Student feedback on technology

One of the things we've been looking at recently is a report commissioned by our Student Union earlier this year on the impact of technology on learning and teaching. Some interesting, but not entirely unexpected, findings. 

We know that students use a variety of devices including laptops and smart phones, and technologies ranging through email, social networking, Microsoft office, Google apps, the VLE, and ebooks. Some are institutionally based, some external. Students use technology in formal teaching and assessed work as well as informal learning and peer support. They mainly see technology as an enabler to learning, not a barrier. The research revealed that negative views are mainly around the lack of consistency in the use of technology  across different departments and variations in the student experience. There's also some confusion about the different systems, platforms and sites available. But the students also asked for our content to be available on more open platforms such as iTunesU and youTube, rather than just our in-house systems. 

It's clear from the research that students want to be involved in discussions with us, and are keen to give us feedback. They want a more consistent, joined up approach to the use of technology in learning and teaching, and more use of technology by those staff who don't currently engage.

So, all of this will get fed into the eLearning strategy which we're currently writing, and I'm very keen to see how we can engage more with students to get not just their feedback, but their ideas.

Agile, Audit and Availability

Yesterday we had our monthly meeting of Service Strategy Board. We don't get project reports in August, but we had a number of items on the agenda to discuss. These included:

We're moving towards much more agile, faster development, and so we need to look at how we run and manage projects alongside this. We had a presentation on Agile Project Management which was very interesting, and well received. In summary, this involves a more iterative, collaborative development between the customer and the developers, keeping customers continually engaged and with a shared ownership of outcomes. Use of prototypes early, not waiting till all specs are finished, More consideration of different options, less getting fixed down one route early. More staging of delivery, short development cycles, release of different stages early. More harnessing of users creativity - this is particularly beneficial when prototypes are used.  Of course, we already embrace some of these concepts to a greater or lesser degree, but we are now looking to increase them. With my customers hat on, I particularly welcome iterative and collaborative development using prototypes - I find it much easier to think about what I want when I can see something in front of me. For those in CiCS, there'll be more info at the next departmental meeting.

Another thing discussed was an audit of learning objects within the University. At the moment we have a range of different sorts of learning objects including audio, video, captures lectures etc, stored in a number of different places and not necessarily easily discoverable by all users. This audit will help us come up with a plan to index, catalogue and make easily available all learning content, which will be a collaborative venture between us and the Library.

As part of our Service Management implementation we looked at a proposal for Availibility Management, and the role of Availability Manager will  initially be to produce a mechanism for automated testing on the availability of our IT services. The aim will be  to provide availability information on all the IT services as defined in the service catalogue (which we also discussed at SSB as we've made a number of revisions to it). So, we 'll be  putting in place automated testing  using the most appropriate technology, but of course there'll  be instances where it may not be practical to put these in place  due to  overhead  issues. Hopefully the outputs of the tests will be developed into appropriate dashboards to help improve information and therefore the quality of our services.

We had a couple of "lessons learned" project reviews to consider, of our SAP upgrade and our Google Apps implementation, so, a busy meeting.

Super High Vision

Well, we had a great time in Lanzarote, if you're really into "what I did on my holiday stories", which I suspect most of you aren't, you can read what I did here. The highlight was 3 hours off-roading on a Segway - my favourite thing!

This week has been mainly catching up, deleting emails, unsubscribing from many email lists and quite a bit of stuff that's confidential and I can't blog about. But, a highlight was last night, being invited to a Janet event at the National Media Museum in Bradford.

Janet have been part of an international collaboration with the BBC and NHK, Japan's national public broadcasting organization, to showcase Super High Vision (SHV) technology. SHV is ultra high quality and transmits images with 16 times sharper resolution than standard HD television. It was developed by NHK, and has been used in selected venues in the UK to show footage from the Olympics. All of the data has been transmitted over Janet.

Last night we watched a selection of clips, about an hour's worth of coverage, from the Opening Ceremony, athletics (including Jessica Ennis and Usain Bolt), and the cycling (including Chris Hoy). Together with the ultra high definition images, there was 22.2 multichannel surround sound!  I have to say, it was stunning. Absolutely stunning. It felt as if you were there. The detail and the definition was amazing, and the sound made you feel part of the action. It is very difficult to describe. Everything at the moment is in prototype, the cameras apparently worth about £1m each. Even the projector at the back of the theatre was worth between £500,000 and £750,000.

