Tag Archives: lawrie phipps

Lacking innovation – Weeknote #296 – 1st November 2024

I took some leave this week, so less intensive (from a work perspective) than more recent weeks.

We had the budget this week, and it wasn’t the budget for higher education. No sign of that fee increase everyone has been hoping for, nor was there any new funding. Of course the increase in employer’s National Insurance contributions had meant that wage costs across the sector have gone up. The Universities and Colleges Employers Association has calculated that this measure will add around £372m to the sector’s pay bill.

We have been planning the launch of the collaboration report that we finalised the draft of last week. There have been a few issues this week, so we have been delayed by a few days. Nothing serious, but it is important that we cover all the details and make sure everything is signed off. I also did some internal briefing documents for internal stakeholders.

Had a meeting about the education in NREN. Across the world there are various NRENs. These are the national research and education network (NREN) and each is a specialised internet service provider dedicated to supporting the needs of the research and education in each country. The Netherlands have SURF, and in the UK, we have Jisc. There have been discussions across various networks about raising the importance of the E in NREN. How can NRENs better support education. I do think in the UK, Jisc provides a lot of support for education across further and higher education. Could we do more, and what is happening in Europe? Lots to think about and find out.

I had a conversation with Lawrie about the lack of innovation in learning technology in higher education, now before you say artificial intelligence, let’s just put that to one side and focus on other aspects of innovation. The mailing lists are quiet, I am not seeing the blog posts or yore, and as for new technologies, is there anything out there which is truly innovative? Back in the day, well twenty years ago now… we were on the cusp of an innovation revolution. In 2004, there was no Twitter, no Facebook, no YouTube. The iPhone wasn’t going to be seen for another three years, while it would be six before we saw the iPad. Yes in 2004 we had smartphones and tablets, but it would be the way in which Apple designed their versions which revolutionised how consumers (and then students) would use them. Over a ten year period we saw massive changes in consumer technologies, connectivity, web services, which all impacted on learning and teaching.

Since then, not so much.

Another thing we discussed was how the financial constraints on higher education could be impacting on the role of learning technologists within higher education. There is an invalid assumption that because of covid, we all know how to do it now. Combine that with the lack of flashy innovation, then the visibility of the hard work of learning technologists might be lacking. When your work moves away from discovery into embedding, then the profile of what you do becomes less visible. Big flash events about how a single cohort are using a new technology is exciting, whereas embedding use of the VLE across the entire university has a greater impact but isn’t as high profile. Sometimes talking about what you are doing and the impact it is having on the student experience is just as important as actually doing it.

It was rather cold – Weeknote #255 – 19th January 2024

Having done a lot of travelling and with anticipation with work being done on the office in Bristol, I planned to spend a lot of the week working from home. However the work being done was rescheduled. Well at least I could access my locker in the office this week.

Much of the week though was researching, writing, and reviewing some documentation for some work we’re doing in the optimising operations and data space. It was challenging, as it is quite complex, and wide in scope. Working out what we wanted, what is needed, and what then, was quite challenging.

I am realising that as I no longer use Twitter, that I am missing out on news and views. I am not getting this from Threads or Bluesky.

A good example was this thread from Charles Knight discussing falling recruitment in higher education.

There is often talk about the future of higher education and how universities need to respond. I do think that there is still an assumption that the traditional three year undergraduate degree programme is set in stone and will be here for a long time. I don’t necessarily disagree with that, but what I do think we will start to see is young people wanting more flexibility, and we will see employers wanting more flexibility and more specialism. It’s an interesting space, but this is less about predicting the future, more about building in the resilience and agility to be much more responsive to future changes in student demographics.

I realise that I am not as immersed into the AI in education discussion as colleagues both in Jisc and in the sector. There is a lot happening in this space. Though I have played with Bard and Firefly, I’ve not really taken a deep dive into AI.

It was great though to see my colleague Lawrie getting his research into academics’ use of AI published in Nature.

Star – Weeknote #242 – 20th October 2023

Took some leave this week and headed off to Chessington World of Adventure for the day.

It was nice to see Lawrie win our Star of the Month award for his work at ALT-C. I took the time to write a detailed nomination about what he did and the impact it had. It was a well deserved win.

Spent most of the week planning, reflection, and researching concept of optimisation of operations and data. Researching the background, exemplars, benefits, issues, challenges, and barriers to shared services across higher education. I have been finding relevant reports and documents, uploading them to Dovetail and then going through them undertaking analysis of the content, tagging different sections. Still early for deep insights, but often these reports flag the potential benefits of shared services, there is a lot of discussion about the importance of process analysis and optimisation, before moving to a shared service model.

