Faceblindness, seeing in colours and metaphor

First keynote speaker was Professor Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego, talking about The Unique Human Brain: Clues from Neurology.

It was a fascinating talk, focusing on the complex structure of the human brain, and it's relevance to creativity and metaphor!

The human brain is the most complexly organised form of matter in the universe, with 100 billion neurones in the adult nervous system each making 10,000 points of contact. It's been estimated that the number of possible brain states exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe. So - how do you begin to understand it? His technique is to study patients with tiny brain injuries which often lead to a highly specific loss of one function. One example he gave was faceblindness. A condition where people canot recognise faces, even of close relatives. Studying these patients has lead to the identification of the part of the brain which indentifies faces.

Another rare condition was one of his students who after a head injury thought his mother was an imposter - he couldn't recognise her face. A highly selective delusion with a number of freudian explanations. However, cognitive neurosciene has shown that it is a straightforward small brain injury where messages are not getting to emotional centre of brain from the visual recognition part.

A particular area of study is phantom limbs, where after amputation patients can continue to feel the limbs presence, often with excrutiating pain in them (as an aside he said that this phantom presence can happen when any part of the body is removed except of course the brain, unless you were a politician). Study of these phantoms has allowed the identification of cross wiring that has gone on in the brain, where the lack of signal from one part of the body to its area of the brain allows that area to be "invaded " by another area and signals misinterpreted as coming from the arm – even though it’s gone. A radical change in the pathways of brain. His hypothesis was that the brain is in a constant state of dynamic equilibrium with the potentail for pathways to be changed and adapted.

The final area he covered was Synesthesia - a condition where people see things (often numbers) in colours and hear music as colours. This runs in families and is more common in artists, poets and novelist.
There are many theories to explain this– the patient is mad, high on drugs, reliving childhood memories, or just being metaphorical. But it is a concrete sensory phenomenon and he has shown that the part of brain processing colour is right next to area which processes numbers and that some cross wiring has occurred. It's a genetic phenomenon, and happens when there is a fault in "pruning genes" which operate in the foetus to correct misconnections in the brain.
Some people see days of the week, months etc as colours and this is caused when the cross wiring is higher up.

The excess connections caused by the synestheseia gene makes people more creative - artisits, novelists etc are all good at metaphors. That’s why this seemingly useless gene has survived. and the reason not everyone is synesthetic - you don't want everyone to be metaphorical and creative - especially neurosurgeons! A diverse set of skills is needed.

I really enjoyed this talk - took me back to being a genetics student again! I liked that fact that he made it clear that he did not believe in intelligent design, but in evolution. His final comment was that it was ironic that the President was championing intelligent design when his own existence was a living negation of it!

A video of the session is here

EDUCAUSE Exhibition Shock Horror!

No Apple stand! Usually one of the biggest there, with constant demonstrations, new products being demonstrated and a lot of hands on experience of how Apple can be used in Higher Education. But, they're not here. Wonder who upset Mr Jobs?

Lots of other suppliers though - some we're customers of, and some who would like us to be! It's a huge exhibition with more than 200 stands, many doing theatre style presentations throughout the day. I spent two hours there today - it's a great place to network and chat to suppliers, and find out about new products which are on the horizon. It amuses me the lengths some suppliers will go to to get you to their stand and then keep you there - one stand had a racing car circuit, and another a juggler on a unicycle!

The conference is really getting going now - they expect 9,500 delegates so it's huge by our standards. The conference centre staff get around on Segways, looks great fun!

Failure is not an option

Saw some great display screens whilst watching Shamu the whale do her stuff - giant ones, with a giant motor behind, and on a track. One minute they were 4 separate horizontal ones, then one single screen with them joined vertically, then diagonal. Sometimes with 4 different things on them, sometimes with one film or image. I though the giant plasma screens we had in the IC were good, but we must get some of these....

Had a great trip to Kennedy Space centre as well - very excited to see a Shuttle ( Endeavour) on the launch pad ready for her next trip in November. You can just see the tip of the solid rocket boosters and the orange tip of the external tank peeping out above the launch pad. I've always been fascinated by space travel and followed the Apollo missions closely. I've said before that one of my heros is Gene Krantz - mission controller for so many of them including Apollo 13 where he famously said "failure is not an option" . It's the reason I hate it when people tell me things can't be done. They might be difficult, or expensive, or would need something dramatic to happen, but they're not impossible. Not when you see how they got men to the moon in the 60s. I stood and looked at the consoles today in the control room used in Apollo 8, and it took me while to work out what was wrong - then I realised - these computers didn't have any keyboards! I've bought a mouse mat with "failure is not an option" on it to have by my desk....

