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.

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.