Graduation Round Up complete with Google Glass

Sorry for interval to blogging - been on my hols to Turkey for a couple of weeks. A bit earlier than we normally go, and as such I missed Graduation Week for the first time in many years. Very disappointed as I always love it - its the culmination of the year, and always brings it back home to me what our jobs are all about.

As usual, we tried to make it as good a day as possible for our students and family and friends, and our creative media team did a great job again. As well as live streaming of the ceremonies, and recording them on USB sticks and DVDs ready soon after the ceremony, we had out famous handshake videos - those few seconds as the graduand walks across the stage that everyone is really interested in. My favourite one was of Alan - famous for replying to the whole list about not having any robes, and starting the hashtag #prayforalan. He got his robes, and graduated to a huge cheer:

 A great moment!

We also had the gigipixel photos available again thanks to our friend Ed from Business Tours UK which are taggable on Facebook.  A new development this year was The University of Sheffield Yearbook, a set of photos taken during the week of students, staff and family and friends, together with their stories - definitely worth a look, there's some lovely stories.

And finally, our Corporate Affairs department showed what you can do with Google Glass - fantastic film:

User Group and Digital Trust

This morning was our User Group - representatives from across the University who we use to gather feedback about existing services, and act as a sounding board for new ones. We covered a number of things - our objectives for next year, the services we're planning to run in The Diamond, and the very imminent demise of Windows XP. Like a number of places, we've still got some machines running it, but as of 1 September we will be disconnecting them from our wired and wireless networks, so that should flush them out!

We had a presentation about our Staff Creative Media Suite, which we set up following the success of our student facilities, and is available for all staff to creative multimedia projects.  Very popular for creating audio and video for MOOCs, iTunesU, and other digital teaching material.

We also talked to them about security - a very hot topic at the moment. There's a lot of media coverage about various security issues, which is leading to an increased awareness. Other things covered was  the project to review our student system, and the work of our comms team, presented as an entertaining Pecha Kucha.

Later in the day I was at PSE (Professional Service Executive), where I was presenting. We had received a briefing note aimed at Audit Committes called "Building Digital Trust". This had been circulated to senior managers, and I'd been asked to comment on the issues and risks raised, and what measures we were taking. The note is easy to read, and outlines the changing environment for IT including the usual suspects - consumerisation, mobile, social media, analytics, connectivity, cloud and the pace of change. It then lists ten topics which have associated risks, and suggests how Universities should be managing those risks. I picked a number out, and outlined our response. These included:
Student expectations, Cybersecurity, Consumerisation, Cloud, New Educational Delivery Models,  and I added two of my own, Digital Literacy and Digital Identities. One of the points I was trying to get over, was that many of these risks nee to be seen not as IT risks, managed by technology, but as University level risks and concerned as much with people and processes as technology.  We will be starting up some University level governance around Information Security and Identity Management soon, so I hope it worked.

The falcons are back

This week we've had a liaison meeting with our colleagues from the Library. Talked about a range of issues including Digital Preservation and identity management, as well as the future of our Virtual Learning Environment. That last one is an interesting question - will large, fairly monolithic software packages continue to dominate the VLE space, or will a variety of solutions exist, loosely connected into an environment for students to access learning materials? We already know that Google apps and YouTube are being used, and there's a number of other services emerging. Will be interesting to see what happens.

I also chaired a Business Continuity Operations Group - this is a group which looks at BC for the whole University and has representation from Professional Services and Faculties. We have a big work programme which we're gradually working through, and a pilot of Business Impact Assessments in departments is coming to a close, and will shortly be rolled out across the University. This will help departments with reviewing their BC plans, and also when updating their risk registers. Many of the actions in our work programme are the result of either reviews of real incidents (a recent fire is a good case in point), or simulated incidents. We hold these at a University level, and also for individual departments or groups of departments. I suspect its getting close to us having an IT simulated one, although we seem to get enough real ones to keep us on our toes. A rather devious ransomware attack is keeping some of us busy at the moment.....

And some good news - we're about to launch our new Creative Media Room for staff. It compliments the great facilities we have already for students, and everyone's welcome to drop in and see it next Friday between 1200 and 1400.

And finally, as its Friday - a picture of one of our Peregrine Falcons,  who've returned to the nesting platform.  Not sure if it's George or Mildred. You can keep a lookout for them here, and follow them on twitter (@peregrines2014), where a motion sensor on the camera should send you a tweet when they land.

Graduation

One of my favourite University weeks this week - Graduation  - it ties with Freshers Week. This week we see our successful graduates celebrate and leave us, and in freshers week we see another group of eager students arrive. The sun is shining, and the University looks wonderful - the new plaza outside of the Octagon Centre is almost finished and looking good

 we have a champagne bar in the Quad

and a jazz band to welcome the students as they emerge from the ceremonies

 

And of course we're doing our bit to make sure the students can remember the day. Our creative media and teaching technologies teams are over there live streaming the ceremonies - you can watch the here - as well as recording them for students to take home on a DVD or USB stick. Both of these are produced on site and we have them ready an hour after the ceremony has finished. We've got our friend Ed from Re:Axive back to take the Facebook taggable gigapixel photos, and for students who don't want the full 1hour recording of the ceremony, they can get their 2 minutes of fame as we release their handshake videos on Facebook which they can then share with their friends and family.

Excellent work from the team as always, and if you wondered what it looks like while they're recording/streaming/editing, here's a pic, courtesy of Chris Clow.

Money...

As well as listening to and blogging about presentations at UCISA, I've also been involved in presenting two.

