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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Use of digital in learning and teaching

Opening session had 4 speakers talking about different aspects of use of digital technology in learning and teaching.

Opening speaker, Principal of Loughborough college, started with something that resonated with me, as she reminisced about what it was like to be a student in the 70s. No mobile phone, no internet, no google, no PC, no social media. Our only tools were a biro and a single landline for the whole hall.
Now, people are predicting that Within a decade 60% of retail jobs could be done by robots. And many more. 11m people put out of work by machines? Are we moving towards an egg timer economy, only low paid and high paid jobs existing.? But this intelligence is only artificial, will never replace the power of the human brain. So, we must embrace digital and new technologies. We need diverse, agile and on demand approaches to learning. Creative pedagogies, self organised learning, flipped, playful learning, learning from peers - vision for teaching and learning for FE and HE

Next up was the professor of digital learning at Wolverhampton talking about mobile learning. Is it dead? When the phrase mobile learning was coined, about 10 years ago, there were phones, limited smart phones, limited 3G coverage, and no tablets. Mobile learning was e-learning's dream come true. It offered the potential for completely personalised learning to be truly anytime, anywhere. Instead, we've ended up with mobile access to virtual learning environments that are being used as repositories. So, in practice, students reading their notes on the bus. For what went wrong, and some suggestions for the future, read this article about the talk here. It's a good, thoughtful piece.

Next up was Ian Dolphin from Apereo who have a number of open source products including Sakai, Opencast and Xerte. He talked about a conversation which had recently happened in the US about the next generation digital learning environments. There was general agreement that current VLEs are Inflexible, course and teacher centred, don't adapt well to student centred learning New VLEs:

• Should be easier to integrate other tools
• Accessibility should be built in
• Should support collaboration
• Should support learner analytics
• Should be more personalisable, for individual learning styles

Most of these issues not new. But more people now discussing them. Technology more scalable now, and better able to integrate and cope with flexibility and plugging in other tools. Obtaining, understanding and using analytics is key for the future of service provision. Learner analytics currently focus on retention but has potential to deliver much more personalised learning, Learning analytics will not replace an educator, but will augment what they can do to aid learning.

Final session was on the importance playful learning. Need to be more creative. Stop teaching students stuff they can teach themselves. Create time in the curriculum for playful learning. And of course, we had balloons!

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Robots, VR and social media

Quick round up of the rest of the day at Digifest. A very packed session from Eric Stoller on the use of social media in education. Lots of interaction, and discussion about how social media can be used to enhance various aspects of the educational experience. These include student engagement, employability (interesting discussion about how we should be encouraging students to build up profiles and endorsements on sites like LinkedIn), critical thinking and Alumni engagement.

Favourite quote of this session- "Social media takes time to learn. We haven't got the hang of email yet."

Then there was a session about engagement with students, and a progress report of the JISC digital student initiative.

Many of us collect feedback about what our students think, but few of us engage students in the development of our digital strategies.

The project has produced a tool to benchmark our student digital practices.
Have also developed a student digital experience tracker. Enables universities to gather evidence from students about their digital experience and track changes over time. Make better informed decisions about the digital environment and better target resources. This is being piloted at the moment,
Couple of examples of digital student engagement:

Harlow college have created a student digital partnership. They have appointed Student Digital ambassadors who do the following:

• Represent the college in digital focus groups
• Help in organisation of at least one digital activity
• Promote use of technology with fellow students
• Act as role model for good use of technology, eg staying safe.
• Paired with digital leaders
• Help in creation of resources

Birmingham City University work collaboratively with students and pay them to work with members of staff to enhance the student experience. Lot of work has been done around improving retention by creating a mentoring programme for first hers using social media.

There's also a lot of technology to play with here, including virtual reality headsets

Fetching aren't they? At least it matched what I was wearing. And of course there's robots, including my favourite, Nao. I want one for the department, I think it would do a lot to enhance our wellbeing!

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Impact of Cloud

Workshop on cloud computing.

Cloud is inescapable. Huge growth. Many vendors now only offering cloud solutions.
Benefits, increasingly towards time to market, faster access to infrastructure.

Size of device has gone down, amount of data has increased. We also own many more cloud enabled devices. Can set up old devices as cloud devices, eg as webcams. As we get to Internet of things, even smaller, more devices, much more data. Struggling now. Will get worse

Use cloud at home, fitbit, Spotify, app stores, music etc

At work, Dropbox, Google apps, azure, salesforce

Our expectations of our relationships with organisations have changed. We're used to accessing services anywhere on any device. If we don't like something, will just download another app. Having the services we need. We expect companies to look after our data securely.

So, organisations are changing. Multiplatform provision, agile development, rapid release. Security around applications rather than perimeter. Proactive monitoring of social media. IT governance. Making workplace employee experience as slick as consumer experience.