Pumpkins and awards

Well I'm here - ever so slightly jet lagged, but not too bad. Not seen Mickey yet, but there's time! America is right in the middle of one of it's favourite holidays - Halloween. Pumpkins everywhere, kids dressed up and sweets being given away for trick or treating - and its not even here yet. I have some time off before the conference starts and hope to get to Kennedy Space Centre, and maybe see Shamu the whale at Seaworld - will have to see how much we can cram in.

Got some good news earlier today - it was the Regional RIBA awards ceremony in Leeds on Friday evening but unfortunately I couldn't go because I was packing! As well as the IC's RIBA
award being presented, the results of the RIBA's White Rose competition were also announced, and the IC won the Gold Prize for architecture, and was also named Building of the Year. Fantastic news!

EDUCAUSE 2008

As soon as I've answered all my emails, cleared, (or at least tidied) my desk, I'm off to pack for the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference which I set off to early tomorrow morning. Anyone who's been reading this blog for a year will remember that last year it was in Seattle, and this year it's in Orlando - home to Mickey Mouse, Universal Studios and Shamu the performing whale. We usually get one free day (to adjust to the jet lag of course) and last time it was in Orlando a few years ago, several UK IT Directors hit one of the theme parks for the day and had a great if very childish time! Not sure what we'll do this year, but I'm sure it will be fun.

Lots of sessions planned, so I'll blog about as many as possible, and until my laptop battery runs out. It's always funny watching people gradually move to the edge of the rooms to find the power sockets- this picture was taken last year by a colleague of mine - 3 of us (and 3 macs!) sitting in a row hogging the power.

Just pull this cable out and see what happens

Normally I'm not let loose in our data centres - I think it's because when faced with all those cables, I have a huge desire to pull some out! However, the other day I was invited into one of the machine rooms, and treated to a demonstration of some clever work our network team have been doing. We're gradually reconfiguring the network to increase resilience, doubling up network connections and replacing our user switches with new virtual routers. Eventually we'll have 2 Gb resilient connections to all buildings. Watched a nice demo of the way the two routers will work with one active and one inactive - if the active one fails, the inactive one immediately takes over. This was simulated by me pulling out the power cables to the active one (heavily supervised of course) and the other one kicking in straight away - barely a blip in the guitar solo being transmitted. Marvellous!

A lot of what our infrastructure team does is hidden to most of our users, with it only coming to their attention when something goes wrong. But it goes without saying that it's absolutely vital to the institution and much appreciated.

Teaching an old dog.....

Had an unusual experience yesterday - I went on a training course! I can't remember the last time I had to watch powerpoint slides for two hours and actually learn something, especially when the topic was a quite complicated HR related one. Still, I now feel equipped to determine how atypical workers (ie casual staff) can be assimilated onto regular contracts, and I think I understand the difference between an employee, a worker and a contractor....

Then to a meeting to discuss the concept of the Sheffield Graduate, which is at the heart of our Teaching and Learning Strategy . This defines 12 the attributes that we believe we should be enabling our students to develop and demonstrate impact, excellence and distinctiveness in their chosen field. I won't list them all here but they include being able to carry out independent enquiry, having core information literacy skills, applying creativity, enterprise and innovation to knowledge creation, identifying the wider social, cultural and economic context of their academic knowledge, and recognising their responsibilities as active citizens. All departments should be building in the concept of the Sheffield Graduate into their own teaching and learning strategies, and we will be looking at how we can build it into ours.

I then had a very useful hour with the PVC for Teaching and Learning where we discussed a number of issues, including the development of our teaching and learning support strategy, the minefield that is student printing (especially the requirement to print out all assignment, single sided and double line spaced), and the management of teaching space .

Finally an Innovative Comms project group - following our announcment of our decision to implement Clearspace, we received many applications from staff to take part in the pilots. Yesterday we had the difficult task of deciding which ones to go with as we couldn't support them all. We were looking to cover 4 different areas - research, teaching and learning, business processes and student activity and will run 2 pilots in each area. If all goes well, they will start in January, and a full service will be available in May.