Yesterday afternoon as part of the University Showcase session Chris Clow and I presented on our Creative Media facilities.
We showed the video which you can see on the web site, and talked through why we'd set up the facility:
- students were clearly producing media
- facilities for them to do so were split over a number of departments and not coordinated
- there was no facility for students to collaborate on projects.

We then showed the facilities on offer, and talked through some of the technical aspects of setting up the shared, temporary accounts which students use. We hoped to show some examples of projects, but unfortunately I'd forgotten to connect my laptop to the wireless network! It seemed to go well, and everyone was impressed with the facilities which we offer to students on a 24/7 basis. So, thanks to Chris and the team.

This morning I was on the main stage with our Chief Financial Officer, in conversation! Asked him the obvious questions, why are you an accountant, what is the point of accountants, and what do you as CFO want from a CIO? Of course he asked me the same question back, what did I want from him? I got a round of applause for asking for procurement officers who understood IT procurement ( no reflection of Sheffield's procurement team who are of course excellent!) It was a lively conversation, streamed, and will be on line soon if anyone is interested in watching it. Watch for the Pink Floyd theme!

EDIT:  The presentation is available now here. And sorry, you will need to install Silverlight.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Priorities and Bitesize

A rare morning - no meetings! was able to catch up on lots of reading, and finalise some information for a planning meeting with other Directors of Services and our Faculty colleagues. As a starting point for discussion, we've been asked to come up with our top five priorities, our top five business as usual activities, and our top five things to change. So, in no particular order, here is our first draft:

Priorities for 2013/14



1  Wireless Everywhere

2  Delivery of IT Support
3  Planning the space in the New Engineering Building

4  Sustainability
     - Green: print, carbon, cooling
     - Services: simplification and standardisation
5  Mobile
   - Service delivery

Top 5 Business as usual activities

1  Improve student related processes including review of student system
2  Review of teaching technologies and support including lecture capture
3  Future proofing of core infrastructure
4  Continuous process improvement  - Process Improvement Unit and facilitation of departmental networks
5  Support for research

Top 5 Things to change

1 How we deliver research infrastructure
2 The way we use teaching space
3 Access to systems and services ( including new portal and identity management)
4 How we collaborate (post-uspace, google apps, others, skills)
5 Transparency of project prioritisation


This will now be shared and discussed with colleagues in CiCS and other departments before our final plans are submitted to the University in March.


The other thing a morning free of meetings allowed me to catch up on, was the first of our "bitesize" sessions we're delivering to students in the Information Commons. It was held yesterday and was about creating videos - recorded so that anyone who missed it can watch it on the IC Blog. I watched it and learned a lot! More are planned  -  keep your eye on the IC blog for details.

Creative Media at Degree Ceremonies

Today and tomorrow are our Higher Degree Ceremonies. The sun is shining, but there is a lot of frost on the ground which won't do the newly planted borders round the Octagon much good :-)

This year  CiCS have taken on all aspects of recording and streaming the ceremonies. We are streaming them for the first time in HD, and had about 150 people viewing at this morning's ceremony. You can watch the stream during the ceremonies here.

After the ceremony the video will be available both as a DVD and on a USB stick, which we are duplicating immediately after the event so they will be ready for the students and families to take away with them. Spent some time in the projection box this morning which was quite exciting

We have three cameras recording things which are mixed during the event. Lots of CiCS staff involved, as well as the Student Union, and they're all doing a great job. And they are all looking so smart....

As well as the whole video, students will be able to purchase a short clip of their "handshake" which they can tag and put on Facebook here.



As well as the DVDs, the USB sticks and the handshake videos, we've also got our fantastic range of Varsity Gifts on sale from our Design and Print Service:

And, if that wasn't enough, we've engaged Edward from Reaxive to take high definition gigapixel pictures of each ceremony which students and families can tag on Facebook. This year's will be available here after each ceremony, but you can look at last year's summer ones here to see how good they are. Edward's pictures are much better than this one I quickly snapped of him working on the picture of this morning's ceremony.

So, a great team effort and some really innovative stuff to make sure the students and their families have a good experience on the day, and have something to take away to remind them of it.

Creative Media Suite

I wrote yesterday about the impact of technology on learning and teaching, and one of the things we are encouraging is the creation of media by students.  In the Information Commons we have a Creative Media Suite which consists of a production room and an edit suite.

in the production room students can create media - it's got equipment in for students to produce many kinds of multimedia projects including video editing, podcasts, screencasting, presentation recording and motion graphics creation. It contains both an iMac and a PC, as well as recording equipment and is bookable, and our staff are on hand to help and advise students. We also loan out equipment to students including digital video camcorders and audio/video recorders - these can be loaned to students for up to 7 days at a time.

The newest of our facilities is the edit suite, which has been open for about 5 months now, and is very popular with staff and students. It contains 5 managed iMacs and you can create media work directly over a network using 100 specially created accounts with access to 20GB of storage. This means we don't have to give individual students access to large amounts of filestore, but more importanly, allows students to work collaboratively on group projects through a joint account.

The suite is open 24/7 so students can work when they want to, and we hope to be able to open the production room 24/7 in the near future.  Having just iMacs in there isn't a problem, and we get a lot of feedback saying how easy they are to use and produce media.  There's lots of info about the facilities, including video of how to use them here.  Our staff are available to help, support and advise, and have worked closely with academic staff and students on a number of projects, including Storying Sheffield. This is a community project based in the School of English where students and people from the city  are working and studying together to produce, record, and collect stories,  of the lives of Sheffield people, and the `life´ of Sheffield using a variety of media. A recent workshop made extenisve use of the suite, and thanks to Andy Brown for these photographs.

We expect demand for this sort of facility to increase, and we're intending to put more "media pods" in the IC space we're designing in the new engineering building.