At the end of the screening, representatives from the BBC and NHK and the head of projection at the museum did a Q and A which was fascinating. Sadly, everything is about to be dismantled and transported back to Japan, but if this is the future of broadcasting, I can't wait!

Quick round up

A quick round up of the last couple of days.

Most of Wednesday I was in a meeting of the design team for the New engineering Building, which will have a lot of student led, IC type space in it. Designed by the same team who did the IC, its getting to the exciting stage now. We've got some great ideas for the external appearance, and the internal layouts are being firmed up. More details soon, but here's a picture of what it might look like.

Yesterday I was in Oxford for a meeting of the organising Committee of the UCISA Management Conference. Agenda coming along nicely now, and some changes and innovations in format being introduced.

This morning I was in a three hour workshop on procurement - and it was interesting and informative! We were looking at where we wanted to be strategically in terms of procurement - lots of issues raised and debated.

Now I'm disappearing for a couple of weeks somewhere hot. See you when I get back. 

Graduation part 2 lol

A couple of days ago I blogged about some things we were doing to make our students and their parents and friends experience of graduation a bit more interactive. I'm pleased to say that the gigapixel photos are up and a huge success. Very high definition, you can zoom in to individual faces, tag them in Facebook, and take a screenshot of you or your friends and post it to your Facebook wall. Thanks to Ed Miller of Re-Axive for doing them for us, as well as graduating himself.

The live video stream is also working well - we get many students each year who we either can't give enough tickets to for all of their family to attend, or their family and friends can't attend for some reason - too far to travel or illness for example. The live stream this year is high quality ( but will be better next year, we're already working on it!), and designed to cope with a high number of users. There's a steady stream of a few hundred people looking at it, and our stats show they're from all over the world. So far, so good. Yesterday afternoon we noticed that the viewing numbers had shot up to over a thousand, and about two minutes of detective work traced this to the brother of one of one of our graduands tweeting to his many followers:

"Guys my sisters university is live streaming the graduation! When I get the link I want you guys to flood it like crazy!!!! IT'LL BE EPIC"
And:
"Everyone! Bombard this link"

Clever eh? What was particularly clever was that it took us about another two minutes to work out who he was and pinpoint the exact seat he was sitting in. :-) So, we were able to have a quiet word with him after the ceremony. Just to point out that if he had brought the stream down, which he had been exhorting his followers to do, he would have stopped parents, brothers, sisters, friends, from all over the world seeing their loved ones graduate. Of course, he behaved in the arrogant, cocky way we expected, and we even got a lol tweet afterwards:-). But, no harm done, our stream coped easily with about 1,700 viewers, and it's a lesson to all of us that part of our planning and risk analysis always has to include the idiot factor!






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Gigapixel, taggable graduation images are here

This week is Graduation Week - I always enjoy it, and try to get to as many ceremonies as I can. Makes me realise why we are all here!

This year we've introduced two new things which hopefully will be popular with the students and their families. We're the first UK University to take high definition images of the hall just before the start of the ceremony.  These "gigapixel" images, which are normally reserved for high profile events such as the Royal Wedding, are being taken by one of our own students, Edward Miller, who will be graduating at one of the ceremonies he will be photographing. Ed won the Sheffield University Business Planning Competition earlier this year, and is setting up his own business Re-Axive. Building on our use of  social media, the pictures will be taggable through Facebook. You'll be able to see them here from Tuesday 17 July. We're also going to use Ed's skills to take some interactive 360degree photos of the campus.

The other thing we're doing this year is streaming all of the ceremonies live. We've experimented in the past with web cams, but this is the proper stuff.  You can watch them here, at  0930, 1200 and 1530 all this week. Each one last about an hour. I particularly like the bit where the students stand up and applaud their parents and friends. Not a dry eye in the house!  If you're watching on Thursday lunchtime, you should get to see Martin Fry get his honorary degree.

