California Dreamin'

The conference got underway with an introduction from myself as conference chair, and the chair of the Executive committee. Then the first real session was from Hilary Baker, CIO of California State University Northridge. The University of California system  is huge - 23 campuses, 460,000 students, 47,000 staff and at Northridge there are 41,548 students.


Hilary spoke about how they had used technology to improve student success, which is largely about largely about increasing the graduation rate - trying to get as many students as possible to graduate in 4 years.  They had provided tools to help students plan and manage their degree progress, navigate their university experience and prepare for careers.I'm just going to give a brief outline of some of their other initiatives:

They had developed a very functional app, which had a lot of the standard features such as maps, lecture schedules etc, but they were continuing to add ne things, with extra functionality added every two months. Use it for class schedules, maps etc.  It was tightly integrated with their student system, and could be used for many transactions including updating their details, paying for things, getting thier grades.

Another initiative was myCSUNtablet initiative which aimed to increase student learning and engagement, improve the quality of teaching materials, decrease student cost. Students bought their own iPads, but they were promised that the cost would be lower than cost of buying textbooks.
Used for creating and delivering teaching materials, eTexts.
Learning has gone from passive absorption to active learning.
Students can no longer escape learning. This is one of the slides showing seats in a lecture theatre, after the lecturer has asked a question and the students have had to respond on their ipad.

APPJam, was a competition for students to develop an app, and the winners had their functionlity put into the CSUN mobile app. 56 teams entered this year and the are partnering with their local chamber of commerce equivalent to help students take apps to market.

I particularly  liked their EPortfolio for students to showcase their work. Can add images, link to videos,  - looked a bit like a cross between Linkedin and Facebook.  Provides proof of competencies through examples. Provides a professional online presence for emplyers. Called Portfolium, its worth a look.

Her closing thoughts:
 Need a culture of innovation. But there is a balancing act between innovation and keeping things running. Have to get the basics right before you start innovating.
Innovation is risky, some will fail.
Follow technology trends. Use things like Gartner hype cycles, New Media Consortium Horizon reports. Don't just look at HE.
Select innovative efforts strategically. Consider your campus culture, align with University goals. This is not about IT, but about university initiatives.

Excellent opener, and you can watch the talk here.

Students are back......

41 years ago today I arrived in Sheffield. A rather naive 18 year old from a market town in North Nottinghamshire. My Mum and Dad brought me in their car - I think it was a Hillman Minx but I
I could be wrong - dropped me at Halifax Hall, helped me unpack, and left. My room is still there - it's part of a suite in the Halifax Hotel. My room is the living area, and it's been knocked through to the room next door, which was the bedroom of my best friend Jane, who I met on my first night and remained my best friend throughout the three years of my degree. 41 years!!! I can't really believe it was that long ago. I remember it really well. And I've never left. But, the reason for thinking about it, is that today another set of young, apprehensive but excited students arrived in Sheffield.

Today many things are different. We greet them in a very different way. When I turned up, you got your key, were told where your room was, and that was it. Now, we have a fantastic red carpet for new students to walk down to collect their key, as well as a whole set of welcoming stalls and information stands. There's even free ice cream from Our Cow Molly.

And of course, we are there to help students with any IT issues. Mainly how to connect to wifi - which is all they really want. But, we are there to help them with anything. It was a bit quiet when I was there today, but that's a sign we've got thing's right. Everything just works, and they don't really need our help as much as they used to. But, don't this team and our stand look wonderful ;-)

And we'd produced a really good leaflet for students based on the idea of free IT deals...





I had a walk round all of the venues where we had staff today, and spotted something new in the Information Commons - self service laptop hire.

Finally, I'd like to pay tribute to a good friend of mine - Pat McGrath who retires next week - this is her last freshers weekend. She has worked tirelessly over the past 25 years to improve services to students. Today, as usual, hers was often the first face students and their parents saw when they arrived to start this exciting journey. She had a friendly and supportive word to say to everyone, and Freshers' Weekend will not be the same without her.

