Gartner Research and MUSE

For several years now I’ve been a client of Gartner, an IT research and advisory company providing expert advice to all sectors - you'll notice I go to their conferences and summits, and we make a lot use of one to one phone calls with their expert analysts.

What many of you may not know is that all staff and students at the University of Sheffield can access Gartner Research. Just log in to MUSE, go to my services and view all services, and click on it.  There's some great stuff there.

And of course, because of the new feature we've just released in MUSE,  each time you select a service from the View all services page, if it isn't already listed on the My services panel, it will be added in yellow to a new right-hand column, so all of the services you need are easily accessible.

MUSE is dead, long live MUSE

Well, back from hols - great relaxing break, only spoiled by the amount of emails in my inbox, most of them junk. Perhaps we should all adopt this technique - put a vacation message on saying all mails received while you're away will be deleted. As long as you give an alternative address for urgent things to be forwarded to (PA, a colleague), would it be a good idea?

Exciting day to come back to work yesterday - launch of  new portal - MUSE (My University of Sheffield Environment, in case you wondered).  All gathered at 8am, and after a bit of a hiccough due to a slight hardware failure problem over the weekend, some magic was done  and it was live. Here's the team just a couple of minutes after it had gone live

Not forgetting Nomit who was out of shot.

All developed in house by our great team of developers, it looks really good and has been the result of a team effort.  This is just the first phase, there's lots more to come. What was really pleasing was how little issues we had - we had extra staff on the Helpdesk standing by, but very little came through. So, shows what good preparation and comms were done.

There's a nice little video about it here:



The videos are produced by our intern, who is doing a great job. Here's one he's just finished on phishing:

New MUSE.....

Our new portal is nearly ready to roll!  MUSE -  My University of Sheffield Environment in case you were wondering - will get a make over in a couple of weeks. All developed in-house - well done to the web and portal teams.The voice-over artist is quite good too :-)

Digital by Design

The Cabinet Office have an initiative to modernise government called Digital by Design, and that could form the tag line for the University's new Digital Engagement Strategy. Although led by our Corporate Affairs department, it is a collaborative project with us and aims to make us the best in the sector at digital communications and marketing. On Tuesday I attended the University Executive Board with the director of Corporate Affairs to present the outline to them, and I'm pleased to say they were strongly supportive. We want our communications activity to be digitally led, not taking printed documents and converting them to digital. This includes everything from the prospectus to our events calendars. We've already made a start by redesigning the University home page, and the rest of the website will follow, and we've launched the Virtual Open Days and Google Street view of our buildings. Much more exciting stuff to come, with the focus on producing exciting, rich, high quality digital content. Hopefully,we'll be expanding our creative media facilities and support to allow staff as well as students to produce material.

There's also going to be a bigger focus across the University on engaging with our customers on social media. This is something we do very well already, especially in CiCs of course, but we need to spread this across the institution.

The redevelopment of our portal, MUSE, fits well into the strategy as it will allow us to surface content from the website to our staff and students in a more focused and targeted way. Eventually we'll be expanding this to prospective students, alumni and other stakeholders. It's an exciting project, and going well. Here's a sneak preview of what it might look like.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The future's a Mole....

Change is afoot for learning technologies across the university. After over a year of review, planning, consultation, collaboration, piloting, technical know-how and lots of hard work -  our new virtual learning environment, Blackboard Learn 9.1 (or MOLE 2 as we call it), is going live.  From the 12th of September a new link will appear in our portal, MUSE, to connect students and staff to MOLE 2. We've been working with Departments to come up with a timescale for migration which suits them and approximately half will be on the new system this month. The rest will follow in 2012 and will remain supported on MOLE during 2011-12.

A big thanks to all colleagues who've worked hard and brought so much experience and expertise to the project.

This isn't the only change which is happening  - not only are we launching our new VLE but the teams which supports it and other learning technologies - from back-end technical support to day-to-day guidance and development for staff and students - are coming together for the first time within this department. It's an exciting time and a great opportunity for collaboration and partnership for all of us. I'm personally really pleased with the way things are going, and the future's looking good!

There's lots more information about the way we're supporting learning and teaching and MOLE2 here.


And if you're interested in our acronyms:
MUSE - My University of Sheffield Environment
MOLE - My On-line Learning Environment
They trip off most people's tongues without us even thinking about what they stand for - suspect a lot of people don't know they stand for anything.

The Eagle and Portal

Well I'm back - had a great week off in Center Parcs. Tried my hand (and glove) at Falconry, and flew a Golden Eagle called Shadow - she flew fast and weighed over 10lbs, and had rather an evil look to her - especially when she couldn't get the food out of my hand because I was hanging onto it too tightly!

And now it's back to work... A day of meetings and catching up. I chaired our Portal Application group, where we discussed the future development of our staff and student portals. We've invested a lot of resource into ensuring that all of our systems are web based and available through the portal, but the user experience is still different according to what system you go into. So, to approve expenses you go into SAP through the portal, but it's a completely different interface to going into our eLearning environment to do something, or into the student system to look up a record. This doesn't cause too much of a problem for "power users", but is a real problem for infrequent users. As we are often told, no-one needs training to do their on-line shopping, so why do they need training to order stationery? Our strategy now is to take bits of functionality out of the systems and make them directly accessible through the portal via a common, user friendly interface. So you will not have to go into the big systems to perform routine tasks, and all of the screens will have the same look and feel. This will also make things easier for access through mobile and other devices. When we've worked out how to do it, I'll let you know.

