Minecraft, flying solaris boxes and a telling off.

We had some excellent talks this morning. Started with Michael Stephenson from Northumbria University who talked about using cloud services to implement two speed or bimodal IT. He had some nice demos of using Minecraft to prototype services, and even demonstrated a service status page in Minecraft which sent a firework up when there was an outage. He challenged us to think about what 10 year olds will expect from IT when they come to university. Some are already coding in Minecraft. His talk is here.

Next up was Paul Boag who challenged us to think differently about digital transformation. Paul has been to Sheffield to help us set up a digital transformation team, and as usual was lively, fun, and provocative. If you want to see a room full of IT people being told off, watch his talk.
He talked about students as consumers, and how we're all one disgruntled student away from a PR disaster. They all have a voice and will complain loudly about poor service. He chhallenged us to think about whether we're in denial as a sector about how our business model might need to change because of disruptive technologies. A bit like Blockbuster and Kodak were. Too many of us are dabbling in digital transformation and not doing it properly. One organisation which has it right is UCAS who are really embracing it. To be really digital, we need to stop long term planning the Government Digital Service doesn't plan more than 8 months ahead. It was a great talk, and I think his message needs to heard by all senior managers in Universities. Especially his final question - how much do e spent on our digital estate, compared to out physical?
He has a page of resources about digital transformation in HE, which is really useful.

After the break, Simon Moores on cybersecurity - chillingly entitled, "It's not if but when..." You can watch it here. He started by talking about how much stuff runs on old technology. Apparently  planes are just flying solaris boxes. I didn't like flying before.... He talked a lot about risk, and I particularly liked this apparently real question on Quora:

Something that was mentioned a number of times in the conference, is that in terms of cybersecurity, the emphasis is moving away from prevent and protect, to detect and respond. Analysing patterns of behaviour, machine learning, analytics, all important techniques we will have to ue.

Final session this morning was Paul Feldman from JISC talking about the future direction of JISC. JISC provides many services that underpin everything we do - our network Janet, access to publications, and lots of specialist advice and guidance. As the funding model for JISC changes, and we move to an opt-in subscription service, JISC will be working with us to provide the best possible digital services. His talk is here.

Final Round up from Digitfest

One of the last sessions at Digifest was about data. First off was Euan Adie from Altmetric how data we mine from the web can help research.I'd never heard of altmetrics before, but apparently in scholarly and scientific publishing, altmetrics are non-traditional metrics proposed as an alternative to more traditional citation impact metrics. Basically trawling and searching the web to see how much your research has been mentioned, discussed, tweeted or blogged about. This data can be collected automatically, but human intervention is still needed to but it into context. , but it still needs a human to put it into context - bad papers can get mentioned a lot!

Next was Tony Hey, previously from the eScience initiative talking about data intensive science.
A thousand years ago science was mainly experimental, describing natural phenomena. In the last few hundred years science was theoretical postulating things like Newton's Laws. In the last few daces we have seen the rise of computational science with the simulation of complex phenomena. But today science is data intensive. Scientists are overwhelmed with datasets from multiple sources - generated by instruments, simulations or sensor networks. New skills are needed for analysis and data mining, data visualisation an exploration, and for communication and dissemination.
Genomics and personalised medicine is a huge  growth area, producing vast amounts of data. A recent experiment by the welcome trust looking at genetic markers would have taken 1,000 compute years to complete using a state of the art machine learning algorithm. Using 27,000 compute cores in the cloud, the analysis took 13 days. Just to demonstrate we need new ways of working.

One other highlight from Digifest was a demonstration of  Mi.Mu  gloves. These are gloves designed to create music using complex motion tracking and algorithms linked to  gesture detection and mapping software.

Used by Imogen Heap originally, they are fantastic. There's a great TED talk of Imogen explaining about their origin and how they work here:



There was a great musician demonstrating them at the evening dinner, but I'm afraid I made a complete cock up in recording a video if her, and just got a video of the table instead!  Just watch a bit of the TED talk above to see how amazing they are.

Final thought from Digifest is about spaces. They manage to take a very ordinary exhibition space and create some great spaces for listening to and learning.

Resources for electronic management of assessment

In a session on electronic management of assessment (EMA) this morning, a couple of useful JISC resources were announced. Transforming assessment and feedback with technology provides ideas and resources to enhance the assessment and feedback lifecycle.