New students on their way

Of course, the other exciting thing happening at the moment is our students are coming back. Tomorrow and Sunday thousands of first years will arrive to collect their keys for their accommodation and start a new part of their life.  We'll have staff in the student villages and on campus all over the weekend to help them get started with us, and get connected. We've produced a new set of web pages, and a new publication to help them.

We've also worked with International Student Support office to make a video about IT services aimed at prospective international students.



So we're all set for our new students, let's just hope the sun comes out!

Save it like a Hero

Communicating with students is not always easy. Lets face it, many of them are a lot younger than us, and have grown up in a completely different environment to us. We know they don't like reading emails, and it can be difficult to engage. For the last year or so we've had an intern working with us producing videos which seem to have gone down very well, with staff and students. Today we launch a new kind of video - we have our own superhero, FileMan :-)  Bit of a departure for us in style, but we're willing to see how it works and if it catches the students attention to read the web pages on saving files, which have been written in comic book style.  What do you think?



The web pages are here.

Gone, but not forgotten

Nobody likes removing services, especially one that is valued by customers, but sometimes we have to in order to protect a level of service. We had to do this very recently. We've been running a PC booking service in our Information Commons for several years. It means that students can reserve a PC and know that it will be available for them when they need it. However, recently we have had issues with it  - it has been failing  and unexpectedly logging out groups of students which creates a real risk of them losing work. Unfortunately our third party supplier of this software hasn't been able to provide a fix for us, so we've taken the difficult decision to turn it off. All of our PCs are now walk up only. So, although our students can no longer reserve PCs, we have a supply of laptops they can borrow which are bookable in the IC and library sites. They can also find free PCs here, or using the iSheffield app. We'll continue to work closely with the company that provides the software to find a fix - I hope it won't be too long.

We try and keep everyone updated with this and other CiCS news through our blog here, and our twitter,  and Facebook pages.

Welcome to new students

 

Well done to CiCS colleagues for their great page for new students, especially the new brochure we've been giving out to them. Although I think the order might be wrong - I don't think they unpack before connecting....

There's some great short videos on there to help students use our services and stay safe on line. All were made in house by our comms team, particularly our intern Kieran. This is my particular favourite, where Kieran has a starring role. Love the moustache.

New students, space and data

So, the campus is buzzing this week as the new students arrive back. We had staff up at the student residences all weekend, mainly helping them connect to the newly installed wireless network. Many had completed all of the pre-registration information which gave them a computer account, but those who hadn't were able to do that as soon as they arrived.  It was very interesting that many of them who had completed all of their pre-arrival information, and had been given a username and email address, couldn't use them, as they couldn't remember what password they had created!  This was despite making it more obvious that this password was actually important to them once they got to University. Perhaps next year we should just suggest they use their Facebook password :-)

Now it's Fresher's Week, new students are finalising their module choices, picking up their uCards, and finding their way round campus. Helping them to do that is our newly re-branded mobile app, iSheffield, available for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and as a web app. It's got some great location features, including finding the nearest free open access PC.

As well as keeping an eye on what's happening with registration, this week so far I've had a couple of catch up meetings, and the inaugural meeting of the the Learning Infrastructure Group. This is a small, focused group, chaired by a PVC, and with the Directors of Student Services and Estates, myself, 2 academic heads of department, a project support officer.  Its remit is to provide a strategic steer to a number of projects which have an impact on teaching space, including the common timetabling project, teaching space refurbishments, and many projects looking at data which utlimately affect the way we handle process such as timetabling.  I'm not sure anyone understood the complex interactions of these projects, until they tried to study the diagram below!

Later today I'm off to London to a Gartner conference on Portals, Content and Collaboration, so will try and blog as many interesting sessions as I can. As usual, this will take the form of live blogs, so most will be in note form.

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.

Wireless developments and laptop loans

Two other great presentations at this morning’s departmental meeting which I thought were definitely worth summarizing:

Wireless
Currently we have over 600 wireless access points, covering mainly teaching and social space, and other congregational areas, recently we’ve been working with faculties to cover the academic areas they have requested. We’ve done a lot of good work and cover probably about 90% of central campus where students are, but that is still only about 10% of the total campus.  We know the world is becoming more and more mobile, and we can see that in the figures of concurrent connections to the wireless network which is rising exponentially. We also know that we need to get wireless into student bedrooms before the start of this next academic year. So, lots to do! Moving forward we’re going to approach installation on a whole building basis, and revisit coverage in some areas. We also need to look at how we cover our external areas – grassy banks, outdoor seating areas etc. We’ll be looking at new standards, with higher bandwidth and the possibility of 4G coverage.

