Category Archives: weeknotes

weeknotes

No Snow – Weeknote #358 – 9th January

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path

I was back at work after the festive break. In theory the first work day back was the 2nd of January, but I had taken leave on that day.

I had about twenty emails in my inbox (which was empty when I finished work in December). Took almost no time to clear as virtually all of them were notifications of some kind.

Across a lot of the country there was heavy snow and as you might expect closures of schools and colleges. I could mention all those blogs and podcasts I have written about snow, but not today. For me, though most of the week was icy cold, the sun was shining. Just one day of wind and rain.

I did manage to get to the Bristol office this week, which was quite busy so had a bit of  buzz in there.

I am continuing to look at data models in relation to student mobility. There are a couple of meetings next week that I was preparing for.

campus
Image by 小亭 江 from Pixabay

I have been invited to speak at two events in the spring, about collaboration in higher education in a smart campus and estates context. Estates are not only a huge asset for higher education institutions, but also take up a large proportion of operating expenditure. Is there a way in which collaboration can offset some of those costs and improve the efficiency of how the estate is used.

Read a well researched report, and an article on Generation Alpha. I am not really a fan of generational generalisations. I am not sure how useful they are. I am reminded of the whole digital natives debate, which still seems to bear its ugly head every so often. When you consider that, according to the Prensky definition, 60% of UK academic staff in UK universities are digital natives. You could even argue that the figure is closer to 80%…

Grouping people together and assuming that they will behave in a similar way, isn’t really that helpful.

weeknotes

It’s coming home – Weeknote #355 – 19th December

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The big news for me this week was the news that the UK will be (re)joining Erasmus+. The UK lost access to Erasmus following Brexit but this announcement means that in 2027 UK students will be able to study in the EU more easily. So what does the Erasmus announcement mean for UK higher education and for Jisc. I wrote up some thoughts from me on this.

We had our team Christmas meal and get together this week. Usually quite challenging for us to get everyone in the same place, as we are quite a geographically distributed team, even this time we didn’t have everyone. 

I continued my work into a student data model and the work SURF over in the Netherlands have done on this and the accompanying OOAPI. 

I also had some final meetings of the year with my European colleagues on various projects we are working on and potential routes to funding.

As the year comes to a close, the whole sector goes dark, as people take leave for the holidays. It is quite nice in some respects as virtually everyone takes the two weeks off, so there is little email and Teams messages.

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Writing stuff – Weeknote #354 – 12th December

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Road with houses

Took some leave this week, so a shorter week than normal. Did spend two days in Bristol where we had some Christmas festivities happening. Nice to see people I hadn’t seen in a while.

Spent time looking at and understanding various data models and standards. Over the last few weeks I have been looking at data models. This made me reminisce about the work I did back in the day with the Western Colleges Consortium, which I wrote about.

I also was reviewing some policies this week as well.

I had some mandatory training come up as well. My usual tactic with this is to just get it done and dusted, rather than procrastinating about it, avoiding all those email reminders and management messages on non-compliance and completion.

I found an WonkHE article on insolvency interesting and the current state of thinking at government and by others on what would happen if a university was to fail. I wrote up my thoughts. 

Typewriter
Image by Patrik Houštecký from Pixabay

I am trying to do more writing, on this blog, for internal communications, and potentially other places well.

weeknotes

Discovering – Weeknote #353 – 5th December

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coffee
Image by David Schwarzenberg from Pixabay

This week was the first week in quite a while that I didn’t have any serious travelling, actually checking the diary the last time I had a week with no travelling was the second week in October.

Spent much of the week looking at data models. This made me reminisce about the work I did back in the day with the Western Colleges Consortium. We had seven different college student record systems sending us student data which was then uploaded to a shared VLE. Back then we didn’t have single sign on, so students would have to have another password in addition to the one they used to log into the college computers. Interoperability was something new to me back then.

Joined an interesting meeting that I helped broker between the UK admissions organisation UCAS and the Finnish NREN CSC. One of the use cases in the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework is on discovery and application.

