Back to work, briefly

Back from IUISC in Galway - had a great time, a very useful and interesting conference, and like the rest of Ireland, very friendly. Spent Saturday driving round County Clare where my father's family is from getting very wet. Someone told me you can get 4 seasons in a day in Ireland, and they're right - we had snow, sunshine, rain and wind in almost equal measure. Lovely place, and I will go back. Flew back with Aer Arron, and whilst I'm very impressed with them as a company and the way they've embraced new technologies, I hate the way those small planes get blown about in the wind - it was a very bumpy descent. I'm sure very safe, but I was terrified. I'm just a wimp when it comes to flying.

Back to work for one day today as I leave tomorrow for the UCISA Management Conference in Liverpool. We've got some good speakers planned, and I'll post about as many of them as I can.

Had a good meeting this morning looking at our next service review which will be on our portal, MUSE (My University of Sheffield Environment, in case you're interested). We're trying to carry out about 6 a year using simple web surveys. Because the University needs to ensure that we don't send our students too many and induce survey fatigue, we need to coordinate them across the University, and that can cause delays in our programme. To get round that we might be asking for students to volunteers for a feedback list - that way we can send surveys out whenever we like. Also difficult to decide what questions to ask - how to separate the portal from the services it gives access to in a way users understand.

The IC to join the Sistine Chapel in SL?

The final conference session was on the use of Second Life in Education, drawing on experiences from University College Dublin. With 16.6m residents, a currency linked to the US dollar exchange rate and almost totally user generated content, it is more than a game - but will it ever become mainstream? It's at a stage that the web was in in the mid 1990s and it will be interesting so see what happens to it over the next few years. Certainly if you look to analysts like Gartner they show it on the downward slore to the "trough of disillusionment" on their hype cycle. But in Education there are some interesting uses for it. You can fly up to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and examine the frescos on the ceiling, learn how to give emergency first aid, and walk though the Saltire Centre in Glasgow. 70% of UK universities have a presence of some kind in SL delivering classes, seminars, skills sessions and conferences.

UCD have a library in SL - it has no walls, no doors, and doesn't try to replicate real life. They've hosted lectures and tutorials in it, and provide information for prospective and new students. The future remains uncertain, and it was interesting to hear a technical view of some of the issues surrounding the use of SL. It requires high internet speeds and high spec PCs, not all operating systems are supported, and there is a steep learning curve to use it properly. I must admit I find it very difficult - my avatar seems to have a mind of her own, and I find it hard to navigate the environment properly.

The conclusion was that virtual worlds offer a lot, but Second Life might not be the right environment - other toolkits may provide a better user experience. We perhaps need to look in more detail at it with our academic colleagues who are already using it. I'm also keen to get the IC in there - especially as the Saltire Centre is there already! Can't beat a bit of friendly rivalry.

Speaking of the IC, nice to see that Google Earth have just updated their images of Sheffield, and it is now clearly visible, rather than a car park.

Edit: Just had a fly round the Sistine Chapel in SL - it's pretty good - for anyone with a Second Life account it's here: http://slurl.com/secondlife/vassar/165/91/24

A vision of the future?

Google made a good pitch for their Google apps product today - email, calendar, talk (IM and videochat), docs and sites (wikis). Free use for 4 years, leveraging their technology infrastructure, integration with existing portals, 7GB filestore. Their presentation was tailored to the theme of the conference, to the point, and appealed to everyone in the room. That's more than can be said for the next presentation given by a supplier. Better not say which one, but you might guess.

It started well, with a great video looking at how the future might be:





Really enjoyed that - lots of exciting things in it and some great glimpses of how we might change our services. But, I'm afraid things went downhill from there. I have to be very careful as a presenter myself because I'm setting myself up to be criticised, but I just felt they missed a great opportunity. Began by demonstrating server virtualisation and clustering - far too technical for the audience, then progressed to demonstrating the new features of Windows 7 which has a dock, I mean a task bar at the bottom of the screen. Outlook 14 took the ribbon concept to its limit - how cluttered can a screen look? And once a command line came on I'm afraid I turned off completely. There was some nice features - IM which translated text instantaneously into different languages - but these were lost in a very technical demonstration which failed to address the theme of the conference at all.

The Airline that Tweets

Got up early this morning (well it seemed early after visiting a Galway pub last night to drink and listen to a music session), to hear Padraig O’Ceidigh, Chairman of Aer Arann. Very inspirational speaker, and all done without visual aids - just the powerpoint slides in our brains! He described it as not a lecture, but a workshop with him doing all the work.

He talked about vision, strategy and the importance of people - "your biggest asset is not on your balance sheet". We should develop our personal vision and strategy by answering the following question. What is the world with you, compared to the world without you ? Do you make a difference? Could you make it more significant? If so how? If not, why not?

In developing a work strategy the focus should always be in the customer and how to improve services. He flies with his own airline, because he wants to know what it's like to fly with them, what it's like to be delayed etc.