The other, Electronic management of assessment in Higher Education: processes and systems, is a guide to to help universities improve business processes and choose information systems to sport assessment and feedback.

The improvement and standardisation of processes was something that came out as a major issue in this talk, and it was often only when an HEI tried to implement EMA that the different processes in departments were uncovered.

Another favourite soundbite from this session "We still assess students by traditional methods including handwriting an essay or an exam. Something they will probably never have to do again in their lives."

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Let's get connected

Monday spent most of the afternoon interviewing for an exciting new post - Head of Research IT. Can't say much at the moment of course, but wath this space. hope to announce something soon.

Yesterday I was in London. In the afternoon talking to JISCcom, the commercial arm of JISC. I was with the CIO of Sheffield city Council, and we are working together, along with other public sector bodies across the city, to improve connectivity, in order to improve the delivery of services. I have an interest in getting our wireless network, Eduroam, rolled out across the City, and the City would like to have their network out there, as well as free connectivity for the people of Sheffield. Once the connectivity is in place, we can look at how we can use it to drive improvements in the services we all offer. Exciting times, and it's great to work across the boundaries of different organisations on a City wide project.

After killing time in London for an hour ( I saw a Lego train in Covent Garden - how cool is that), I was off to the Chemistry Club - a networking event for CIOs from across many different sectors. Great to catch up with colleagues from the Government Digital Service, Tesco, the BBC and many others. Only downside was I had to travel back on a late train, to Doncaster - luckily I got a lift back from there. Hanging around on Donnie station for 30 minutes at 2330 waiting for a connection didn't fill me with joy...

Prioritising projects and coffee ordering

Having met the new Chief Executive of JISC at RUGIT the other day, yesterday I was pleased to welcome him to Sheffield. We had a really good discussion with our CFO about the future of JISC, especially around funding arrangements, and then I chatted with him about our plans and strateies and the issues we were facing. Of course, I took the opportunity to show him round our excellent learning spaces - The Information Commons and The Diamond. I think he was impressed ;-)  As well he should be - they are some of the best technology enhanced learning spaces in the UK, of course, I might be biased, but I'm sure I'm right. 

Later in the afternoon we had a meeting of our Service Strategy Board to look at how we prioritise projects. Considering a number of criteria including alignment to strategic goals and impact, we played an interesting game of "Play Your Cards Right", for those old enough to remember it. Having all the projects written on cards, we placed one in the middle of the table, then ordered the others either higher or lower. We got to an agreed list in the end. But of course, that doesn't necessarily mean thats' the order we will do them in, as so many other things impact on that. The resources needed, deadlines, availabilty of resources - all come into play.

Finally this week we had a very productive meeting with the Students Union about how we might work closer with them on a number of digital projects. My dream is to be able to order a coffee from Coffee Revolution from my desk, walk over to the SU, find a table and sit down and have it delivered to me. Apparently we're not that far off :-)

UCiSA, RUGIT, JISC and JANET (acronyms galore)

Back from Barcelona, and straight off to to more exotic places - Manchester and London!  Manchester was another site visit for the UCISA conference to be held there next March. This time we were looking at how we might use some of the technology we have available, including disply screens for our posters, which aren't going to be posters at all but videos, and a rather exciting exhibit looking at wht theuniveriyty of the future moght look like.

London was a RUGIT (Russell Group IT Directors) meeting. We were very fortunate to have members of JISC with us including the new Chief Executive. We had a very good discussion of what JISC is about, and how we benefit from it. JISC has three main functions - to provide a digital infrastructure, primarily through JANET, our network; to broker sector wide deals, mainly for electronic journals; and to provide expert advice and practical assistance. They're funded mainly from the funding councils and Universities, and provide a great deal of value to the sector - they calculate about £140m per annum. That's a lot of money! This mainly comes from the provision of the network, the work they do on cybersecurity and protecting us from attacks, and the deals they are able to do for us. We had a very interesting and frank discussion with them about what the furure holds, especially as their funding decrease and our current subscription ceases to become mandatory and we can choose whether we pay it or not. Personally I think it is worth it for the provision of JANET alone, despite the problems we've had over the last year. It is still the best network around!

Other things discussed at RUGIT included our response to the PREVENT guidelines, how and why, we're going about Student Attendance monitoring, and Information Security training. 

