Category Archives: digifest19

digifest19, presentation, weeknotes

Photographic Presentations – Weeknote #26 – 30th August 2019

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Mine shaft at The Black Country Living Museum
Mine shaft at The Black Country Living Museum

A rather short week for me, as taking some leave. This week started for me on Wednesday as we had a bank holiday here in England and I took some additional leave.

Fetter Lane, London
Fetter Lane, London

I was off to London again, this time for an internal meeting about the Intelligent Campus, in which I provided some insights into the work I did on the project over the last few years. It reminded me about how much I enjoyed working on that project and the sheer quantity of ideas, use cases, blog posts I created and wrote over that time.

It also reminded me of how the presentation I created for the project evolved and developed over the life of the project.

When I ran the first community event at Sheffield Hallam in March 2018 the presentation was very wordy.

PPT Slides

When I spoke about the Intelligent Campus in March 2019 at Digifest, the presentation was nearly all images.

PPT Slides

I delivered variations of the presentation many times in that twelve month period, including a keynote in France, as well as versions at events and at meetings with universities. The more confident I got with the content and the details, meant I reduced the words and replaced them with images.

I have also been working on the assessment criteria for the Learning Technologist Technical Career Pathway using the SIFA framework.

I think it needs more work and some extra non-SIFA units to make it more aligned to the Learning Technologist role within Jisc.

I was only working two days this week, and Friday I was back in the office for more meetings and tying up loose ends from my growing inbox.

We have moved to a self-service model for booking travel and accommodation, which means for me less back and forth when booking hotels in cities I don’t know or have not stayed in before. Having booked a hotel for a trip to Leeds, my next booking will be for a meeting in Edinburgh.

Group working
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

I did find this article from Wonkhe interesting and insightful

We’re failing black students if we don’t talk about recruitment bias

I remember a long time ago, getting a job, not just because I matched the criteria and did a good interview, but because the panel felt that I was someone they could drink coffee with first thing in the morning. In other words I fitted their expectations of a colleague they could both work with, but also fit into their culture.

I doubt back then “unconscious bias” was even thought about, let alone even considered as an issue. Did the other candidates make them feel uncomfortable? Did they even understand why that was?

Interesting it was in that job, that I started to realise as white middle class male that I had privileges that came to me just because of my gender and ethnicity. I started to recognise that when working with people that they had different backgrounds, cultures and challenges, that were nothing like mine, so I had to ensure I didn’t let this impact on the decisions I was making.

My top tweet this week was this one.

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Intelligent Talking – Weeknote #02 – 15th March

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Monday I was working at home and spent some time preparing for my talk on the Intelligent Campus which I am delivering at Digifest.

I spent two days in Birmingham at the annual Jisc Digital Festival, Digifest. On the first day I delivered a one hour thought leadership session on the intelligent campus.

There were over a hundred people in the room and I enjoyed talking about the intelligent campus, defining what it means, how it could work, the potential for universities and colleges.

The second day of Digifest gave me a chance to participate in a range of sessions, though I really did enjoy the panel session on the listening to teachers report run by Lawrie Phipps and Donna Lanclos.

I had a fair few calls about future events and my role within those events.

Towards the end of the week I was ensuring that all the logistical details of the Senior TEL working group meeting were completed. In a new directorate meant that not everything was done in the same way as was done in my previous role. Some of the processes though were the same. I also took the time to doing some background reading for the meeting.

My top tweet this week was this one.

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Talking Intelligently at #Digifest19

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Digifest

Next week it’s time for Jisc’s Digifest and I am doing a one hour interactive presentation on the Intelligent Campus.

The smart campus is already here; the technology, sensors and data analysis capability is all available, but it isn’t all joined up and so has limited scope in terms of what we can learn and how we can use the knowledge.

In order to enhance the student experience, allow for more effective and efficient use of space, could we take the smart campus and make it intelligent?

Universities and colleges spend billions on their campuses, yet they are frequently underutilised and are often a frustrating experience for students. In this session, I will describe the campus of the future. How does a traditional campus become a smart campus? What are the steps to make a smart campus, an intelligent campus? We have an opportunity to provide our members with a service that can help them address that problem. If we extend our learning analytics infrastructure to collect data from a wider range of institutional software and devices then we can deliver novel insights to institutional managers to help them make their campuses more efficient, improve student experience and deliver higher quality teaching.

The future intelligent campus service aims to find effective ways to use data gathered from the physical estate and combine it with learning and student data from student records, library systems, the virtual learning environment (VLE) and other digital systems. This session will describe what data can be gathered, how it can be measured and explore the potential for enhancing the student experience. It will demonstrate and explain to the delegates what the exciting future of the intelligent campus. Importantly I will also ask delegates to consider the ethical issues when implementing an intelligent campus as well as the legal requirements.

The one hour session takes place on there 12th March, at 11:30 in hall 9.

To read more about what is an intelligent campus have a read of this article, What makes an intelligent campus?, in Educational Technology written by me.

To find out more about the Jisc Intelligent Campus project – Using data to make smarter use of your university or college estate – see this webpage.

Jisc have published a guide for universities and colleges who are interested in venturing into the Intelligent Campus space.

In order to understand the potential of the Intelligent Campus space we have published a series of use cases.

For regular updates on the project and what is happening in the Intelligent Campus space then visit the project blog.