I spent much of the week in London, attending meetings at our Fetter Lane office and visiting some London university campuses incognito.
We had our quarterly leadership meeting, always nice to have it in-person. The team is quite geographically distributed, so we rarely have the opportunity to meet in-person or even co-locate to work together. Yes we have Teams and all that, but there is something nice about the ad hoc, happenstance of working together in the same office.
I undertook some more desk research and field work for smart campus and belonging understanding.
Spent time organising and developing a Leadership Masterclass with Training and Development Team.
I did some more planning and scaffolding for the next year, our planning year ends on the 31st July.
I spent most of the week in our Bristol office. I had my regular monthly catch-up with my line manager.
Booked myself onto the WonkHE Festival of Higher Education which is taking place in November.
Started working on a presentation for a forthcoming event that is taking place later in July.
Reviewed a report on HE challenges, well actually just reviewed a section about some work I had done.
Had a meeting with Sarah Dunne on their work on AI and Libraries.
Said goodbye to Andy McGregor, who is leaving Jisc. I worked closely with Andy on the Intelligent Campus.
Spent time going through usage of our Dovetail licences, checking who still needed a licence and who didn’t.
Read through the Trend Report Future Campus from SURF.
What might the physical and virtual campus of vocational education and higher education look like in 2040? That is the central question of the SURF project ‘Future Campus’. The focus is on the Netherlands, specifically education (research is out of scope). This project brings together teachers, students, and experts at the national level who are involved in campus development from various perspectives. In collaboration with them, SURF is working towards different future scenarios, which are expected to be presented by the end of 2023.
Friday I went to Gloucester to shoot some video for a presentation I am doing at ALT-C in September.
My top tweet this week was this one.
I always say I saw Star Wars at the cinema when it came out in 1977.
I was wrong.
Though Star Wars was released in the US in May 1977, it didn't premiere in the UK until 27th December 1977.
That was in London and it was later when it was screened in the rest of the UK. pic.twitter.com/zNhgZ0opfG
It was a really hot week this week again, weather wise again.
For the third week in a row, I was back in London. I also went to the Bristol office for a couple of days as well.
This time I was in London for the Intelligent Library session I was running. It was nice to focus in a specific use case for the Intelligent Campus looking at the use of data in the library. This workshop demonstrated that there is a real demand for support and help in this space. There are opportunities for more advanced Proof of Concepts, advice and guidance, vision and inspiration, and potential consultancy and training opportunities.
What was shown of value was the range of use cases for stimulating discussion and debate. We have published use cases for the intelligent campus; however, we never published the intelligent library use cases. I did create a series of use cases for various conference sessions I delivered. Something for next year, the key question is where? Also demand for a toolkit to support the use of use cases for both areas.
Working through notes and output captures across the various workshops over the last few weeks. The one consistent across these workshops (internal and external) was that the technical hurdles to the smart or intelligent campus (or library) are relatively simple and easy to deliver on. The challenge is the “so what”. How do institutions exploit the narrative the data is telling them. How does data informed decision making actually work in practice. Something to reflect and think about.
I visited our Harwell office as I returned from London. I often visit our other offices to work, partly for the change in routine, but also to meet other staff and be available for conversations about our HE strategy work.
Spent time developing and working on a new DPS document for student experience, to enable Jisc to utilise external expertise in our work.
Continued my research and analysis on personalisation.
Spent time working through my notes and image captures across the intelligent campus, intelligent library, and smart campus events and inputting them into our research analysis tool Dovetail.
I had my Senior Education and Student Experience Group meeting. Originally, I planned to have the meeting in Scotland, but in the end we had an online meeting.
Was in London for park of the week, where I attended Cisco and PTS The Smarter Campus event in Chancery Lane.
This event demonstrated that there is a real demand for support and help in this space. There are opportunities for more advanced Proof of Concepts, advice and guidance, vision and inspiration, and potential consultancy and training opportunities.
Went through my risks in the risk register and assessed them in light of recent changes.
I went through and updated and finalised my ALT-C submission.
Attended a few finance meetings.
Spent time planning and organising the Intelligent Library community event, which is now full, for next week, it’s taking place in London.
A full week back working after a week off. I nearly wrote a full week back in the office, but these days I rarely am physically in the office for the whole week.
Of course, the first day back was spent dealing with the bundle of email in my inbox. Though I use this approach to deal with my email, I also plan my work and communication, so that when I do get back from leave there is generally nothing urgent or critical to deal with. However, I did have one critical thing to do which was contribute a board report. As I have a range of smart objectives, use of JIRA, and these weeknotes, it was relatively simple to put a report together.
My submission for ALT-C this autumn was accepted. This is the first time since 2017 that I have presented at the conference. I didn’t submit a session in 2018, I didn’t attend in 2019, the conference was cancelled in 2020, it was online in 2021, I did attend in 2022. At this point the only thing I will say is that the session is not about dead VLEs.
I was totally impressed with Apple’s new Vision Pro, and totally disappointed that it will be US only in the first instance!