Learning Analytics, a shared service

Interesting session on Learning Analytics from Phil Richard, Chief Innovation Officer at  JISC

Learning analytics is the application of big data techniques such as machine based learning and data mining to help learners and institutions meet their goals. 

Everytime a learner touches something digital, they leave a digital fingerprint. By looking at changes in these, can improve retention, achievement, employability, and help deliver personalised learning

Learning analytics has been requested as a new national shared service by the sector.

This is the proposed architecture. Shared multi tenanted data warehouse at the centre. 

Will be a staff dashboard, and also will present the data back to students through an app.

JISC have been out to tender and filled all slots with commercial partners except student consent service. Going to build that themselves.

The data model is consistent with the HEDIP landscape and HESA data service.

Commercial partners are Unicom, Marist, Blackboard, Tribal, Therapy, Box and HT2. Half are open source.

Staff dashboard will be delivered through Tribal insight. Will show how a student digital fingerprint changes. Eg if a student stops attending lectures, borrowing books, but spending more on thier cashless card at midnight in the bar it might trigger an alarm for some sort of human intervention. Should help with retention, student well being.

Will be an app which feeds back data to the students so for example they can set targets. Can even share targets for a bit of competition.

Are some ethical questions. JISC have produced a code of practice to help with issues such as informed consent.

Also is a guide produced by NUS

Working with universities to build the system which they hope will be running before Christmas

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Summer of Student Innovation is here again

The JISC Summer of Student Innovation is with us again. If you're a student with a good idea to improve student life through digital technology, or know of one, and want to win £5000 to help develop it, then submit it here. 

This year's there's other categories as well -

Supporting technology start-ups
Learner ideas in Further Education
Apprentice-led ideas

Looking forward to judging - over the past couple of years we've had some great projects - you can read about some of them here.

Gadgets

Digifest is an interesting concept - designed to be more like a festival than a conference, there are some nice touches. There were a group of students using iPads to paint images of what was going on. This one's a picture of my favourite little robot - Nao.

Nao is so cute, and quite easy to programme. Well, it looked easy when someone else was doing it.

Plenary sessions are held in the main auditorium, but breakout sessions are held in "pods" which are part of the main exhibition and social area

 

As well as Nao, there are some neat gadgets here - an augmented reality dummy for training medical and nursing staff. Full of electronics, so that you can even inject it with drugs and it will react accordingly, with augmented reality video on an iPad


A 3D printing pen which you can use to draw 3D models


And my favourite  - a 3D display of outstanding quality which you control with a virtual pointer. this is John looking a 3D fully animated heart which you can turn, rotate, expose bits. I could have played with it all day!


 And finally, that little robot can dance....




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Digifest kicks off, MOOCs and the future of Universities

So, we're at Digifest at the ICC in Birmingham. Bit of a festival theme... .




Posts will probably in note form. Haven't got time to put them into English
It kicks off with a keynote from the CEO from Futurelearn. Launched in 2012, the platform on which 40 Universities in the UK offer their MOOCS.

Worked in BBC radio, and with the onset of the Internet, talk was of the death of the radio, all music would be on demand. BBC rose to the challenge, and, launched 5 new digital radio services, put radio everywhere, and made it available on demand. Then moved to TV and headed up digital services. More hype. Assumption that live TV watching, channels and schedules would be wiped away by services like Youtube. Again, BBC didn't sit back and let it happen. IPlayer launched, on demand, on a variety of devices.

Now in HE, debating whether there's a future for Universities as we know them in this digital world. MOOCs obvious subject of discussion, but it's not about MOOCs, it's about the Internet. There is a bewildering range of opportunities facing HE. What do you prioritise? No right answer, just informed bewilderment. :-)

A number of different things to think about:

Accessibility
Opportunity to open up access to much wider range of audiences, on a wider range of devices, globally. Open up the huge range of expertise and knowledge locked up within its walls to everyone.
Futurelearn platform built from scratch, available on any device. Simple design and interface.
The ability to reach globally will change the mission of the University.
Good map of world showing the reach of a course run by Southampton University about the spread of the Ebola virus and its impact. Impact of the course already profound. Some of highest participation rate. Excellent feedback from medical staff in affected areas, to educate locals.
Just at the beginning of what's possible in opening up access to our knowledge.