Teaching space review

One of the discussions I'm involved in at the moment is a review of our teaching space - have we got enough, is it in the right place, is the right size, is it in good condition and does it have appropriate facilities in? Changes in the way we teach means that we need different sorts of space - for example flexible spaces, break out rooms etc - and we're looking to see how that can be provided. There's also issues of how we timetable the huge number of modules we run and allocate space to them. Lots of work involved!

I've also had a meeting about the University Collaboration Improvement Programme, and in particular how we measure the use of our services. It's important to measure use so that we can track changes as we try and increase the uptake of some of the services we offer. We're especially looking at MUSE (the University portal), myCalendar and myChat at the moment. MUSE is going well, with a large increase of people using it, but we have a lot to do to get the use of myCalendar and myChat up to our desired levels. Measurements of use are by department and we will be making these public on our web site soon, so we can see where departments are making full use of the services and maybe use those as examplars to other departments.

Risks, portals and awards

A couple of interesting meetings today, and an awards ceremony.

First meeting was about Risk Management, and whether we should develop some software for keeping track of risk, or whether we should buy something. We did develop a database a couple of years go but it has never really been used and things have changed. What we need now is something a bit more sophisticated. Something for example which would allow groups of people to score risks in terms of likelihood and impact. I went to a workshop a few weeks ago where a group of us scored about 35 of the University's Corporate risks. Then we discussed them and then scored them again. What was interesting was seeing what scores had changed following the discussion. Given the events of the past weekend, I was particularly interested in the scoring for the likelihood and impact of a major systems failure or power outage! They ranged from low to very high.

The second meeting was the Portal Applications Group where we discuss and prioritise developments of the University portal MUSE (My University of Sheffield Environment).
At the moment our biggest priority is to develop a self service portal for students to allow them to do for themselves many things which at the moment they have to come into central offices to do - print off council tax exemption forms for example. We also need to educate and help users in how to get the most of out of MUSE and customise it for their own personal use. Many criticisms we get relate to things people think they can't do, but can.

Tonight Kath, Patrice and myself went to the Exposed 2007 Awards Ceremony, where the Information Commons had been nominated in the Best New Development Category, along with Millenium Square, Leopold Square, and Sheffield Station. Never having been to an awards ceremony before, we were a little nervous - what was the dress code, would we be expected to make a speech? The invitations said dress to impress, so at least one of us was tempted to hunt out the hotpants, but we resisted the urge, and in the end blended in rather well I think. Unfortunately we lost out to Leopold Square, but we did get a big cheer when the nomination was read out which was very gratifying. The three free vodka and tonics also went down rather well.

Staying connected...

Having just spent some time away from the University at meetings, conferences and on leave, a few random thoughts about staying connected.

I have a mobile phone which allows me to browse the internet, and read my email if I can be bothered to wait for it to download. It won’t however synchronise properly with myCalendar – partly my fault for using an iMac and not having a PC, but mainly because of the incompatibility of the different phones and the different calendar and synchronisation clients. It’s not bad for making phone calls from, but terrible to receive them on – to answer a call you have to hit a tiny button, and if you don’t, the call gets cut off. Apologies to the many people who phone me and get cut off after a couple of rings. I need a new one, but more on that later….

I also have a Macbook Pro which I can use to connect to wireless networks – Eduroam if I’m at another University, various hotel and conference networks, and, if I give them my credit card details, pay as you go networks.

I recently got a Vodafone USB modem for it which has revolutionised my train journeys – it connects to the 3G network if there is one and ordinary GPRS if there isn’t. When connected to 3G it’s really fast, GPRS is OK for scanning email but downloading attachments is painful. But, there are drawbacks. I’m not now reliant on a wireless network – so I can use it anywhere – even on holiday, where the temptation to “just check your email in case there’s something urgent”, is great. And then when you’ve had a quick look, you can’t resist reading some of them, and then answering them, and then getting cross, and then spoiling your holiday.

I recently discovered another downside of the Vodafone modem – it comes with parental content control already switched on. And it’s not easy to get turned off. Now, in case you think I discovered this by trying to access some dodgy web site, you’d be mistaken. I was actually trying to get to some of my pictures of the Information Commons which I’d uploaded to Flikr to include in a report. Unfortunately Vodafone blocks access to Flikr. But not to YouTube. Strange.

MUSE is a fantastic way of staying connected, with access to mail, calendar, filestore, corporate applications etc - I have no problems blowing our trumpet over this one. We were one of the first Universities in the UK to implement such a feature rich portal, and we are continuing to develop it. One day, you may even be able to run applications though it. More on that in a later post.

Now, back to me needing a new mobile phone. Want I really want is an iPhone. They are beautiful. Never mind what they can do, they are fantastically designed and have a wonderful interface – only when you’ve tried one, as I did last week, can you begin to appreciate this. Of course, there will be a few problems to overcome, such as the fact that they are tied to the O2 network and we have a contract with Vodafone, the fact that they won’t work with the Eduroam network because they don’t support the correct standards, and they don’t use the 3G network. Problems I’m sure will eventually be overcome. Roll on November 9th…..