EUNIS round up

Interesting presentation yesterday from Campus IT, called from Zero to Live in 4 weeks.

They developed a postgraduate application system for the Dublin Institute of Technology, with a very tight time frame for implementation of less than 6 weeks.
The process consisted of a downloadable form which was printed, filled in, posted with attachments. No validation, lots of missing information. Long slow process, and during it applicants were lost. 5 staff working on it. Needed quicker system, more user friendly and tailored, collecting better data.

The IT department had no spare resources, and coupled with the tight deadline, so went for hosted system which is in the Amazon cloud. The system was developed quickly, and a prototype produced in weeks which was tested on academics, who had to apply for own course, then deal with application, and reject it. This produced a list of change requests. Because the system is configurable by business users, not developers, the 5 staff in admissions office made changes in a few days.

System ready in 4 weeks. End users continuously improving it, changing questions, messages, workflows etc. Put onto web in 6 hours, on every course screen. Not integrated with student system, but could be future development.

Good example of rapid development and deployment, and interesting that it's hosted in a public cloud.

This morning we heard from John Dyer from Terena on how national research networks can serve the community. Terena is 25 years old, and is the association of research networks of Europe. Some interesting facts about networks including our own JANET which when it was formed in 1983 it had a 9.6kbps backbone! Now it's 100 Gbps, which is a millionfold increase. Good presentation on issues facing networks, including federated access, cloud, and security and privacy issues. Also the data deluge, the massive amounts of data being produced by research projects.

Final presentation from the conference was William Florance from Google Apps, on Consumerisation, Commoditisation,Cloud and the limits of the new normal. The Cloud is not a passing trend, it's here to stay. It matters to education, and there are risks, but they are addressable.

Lots of trends linked to cloud including consumerisation, bring your own technology, commoditisation. Email now heavily commoditised.
Why does cloud matter? If you don't embrace it, you'll miss the opportunity to innovate. Don't know what the future is, but there are clues. Students are in a totally digital world, don't know the analogue one.

Interesting hypothesis that in the end the amount of information we ingest will inevitable move to zero, (think thesis report, memo, email, twitter.....).
But, the capacity for the average user to access the information they they desire is limitless, the limit of depth goes to infinity.
Information wants to be free. The limit of price, at least in education, goes to zero. Think MIT course materials on line, and the Khan Academy.(60million lessons watched around the world, you tube videos, and an environment built on google apps).

Don't waste valuable resources on things that are commoditised.

The limit of privacy will be one of most difficult to solve. The risks of cloud computing are fundamentally no different than the risks with any other industry commoditisation. You need to Trust, but verify, look for clearly articulated privacy policies and a history and pattern of security.

Good final presentation and end to the conference. Slightly surreal this morning, as I was in a pub at 8am, before the sessions started, watching a guitarist break the world record for continuous playing. We've been watching him most evenings, and some early mornings. He played for 114 hours non stop, and when he reached the record everyone was sprayed with champagne, so I came into the conference sessions slightly damp and smelling of alcohol! And I had resisted the temptation to have a pint of Guinness for breakfast and stuck to coffee. Will probably write something and share some photos and videos on other blog.

Edit:  Here they are.

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The FEAST Report

Next session was an overview of the FEAST report, an overview of the adoption of shared services and cloud computing in universities which was funded by JISC.

HE is just too expensive for most economies, especially as an increasing percentage of the population attend University. In the end, the customer pays, either though fees or taxation.
Administrative overheads must be cut, putting more emphasis on front facing services. Why do we compete on services that give no competitive advantage eg payroll?
The transformation of the IT environment requires greater agility than we currently have. The world is changing rapidly!

Government in UK believes that efficiencies will come in back office services through sharing, pooling or outsourcing. They believe we have too much money, we can afford to run 160 payroll systems, data centres etc.

We have an excellent record in shared services eg purchasing consortia, JANET, UCAS. However the sector has been set up to compete with each other. We all want the best students and the best staff.

The report is aimed and written for VCs, Finance directors etc. High level. Intended as a report to be utilised rather than stand alone.

You would expect back office systems would be expensive in small institutions, and cheaper in big ones. Yet, this isn't seen.
Expenditure often based on legacy, not cost justification. Also institutions have no understanding of their back office costs. Know cost of IT systems, but not processes, eg how much does it cost to register a student.

Full report is concerned with emerging technologies with a focus on innovation to support flexible service delivery. The report contains a number of vignettes of shared services, and 6 in depth case studies. Eg University of Canberra have outsourced a lot of administrative systems and processes, with significant cost savings, and an increase in user satisfaction. Major process change took place. Kings College have outsourced a number of services including email and the desktop. The case study highlights a number of successes, but also the people and contractual issues.

Also includes a study of the STEP-F project which looked at the implementation of SOA projects across institutions though the use of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Very rapid deployment of cloud based applications calling data from different student systems have already been demonstrated.

Message is that the pace of change is being driven by an accelerating provision of technologies and end user expectations. New paradigms are rapidly gaining maturity and institutions should prepare for the adoption of many. As IT depts we need to move away from technology and concentrate on processes and people. The obstacle to shared services is not technology, it's culture and people issues.

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Business as Usual?

Second session is from Keri Facer, Professor of Education at Manchester Metropolitan University and is on Challenges Facing Education. She promises us Zombies by the end of the talk!

The ideas that we hold about the future are critically important to education. We have an educational contract. We say that if we invest in education now, the student and society will be better in the future. But, is this contract breaking down? Questions are being asked. Students work to borrow money to get them through Higher Education, and to get jobs after graduation which are similar to those they get whilst studying.