The IT function is changing. Change in control, consumers have choice. Change from data to information. Changing the way we recruit. We have information security mangers. UI/UX teams, more API development platforms. More contract managers. More business partners. More process improvers.

Also, our data is in many more different places. Do we know where it is? Mainly no :-)
Vendor maturity is a challenge. Some build up business, then fail. Vendor error also an issue, gives a different sort of risk profile. Failures can cause huge impact on our services. We are dependent on them, services are out of our control.

Early stage impacts of cloud include access to massive compute and storage resources, access to content and learning, access to new platforms and social collaborations. But, what are future impacts going to be?

Despite all the hype about cloud computing, we have mainly kept doing what we've always done with new applications and new titles, the real impact of cloud is only just starting to be visible.
IaaS, PaaS, SaaS is where we are.

Where we're going is machine learning as a service (MLaaS) and Business process as a service (BPaaS) this is where new impacts will be.

Cloud only works if you think it through end to end. So, if you put all your services in the cloud, they will still be down if your connection goes down. But, they won't be if authentication to those services is still on campus. Can't think where he got that example from!

Real impacts of cloud. You store your data in the cloud, your organisation loses the data when you leave. Your data is sold without your knowledge, you can't get insurance. Your data is shared for medical research purposes, and your life is saved by early intervention due to predictive analytics.
Internet of things, machine to machine interaction, there will be huge impacts.

 If the fridge won't speak to the oven, you may have to go out for dinner....

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Opening Digifest keynote, the Power of Digital

Opening session at Digifest is about the Power of Digital for Change and opens with a short video featuring our own astronaut, Tim Peake from space.

Opening introduction from Paul Feldman, relatively new Chief Executive of JISC. He stresses that it's not just about digital, but what we can do with it. How we can use it as a force for change.

Then the Chair of JISC, David Maguire. Need to combine vision and pragmatism. Build things that work. JISC does three things:

• Shared digital infrastructure and services, eg JANET, Eduroam, future developments include learner analytics
  
• Sector wide deals, eg with Microsoft, Amazon web services, ejournals
  
• Expert and trusted advice eg on open access, cloud advice
  

JANET network traffic has increased sixfold between January 2010 to Jan 2016 and will double again in next two years.

Some practical challenges we all face

• Digital Wild West - BYOD, Wikipedia scholars, limited IP respect. Everyone expects everything to work on everything and is an expert on everything.
  
• Students moving faster than university policies, systems, practices and staff . Solution is not to slow students down!
  
• Keeping up with demand, building industrial strength solutions, MOOCs, VLE, student systems
  
• Breadth vs depth. How do we meet the need of digital champions, whilst improving digital literacy of those that aren't experts
  
• HE sector is not a huge one. Not a huge market for our specialist systems around students. Need some sort of shared infrastructure to deliver systems effectively.
  

JISC working on a number of solutions to these challenges:
JANET upgrade, national learner analytics system, more technology and content agreements, open access agenda not right yet and needs improving, research data management developments and rekindling JISCs leadership of TEL.


Next speaker is Andrew Harrison about creating great digital spaces for learning.
The rules are changing.... Some major influences of space include: The Internet has changed notions of place, time and space; Emerging new methods of teaching and learning; Blending of living and learning.

More emphasis now on informal learning spaces. The cafes, parks, social spaces are all important aspects of planning learning spaces.

Need to create a different landscape of learning. A shift from physical to hybrid learning spaces, where technology is an integral part of the learning experience. But one type of space does not replace the other. When in a virtual space, you are still in a physical space.

Spaces to support blended learning are bigger, more flexible, easily reconfigurable, lots of technology, access to natural light, more space per student. These are often boring. Obviously not been to The Diamond... No need to be. Need for estates team, technology team and TEL teams to work together to design these spaces. Maybe more space per student, but will get better utilisation.

Libraries changing from their traditional role as a repository to informal learning spaces, collaboration spaces, virtual spaces, learning commons (or maybe Information Commons).
Successful digital space has to take account of

• Space - size, technology
  
• Place - well designed meaningful space
  
• Process - learning and teaching approach including use
  
• Experience - total student experience including before during and after the learning event
  

Final speaker of this opening keynote is Donna Lancos who talks about thinking about digital as a place, not an add-on. Also about how we use digital to change things. And what are we trying to change, and why? There needs to be an institutional acceptance of risk in implementing change. No-one is going to die!

Change is not about looking at tools and how you use them. Think first about what are we trying to do? Who do we need to work with. Start from practice and intention, not tools. Engage with human experience not technology.

Change doesn't come from predicting the future, that restricts us from embracing stuff we haven't imagined yet.

Favourite quote of the keynote "Telling a learner to turn off their mobile device is the same as the old "look me in the eye young man". It didn't work then either."

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