I suppose the thorny question is whether we’ll get to wireless being the primary network? It already is for our students. It would require less cabling and kit, less power and less cooling. We might even be able to deliver phone services over it. Watch this space!


Laptop loans
Last year we started a pilot laptop loan service in the IC – driven partly by the demand for PCs which often outstripped what we had, and feedback we had from students telling us they’d like such a service. We also knew it was something others were doing, and we had the opportunity because some laptops became available from a service no longer being run. It was a pilot, so we only had 10 laptops and was restricted to the IC for 2 hours at a time. Student feedback was mainly good, but they didn’t like the old laptops, or the battery life. So, this year we embarked on a real service. We purchased 66 fairly rugged laptops with 6 hours battery life complete with a bag, power and mouse. These are used for loan and teaching and the flexibility does allow us to cope with seasonal demands.  They run our Windows 7 managed desktop, a familiar environment with access to many applications, and can be booked in advance through our resource booking system. This is called myR&R which amuses me no end. I know it stands for My Rooms and Resources, but it will always be My Rest and Recuperation to me.  When we first went live with it, I tried to book some.

It’s proving to be a very popular service (the laptops) with 53% of users using the service more than once. Currently not many students are booking them in advance, but we know that will change over time.  Our next tasks are to publicise the service more, look at expanding it, and investigate developments such as self-issue and return and allowing them to be taken away from the IC.

Google+, Libary Clouds and the future of student computing rooms

I spent most of last week doing things I can't really blog about - promotion and regrading meetings, scoring Exceptional Contribution Award cases, that sort of thing, so sorry for lack of posts!

A couple of interesting things happened, which its probably worth mentioning.

Google announced that Google+ is now part of the apps suite. We've already enabled it as part of our test domain, and now we'll be looking at the implications of rolling it out.  I'm particularly interested in how we can use "hang outs" for desktop video conferencing across campus. There will be issues for those of us already using it for our personal accounts, I'm not sure how that will work.

We had a meeting with our colleagues from the Library, who are replacing their existing library management system with a totally cloud based one. They have signed up to be part of the  Ex Libris early adopter programme to implement this next generation of library systems. They hope to migrate fully by summer 2013, and we look forward to working with them on this exciting development.

And finally, one of the sessions I didn't get to at Educause  (there are about 20 parallel sessions so often there's two or three on at the same time I want to go to), was on the future of the Computer Room for students.  As student ownership of laptops increases, and we can virtualise more software, we're often  asked why we provide open access machines. In practice, they are one of our most popular facilities, in the Information Commons there are about 550 available 24/7, many of them pre-bookable, and there is stil huge demand for them.  Peter Tinson attended the session, and has written a really good blog post about it and some of the issues surrounding the provision of student machines, and I recommend a read of it here.

Getting started.....

As well as the excitement over Freshers Week and registration, there still other events going on. Last Friday I was at the HEFCE Cloud Advisory Group for an update on the various strands of the UMF Cloud projects. Going well, and there'll be another press release soon. Particularly important given the UUK report last week, with its emphasis on shared services.

Tomorrow I'm off to London again, this time for the formal launch of the Universities UK report on Efficiency and Modernisation, so hopefully you'll be able to read about it here.

Today was our first real day of Freshers Week. A real buzz on campus, and it's great to see the students back. Loads of flyers being given out for local clubs, bars, shops - lots of things might have gone digital, but this sort of advertising hasn't - the campus looked as though it was drowning in a sea of paper. And of course we have our own booklet as well, which proved very popular when we gave them out yesterday.

Our new registration systems were put to the test today. Lots of people working hard together the make the experience as positive as we can do for students. A bit of a teething problem this morning, fixed by lunchtime, and all in all a very successful day. Well done to everyone who helped.

