June 2006 - Posts
We now have two
wikis up and running.
The first, at
http://wiki.newport.ac.uk is intended to be an encyclopedia of life at the University. All staff and students can login and contribute. If this is a success it could be a brilliant resource. It will form part of our 'myLearning Essentials' portal, ready for the start of the academic year.
If you are interested in the technical side we are using MediaWiki, linked to Active Directory for authenication.
I think there are two things that will contribute to the success or otherwise of this project:
- Getting enough 'seed' content in so that people don't go away from it immediately. The idea here is that we'll get a group of people to add pages before we have a full launch.
- Making sure the content is appropriate. We've started of with a very basic acceptible use policy
At the moment we are still really at an early test stage - in particular we haven't really done any design work, but if we are a University member feel free to login and contribute.
The second Wiki is just for IT staff - we have started moving all of our documentation to a wiki. This has been in place for a few weeks now, and seems to be working very well. The real attraction is that it is really easy to update documentation, and there is a full audit trail of changes made.
Senior staff within Library and Information Services spent an interesting and enjoyable three days with management trainer Robina Chatham, looking at things such as personality types (Myers Briggs), team dynamics (FIRO-B), stereotyping and change theory. (Apparently my Myers-Briggs type have trouble producing lists of more than three things, so a really pushed the boat out in the previous sentence).
At the end of the session we produced a set of shared values for LIS, which were as follows:
Teamwork
Helping other people
Excellence
Efficiency
Knowledge
Effectiveness
Flexibility
Innovation
Competence
Leadership
This article doesn't really need any further comment:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32550
!!!
Each year
HEWIT organise a three day IT conference for Welsh HE IT staff, at Gregynog near Newtown:
(picture from Mike Simmons' gallery)
This year's conference was jointly organised by Newport and Glamorgan's Universities. I missed the first day and a half as I was in Bath at IWMW2006. I still caughts some interesting presentations though.
I got there just in time to catch Cardiff's description of their 'Modern Working Enviroment' - a portal underpinned by business processes. Nice idea, and pretty ambitious.
After a fun filled evening with a quiz centred around 1974 (quiz author's favourite year I guess) activities resumed with a presentation on server virtulisation from conference sponsors ICM. Basically the idea is that we use VMWare ESX to make better use of processor power, provide more resilience, and provide services in a more agile way. I think all agreed it looked like a pretty good idea. Won't go into the technical detail here at the moment. The final sessions covered the history and future of Welsh video networking, and PR for IT people. The latter was a particular welcome interactive session, helping us to sell our service rather than only be contacted when things go wrong.
Glad it all went smoothly. I'll post a summary of the conference feedback at some point.
On Wednesday I spent the day in Bath, where I presented at the
Institutional Web Management Workshop - a really enjoyable day. It was great to spend some time with so many people focussed on improving web services - a really friendly group full of enthusiasm for what they do.
My talked described our approach to implementing Web 2.0 services - I've attached the presentation. I was hoping to at least provide some food for thought, and maybe to inspire one or two people to really engage with the subject, and perhaps take one or two risks. I'd like to thank those that came and talked to me afterwards - it's always great to get some feedback (and thankfully most of it was positive!) - it made the trip worthwhile.
My talk was the second plenary session - the first was from Chris Scott from Headscape. It worked out quite well, as Chris described Web 2.0 technology, and they I followed it with one approach to implementing it - almost look like we'd planned it...
The other session I attended was a hands on workshop on Podcasting, which included some useful tips on successful postcasting (eg make sure your idea is sustainable, don't make the podcast too long/monotone etc).
The evening session was enjoyable - much more informal and fun than our management conferences - we even had a rapper sword dance demo (I'm sure I'll get kicked for saying this - but kind of like morris dancing but with swords....)
I would have liked to have stayed for the whole conference, but unfortunately it clashed with our
HEWIT Conference in Gregynog. I'll add a report on that one later.
For the group sessions we split into four groups and addressed the following questions:
1. What skills/attributes gaps do we see in students coming into higher education
2. What skills/attributes do these students bring that we are not fully utilising or considering?
3. What three ideas can each group put forward to attempt to close any gap(s)?
These were fed back in the plenary session.