This reminds me of some work I did back in 2014 about process analysis and optimisation before adding software or a digital service to the workflow. For example no point in adding a CRM for student recruitment, unless you go through the current process of student recruitment, and then reflecting on what you are trying to achieve. Without undertaking the process analysis, you can often find that all you are doing is spending a lot of time, effort, and money on creating a digital version of the existing process, which often results in just translation, and not taking advantage of the affordances of what digital and online can bring, and usually losing the nuance of the analogue or in-person process.

It has been a little but more challenging to see some of the blockers and barriers that stop the implementation of shared services, but this is where I can bring in some of my own experiences to the table.

Read this interesting article this week: Sunderland City Council is planning to extend the local eduroam Wi-Fi network into the city centre.

It is working with the University of Sunderland and its smart city partner Boldyn Networks to enable accredited users of EduROAM, developed as a Wi-Fi service for the higher education sector, to obtain connections beyond the university’s campus through the public Wi-Fi network.

From a social mobility perspective, inclusion, widening participation, reducing carbon, wellbeing, and a range of other factors it’s important that eduroam extends beyond the campus. It enables students to access Wi-Fi at a time and place of their choosing, rather than being forced to travel to campus.

Phygital is not a word, ever…. – Weeknote #221 – 26th May 2023

Quite a busy week all in, including some time in London.

I liked this post by Lawrie on accessibility and inclusion: If you set a minimum standard…

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.

Wheelchair ramp
Image by Andrzej Rembowski from Pixabay

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.

Library
Image by RHMemoria from Pixabay

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
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.

Eventually both companies put wifi on their trains. However, the BBC published an article this week that said train wi-fi at risk as part of cost-cutting move.

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.

Is this appropriate? – Weeknote #205 – 3rd February 2023

Spent a lot of time this week reading, digesting, reviewing, and reflecting. Also attended a few meetings and spent time having conversations on Teams.

On Tuesday I went to our Bristol office. The train was delayed, so I started attending a meeting on my phone, which I find weird, but it worked.

Attended an internal meeting about Microsoft – Mixed Reality (MR) and Metaverse. There is some excitement around the Metaverse. As I said last week  industry perspectives on the metaverse and immersive platforms are varied. Meta, Google are all laying off technical staff in this space, Apple have delayed their AR/VR product again. Lots of confusion between immersive games and the Metaverse. Apart from some niche areas (such as education) what is the unique selling point of the metaverse? As Paul Bailey in a recent blog post said, the “effective” metaverse is probably decades away…

Had an interesting discussion about the Office for Students and its future. There is criticism that they have been receiving from members and member organisations (such as GuildHE and the Russell Group). Labour (who are likely to win the 2024 election) have been quiet on HE and the OfS. Also found and read this  Can Labour de-Commodify Higher Education? It has a Minor Problem.

The education system in Britain is in the mud. That is scarcely news. But would Labour have the courage and values needed to revive it? The trouble they would have if they win the next General Election is due partly to their Party’s legacy and partly to a personal problem.

Attended Monthly sector strategy leads meeting and discussion. We had an interesting discussion on scenario planning. Thinking about a workshop on this. Continue reading Is this appropriate? – Weeknote #205 – 3rd February 2023

Planning, discussing, and conversing – Weeknote #204 – 27th January 2023

I had a busy week with most of the week travelling and being in Manchester.

Monday though was a series of meetings across the whole day, incorporating updates, discussing the customer experience, finalising our team coaching, and a meeting with our public affairs team.

Tuesday I headed first to the Bristol office, where I picked some stuff up I needed for Manchester (okay I picked up my coffee machine for the hotel) and had my Q2 review. After that I travelled up to Manchester.

I spent two days in Manchester planning, discussing, and conversing.

Reviewing industry perspectives on the metaverse and immersive platforms. Meta, Google are all laying off technical staff in this space, Apple have delayed their AR/VR product again. Lots of confusion between immersive games and the Metaverse. Apart from some niche areas (such as education) what is the unique selling point of the metaverse? As Paul Bailey in a recent blog post said: “Let’s be clear: the metaverse (however you define it) is decades away.”

I had a meeting on the second edition of the guide to the intelligent campus, the decision has been made to make it a web guide.

Read this blog post from Donna and Lawrie on digital leadership.