Fresher's Weekend

Well, another Fresher's Weekend is over, and our new students have arrived. The rain held off for most of the time - Sheffield looks so much better in the sun - and the usual festivities happened at our two Student Villages, including free ice cream from Our Cow Molly.  I recommend Cora's Chaos - very good! As usual we had teams of people in - in both Student Villages helping students get connected, and working across campus fixing network points, installing AV equipment for the start of term, and printing several thousand Ucards to be dished out starting tomorrow. This year we've developed new systems to enable most information to be loaded by students before they arrive, unfortunately not delivered through our new portal as we'd hoped, but a huge improvement on last year, and some very nice looking screens.

Virtually every student arrived with a laptop, and many more than last year with wireless only devices - mainly iPads and Macbook Airs, so we need to crack on with getting wireless in the student bedrooms as well as the wired network which is in there now.  This year students have access to student.com which gives them free TV, free phone calls, back up, and various other services provided by Cablecom.

So, now we move into Intro Week, and hope that registration is a success, after the one or two problems we encountered last year. Lots of hard work has been done by many people, and hopefully it will be a much improved experience. I leave you with a picture of a penguin, drinking a cup of tea, because it amused me.

Google CAB round up

So, the Google CAB yesterday wasn't just about security and privacy. We looked at the roadmap for Google apps, and at some exciting new developments - which I could tell you about, but then I'd have to kill you.

We also had an interesting session on Chrome OS, and Chromebooks, which are optimised for the web, and in fact only have a browser on them. Google's pitch is that they're easier to manage, more secure, have a lower TCO and make for more productive users. They're very quick to load - about 2 secs from sleep -  and have 8 to 10 hours of battery life. Although we didn't get to play with one (they won't be in the UK till later this month), we were told they feel like a tablet. So, one question for Google might be - is there going to be a Chrome OS tablet?

They're secure, in that every app runs in its own sandbox, the OS is separate to the browser, local data is encrypted, and they only boot to a verified OS.

They can also be easily shared, as once you log in to the browser, it's your machine. I could see a really good case for using them as loan machines for students in places like the Information Commons and teaching labs. Or even coffee bars, the Student Union? We'll be getting hold of a few for a trial as soon as they come out.

The final presentation was probably the best. It was from ESSEC,  a French Business School with campuses near Paris and in Singapore. They have embraced Google apps in a big way. They describe it as an ecosystem - they have no VLE, doing everything in apps, and they don't develop anymore but instead look for solutions to problems which are publicly available, for example in the Google market place.

They make extensive use of Google Sites to produce learning materials, and more than 70% of courses currently have a site. They also provide life-long access to course documents to alumni.

There's a nice site here with information about how to use apps. Hopefully this will be a Google case study soon. We saw a good video, which Jean-Pierre and Benjamin who were at the CAB star in, but I can't find a subtitled version on YouTube. So, for those of you who speak French, it's here:

From Drama to Bums on Seats

Quite a lot of meetings to catch up on, so here's a quick round up.

Friday morning was the Drama Studio User Group, which we effectively disbanded!  Well, in its current form. Rather than try and look at operational issues, management and policy, the group will reform and look at operational issues, becoming a consultative groups for all users of the Drama Studio. There's a wide range of them - academic departments, students, local amateur dramatic groups, and we'll be meeting for some of the time in the evening to make sure all users are represented.

Then on Friday afternoon the Exec spent 2 hours going through our operational plan and prioritising all of the different objectives to present to the Service Strategy Board for their comments. A big job, and interesting to see where we might have different views to the managers who have put it together. In these tight financial times, and where our users want more services than ever, it's important we get this right.

Today I had the first meeting of an important project - we're calling it IT as a Shared Service, and it will be looking at how CiCS and Faculty and departmental IT staff can work more closely together. Lots of benefits to be had if we get this right including better IT support in departments, efficiency, less duplication, better career development for staff.

Then this afternoon it was the Service Strategy Board.  Lots of good discussion. Topics covered included how we're coordinating improvements to the registration process for new students, how we ensure development work done outside of the development team gets the right technical advice and progress on all of our projects. No new projects to approve today, but one "lessons leaned" review which we carry out on all completed projects.