Discovery.
Over 1m registered on Futurelearn in just over a year. 60% from overseas. Have overseas partners, from Korea, China, Europe.
Opportunity to recruit new students. Free, online courses can be an important recruiting ground, especially for international students. Can register interest in paid courses.
Need to make content open, shareable, discoverable on the web. Some of their step pages are now open to make them searchable by Google. Increase the digital footprint beyond the course. Some excellent content on courses, at the moment, is hidden.

Social learning
The ability to interact with content and engage with other participants is an important part of platform. All happens alongside the content they are consuming, enabling rich discussion. All participants have personalised profile page, and social networks can be built up.
Biggest course is Exploring English Language and Culture run by British Council, over 100,000 people participated. Lot of social interaction.

Enhancement
Enhancing and improving the teaching experience using digital technologies is essential if universities are going to keep pace with the increasing expectations of their learners. Have to work hard to make sure these courses are not just a load of videos on the web. Need good storytellers.
Also, put the learner first
Simple, delightful flexible user interface
Not just for MOOCs, but for on campus learning as well. Can be used for blended learning

Extension
Of the 1m signed up, more women than men, broad age range, and broad socioeconomic backgrounds. Enables universities to reach groups they would not normally reach. Courses for school leavers, professional learners, CPD, personal development. Wide range of motivations.
Futurelearn owned by OU. Free, but piloting different business models. Are producing a statement of participation, if complete most of the course, costs £29. Big uptake.
Courses are free, but are exploring other options for revenue generation.

Creation
Audience no longer a passive recipient of content. Are creators in their own right. Need to facilitate and enable that. Eg Help people create and develop games. Share photography on astronomy courses. Develop and share coding skills.

This is not the end of Universities, but an amazing opportunity for them to reinvent themselves in society.

Good start to the conference. Will be interested to see where MOOCs go....

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Planning and Digifest

The end of last week was a bit of a blur. I had a lot of meetings, and we had to get out planning statement in on Friday. This is the document which sets out what we're going to do next year, and what resources we need to deliver it. A lot in it about our proposed new Research IT Support service, and also many developments in Digital Learning. I'll distill everything down tothe key points sometime this week and post up a summary.

Also met with two more of our faculties for our Strategic Liaison meetings - both went very well.

Now I'm in Birmingham for Digifest - JISCs Digital festival. Last year it was excellent, so I'm looking forward to it.  All of the keynotes and many of the sessions are streamed for free on line - you can register to see them here.

Keep calm and call control...

Quick wrap up of things I've been doing this week.  As well as meeting Faculties, I've chaired a meeting of our Business Continuity Operations Group where we looked at a number things including how we respond to student occupations of our buildings, what emergency procedures the city has in place which might affect us, and a review of our major incident plan. We have a really good set of web pages about what to do in an incident, which everyone should be familiar with, and a neat little poster:

I've also taken part in a forum of Heads of Academic Departments and Director of Professional Services about how we should interact both with the University executive Board 9UEB), and with each other. Some very interesting discussions, and a general view that the current UEB/HoDS forum doesn't work well and can be improved. A set of recommendations will follow....

Finally, this morning I had a conference call with other members of the Steering Group for one of the JISC Co-Design projects which is looking improving the digital skills of staff in HE.   It's title is Building capability for new digital leadership, pedagogy and efficiency, and you can read more about it here. The project intends to provide clear guidance over what digital skills are required, and equip leaders and staff with the tools and resources they need to improve digital capability at a local or institutional level. This will cover all areas of the University - technology enhanced learning, Administrative processes, and research.

RUGIT awayday continued, JISC, HEFCE and N8

We started this morning with an update from JISC. Tim Kidd outlined some of the things JISC Technologies have been doing, including:
Agreeing terms of contracts with Microsoft and Google for the sector
Putting in place a dynamic framework for file synch and share.
Establishing an archive to tape framework
Amazon web services framework launched in October
Consolidating the Financial XRay which looks at the total cost of IT
About to look at what the sector wants them to do with cloud frameworks
The shared tier 3 joint data centre in Slough with an 800 rack and requirement gathering started for second data centre in North of

They are also just starting Eduroam service monitoring which shows compliance with Eduroam technical specification and provides real time feedback to sys admins. Prof of concept is complete and the "box" will soon ship to 300+ sites.

