Tag Archives: virtual reality

Presenting, presenting, presenting – Weeknote #33 – 18th October 2019

Photo by Alex Litvin on Unsplash
Photo by Alex Litvin on Unsplash

Monday I was undertaking the final preparations for some presentation training I am delivering on Thursday. This included printing some postcards as well as designing activities.

I took advantage of Pixabay to find images for my postcards, this is a great site for images, and due to their open licensing, you can use them in a variety of ways. Though I often attribute the site for the images I use, it’s not a requirement, so if you use them later or forget, it’s not really an issue.

Tuesday I was off to London for a meeting to discuss some future collaborative work that Jisc may undertake. What are the big challenges that HE (and FE) are facing for the future. One comment which was made I thought was interesting, was how challenging it was to get people to think about long term future challenges. Most people can identify current issues and potential near-future challenges but identifying the really big challenges that will impact education in the medium or long term, is really hard. Part of the challenge is that there are so many factors that can impact and predicting the future is thus very hard.

Reminded of this challenge of predicting the future, this week with the imminent anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall thirty years ago. Watching the haunting nuclear war TV film, Threads in 1984, I had no idea that the Cold War was every going to end, it looked like it would last forever and we would always be living under the threat of nuclear war. Five years later on the 9thNovember 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. I remember watching it on the news in my student accommodation, thinking, what’s happening, how is this happening? Back then we didn’t have social media, mobile phones or the web, so the only way for news to filter through was by television and newspapers. A year later we had the reunification of Germany. A year after that the USSR was dissolved. Continue reading Presenting, presenting, presenting – Weeknote #33 – 18th October 2019

What’s a lightboard? – Weeknote #28 – 13th September 2019

The Old Bailey

So it was off to London on Monday for a couple of meetings. The weather on Sunday had been lovely, Monday it was raining.

I don’t think I would like to commute to London on a regular basis, as in every day, but don’t mind the fact that I am there three to five times a month in my role. I nearly said new role, I have been doing this job now for just over six months (Weeknote #28 is a bit of a giveaway), when does a new role, become just my role? Other parts of the country differ in their accessibility with public transport, so sometimes I drive.

The failings of the CIA over 9/11 have been well documented, though on Tuesday morning I did read the following BBC viewpoint article – Viewpoint: The CIA, 9/11 and collective blindness

These two quotes are what I really took from the article.

We are unconsciously drawn to people who think like ourselves, but rarely notice the danger because we are unaware of our own blind spots.

This applies to groups as well as organisations. We employ people that are like ourselves rather than think about the whole. You can measure diversity within an organisation, but that only tells you what you already know that your organisation isn’t diverse. Sometimes your organisation needs to be more diverse than the population, but how do you know that?

You may feel you have fair employment recruitment practices, but who decides what is “fair”, sometimes you will want to recruit people that wouldn’t be recruited if you were to be fair.

I am also reminded of unconscious bias, and the fact that this is easier to say then sometimes to actually do something about. This was echoed in the second quote from the article.

There is a science to putting together the right minds, with perspectives that challenge, augment, diverge and cross-pollinate rather than parrot, corroborate and restrict. This is how wholes become more than the sum of their parts.

There isn’t an easy solution to this, you could think outside the box and put together teams that are not like ourselves, but that is not as easy as it sounds. The rewards though, as the article says mean wholes become more than the sum of their parts.

Rochdale Canal in Manchester
Rochdale Canal in Manchester

Wednesday I caught the train to Manchester, to attend an internal product meeting where I was presenting on the drivers within the draft Jisc HE strategy.

It was quite along train journey there and back in a day, and though I did manage to get a fair bit of work done, the lack of connectivity did annoy me as it has before.

Rochdale Canal in Manchester
Rochdale Canal in Manchester

I wrote a blog post on making digital a choice,  in response to a BBC news article about a branch of Sainsbury’s in Holborn in London where the only choice to pay was via an app.

Digital should be a choice…

University of Leeds - Leeds Business School
Leeds Business School

Friday I was in Leeds to deliver a keynote on Education 4.0 for the Leeds Business School, I had travelled up the day before.

Leeds Business School Active Learning Studio
Leeds Business School Active Learning Studio

I showed a presentation, which is all photos. In the presentation I talked about who is Jisc, what do we mean by the Education 4.0 and some of the challenges we face in moving down the road to Education 4.0.

I also showed the Jisc Education 4.0 video we showed at UUK last year and at Digifest.

https://youtu.be/aVWHp8FsV1w

Frances Noble from the University of Leeds did a fantastic sketch note of my talk.

Education 4.0 Sketchnote

I attended a couple of sessions following my keynote including a demonstration of ClassVR.

ClassVR demonstration

I was also shown a piece of technology I had never heard of or seen in action.

The Lightboard (a.k.a. learning glass) is a glass chalkboard pumped full of light. It’s for recording video lecture topics.

My top tweet this week was this one.