Green IT Audit

Our auditors have just completed a "Green IT" audit on us, and I met them yesterday to discuss the first draft of the report and their recommendations. Interesting discussion about the difference between what we as a department can do, and what the University must recognise is its responsibility. Lots of recommendations for action, but on first glance, most of them very sensible. Some will be easier to do than others such as looking at procurement policies, educating users (will that be easy?) to save power by turning machines off, using low power screen savers etc. Some will be harder because they will cost money including looking at DC and alternative energy power sources, optimising computer room airflow, installing sub metering so energy use per department can be measured. Some will be political, such as consolidating computer rooms, ie removing them from departments and locating all servers in our central machine rooms. Some will be impossible, such as powering down servers out of hours - I did point out that defining out of hours on a 24 hour campus and with distance learners all over the world would be a bit tricky!

I'm pleased to say that we came out of it very well, and we were commended on the actions we have already taken to reduce our carbon footprint, but there's still a lot to do. Don't get me started on printing again.....

Happy Birthday Blog

It's a year ago today that I sat and wrote my first post on this blog. I was in a hotel in London, about to go to a couple of meetings, and then a week later, the Educause Annual Conference. Everytime I was out of the office for any length of time, someone would ask me what I actually did when I wasn't there (and often what I did when I was there!) So, this blog started as a way of keeping people in the department in touch with what I was doing, and as an experiment to see if I could keep it up, and whether it was useful. I did what any self respecting IT Director should do, and asked someone to set it up for me. No, they said, set it up for yourself. So I did, and I'm quite proud that this is all my own work!

I decided that if writing it got to be a bore, or if I couldn't think of anything to say, or no-one read it, I would stop. Well, I'm still here, a year and 232 posts later. I haven't found it a bore to write, I can usually think of something to say ( well, about 4 times a week I can), and I know from google analytics that people are reading it. What I don't know is how useful or interesting it is! When I sit down to write it, the audience in my head is still my department, with maybe a secondary audience which is the rest of the University. What I have been fascinated by is how many people from outside the University read it - not just once, but keep coming back.

Readership has gradually risen, especially as it's been linked to from more places, and there are always interesting peaks. Sometimes I know why, for example when I put the Christmas Party pictures up, and some have me scratching my head as to what I've written that's suddenly so interesting. The last time was when someone linked to one of my posts from a local forum because I'd used a picture of a Sheffield building they obviously couldn't find anywhere else.

You can get some interesting stats from the analytics software. The most viewed post (other than the home page) is one of the first ones I wrote, about Abraham Lincoln - there's a lot of people interested in him as the most commonly used term to find this blog in Google is "leadership traits of Abraham Lincoln". The second most common term which finds this blog is "egg catapult'! Firefox is the broswer most people use, 22% of visitors use Macs and the average time people spend on the site is about 3 minutes.

So, I shall carry on until I run out of things to say, hoping that someone, somewhere is reading it and finding it vaguely interesting or useful, or better still, both!

Another train journey with no wireless and no laptop power...

Another travelling day today – to London to the UCISA Executive meeting. Our Chairman is holidaying in Australia, so it was down to me to chair the meeting. As usual, we began with a number of strategic items, presentations and discussions before moving to the business meeting after lunch.

First off was a presentation from JISC Infonet on their Strategy Planning & Implementation initiative which is funded by the JISC Organisational Support Committee. This programme of work is aimed at supporting and improving the effectiveness of strategic planning and looking at its implementation within higher and further education institutions. One of their first tasks was to carry out a survey on strategic issues faced by institutions, and the results are now available here.

Issues relating to 'organisational infrastructure' are the biggest challenges apparently faced by institutions, over financial concerns and operating within an increasingly competitive, market-driven sector. Indeed, five of the top six issues cited as wasting the most time, effort and energy within the institution are of an infrastructural nature (relating to the quality and efficiency of processes, communication & collaboration, IT infrastructure, information quality & access and poor decision-making processes). However, when institutions were asked why they were facing these pressures, 'external factors beyond their control' was cited as the principal factor.

We then had a very interesting discussion with the Chief Executive of JANET UK Tim Marshall about how UCISA and JANET might have a more formal partnership. We have an interesting relationship –we provide mission critical services to our institutions, and JANET provides the critical network infrastructure upon which we run those services. We discussed the measurement of services and performance, the importance of good customer feedback and governance.