Also touched on Security, and they are enhancing the security monitoring of the network so that they can identify, analyse and classify events in near real time. They are also looking to protect customers from a wider range of DDOS attacks.

We also got an update about what the R and D section is doing, including some of the student projects from the summer of student innovation which I've written about before.

Something I'm interested in is their Learning Analytics project which aims to develop a dashboard and app so that staff can track students learning progress and get warnings when students are at risk of dropping out so that interventions can be planned. Some interesting ethical issues need to be addressed, for example when university data is combined with postcode data.

After that we got an update on the N8 HPC project which we are involved in, and you can read about that here.

Final session was from David Sweeney, Director (Research, Education and Knowledge Exchange) at HEFCE. As ever, an entertaining and informative talk, looking at the funding landscape particularly in relation to research. His main point was that UK Higher Education is world leading and will continue to be so. We should consider our cups to be half full rather than half empty, there's been so much change in last 20 years that we will surmount anything. It will be tough but we will win.
Higher education is vital for economic growth, and research is central to this. He touched on the REF, and particularly the impact measurements. I hadn't realised that all of the case studies are on line on the REF web site, and they make very interesting reading. The conclusion was that we should make strategic decisions about research investments, partner with big players and stop doing things that aren't productive.


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RUGIT awayday part 1

In York at the moment for our annual RUGIT ( Russell Group IT Directors) two day meeting.

Started with an update about the JISC Technology Consultative Forum. This forum is part of JISC's engagement strategy, and we are represented on it. One of the things we will be looking at is the services JISC offers, are they the ones we need and want, and what value do we get from them. The forum will give views, advice and suggestions, and also provide a means to discuss a strategic ambition about what could be achieved for HEIs and colleges by acting together for the common good. It's met once so far, and one of the main outcomes was to look into the provision of cloud services across the sector. Can JISC help broker cloud services for us for example. Priory topics for the next forum will be the research life cycle, teaching, learning and e-assessment, cloud services, remote management of services and information security.

We also had an update from UCISA on recent activities. We are in the final stages of putting together an Information Security Management toolkit targeted mainly at people responsible for implementing security management policies and procedures. That should be released soon. Social media and learning spaces toolkits are also in production. There's a few best practice guides which have just come out, including one on Effective Risk Management. And of course I got to give a plug for the UCISA conference in March, the programme of which is now complete, and looking good, though I say it myself :-)



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Digital Student

One of the JISC projects to come out of the codesign process is Digital Student, which is exploring students expectations and experiences in using technology, and they have recently published almost 50 exemplars of effective practice in support of students’ digital experiences. You can see them here, and I'm pleased to see that Sheffield is represented by All About Linguistics. There's some really good ones, and a real variety of case studies - a good set of resources for anyone interested in improving the students digital experience. They are categorised under the following headings:

    •    Prepare and support students to study successfully with digital technologies
    •    Deliver a relevant digital curriculum
    •    Ensure an inclusive student experience, using technology to overcome disadvantage
    •    Provide a robust, flexible digital environment
    •    Develop coherent policies for ‘Bring Your Own’
    •    Engage students in dialogue about their digital experience and empower them to make changes
    •    Take a strategic, whole-institution approach to the digital student experience

JISC Stakeholder Forum

Today I've been at the JISC Stakeholder Forum meeting in London. A range of people present including PVCs, CIOs, Librarians, and from across the sector, including FE as well as HE. The meeting was for JISC to tell us what they've been doing, as well as to get feedback from us on the direction we'd like them to take. They've undergone quite a transition over the last couple of years, and I think are now beginning to gel into a single organisation serving the sector. Lots of talk about engagement, and how they are going to work with us to deliver services.

We had a look at some of the last years achievements. Including the shared London data centre, a tier 3 data centre based in Slough with a number of anchor tenants already agreed. Hugely successful development, saving the sector about £20m over 5 years.

We also looked at the Summer of Student innovation and some of the successful projects that have come out of that. JISC have a new R and D web page which lists all of their projects which makes interesting reading.

We had a good round table discussion about how we can work together and how we can get the best value out of JISC services. Knowing what the services are, how much they cost and much they save us was probably the most important point to come out of the discussions.

