing change

Square One

Next session, Square One: a prescription for operational excellence. Just took a few notes, but the presentation is here.

Institution's success and reputation is built on operational excellence, and our credibility within the University is built on it. Your never going to have a strategic conversation with your VC, if your talking about why a system isn't working.

Most outages caused by either systems and hardware failures, or people and process issues. 80% caused by people and processes. 50% of these are specific to change processes. Concentrating on hardware/systems only gives you the opportunity to improve 20% . Need to get your processes right, and invest in people.

Most of our budget is on staff. We need to invest in them, training etc.

Need to deal with negative reaction avoidance, fear of doing something and getting a negative reaction.

Fear of failure is high. People respond to positive rather than negative. Need a space where it's safe to say I can't do this, or I don't know how to.

Leadership sets the tone. The team needs to be in control with management as coach. Teams and individuals can increase their skills and ability to expand their capacity to think and solve problems as they arise. Catch people doing something right, spotlight it and reward it. "Right" can be as simple as someone documenting a process.

Managing change has the biggest impact on improving the reliability of a service. A change request process, Change Advisory Board and Change Window are the foundation of operational excellence. The default position for a CAB is that changes are not approved.

We have regular progress meetings etc during projects, but what about services that are in production? An operational planning meeting focused on only the health of a service needs to happen regularly for critical services even when there is no change planned.

Use RASCI charts when decisions made. Responsible, Accountable, Support, Consulted, Informed.

Then we went through a plan for looking at a service and delivering operational excellence. The plan is here.
We chose email on our table. Interesting discussion about different way of achieving operational excellence and different risks with in house vs outsourced services.


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EDUCAUSE opening, Clay Shirky

So EDUCAUSE proper is about to start. Huge theatre, about 6,000 delegates and many thousands of wireless connections. Eduroam coping quite well! Opening remarks as usual from Diana Oblinger, introducing EDUCAUSE as Uncommon Thinking for the Common Good.

Then it's the opening keynote, Clay Shirky on "IT as a Core Academic Competence"




Degree of connectivity we now have is so large that we can make impossible problems trivial. It changes how we approach our jobs. IT is increasingly the place where we collaborate, research etc.

Used the DARPA network challenge as an example. 10 weather balloons put up in different locations in US. Had 30 days to find them to win $40,000. MIT found them in 9 hours using social media. Read about it here.

There's a new resource we can take advantage of, the cognitive surplus. Made up of two things: the free time and talent of every one In world, and a communications infrastructure which is based on collaboration and groups.
To take advantage of this means doing more sharing, being more open.

For example, Smithsonian Institute took several thousand of their photos and put them on Flikr. Users tagged them, thousands of different free-form tags. Tags that professional catalogers would never have used, eg moustache, steampunk. Made the collection so much more valuable.
Photos were also put into different databases.
Only done by opening it up to see what people will do with it. Don't need to know what will happen to data sets before you open them up. Need to see what users will do. This collection had been sitting in the institute for years, and is now being used.

Experiment in openness in academic mathematical community, the polymath blog. Problems posted, community throw out ideas about how it might be tackled. One such problem solved, submitted to journal, but journal wanted list of authors! But it wasn't clear who authors were, it was so large and so collaborative. So they put up a wiki page and said add your name if you think you were an author! The old system has to change to adapt to new ways.

Music industry in 2000 was selling playback quality. Then MP3 came up. Music industry laughed at it because of quality. Then Napster became fastest selling piece of software in history. They sued them, closed them down. But still lost, didn't take control. They couldn't kill the story that Napster told, that the user is in charge. Now hundreds of legal music distribution channels. Music industry didn't see the changed paradigm.

Student set up Facebook group to study chemistry, college charged him with cheating. They said all collaborative study is cheating. He said if this is, then so are tutorials. Google Chris Avenir, Clay has a couple of YouTube videos talking about this case.

Journal Register Company, newspaper chain. Struggling with transition from paper to digital. CEO said everyone has to publish something digitally in their town. No budget. Can't buy new tools etc. We've all sat in meetings talking about whether something might be a good idea, and it's cost more than just trying it. So, they used YouTube, etc. It hugely improved the level of communication by staff between departments and different papers. This was the big win, collaboration.

Rapgenius web page, page for annotating rap lyrics. Someone noticed that it was just an annotating tool and posted a paper on the Mayflower project. Which was promptly annotated. This morning Obama's acceptance speech was there and being annotated.

Big change is openness. If you want to do something, don't put a multidisciplinary team of 20 together with a budget of 200k and a 6 month timescale. Ask 5 people what they can do in a month, for free.

Great opening talk by Clay. Lots of him on YouTube and TED, he's worth a look.


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Things to do in Denver...

Hello folks - I am still here. In case you're wondering about the long lack of blog posts, there's a number of reasons. I went off for a long holiday - not something we usually do in October but there were a couple of personal reasons for doing it. Got caught up in Hurricane Sandy whilst we were there, but otherwise it was great. I only had a few days back at work then, during which I dealt with 1,200 emails and tried to catch up with everything I've missed. Luckily I had few meetings so was able to do it.

Now I'm in Denver for Educause, the big HE IT conference held in the States every year. It's a great opportunity for networking, meeting suppliers and listening to some great talks. I'll try and blog the sessions as they happen, but a lot depends on what the wireless network is like  - there's about 6,000 delegates and that's a lot of pressure on the network in one room during the keynotes.  There's also a 7 hour time difference, so they'll appear at funny times. The timings of the conference have been changed to accommodate the presidential election, so although I have some meetings tomorrow, you'll see real posts appearing from Wednesday.  We're hoping to find a bar tomorrow night to watch the election results coming in - should be interesting - Colarado is a swing state.