We no longer encounter as many people in workshop contexts who have the option of not engaging with digital.  We no longer encounter people who believe that “digital” is a separate job that only a few people in an organization should have.

This reminds me of the staff IT induction sessions I use to run at Gloucestershire College, in that in 2006, there were many new staff who didn’t have and didn’t use e-mail, or the internet. By 2013, things had changed, all staff were using the internet and doing things that even I wasn’t doing online. Digital is not constant or standing still, it is constantly evolving and changing.

There is also a call to action on ensuring that digital leadership going forward is seen through the lenses of:

  1. Social justice and equity,
  2. Ethics, privacy, security, and intellectual property
  3. Environmental impact and sustainability of using Edtech (and tech generally) in education

Reviewing industry perspectives on AI and the impact of ChatGPT. Huge investments being made by Google and Amazon. Could we see an AI OS. Machine learning already in place in many applications (such as photo apps). Microsoft looking at including AI into tools such as Word (in a similar vein to a spellchecker and grammar checker).

My top tweet this week was this one.

Ich bin ein Berliner – Weeknote #196 – 2nd December 2022

Spent most of the week in Berlin for the Moving Target Conference.

I was at our London office on Monday. We had a team coaching session looking at our internal and external stakeholders.

On Tuesday I flew out to Berlin from Heathrow. When I was invited to the conference I did consider catching the train to Berlin, but after doing some research I found out it was going to take in excess of 20 hours and required not just changes (which I expected) but actually would entail taking a bus for part of the journey. So despite some reservations decided to fly. I would have preferred to fly from Bristol, but there were no direct flights to Berlin, so in the end flew from Heathrow.

Travelling to Terminal 5 from my hotel, I took an autonomous pod. These pods are for those parking at a car park, but were also available to hotel residents.

The conference was excellent and I enjoyed attending. It’s useful to see education from a different perspective.

The conference had a focus on trans-national education.  There were some interesting panel sessions and presentations. I did a few sketch notes on various presentations and panel sessions.

Here is my sketch note of trust and reputation in the digital economy with Prof. Timm Teubner.

I delivered my keynote on the Friday.

Making the transformation happen: The UK higher education digital transformation journey

The UK higher education sector has over the last three decades invested heavily in information technology, online solutions, digital services, resources and content. The aim has been to enhance and improve and reframe the student experience, to reimagine learning, teaching and assessment, and to transform the infrastructure, the university estate to enable and enhance this digital transformation. Across this, Jisc, the UK national research and education network, has been proving the infrastructure, security, advice and guidance to the UK higher education sector. In this keynote, James Clay Head of Higher Education and Student Experience at Jisc, will explore what we mean by digital transformation, what it means for students and why the UK higher education sector needs to deliver on their digital transformation journey. He will explore the UK experience over the last few years and how this has helped to accelerate the digital transformation journey and will showcase exemplars from across the UK university sector. He will discuss how Jisc is supporting UK higher education and what are plans are for the future in enabling future digital transformation and what our colleagues can learn from our experiences and those of the UK higher education sector.

There was an online audience as well as people in the room.

The conference was at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences).

The building still had the scars from the fighting in 1945.

It was a great venue for a conference, with good spaces. I also appreciated the fact that the building had eduroam, so connecting to the wifi was quick and easy.

I get a mention in the closing comments about my sketchnoting and tweets on the conference.

Saw this Twitter thread. Really useful list of locations in London for working and reading, where you don’t need to buy endless cups of coffee.

Read this paper COVID, Campus, Cameras, Communication, and Connection by Jasmine Price, Donna Lanclos and Lawrie Phipps.

This article discusses insights from two separate and linked projects. A staff-facing project at a UK university in the English Midlands, took place in late Spring 2020. We heard at that time a concern from staff for students who were not in touch and were not “visible” due to their absence from digital places as well as the more obvious physical ones. Staff also discussed their sense that, from the students who were in contact, there were a lot more emails and one-on-one discussions about logistics and worries. In Spring 2021, at a university in the north of England, we conducted a student-facing project intended to discover their lived experience of the 2020-21 academic year, as well as surface insights into what the phrase “back to campus” might mean for these students. Students struggled with what their lecturers were asking in terms of visibility (especially cameras). Students were also concerned about building and maintaining connections. The desire for effective and transparent communication in a time of crisis was also expressed. We juxtapose the rhetoric about “back to campus” and assumptions embedded in policies around cameras and digital participation with the expressed desires of students for human relationships and care in a time of uncertainty and upheaval. We end with implications for institutions going forward, with the certainty that this will not be the last time, as a sector, when we have to rely primarily on digital places and platforms for the work of the University.