This video looking back over the past year is worth a look and has some interesting figures in it




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Summer of Student Innovation Showcase

Today I'm at the Summer of Student Innovation Showcase at Reading University. This was funded as part of the JISC codesign programme, and it's great to see so many student projects which have been developed as part of it. It's the second year it's run - students suggest projects to improve student life  and JISC fund them to get them into an early stage of development. 18 student teams are presenting what they've developed over the summer. Amazing how much has been done in a short time.  Each project had a stand with a demo, and gave a 5 minute short presentation. Some of the projects are listed below, and I've done some brief notes, and included a link where there is one. They are definitely worth a look, and it is quite illuminating to see what students think is important to them. Most have a prototype, and have done a pilot, and are are looking to extend the pilot to other Universities.

Unitu
20,000 students made a complaint about their university in 2012. Student expectations are very high, and student satisfaction is critical. Student feedback is key, so this is a way of collecting feedback from students. Unitu is an app which facilitates a collaborative feedback process by creating communities of course reps and staff where issues can be raised and resolved. Being piloted in two Universities already.

Lingoflow
Learning and retaining foreign vocabulary can be difficult. This is an app for teachers and students providing tailored support for commonly taught languages, with a vocabulary library and  tests for students and analytics for staff.

Open Access Button
A suite of  apps to help researchers, students and the public get access to scientific and scholarly open access research. There's also functionality  for publishing your own research in an open access way.

Peermedics
This is a peer to peer teaching initiative enabling medical students to deliver regular structured teaching to younger students. Medical students already help each other and there is currently lots of information from students, on Facebook, Dropbox etc, but it is hard to find. This brings it together. Being piloted at Universty of Liverpool and Limerick.
I was really impressed with this - there's some good content there, and I can see its application to other subject areas.

Proofswap
An app for getting someone to proofread work before its handed in. Based on the premise that it is often difficult to spot your own mistakes and it's expensive to employ a proofreader. This development is an online platform so students can swop their work and proof read others for free.  It also aims to improve reading and writing skills as will be building in tips on grammar and spelling.
Impressed with this one as well - they've given a lot of thought to how they might handle plagiarism etc.

Evaloop
Fully functional app which actively solicits feedback from students after every lecture or seminar and feeds it back to teachers. Being piloted at LSE.

StartWrite
An app designed to help students plan and deliver assigments etc on time - a sort of academic to do list. It helps student meet deadlines. Has a lot of tips built in on referencing etc. Gamification is built in so you can see how far along the timeline you've progressing.
I can see the potential for this to all students. but particularly those who have difficulty organising themselves. 

MyCQs
Students are better connected then ever before, not only to each other but to information and resources.
This is an app which allows students to create and share multiple choice tests. To create a test means you have to understand it. A dashboard is being created to allow insitutions to look at what the students are doing.

eusay
A platform for students to submit ideas, discuss them, and have them turned into action by their student union. Ideas can be voted on and have comments on them.
Launched in University of Edinburgh Student Union, and they have built it into their portal so their is single sign on to it.
Free and open source.
I was very interested in this. It looks very much like Ideascale but simpler, and it is free :-)


Homicidium
A murder mystery game as part of student induction. Takes students to places they need to know about, meet people they need to know. Uses a lot of technology including geoloaction maps, virtual reality (aurasma).
This was great, if slightly wacky. Not sure how they would roll it out further as it requires a lot of input form them, but very cool!

Vet-revise
A flashcard app for vet students. Lot of content to learn in vet studies they study more species than medical students! Does 3 things. Spaced repetition, a algorithm which schedules a card just before you forget it. Database of 80,000 cards - huge database of vet content. Also uses collaboration - can work with other students.
Saw a demo of this and very impressed, especially with the algorithm which works out when to repeat a card based on when you are going to forget the info.

VideoCVs
Project to help students sell themselves. Students undersell themselves through using traditional paper based CVs. Also good way of making better contact with employer at application stage. Biggest problem not technology, but most people don't know what their most sellable skills and assets are. So, as well as making the videos, they run workshops to help students to work out what they should be emphasising.  They've run a pilot scheme at Loughborough University and want to expand. Really good project.

Host and Dine

An app to put students in contact with each other, to cook for and with each other. Encourages
students living in halls to learn, share and cook meals together. For example, you want to cook a Sunday roast. Not practical on your own. So you post it as an event. Others can join, and come over and cook together. Also good for sharing cooking for different cultures. Have run a pilot, and now want to extend it. Also getting in touch with private companies such as Unite.
I though this was great - the pilot has apparently been ery successful.