And we've got another press release out - that's three this year :-)

Well Connected

Was pointed at this last night by a colleague - a website and a mobile one for our students who have mental health and wellbeing difficulties. It's called Well Connected, and is in beta at the moment. I thought it was a nice example of using the web and social media to help our students.  Developed by colleagues in Student Services with a lot of input from students,  especailly the outgoing and incoming welfare officers. We also had a hand in it, on the project board and the design. There's a good video showing the ideas behind it:

Service Strategy Board

Service Strategy Board yesterday. Another good meeting - always lots to discuss. As usual we went through  reports from all of our projects as well as getting reports from all of our service managers.

Particular things we looked at included:

• A review of our recent filestore upgrade. This had a timeline of everything that had happened, and focused on lessons learned, and made a number of recommendations for future such events. The timing of this one hadn't been easy, it had to come before our VLE upgrade, and it did have the potential to disrupt some exams processing, which is one of the reasons the work was carried out through the night. We discussed whether we should have a dedicated upgrade/downtime window during the summer, but discounted it as it was felt that users would expect all work to be done within that period, which would carry its own risks, and it would be difficult to time. We agreed that we would probably  always have to build at least one downtime window into our planning for the summer, and we would have to ensure that our customers understood the reason for this, but that we would arrange the time in order to cause as little disruption as possible. 

• A proposal to build more formal gateway reviews into all of our projects. This will be at major milestones, and will give SSB the opportunity to consider strategic priorities  at key points, and contribute to the consideration of project options.

• A proposal to look at providing a mobile print service to allow students and staff to print from all of their mobile devices. The first stage of this will be to assess demand.

• A proposal to implement a mobile app for our VLE.

• A revised service catalogue - our first major review has taken place.

And I thought I'd share this with you - you'll know I was at the JANET Brokerage last week, and I admired their new mugs. So they sent me one. This is how it arrived. Well, that's the Brokerage for you.

Janet Brokerage advisory Group

Today I've been in Harwell at the Advisory Board for the Janet Brokerage. Lots of interesting discussions, can't report on all of them for commercial reasons, but will try and give a flavour of things covered.

The Brokerage are talking to major cloud service providers, and we had a report on negotiations with Microsoft about their 365 service. Work is being done on standardising contracts, terms and conditions, and different licensing offerings to the sector. Other cloud providers will also be approached, including Google.

We also confirmed what the eight suppliers on the framework agreement offer. In summary:
Collocation at tier 2 and above
IaaS, including VM ware, public, private, community and hybrid clouds
Combined procurement
Complementary services eg consultancy, planning and managed services.

Use cases include off site data centres, Disaster Recovery, hybrid virtual infrastructure, cloud burst and research infrastructure

There's an event coming up soon where we will be able to ask the suppliers what they can do for us, and for them to find out what it is we need. It's a speed dating event, and details are here.

The brokerage are also working with other bodies including UCISA on costing of IT Services, with the hope of producing some sort of calculator or modelling tool. Knowing the total cost of services is an important part of any cloud or outsourcing decision making process.

During the day I learnt about Moonshot, a project looking at authentication and federated access to applications in the HE community led by JANET. looks interesting, and of particular use by researchers.

Finally, we had a demonstration of meaning based computing from Autonomy. Using their Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), very intelligent and contextual searches can be carried out across multiple data sources, looking for patterns. Think searching emails from Barclays Bank looking for evidence of rate fixing.... The can also search media, including in socialedia looking for trends, looking for what people are saying about you, your brand, your product, and giving it a positive or negative rating. Unfortunately I had to leave to catch my train before the end, but was very impressed with what I saw, and could see an application for the intelligent and contextual searching in the research collaboration space.


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Think before you post

Today one of our local legal firms ran a workshop for senior Professional Service managers on Social Media.  I was a little nervous at first, as I didn't want it to be full of the legal pitfalls and put people off, but I needn't have worried. It was an excellent session, very interactive with a lot of discussion around issues that everyone needs to be aware of. I began with a quick overview of how we use social media in the University, and particularly in CiCS, mainly Twitter, Facebook and blogs. We then had a round table discussion about how other departments, including the student Union, our accommodation service and the Library use it. What soon came out was that this is not something you can do as an afterthought. It requires dedicated resource at a reasonably senior level, and constant monitoring. It's also interactive, and questions need to be responded to, conversations need to be completed.

Then we had a look at some of the pitfalls and how things can go badly wrong. From misguided marketing by Habitat to posting from an official account, instead of your personal one. Some of the risks you have to be aware of include damage to the University's reputation, liability for defamatory material, infringement of IP, data protection breaches, and making contractual agreements. All of these risks can be mitigated if you control who has access to your official account, having some guidelines, and agreement about content and messages, and being positive, helpful and friendly.

