All posts by James Clay

It might be cold, very cold – Weeknote #310 – 7th February 2025

Next week I am off to Helsinki for an E in NREN workshop. Looking at the predicted weather forecast I think it might be cold. So the question is do I buy some cold weather gear for a few days in Finland, or do I make do with what I have, and if necessary just stay indoors? I am not expecting to be spending a lot of time outdoors, so…

Managed to get to the office this week. I do like going to the office, nice for a change of scenery, and the social aspect is important as well.

I had a couple of meetings with NREN colleagues this week discussing some stuff. That workshop, future collaboration, and sharing what we do.

I attended a regular meeting Jisc has with the OfS and discussed the various activities Jisc has been undertaking for higher education.

Continued my researching, planning and writing initial draft for higher education State of Activity report. Getting there.

Is there an appetite for collaboration? – Weeknote #309 – 31st January 2025

This week I attended the joint HEPI and Jisc webinar: Competition or collaboration? Opportunities for the future of the higher education sector. This was building on the Collaboration for a sustainable future report we recently published.

The appetite for collaboration and sharing appears to be growing, but as with any change, people want change, but don’t necessarily want to change. The more radical the change, the more resistant people become it would appear. However to maximise the benefits of collaboration, then very likely we will need some radical change.

One thing I have been thinking about is the barrier of identity. When you collaborate, do you lose your institutional identity. This actually brings back to the table the importance of personalisation.

I have continued to research, plan, and start writing an initial draft for higher education state of activity internal report. The challenge is how much to include and how much detail to put in there.

iPad
Image by Photo Mix from Pixabay

I have also been researching data standards for teaching and learning, and corporate systems. The more I do, the more I realise I don’t know.

Managed to get to the Bristol office twice this week, Wednesday was very busy, and as you might expect Friday was less so.

Raising the standards – Weeknote #308 – 24th January 2025

I was off to London again this week. I was attending an 1EdTech Event in London, Innovate your way out of the funding crisis. This was my first engagement with the standards community for some time. Before I joined Jisc and when I was working in Further Education I did a lot of work looking at standards in relation to moving student data around so it could be imported into the VLE. Then there were standards for learning objects and ensuring that they would work on the VLE, both importing and exporting the right data. I also being very impressed with LTI and what it would enable in allowing students to use a WordPress installation for blogging. Blogging, what was that, and is it still around?

We are starting work on a collaborative project with UUK on collaboration. Part of that is reviewing the original terms of reference and bringing in a consultant to undertake some of the work as well.

laptop
Image by fancycrave1 from Pixabay

I have been spending time researching, planning and writing initial draft for a higher education state of activity report.

In February Jisc has one of its regular meetings with the OfS and I have been preparing some notes for that meeting.

Spent time on the planning and logistics for a workshop I am attending in Helsinki in February. The workshop is about NRENs for Education. NRENs are the National Research and Education Networks that most countries have for connecting their universities and research institutes. In the UK Jisc is the NREN. This workshop is bringing together a group of like-minded NRENs to work together on essentially student mobility.

I am anticipating that Helsinki will be cold. I have been before, for an EU e-Learning Conference which took place in July 2006 in Finland. I reminisced about that conference back in a weeknote in July 2019.

I also signed up for TNC in Brighton in June. It’s the first TNC I go to, and it’s in the UK. Reminds me when I got funding to go to the international conference mLearn, and the year I went, it was in Dudley.

I haz a cold… – Weeknote #307 – 17th January 2025

The week started off well, but by the end of the week I was off sick with a bad cold.

Have been having meetings with UUK in regard to strand two of the work of UUK’s Taskforce on Efficiency and Transformation in Higher Education. Strand two covers: Developing detailed business cases on options for national collaboration, which will be externally published, and will give the sector clear paths towards transformation. This builds on the recent report I worked on, Collaboration for a sustainable future which looked at collaboration and shared services.