The more I hear and read about the Vision Pro, the more I am intrigued and impressed. Will it be a game changer? Don’t know, but I do see it more as a (remote) individual technology compared to say a class set of iPads.
I’ve blogged about AR quite a bit over the years, this post was 13 years ago in 2010. What I think Apple’s Vision Pro will do (in the future when it is cheaper) is make this a more engaging AR interaction. The key, will it be *better* than a flat screen?
Agreed with this comment from Alex Lindsay on the Twitter about the WWDC keynote.
The event video was so great… I can’t go back to watching stage events. The era of the “Keynote” has less than 3 years left before it’s gone everywhere.
Discovered Freeform for the Mac and the iPad. It looks like a great planning tool, I did wonder if it would be useful for sketch notes, it could be, but it is missing many of the functions that I use in Paper by WeTransfer.
Spent time organising the final Senior Education and Student Experience Group meeting for this year, which takes place next week. Originally planned to be in Scotland, it will now be happening online.
Did some work organising and planning Intelligent Library community event for the 21st June, which is now pretty much full, which is nice.
Got some feedback from the Intelligent Campus Community Event I ran a couple of weeks back. There was 100% satisfaction with over 66% very satisfied.
Small group forum worked well, good space for interactions, right duration.
Had an excellent meeting with a University about their current work in the smart and intelligent campus space. It was really refreshing to see an institution actually delivering on the theoretical and vision concepts we imagined in this space five years ago.
The thing that we keep confusing is that accessibility is not the same thing as inclusion. In reality, we have not moved beyond the traditional concept of accessibility, something that is measurable, something we can benchmark, such as web accessibility “regulations” to a broader notion of inclusion. Accessibility has been a crucial stepping stone in creating environments that accommodate individuals with disabilities, but its language and approach can sometimes inadvertently complicate the goal of achieving true inclusion.
Talking about with a colleague about physical spaces, we discussed how ramps can make a building accessible, but doesn’t mean that the building is inclusive.
I was supporting colleagues interviewing for a position within their team. I haven’t done interviewing for a while now, so was an interesting experience.
There was quite a bit happening in the intelligent campus space this week. On Wednesday I was running the Intelligent Campus Community Event in London. Over 15 delegates attended the event, and there was lots of positive feedback.
Just wanted to say thanks for running that event yesterday – I thought it was very useful, also I was glad to make some new friends with similar interests! You did a great job on running it!
On the same day, the Building the future intelligent library guide published on the web – bringing together existing systems with innovative applications to improve learning, support the research lifecycle, enhance physical environments, and maximise resources.
To support the guide an Intelligent Library blog post published on the Jisc blog – Libraries are the beating heart of every university and full of staff who are often proponents of digital-first thinking; so, they could take a leading role in exploring these exciting new avenues – deciding which technologies to adopt, how and why.
On the same day as the Intelligent Campus Community Event I was also delivering a presentation for the Advancing Blended Learning in Higher Education Event. I did a pre-recorded video for the event which was running at the same time as the community event.
I just wanted to say a huge thank you for being part of the event yesterday. Thanks for preparing such an engaging video. It was a really great addition to the event.
Spent some time trying to resolve internal and external problems registering for ILTA EdTech Conference in Dublin next week, having had a paper accepted. The end result was, no resolution and no time, so had to withdraw my paper from the conference. The main problem for me was the short window from having my paper accepted and the date of the actual conference itself.
Have been writing up notes from the personalisation workshops I have been running over the last two weeks. Analysing content from workshops and formulating plan and next steps.
Started writing up notes from the intelligent campus community event as well.
Caught this tweet from Lawrie and responded with a GIF.
People have enough trouble having a shared understanding of terms such as hybrid we really don’t need to create new words such as phygital.
CrossCountry train at Cheltenham Spa Railway Station
I have blogged about train wifi quite a bit in the past, I wrote this blog post in 2010.
I did wonder why CrossCountry Trains didn’t put in wifi as you find on the East Coast Main Line services and Virgin Trains Pendolino. Well it appears that providing wifi was part of their Franchise agreement with the Department of Transport. CrossCountry Trains was suppose to have wifi in place by November 11th 2009. They failed to meet this deadline!
I also asked about the lack of train wifi on First Great Western (now GWR).
My question though is much more, why isn’t there wifi on First Great Western services from the West Country to London and why wasn’t it in their franchise agreement? I travel with First Great Western much more than I do CrossCountry and would really like it if they had wifi.
Rail users could lose access to wi-fi on trains in England as part of cost cuts after the government said it was a low priority for passengers. The Department for Transport says cost pressures mean it will review whether the current wi-fi service “delivers the best possible value for money”.
Most times I travel by train these days I am more likely to use my own 4G or 5G connection as I still find train wifi unreliable. However I still think it should be on trains for those that don’t have their mobile connectivity.
A question for you to ponder this week.
What do you think is the difference between adaptive learning and responsive learning?
My top tweet this week was this one.
A1 #LTHEChat I was the IT Education Officer for a hands on science centre in Bristol and did more than just IT. One day I would be talking about urban regeneration to a local history group, the next I would be doing mummification with five year olds. pic.twitter.com/9qui50iqcx