Each month for  the  meeting of the SSB the service manager produces an overview report of their own area - not just projects, but other developments and significant changes. These are invaluable for me and the rest of the team to keep up with everything happening in the department. I can't summarise all seven of them here, so I thought I'd highlight one or two after each meeting. Today it's the turn of  Teaching and Learning, and the following new developments were reported:

• Managed laptop service being piloted to allow departments to use space more flexibly, eg using teaching labs as IT spaces

• New PC availability service (or Bums on Seats as it's affectionately known in the dept) which will graphically show individual PCs on each floor in the IC and display availability status. This will be linked with the PC booking system so you can walk into the building and book a PC on level 0 and it will be ready for you as you reach the higher levels

• Creative media space opening in the IC where students will be able to produce audio and video material

• Laptop loan service in IC being piloted

All good stuff and well done to everyone.

Off to Loughborough tomorrow for the Google Apps for Education UK User Group.

Tailoring services to meet the needs of the current iGeneration of students

Examples of the current pace of change and why we need to be aware of changing expectations of our current students.
Time taken to reach 50 million users:
Radio, 35 years
Telephone 23 yrs
TV 20 yrs
www. 10 yrs
iPod 4 yrs
YouTube 1yr

MISO survey. Perceptions of students, faculty and staff of views of library and computing services. Been carried out since 2005 across different institutions.

Summary of results:

Most frequently used services:
Course management system
Wireless access

Most important:
Network speed
Network stability
Email
Wireless
Virus protection
Public computers
Course management system

Highest satisfaction:
Library borrowing
Library circulation
Library reference

(highest satisfaction was dominated by library services)

Only 4 items poor satisfaction:
Wireless availability
Network speed
Network reliability
Wireless reliability

Trends
What's becoming more important:
Wireless access
Digital image collections
Course management system
Quiet workspace in the library
Borrowing laptops

Becoming less important:
Library web site (because can get to resources without going through it?)
Helpdesk ( fewer problems or solving them themselves?)
Campus computing labs (because own more laptops?)
Residence phone service ( because all have mobiles)

increasing satisfaction:
Input into decisions
Status information about problems
Wireless availability

Decreasing satisfaction:
Network performance
Campus computing labs

Cross over.
Helpdesk going down in importance but computing website going up. About to cross. All about self service and students preferring to search for solutions rather than come to hands on, busy helpdesk. Want to be empowered rather than helped.

Campus computing labs going down in importance, computing in the library remaining high. Increasing gap. Value of library as key place for students. Much rather do computing in library than in commuter labs.

In summary, what students seem to be saying is Give me the tools, and let me get on with it.
But, infrastructure must be up to it. Always on. Fast.
Give them space, especially in libraries
Give them tools and services that they need in a easy to use way

Scales that can tweet your weight?

Spent most of the last couple of days in meetings or preparing for a talk I gave this morning at SROC - the Student Records Officers Conference. I'd been asked to cover Web2.0 in HE, and specifically address it for a non IT audience. I cheated slightly and expanded it to cover new technologies in general - including phone apps and cloud computing.

I used the wiki dictionary definition of web 2.0 - "The second generation of the WWW, especially the movement away from static web pages to dynamic and shareable content and social networking". There's loads of definitions out there, but this one is nice and concise and easy to understand. I also stressed the importance of user generated content and collaboration.

The CLEX report published last year - Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World - is still relevant and I used a couple of quotes from it to illustrate their conclusions:

Web 2.0, the Social Web, has had a profound effect on behaviours, particularly those of young people.....They inhabit it with ease and it has led them to a strong sense of communities of interest linked in their own web spaces, and to a disposition to share and participate.

The world they encounter in higher education has been constructed on a wholly different set of norms..... hierarchical, substantially introvert, guarded, careful, precise and measured.

The two worlds are currently co-existing, with present-day students effectively occupying a position on the cusp of change....they are making such adaptations as are necessary for the time it takes to gain their qualifications.... This is unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. The next generation is unlikely to be so accommodating.