Of course, we all make mistakes, and how you recover from them is very important in a medium as fast and pervasive as twitter. Do you take down the offending material, or respond, or apologise, or make a joke of it? This is a really good example of how to do it.

In terms of personal use, one of the hardest things to deal with in the workplace is bullying and harassment issues.  We had a discussion bout whether we need guidelines on the use of social media for all of our staff - at the moment we don't. Our view has always been that our existing policies - on use of IT,  on bullying and harassment, on bringing the University into disrepute, should be robust enough to deal with any form of media. Similar discussions took place when email was first implemented. Our values, including respect for our colleagues, should also be applied to all forms of communication.

Finally, we had a quick look at how third party social media sites can be handled if defamatory or misleading information is posted on them.  I particularly like this example of a response.

And we ended on a very good piece of advice - "Think before you post".  Something that Michael Ruse would have been advised to do.

Annual Report and Newsletter

Every month we send a newsletter to all staff and students (different ones - tailored to the information they need), and this month's has just gone out, and with it our Annual Report for this academic year.  As usual, our comms and design and print teams have done a great job - it looks good, and I hope people find it interesting. For the first time we've made it available to mobile devices using Google Currents, thanks to our web team. You can see the newsletter and get links to the pdf and mobile versions of the Annual Report here.


Here's the Currents version on my iPad, I think it looks great:

Computation meets knowledge

The final session yesterday was a talk from Conrad Wolfram, strategic director and European co-founder and CEO of the Wolfram group of companies. He is the person behind Wolfram Alpha.

He was great!  Started by explaining that we'd gone from a situation where knowledge was difficult to get, to a situation where we are overloaded with information  and we find it difficult to get to what we need. It's going to get worse! Data will soon be bombarding us from everywhere. Everything from personal medical devices monitoring everything about us, to domestic appliances, not forgetting government data and financial data.

He believes that Computation is the answer and that Computation is for everyone!

Wolfram alpha is a computational engine, and he demonstrated some of the queries it can do in real time - such as calculating the  GDP of the UK. Then comparing it with BP's share price. My favourite was when he put in cous cous plus rhubarb. Try it. you get all sorts. Or, you can just ask it,  "Am I drunk?"and it will bring up a blood alcohol calculator.

They've launched a format for interactive documents called CDF - the computable document format.
So, you don't get dead documents, but you can change stuff on them and it recalculates the answer. Really useful for things like pension statements.
There's some great apps on the Wolfram demonstrations site. Go have a look.

I was impressed that he demonstrated live app authoring, on stage. Took about 60 seconds:






A good question - how many of us can ask  linguistic questions of our ERP systems? Can we say to SAP, "how much holiday have I got left?" The answer is clearly no, but he believes this is the way we should be going.

Finally, he talked about how he believed that we had to change our education paradigm, especially in Maths. Summed up in this TED talk:




Great end to a great day.
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More lightning sessions...

Founder, Tech for Trade
Interesting project to use to 3D printing in the developing world. More here, including a video.

CEO, SpotOne Global Solutions
Helping Africa get access to technology. Work with investors, technology providers, donors, software developers and resellers. Bring technology into villages, including mobile phones. Apps for Africa competition.

Founder, AMEE
Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine.
Set up to measure the footprint of things.
Looking at systems collapse. Species. Corals. Marine dead zones. Global freshwater quality.
Don't have adequate data to make good decisions.
Lack of reliable and consistent time series data.
Started with aggregating all worlds environmental standards into one platform. Then make it easy to interrogate and report on.
Then built an environmental intelligence system within collects data from many sources, sensors etc. Can calculate environmental footprint of anything.

Co-founders, Technology Will Save Us
Make DIY technology kits. Show people what their capable of by lowering the barrier of entry to technology. Kits contain components and instruction to inspire appreciation and production of technology. Range from musical instruments to speakers. Also tools like soldering kits. Not just kits, but educational experience. Workshops, and hands on courses. Even how to wire a plug. Soldering for kids. Also teardown everyday appliances to show how they're made. Had a toaster tear down day.

Great set of speakers and presentations.


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