Our final strategic item was an update on the UKRDS which I’ve reported on before.

Lots of items covered in the business meeting including the implementation of an extended character set by UCAS to enable applicants to have their names spelled correctly including special characters such as accents. This will have an implication on our student record systems. We also had to look at the current financial situation and how it might affect our business. One obvious area is conference attendance, and sponsorship of our events by suppliers.

Blogs and Wikis on their way

I've mentioned before that our Innovative Communications Project has been looking at web based applications, such as blogs and wikis, and we have agreed to invest in Clearspace. We've recently announced it to the University as follows:

A Internal Blogging and Wiki Service

We are investing in Clearspace, a collaboration environment, which we anticipate will have many applications within the University. Academics will be able to use it as a wiki and blogging environment in their teaching, linked from MOLE. Research groups, working with external collaborators, will be able to share and write documents together, and capture discussions as an alternative to email. Departments and groups across the University may use it to communicate and collaborate with colleagues as well as to publish documents.

In order to ensure the new service meets the needs of the University, we are running a number of pilots from Jan 2009 (through to May 2009), and the selected pilots will be asked to write a case study about how they used Clearspace and the benefits, and any problems of using it. If all goes as planned, the service will be available, to all, in May 2009.

We're well aware that many departments will be using external Web 2.0 Services within their work already - things like YouTube, Google, Slideshare or Facebook. These can be extremely useful applications, but there are some risks associated them including the ownership of the intellectual property of the ideas expressed through these tools and what happens if the application you're using is no longer available or the company providing it is taken over?

We have drawn together a number of resources to help departments consider the issues before they start investing time in using externally hosted web 2.0 applications.

UEB/HoDS meeting

Spent yesterday in Oxford on UCISA business - the train journey there is dreadful, but I get a lot of work done, and find myChat (our IM service) invaluable - I can talk to lots of people, it works better on my modem than email, and the rest of the carriage don't have to listen to my conversations whcih they would if I was using my mobile phone.

This morning we had a Heads of Department meeting with the University Executive Board. Very well attended meeting, and lots of good discussion. We had a presentation on the results of the NSS (National Student Survey) where overall we do very well - 3rd in the Russell Group. We've also seen big improvements in the area of Learning Resources (covering Library, IT and facilities) where we also score well. Some areas for improvement though, and these are being looked at.

The VC talked about his first year in office and the changes that have happened, as well as those yet to come! We'll be reviewing our Corporate Plan (Our Shared Vision) to ensure that not only are our aspirations still relevant, but we know how we're going to get to them.

We couldn't have a meeting in the current climate without looking at the University's financial position, and the only thing I'd better publish here is that we don't have any Icelandic deposits!

Customer Service Week

Last week the University took part in National Customer Service week. Lots of events all week, with the main one on Friday - the Customer Service awards. All staff and students are invited to nominate staff who have shown excellent customer service. This year we were very pleased to have 8 departmental nominations – 4 individual nominations and 4 team ones. Unfortunately we didn’t get one of the awards, but it was an excellent achievement to get so many nominations. I would like to congratulate the concierge team in the Information Commons who won one of the team awards – very well deserved. The building is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year – they are the first point of contact for all visitors to the building, and the only point of contact when the IC staff are not there. There are nights when there are several hundred students in the building and the team have to deal will every eventuality - which as you can imagine are many and varied! Well done to the whole team.

As part of the award ceremony we had a talk from Andy Hanselman on "Creating Devoted Customers". In a world of rising customer expectations and demands, how do you provide customer service that not only delights them, but keeps them "devoted' to you as a service provider? And just as important, how do you deal with their disappointments when the service isn't up to scratch and stop them becoming disaffected? Word of mouth - and word of mouse - is increasing and poor service can't be hidden. Andy gave some great examples, and provided a number of tips and ideas to answer the above questions. A few I remember are: stand in your own queues, ring up your own business, give your customers a damn good listening to, delight your customers, spot disappointment and address it immediately. All common sense, but easy to not do.

I'm committed to CiCS providing excellent customer service, and it's the reason we have a dedicated section to it in the department. BUT - it's everyone's responsibility, and just because we have a Customer Services Section it doesn't mean everyone else can just sit back. We're doing regular reviews of our services to get the views of our customers but over the next few weeks I want to get the views of those who provide the services - so I'll be walking a floor near you soon.....