I also talked about the consumerisation of IT - technology and the internet are all around us. Internet enabled fridges, and bathroom scales that send your weight to a server over your wifi network are already with us. I can see the benefits of being able to connect to your fridge from the supermarket to see how much gin, oops, milk you've got left, but I really don't want my scales checking up on how much I weigh and tweeting me telling me to go easy on the chocolate!

So, we then had a look some of the technologies out there including Facebook, Blogging and Twitter, and also about some more "controlled" web 2.0 environments such as our own uSpace service, demonstrating how they can be used in an HE environment. I think I also successfully demonstrated how mad I can appear to non-users of this technology when I showed a picture of my desktop the night I was watching the debate on the Digital Economy Bill - with BBCiPlayer, Tweetdeck, Twitterfall and the Guardian live blog of the event all open at the same time and me actively reading, watching or participating in all of them. And watching the final of Masterchef at the same time.....

A demo of our mobile phone app CampusM, some thoughts on Cloud Computing, and we were on to the perceived risks of these technologies, including privacy and security of data, loss of control, copyright/IP issues and the ephemeral nature of some of the services. My view is that this is all about risk management - you have to know and understand the risks, and then decide which ones you're prepared to take and how you're going to manage them.

A good discussion followed, so I hope I made the audience think a bit about about how these technologies might be used to improve the services we provide to our students.

Students to get University direct to their mobile

This press release has just gone out about a new mobile service we're about to launch:

A unique new mobile application that will enable students to receive University information direct to their mobile phone is set to be launched next month by the University of Sheffield.

The pioneering new campusM™ application will allow students to access comprehensive information about upcoming events, view campus maps and have their own up-to-date timetable, with just one click of a button.

The application, developed by oMbiel, will also feature a friend locator to help them meet up with other students, and users will also be able to browse their library records and look up faculty, staff members or student contacts from the University directory. Students will also be able to use the application to receive the latest news and important alerts to help them get the most out of their University life.

The University of Sheffield will be the first of a group of universities in the UK to roll out campusM™ to its students, who will then be able to download the application for free from the University’s online portal.

For the launch, campusM™ will be available on the iPhone and iPod touch, but by the end of the year, the application will be compatible with other mobile phones, including those from BlackBerry®, HTC, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Samsung, Sanyo and Sony Ericsson.

Dr Christine Sexton, Director of the University of Sheffield’s Corporate Information and Computing Services, said: “With over 24,000 students and almost 6,000 staff, students are living increasingly mobile lives, needing information and services on the move at anytime. We had to find a way to make our services more accessible to meet the need of our students. campusM™ will ultimately save students time, keep them better informed and make communicating with staff and other students a lot easier.

“The campusM™ application offers an integrated suite of services that our students want, enabling them to stay informed with the ease and convenience that mobility brings. It gives students all the information they need in one central place, which is accessible anytime and anywhere and which will enhance the overall student experience and allow them to concentrate more of their time on their studies.”

Hugh Griffiths, CEO of oMbiel said: “Our selection by the University of Sheffield is validation that oMbiel is providing a leading industry application to make student services available at the tap of a finger, regardless of their location. It is a major milestone in our development of mobile applications for the Higher Education sector and it will significantly contribute to the rapid expansion of the technology in the UK.”

I'm dead pleased with this - it's been a great example of a quick implementation, outsourced to a company who worked extremely well with us.

All go for Google

Only a week to go to the arrival of most of our new students, and then a week after that the returners come back. Over the last few weeks we've been making sure that our new Google mail service is in place. That's meant creating all of the new student accounts with Google, and then creating accounts for the returning students and migrating all of their mail over. In addition there's a lot of technical work going on with passwords and getting single sign-on through our portal to work. Had a catch up meeting this morning and so far, so good. One or two hitches but nothing too serious. Migration will be finished next week, and single sign-on turned on straight after. Given that we only took the decision in May, it's been a fairly rapid implementation. Should be a much improved user experience for our students - hope it's appreciated! Had an interview yesterday with Google's PR agency for a press release they're doing - apparently there's quite a few Universities moving to them this September (14 is the figure I've heard) - and in Sheffield both ourselves and Sheffield Hallam are implementing in the same timescale so we've been able to share experiences. Suspect a UK HE Google User group will be on the cards soon.