Unisaver
 Online money saving community which calculates the cheapest prices possible for products and tells you where to get them. Also a crowd sourcing site for people to share information about offers etc.
Developed by a student who was having trouble making ends meet. 


Some of last year's funded projects were also there:

 Uniboard
An online noticeboard for students to search, buy and sell at their local university. 
Phase 1 developed and rolled out at Brunel University.
Now looking to roll out phase 2.


Call for Particpants 
This offers tools to researchers to connect them with volunteers to take part in research projects and then for a university to measure public engagement with research


So, a great day, some great projects. Really enjoyed talking to the students.

Enterprise, Mobility and Digital literacy

Last night I was honoured to be invited to the Enterprise, Innovation and Impact awards in Firth Hall. The hall looked lovely as usual, and it's nice to see the window at the front of the hall which until recently was bricked up. The awards recognise the enterprising nature of many of our students, and the partnerships we have established with local businesses. There were some great projects, including The Bear Sock company promoting socks made from bamboo, the sales of which go to  support bear welfare, We Love Life, a community platform which helps people improve the way they manage diabetes and Panela, a company extracting raw cane sugar without using additives. An excellent evening, and so good to see what our students can do. Lots more info on the Enterprise web site.

Today we had the first meeting of our SAP Mobility project bard. We're about to start implementing a range of mobile apps which give access to functionality from our finance and HR systems - viewing payslips, booking and approving leave, approving purchase requests etc. All things people want to do on any device, and fitting with our mobile strategy. Using Agile techniques, we'll be rolling apps out as and when they're ready, and consulting about priorities.

Finally this afternoon I met with a JISC colleague to talk about another JISC project I'm involved in - Building Capability for Digital Leadership, Pedagogy and Efficiency.  This is about digital literacy skills for staff in all areas.All staff need these skills to get the most out of systems and services we provide, to make the best use of teaching technologies, and to improve efficiency in our processes.  We all agree this is a real need, but how we will address and solve it is another matter. Answers on the back of a postcard please!

From Cradle to Grave

Yesterday I was at a JISC workshop looking at prioritising strands for one of the co-design projects, From Prospect to Alumnus, or From Cradle to Grave as it quickly became renamed.

Basically this project is looking at how we might provide a more joined up experience for students in their interactions with different bits of the university. Currently this tends to be disjointed, not coordinated and must be confusing for students. One of the things we looked at was the different "touch points" a student has with different parts of the University. These are many and varied, from initial enquires about open days and application, through registration, their academic department, tutors, the IT Helpdesk, libraries, accommodation helpdesks, to graduation, careers and alumni. Data is collected at many of these touch points, but it isn't collected in similar ways, and is often not shared across different agencies. We compared this with some good examples in the private sector.

We also looked at sharing of information across institutions, which will become more important as mobility between institutions increases. At the moment, most of us focus on retention.

We discussed the many cultural and process barriers to sharing information, which are often more important then the technical.

We agreed that the learner needed to be put at the heart of this journey, not the institution and not the systems.

We ended with a list of priorities for further development, including customer relationship management, vendor management, data structures and integration and employability. All of these will have action plans put against them which I'll share as soon as they are published. All very timely for our own student system review.

Today I've been meeting with senior executives from Computing magazine, discussing with them our current issues and what we would like to see them cover in future publications and events. A very mixed set of attendees from commercial private and not for profit sectors so a variety of views expressed!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Ten great things and a murder mystery

Busy campus today as its an open day. As usual we have a stand telling students what to expect when they get here, and what they might need to know about IT facilities.

Building on our success as being number one for student experience this year, we've devised a new set of web pages and a small booklet with the Ten Great Things in IT here in Sheffield.

Also today, the Student Summer of Innovation awards were announced - I blogged last week about the selection process, and now can tell you about the 20 projects that will be funded. You can see a complete list here and read about them in detail. There's some really good ones. To give you an idea of the diversity of them they include:

• An app to encourage female students to break gender stereotypes

• A flashcard revision system for veterinary students

• The Duct Tape University - an Open Education Resource discovery and publishing tool for learning communities

• Homicidium  - a nomadic campus game which aims to introduce students to elements of their modules in a day long murder hunt. 

Will be really exciting watching them all develop over the summer.