On Thursday, decided I would get to London for our team away day. It was exhausting and certainly I regret a little bit in heading off there feeling rough as I did.

e-Learning Stuff: Top Ten Blog Posts 2024

laptop with coffee
Image by Firmbee from Pixabay

Having posted that I was unable to post a top ten from 2024 looking at the dashboard I realised I could see the stats for the blog posts from 2024.

In 2024 I posted 70 posts on the blog. In 2023 I wrote 89 posts on the blog. There were 92 posts in 2022, 113 blog posts in 2021. In 2020 I had written 94 blog posts. In 2019 I had written 52 blog posts which was up from 2018 when I only wrote 17 blog posts.

Microphone
Image by rafabendo from Pixabay

The tenth most popular post was Lost in translation: the radio programme. This was a blog post from a series of posts I did during the covid pandemic, but still has relevance today.

The post at number nine was The idea of capturing a lecture… was a thought piece from April 2024. It discussed that capturing a lecture isn’t a new idea, however capturing a lecture may not be the optimum way of delivering a recorded version of the in-person session.

A really old post from 2008 was the eighth most popular post. Full Resolution Video on the PSP. Do people still use the PSP?

PSP
Image by WikimediaImages from Pixabay

Seventh place was Ten ways to use QR Codes which was not a post about ten ways to use QR codes. At the time QR codes appeared to be more of a fad with people using QR codes because they were QR codes. Since then the proper use cases for QR codes has grown, most people find them useful now for doing other things, they are a means to and end.

The post at number six was from 2015, I can do that… What does “embrace technology” mean? was from the FE Area Reviews.

The post at number five was a week note from 2019, Student Journey – Weeknote #08 – 26th April 2019.

walking home
Image by 춘성 강 from Pixabay

The fourth most popular post was written in February 2024 and asked the question: What makes an intelligent campus?

At number three was a post on freakish occurrences, “million-to-one chances happen nine times out of ten”. One of my favourite quotes from Terry Pratchett is that “million-to-one chances happen nine times out of ten”. When something awful happens, or freakish, we hear news reporters say “it was a million-to-one chance that this would happen”.

snowy road

The second most popular post was from 2009 and asked To Retweet or not to Retweet which was a post about retweeting on the Twitter.

The most popular post in 2024 is one of the all time popular posts, The iPad Pedagogy Wheel. Published in 2013, this was number one for many years.. I re-posted the iPad Pedagogy Wheel as I was getting asked a fair bit, “how can I use this nice shiny iPad that you have given me to support teaching and learning?”. It’s a really simple nice graphic that explores the different apps available and where they fit within Bloom’s Taxonomy. What I like about it is that you can start where you like, if you have an iPad app you like you can see how it fits into the pedagogy. Or you can work out which iPads apps fit into a pedagogical problem.

Snow time for regrets – Weeknote #306 – 10th January 2025

Well first week back at work after the two week break for festivities. I nearly wrote first week back in the office, but with hybrid working, I suspect for some, this first day still means working from home. Also in various parts of the country the snow and flooding would make commuting challenging Personally I headed to our Bristol office. We still have a choice of where we can work with hybrid contracts, but I read yesterday about how many companies are now forcing or requiring staff to come into the office.

This was covered in a Guardian article, ‘It didn’t come as a surprise’: UK workers on being forced back into the office.

Some welcome cuts to hybrid working but others feel less productive and are considering change of job or country.

Many employers are mandating the return to the office, in this other piece on the Guardian website.

The post-festive return to work in the dark days of January is never easy, but this new year is shaping up to be tougher than usual for UK workers. Not only must they brave days of severe cold and ice, but many face the end of post-pandemic hybrid working.

The article continues…

Such orders are provoking fresh battles between employees and their bosses, who believe staff need to be brought together to foster collaboration, creativity and a sense of belonging.

The challenge I find with that, is with a geographically distributed team, even when you are in the office you are spending a lot of time on online calls and meetings. The value in being physically in the office is lost.

I expanded on this on one of my other blogs.