You can be a victim of your own success

One of the problems with creating something innovative and popular is that it can easily become a victim of its own success. That's something we have to face with the Information Commons. I've blogged before about students not wanting to work in other locations so that there is extreme pressure on the PCs in the building, even when there are many PCs not being used just minutes walk away. The same is happening at the moment. It's one of our busiest times, and the screen showing PC availability across campus is almost completely red for the IC, and green everywhere else. (You just need to know that red is low availibilty, green the opposite).

To make things worse, after blogging not long ago that students didn't seem to be making a huge use of the wireless network, that has now changed completely. In the last few weeks they've turned up in droves with their laptops to the extent that the wireless network we put in the IC has been overloaded! A number of new access points have been added quickly, but a serious review will need to take place over the summer as we see growing evidence of changing student behaviour. It doesn't help the load problmes on the network that every device with wireless capability (eg the iPhone) connects as soon as you walk into the building whether you want to use it or not.

Formally announced the Google mail for students option last night by sending an email to all staff and students. Replies are split almost 50/50. From students saying this is great news, and from staff saying why can't we have it!

CLEX report published

The Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Learner Experience (CLEX) has just published its final report entitled "Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World”. I've just spent an hour reading it and would recommend it to anyone involved in IT or teaching and learning in Higher Education.

The report outlines some key findings about today's learners and their experience of the digital age. Some statistics are not surprising - 75% of 11 to 15 year olds have at least one social networking site, 90% use email and instant messaging and 85% own a mobile phone with camera. It also looks at the deployment of Web 2.0 technologies in Universities at the moment, commenting that although the use is relatively high, it is not systematic and comes from enthusiastic individuals, with patchy implementations in teaching and learning. The report makes a number of recommendations for Universities and the JISC which I'm not going to go into as they are very well presented in the executive summary, but I do want to draw attention to the conclusion:

"Web 2.0, the Social Web, has had a profound effect on behaviours, particularly those of young people whose medium and metier it is. They inhabit it with ease and it has led them to a strong sense of communities of interest linked in their own web spaces, and to a disposition to share and participate. It has also led them to impatience – a preference for quick answers – and to a casual approach to evaluating information and attributing it and also to copyright and legal constraints.

The world they encounter in higher education has been constructed on a wholly different set of norms. Characterised broadly, it is hierarchical, substantially introvert, guarded, careful, precise and measured. The two worlds are currently co-existing, with present-day students effectively occupying a position on the cusp of change. They aren’t demanding different approaches; rather they are making such adaptations as are necessary for the time it takes to gain their qualifications. Effectively, they are managing a disjuncture, and the situation is feeding the natural inertia of any established system. It is, however, unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. The next generation is unlikely to be so accommodating and some rapprochement will be necessary if higher education is to continue to provide a learning experience that is recognised as stimulating, challenging and relevant".

So, we're at the edge of major change with today's students putting up with what we give them rather than demanding a different approach. Look what it says about this being unsustainable, and tomorrow's students not being as accommodating.

Universites will need to change and embrace new technologies and new ways of working and interacting with students. I find it extraordinary that there could be resistance to this - especially from IT departments. I am always disappointed when colleagues aren't as excited by change and the potential of new technologies as I am, and in many cases don't even use them. How many of my department make use of web 2.0 or social software I wonder? Why aren't there more bloggers, twitterers etc? If we are the department who are facilitating and supporting students who use this software, don't we have a responsibility to know how it works rather than just dismiss it?

Perhaps our new social software will change all of this - uSpace will be launched at the beginning of June and will provide all staff and students with blogs, wikis, discussions, social groups and collaborative spaces. Pilots have been running for a few months and the feedback is very positive.

As a side effect of the CLEX report we got an unexpected bit of publicity in the Guardian article released to accompany its launch which told the world of our decision to implement Google mail for students, before we've actually formally agreed to do so. All publicity is good publicity though, and it has speeded up our decision making process - formal decision expected soon!