Do we take "the future" seriously enough in education? We haven't got time, conning on issues of today. Also we use cycles a lot, if it happened in the past we assume it will happen again in the future. Often ideas are highly tokenistic and rhetorical. Also the future is very technologically determined.

Problems of this approach: radically disempowering, vulnerable to fads and gurus, lack of awareness of special interests, no accountability to future generations.

So, what should we be doing? We should understand the range of discussions already going on about the future, think about how education could respond to those discussions, and intervene in the futures that are being imagined.

Project looking at possible scenarios, beyond current horizons, is here.

Technology futures we know will happen are:
Constant connectivity, to people, to systems, to networks and processing power
Culture of accountability and security, coupled with increase of storage capacity, leading to massive data sets. easier to keep everything, then use search
Merging of digital and physical, the Internet of things, pervasive and augmented realty, prosthetics.

In the longer term:
Working and living with the machines, automation, access to NHLI and processing power
The rise of Biotech, the biotechnical in education, cognitive enhancement, genome maps. Personal genomes, bespoke medicine, cosmetic pharmacology. How will this interact with social and cultural norms? Cognitive enhancement?

How will Universities cope with bioethical diversity? How are we responding today to the connected learner? How are we enabling students to work with their own data?

Knowledge futures:
Collective intelligence or the global brain. Developing a student who knows how their knowledge fits with the knowledge of others.
Embodied knowledge, modelling and the reconnection of mind and body, academic and vocational knowledge
Dangerous knowledge. Biotechnical knowledge, eg posting genome of flu virus on Internet. Interconnected systems and interdependencies of systems eg financial ones. Recently biggest crash on stock Market, billions wiped off, then it came back. No-one know how it happened.

Demographic futures:
By 2035, 50% of population of wester Europe will be aged over 50 with a further 40 year life expectancy. Competition for public resources, eg pensions at expense of education. Raising working age when lot of youth unemployment.
Intergenerational conflict?
Radical longevity argument. If we get through next few years, will be able to live to 500. Raises interesting questions about lifelong learning.

Are we moving into a high skills, low wages culture?
Radical casualisation of middle class roles ie secure professional roles. Growth of crowdsourcing, freelance, amateur, volunteer effort.

More radical future scenarios.
Energy shocks and constraints interacting with climate disruption causing breakdown? We don't know how oil is going to run out. Don't know how temperature changes will effect society.

What sort of education helps students deal with the futures outlines above?

Technological, demographic, knowledge, economic and environmental changes mean that we cannot count on a business as usual future.

How can we radically reimagine Universities?

Need to remember that playfulness, trying out different approaches has to be part of this conversation. Here come the Zombies! Several hundred gamers in Bristol playing zombies on the street. Video. Maybe we should adopt this sort of creative gameplay to imagine the future and how to deal with it?

Be creative! Move aware from future proofing the university. Recognise that we can't control the future, but we can work together to nudge it in the direction we want.

Be optimistic and imaginative.

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EUNIS begins

First plenary session at EUNIS is from Patrick Cunningham, Chief Scientific Advisor to the Irish Government, and is about Investing in the Knowledge Economy.

Ireland has a statement of policy that it will by 2013 be internationally renowned for the excellence of its research and will be to the forefront in generating and using new knowledge for economic and social progress, ie investment is part of economic and social policy. Up to 2007 invested in
Institutes of Technology across the country offering range of courses, including degree and PhD. Also large investment in R and D. But, then in 2008, recession hit. Rate of growth dropped, and public investment in R and D decreased.

Public investment in science and technology has to have outputs. Has to be new knowledge. Look to published literature for evidence first of quantity, and then citations for quality. Both are still increasing in Ireland. Also benchmarked their Universities against similar UK and European ones, TCD and UCD both doing well.

Benefits of R and D investment by private and public sector include new patents, improved processes, products and services, leading to benefit to society in terms of employment, health and quality of life. Goal is economic and social. Wealth creation is important. Natural wealth, created wealth and intellectual capital all contribute to a nation's wealth. In Ireland, natural wealth is 3%, produced is 14%, human and social wealth is 83%.

What should be goals for investment in society? GDP is one measure of how successful a country is. Can also use human development index which uses health and education measures, is a strong correlation with GDP. Satisfaction with life index, still a high correlation with GDP. But, don't just need R and D investment to improve quality of life, are social and political factors as well.

Innovation scoreboard ( a combination of many metrics) for EU shows leading group to be Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. UK and Ireland in next group ( the followers).

Challenges in getting into leading group include monitoring delivery against correct indicators, effective linkages to business sectors, and keeping on track in investment terms with leading countries.

Interesting tweet during the talk " Unis add £1.31 billion a year in value to UK society Reminder why Govts should invest "




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In Dublin's fair city......

I'm in Dublin at the moment for the EUNIS annual conference  - the European Universities Information Systems organistions.   I've been asked to be a plenary speaker, and I'll be speaking tomorrow afternoon on Challenges are what make life interesting. Will be blogging some of the sessions from tomorrow morning, trying to get them up as fast as possible, so apologies as they'll be in note form. Was a bit surprised when I registered to be asked to sign a disclaimer from the University where the conference is being hosted giving them the right to record my presentation, and use it in various ways, such as on their iTunesU and YouTube Channels, and to reproduce, distribute, and publicly display it in any medium, in part or whole.  Lots of other legal stuff in it about releasing the HEI from claims in law that I might have out of the recording.  I signed it, reluctantly, because I was surprised by it.  Am I right to be a bit concerned about it? This isn't even the organisers, just the University hosting the conference.  Will ask around and see what others think, but would be interested in comments.

But, forgetting that,  should be a good conference. Lots of attendees, from many different countries, and Dublin is a cracking place.  I've had time to sample the Guinness already  - something I never drink in the UK - and am always amazed how different it seems to taste over here!