Well worth downloading and reading.

My top tweet this week was this one.

Staff conference time – Weeknote #133 – 17th September 2021

Brean Down

I spent much of the week working from home.

Most of the week was spent reading, analysing and writing.

Guardian published this article: Awaiting a ‘tsunami of Covid’: UK lecturers fear students’ return.

Dr Stephanie Coen, assistant professor in health geography at Nottingham University, is eager to get back to teaching in person. But she fears that with students not required to wear masks when classes start in a few weeks, squeezing them like “sardines” into her tiny room for seminars will be unsafe.

I don’t think anyone will be surprised if we see a repeat of what we saw last September when students returned to university. Though the numbers initially back then weren’t high they did start to rise as term continued. What will happen now, we don’t really know.

This tweet from Alejandro Armellini resonated with me.

It was a thread of tweets about the importance of being pedagogically critical of new ways of delivery such as hybrid. Ale has actually done hybrid and brings that experience and perspective to his views.

Lawrie posted a really good blog post this week: We need to stop designing curricula with “white able males” as the default setting, based on a presentation he gave about the research he has been doing.

The pandemic has also shown us that we do not have to do anything special for the people for whom institutions and systems have been built. Our white male able students are going to be fine, they are the default category of person higher education is already built for..  It is ok–I would argue it is necessary– to start saying to ourselves “my starting point for designing this curriculum, this system, this process, will be to serve those students who are disadvantaged, who are disabled by our institutions.

Clifford's Tower in York
Clifford’s Tower in York by James Clay CC BY-NC 2.0

I went to York so this story was interesting for me: University of York offers students accommodation – in Hull.

The University of York is offering students housing an hour’s drive away in Hull due to a shortage of accommodation. The crisis has been sparked by an over-subscription on the university’s courses which has created a surge in demand for student housing.

This kind of situation is one reason why universities might want to consider a more flexible curriculum which takes advantages of the affordances of online and digital so that students don’t have to spent two to three hours commuting to campus five days a week. Though I imagine that students might actually want to go to campus (and the city) as they applied to York not Hull. I went to York as much for the city as for the course.

Thinking that this mobile telephony would never catch on….

https://twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/1437438420867956738

Michael Rodd makes a call with an experimental cordless mobile phone.  It’s 1979 and time for the telephone to go mobile. In this report from a longer programme, Michael Rodd examines a British prototype for a cordless telephone that allows the user to make calls from anywhere. Also included at the end of this item is a rather nice out-take as Rodd also experiences the first mobile wrong number.

I do recall watching this when it was broadcast.

Of course we don’t really use our phones as phones these days, the mini computer we have in our pockets is now used for way more than just making calls.

Thursday I was off to Birmingham for our all staff conference.

This was my second in-person event in a week. I drove to Birmingham, parked my car. I parked at Five Ways. In the past when I parked there I would generally have to park on the roof, this time I could have parked on level 1, though as there was more room I parked on level 2. I walked to the ICC and showed my covid pass and I was into the event. There were nearly 500 Jisc staff in the event.

This was the final day for Paul Feldman as CEO and the first day for Heidi Fraser-Krauss our new CEO.

The day mainly consisted of talks with Q&A. There was some group work, but overall probably about 30 minutes worth, a missed opportunity I think, but it’s always challenging to design a programme such as this for 500 people. What was nice was the time to connect with people, though we obviously talk a lot through Teams and Zoom, there is something different about meeting in-person.

Friday I had a chat with some consultants about some possible work, and we also discussed the Intelligent Campus concept as well.

My top tweet this week was this one.

Day 26: Best recent EdTech Read

This post is part of the #JuneEdTechChallenge series.

Probably this recent blog post by @Lawrie  and @nicwhitton.

looking through a telescope
Image by S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay

Though I didn’t post these posts each day in June (and to be honest I didn’t post it each day on the Twitter either) except the final day, I have decided to retrospectively post blog posts about each of the challenges and back date them accordingly. There is sometimes more I want to say on the challenge then you can fit into 140 characters (well 280 these days).

Day 10: My office buddy

This post is part of the #JuneEdTechChallenge series.

Lawrie

Though I didn’t post these posts each day in June (and to be honest I didn’t post it each day on the Twitter either) except the final day, I have decided to retrospectively post blog posts about each of the challenges and back date them accordingly. There is sometimes more I want to say on the challenge then you can fit into 140 characters (well 280 these days).