Image by Anja from Pixabay

Lots of snow this week, however, I didn’t see much mention of university closures compared to say fifteen years ago when we had some really bad snow. I wrote about this.

So this week we’ve had some snow, but I suspect the disruption is still there, but the response from the sector will be influenced by that covid experience, to the point where the disruption can be minimised.

Met with our new Head of Research this week.

Universities need new ways to make their research pay. An interesting opinion piece on the FT about York looking to diversify their research income by looking to industry to fill that gap.

Public and private funding are both vital for institutions such as the University of York as international student fees fall. But cracks have appeared in York’s financial foundations in the past couple of years. It suffered a £9mn deficit last financial year amid a fall in the number of higher-fee international students on whom it relies to support research and teaching of UK students. It shed 275 jobs, mainly among administrative staff, as part of an unpopular restructuring.

Attended our regular internal Consultancy Forum where the Collaboration for a sustainable future report was discussed and the opportunities therein for possible consultancy in this space.

Spent much of the week I felt filling in a survey for a workshop. The survey was about Jisc activity across various spaces and planned activity.

I finished and completed Lead at Jisc management and leadership course I have been doing since last April.

Is it a Snow Day?

Lots of snow this week, however, I didn’t see much mention of university closures compared to say fifteen years ago when we had some really bad snow.

Back in February 2009 we had the worst snow for twenty years. Many universities  and colleges closed, most publishing notices about the closure to their websites.

At the time myself and few others recorded a podcast about the role that learning technologies and communication tools can have in supporting colleges and schools that get closed because of the snow.

I remember discussing the issue with colleagues at the time once the snow had melted that we as a college did not make much more use of our VLE and other online platforms during the time we were closed. The result of the discussion was that closing for three days every twenty years was not something we really needed to spend resources and time planning for. There is a point, when there is an “out of the ordinary” event, contingency planning probably isn’t required in any great depth. Much easier just to deal with the problems resulting from the closure than try and plan just in case (which at the time) for a remote chance of closing.

However then in January 2010… the snow came back, this time the worse snow for forty years! Once more lots of universities, colleges, and schools closed. I discussed this at the time in my blog post on snow. My main point was:

Yes, snow makes it dangerous to travel, but with the internet and mobile technologies, does it mean that learners need to stop learning just because the decision is taken to close the physical location? So what if this snow is unprecedented? What if we are now not going to have bad snow for another twenty years?

My next point in the post was this.

Closures happen a lot, time to start thinking about how an educational institution can make best use of the fantastic tools that are available to it for learning. Though the first thing to do will be to change the culture. It’s not just about contingency planning; it’s about changing the way people work when there isn’t snow and changing the way people think when there is.

It was never about the snow; it was about the disruption.

In 2010 I spoke at the Plymouth e-learning conference, I chaired a debate about closing the physical campus in times of crisis and disruption. I wrote about this at the time in this blog post.

Even if it doesn’t snow really badly next year, other things may happen that result in the physical closure of the educational institution. It could be floods, high winds (remember 1987), flu or similar viral infections, transport strikes, fuel crisis, anything…

Of course in 2020 we had the global covid pandemic, and disruption was taken to an unprecedented level, which meant as a sector, we had to respond quickly and effectively. There was a massive emergency response and the sector moved everthing online and people stayed at home.

So this week we’ve had some snow, but I suspect the disruption is still there, but the response from the sector will be influenced by that covid experience, to the point where the disruption can be minimised.

Is today a snow day? No it’s just a day when it snowed.

Review of 2024

coffee

Usually at this time I would publish a blog post of the top ten posts of the previous twelve months. However WordPress have stopped doing free stats for blogs that show adverts. So I don’t have detailed stats about the top posts.

I posted 70 posts on the blog.

In 2023 I wrote 89 posts on the blog. There were 92 posts in 2022, 113 blog posts in 2021. In 2020 I had written 94 blog posts. In 2019 I had written 52 blog posts which was up from 2018 when I only wrote 17 blog posts.