Much of this week was spent in London. Monday I was in our London office, and on Tuesday and Wednesday I was at the WonkHE Festival of Higher Education where I was speaking on a panel about collaboration.

I really enjoyed attending the WonkHE Festival of Higher Education and I am slightly sad that they are taking a fallow year in 2026. What works for me is the structure and format of the range of sessions that happen across the conference. I like the interview format of the keynote sessions which is different to the usual kinds of keynotes we see at other conferences. There was a dearth of PowerPoint slides in most sessions, which I liked. Sometimes slides dominate a session rather than enhance it.

My session was on how to collaborate, which seemed to go down well. Also decent audience for a penultimate session on the final day. The only issue for me was that I had a bad cough all week which meant that I had virtually lost my voice and did have trouble speaking in the session, a number of people referenced my radio voice.

I particularly enjoyed the final session about where will higher education be in 2050. There was an amusing lively debate on the discord channel for this conference session. It reminded me of how we would use what was the Twitter back in the early 2010s at conferences.

At the end of the week I braved the rain and delayed trains to get to the office in Bristol.