I have first hand experience of some of the things they offer, as I flew with them from Manchester to Galway on Tuesday. The flight was delayed, and I've already told you I don't like Turbo-prop planes. But for me the two things that stuck out were that I got a text on Tuesday morning telling me the flight had been delayed, the estimated departure time and what time check in had been moved to, and when I landed there in my Twitter inbox was a tweet from @aerarann asking me how the flight had been. Very impressive.

Google and the Future of Thinking

The last session yesterday was by Tara Brabazon, Professor of Media, at the University of Brighton - entitled Google and the Future of Thinking. I couldn't possibly do the talk justice here - a very lively talk and she kept all of us riveted (as well as slightly scared). Tara has been refered to as a digital dissenter, and used an overhead projector and acetates to deliver her talk (very effectively I might add), which rather bemused the AV technician, who like me, was suprised to find out they still existed. She caused a bit of stir in the media last year by reportedly banning her students from using Google and Wikipedia, and her inaugural lecture was entitled Google is White Bread for the Mind.

The premise of her talk was that Web 2.0 technologies, Google, blogs etc, are creating a generation of students with no real information literacy skills - they know how to find information, but not how to interpret it. She wants to put the research back into search - Google provides facts without a context. Her students have to answer questions about all of the information they use, including who authored it, what evidence is used are there citations in the piece, what genre is the document (journalism, blog, acdemic paper?), who is the intened audience? All basic questions which should be asked about any citations, but apparently not regularly by todays Google generation students.

She believes that for too long teachers have got enthused about new hardware, software and how can they use it and not what they're trying to achieve. Curriculum development has suffered, as the focus has been on process and tools not literacies and knowledge.

Her new literacy model was:

Click, pause, Think.

Not click, click, click.

Very entertaining - and heads up to the brave soul at the end who challenged some of her assertions!

First IUISC session

First session finished - began with an excellent speaker (me!), talking about an award winning building (the IC). But seriously folks - think my talk went down OK. Managed to fill the time, all technology worked, lots of questions, and lots of interest afterwards.

Second presentation was Jeff Haywood from the University of Edinburgh talking about Bridges and chasms: Successfully managing the Relationships between IT, Library and eLearning. Very entertaining and thought provoking talk as ever from Jeff.

He looked at the opportunities and problems of bringing library, IT and eLearning together, and why you would do it, pointing out the huge amount of change affecting all of our services at the moment. Internationalisation, mobile students, the Google generation, web 2.0, BYOTechnology, eResearch, pressures to do more with less, 24*7*365 services and self help. He postulated that all of these are unsustainable with the traditional silo-ised model.

There are questions which need answering which require an interdisciplinary approach:-
How do we curate and preserve big science/digital humanities data sets?
What tools and and expertise are needed to support learning and teaching?
How do we give mobile access to digital resources?
How do we define and support essential information and digital literacies?

He covered the different cultures of the areas of Library, IT and eLearning, and how sometimes we all have different view of the big picture and a lack of awareness of the work of others.

Jeff used the organisational structure at Edinburgh to illustrate how the above areas can work together - I don't personally think that you need to physically or organisationally restructure to achieve this, but I do agree that what is needed is good leadership, explicit strategies with alignments between professional domains, shared staff development, common terminologies and methodologies, joint projects and services and multi-professional teams.

Galway at last

Arrived in Galway this afternoon. I don't particularly like flying, but accept it as a way to get to places I need to go to. But, I really don't like flying on planes with propellors instead of jet engines! They're noisy, the planes rattle, and I don't understand how the plane can go fast enough to fly. The fact that it does fly is irrelevant. It was a bit of a shock to land in Galway in snow! Apparently it was a bit of a shock to the people here as well!

As the plane was 90 minutes late, we went straight to GMIT for a look round their learning centre and general IT facilities. I've posted before about how we nearly got there in the planning stages of the IC. What I hadn't realised was how much in terms of design the two buildings had in common - not just the copper cladding , but the strip windows, the northlights and some internal features. We had a great tour round, and a good discussion about how the two buildings operate. Lots of things in common, even though our two institutions are different. Some very different things though, including web content monitoring which they take very seriously here, and we don't do at all - nor do we want to!

Off to try the Guinness

Off to Galway in the morning to give a talk at IUISC on the changing way we deliver services to students. I'll be using the Information Commons as an example, and I spent most of the weekend putting a presentation together. I'm not a great believer in death by powerpoint bulleted lists, so mine will be mainly photographs and pictures. Only 115 slides and 70MB - lots of stamina needed!

Had an Executive meeting today where we covered a lot of things - an agenda for our User Group later this week, how we're going to manage printing across the campus, particularly to MFDs (or photocopiers as I like to call them), and lots of learning and teaching matters including a proposal to move to central timetabling either at University or Faculty level.

Most of rest of day spent trying to clear inbox, without success - still has 6000 mails in it....

Next post will be from Ireland, hopefully after I've sampled the Guinness!