Blenheim Palace
Image by Ad Vertentie from Pixabay

In a conversation with a colleague last month they mentioned the potential impact of AI on estate data, something they thought I might be interested in, in relation to my long history with the intelligent campus. At the recent HE Transformation Expo in Birmingham I was talking to my fellow presenters and they also mentioned this. So, where to start, well I did a quick Google search and an article came up in my search results: Oxford Brookes University expertise in AI helps Blenheim Palace. I wrote a short blog post on Intelligent Visitor Attractions.

weeknotes

Amsterdam is not just a city, it’s a state of mind – Weeknote #352 – 28th November

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light display on the canals of Amsterdam

This week I was off to Amsterdam once more, this time for the GÉANT CTO workshop which I was helping to deliver a session for.

I spent time on Monday reviewing the two events I had attended in London and Birmingham over the last two weeks. What they were like, who was there, and what (if any) were implications for Jisc.

Tuesday I flew out from Bristol to Amsterdam. This is quite a quick flight. I had anticipated a lengthy wait at passport control, but it wasn’t that bad in the end. They did have the new EES system, which meant scanning my face and fingerprints. I thought that would be that, but I then had to go through the automated passport gate, which didn’t work for me. So, it was then to a manned passport booth. Got my passport stamped (which I thought EES would stop, maybe it will, but not at the moment). 

Prior to the workshop I spent time preparing going through my notes and the presentation slides we were going to use in our session. I also had various online (and in-person) meetings as well.

The workshop went very well, with lots of positive comments about the approach and lot less resistance than expected.

houses along a canal

I have also been looking at student data models and how SURF in the Netherlands approach this with regard to sharing data about students, courses and other aspects of education. A very different approach compared to the UK.

I had an afternoon flight back to the UK, so didn’t get back too late.

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A quiet place – Weeknote #351 – 21st November

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This week I was up in Birmingham for a conference. The HE Transformation Expo was a new event, and I was on a panel session entitled: Is Your Estate Working for You? Deploying Smart Campus Capabilities at Scale to Meet Efficiency Objectives.

We had a good session and an excellent discussion.

The event was at the NEC was part of a larger schools and academies show. This was much more a trade exhibition than a traditional conference, well it was described as an Expo. The sessions I watched were well attended, with standing room only. There was the challenge of delivering and listening to sessions against the noise of the event itself, but headphones were provided.

I did have some interesting conversations, as well as listening to some good sessions. The need for collaboration was across many of the sessions, the challenge of how you deliver on that aspiration was also there too.

Unfortunately I had some online meetings I needed to attend, and there wasn’t really any space at the Expo for such a meeting. I had planned to take the call in the speaker lounge, alas the lounge was just a fenced off area within the hall with tables, chairs and some really bad coffee. There were no other suitable spaces within the NEC, so I had to head back to my hotel for the call. Usually I try and avoid having meetings whilst at a conference, but sometimes this isn’t always possible.

I was lucky in that the cold weather didn’t impact on my travel arrangements however really felt that winter was now upon us.

Spent time planning for next week, I am attending a GÉANT workshop in Amsterdam.

weeknotes

Your radio voice – Weeknote #350 – 14th November

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Senate House Library

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.

weeknotes

Cream, two sugars – Weeknote #349 – 7th November

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This week I was in Amsterdam for a GÉANT workshop on education and their strategy.

As I was anticipating that the new Entry/Exit System (EES) would be in place at Schiphol Airport I didn’t want to take a late flight to Amsterdam or try and get there first thing on the day of the workshop. Though the EES wasn’t in place at Schiphol, it still took me longer to get out of the airport after landing then the time if took to fly from Bristol.

I had a late flight back, so spent the afternoon of Thursday working in the GÉANT office.

Next week I am in London for the WonkHE Festival of Higher Education where I am speaking on a panel about collaboration. I am doing some preparation for that.

coffee

Saw on WonkHE that Nestlé had undertaken a survey on student coffee drinking habits, now I had to read that. With my intelligent campus and learning spaces work I have visited many different university campuses, one constant feature was coffee shops, sometimes chains such as Starbucks and Costa, other times it was home brewed coffee places. Of course, all were selling espresso based drinks. I look back at my university experience in the late 1980s and I trying to recall what was available back then. There wasn’t any espresso type coffee on sale, and I suspect that it was probably filter coffee, or even instant.

Just to note I did write an interesting blog piece on coffee analytics a couple of years ago and could we combine data on coffee drinking (along with snacks and tea) with other student data sets to better understand the student experience. I actually think we could still do that. I wrote some more on that here.