I've attached a Powerpoint presentation that summarised the responses.
An observation: both speakers talked about 'Digital Natives' in their sessions. We had a couple of students in our session, digital natives, and it was fascinating to watch the discussion between them and non-natives - there was absolutely no shared understanding, and virtually every point made was misunderstood by the other party! We've obviously got a long was to go!
The second speaker at our Learning and Teaching Conference was Haydn Blackey, from the University of Glamorgan.
Here are some brief notes/thoughts:
Haydn's talk was entitled 'Homo Zappiens - Learning for the Texting Generation' - a really lively, amusing and informative talk on how technology has changed children's learning styles. It was really great to hear this sort of thing from someone from a non-technology background - sounds more convincing than coming from us IT geeks...
He started of by saying that lectures should be in student's preferred styles - if they want to text one another what is the problem? If they have access to the internet they will Google info as the lecture progresses which can facilitate interactivity (eg challenging information given). If we are going to provide learning spaces there should be power etc - similar to the point Steven made about making people keep still, keep their coats on etc.
Haydn then talked about the impact of gaming - eg students learn manual skills for example through GTA. Also, in games they can recreate their character - why can't they do the same with learning? (but gamers are largely male - although the same sort of thing is true for MSN etc which I think has more of a gender balance.
He pointed out that students now learn by Googling what they need to know - why remember things - still a big place for face to face though. He also pointed out that some (many?) children have closer virtual relationships than some physical ones - not necessarily bad, just a fact.
He also noted that this generation learns when it plays - he noted with incredulity that a friend played a game for 58 hours in month (me - Zelda - Wind Waker at around 30 is probably most - didn't count my Tetris DS online obsession last month!). If we fail them only one resit - why? In their own (gaming) life students retry until they've learnt.
He then talked about students talking to people around the world - our group this morning seemed to completely miss this point - we were talking about community as being local to the University, or even the course. Part of the digital immigrant thing mentioned later I guess.
A really great point that he made was that students are online (eg internet, SMS, IM etc) all the time - what is it like then being locked in a room offline for hours as an assessment. This relates to the earlier comments about memory and google. I guess there was a time when access to books was limited and it made sense to remember some of the contents - now you just need to remember what to google, so why are we forcing students to memorise in exams?
Haydn then moved on to talked about learning styles eg multitasking and sequencing. To illustrate multitasking he showed a non-staged photo of a child on a phone, using a computer, listening of music, doing homework all at the same time.
In a similar vein, he talked about non-linear learning. ie we still set our couses out as linear journeys - learning a, then b, then c etc. Instead we should make resources available and say get on with it, as students don't learn sequentially anymore.
Next some great phrases - digital natives vs digital immigrants
Digital natives - people who have been brought up with digital technology vs the immigrants who have to learn it- the powerpoint slides list the attibutes. Got me wondering where I fit it to that one. Us IT people had access to the internet first, so I've used it for 20 years, but still didn't grow up with it (although got my first computer when I was 11, so that might count..)
Haydn then moved on to learning styles and creation of material - lecturers should now be leading students through material, not necessarily creating it as there is a wealth of great material available for free. He then talked about Creative Commons as a potential way to deal with copyright. This is something we really need to get to grips with in academia - I keep meaning to set an example and put a Creative Commons notice on my blog.
Next on to the idea of blended learning - he was suggesting was we that we need a a fundamental redesign of learning processes... eg making better use of face to face time so it's only used for things it is good for, using technology when appropriate etc, not the hybird approach we all use at the moment.
Haydn then talked about Web 2.0 - a description of the technology - I won't go into any detail, but one thing he was said that University's don't need to host their own blogs. Obviously I don't agree with that one - I think the 'value added' thing we can provide is to group blogs into a University community fundamentally improving the communication processes.
Time was short then - Haydn sped up so I couldn't keep up! The slides are pretty comprehensive though - these are attached.
The first speaker at the University's Annual Learning and Teaching conference was Steven Naylor, from Manchester Metropolitan University. He has a school level Art education background.
The main message of the presentation was that secondary education was very constrained by targets etc, but there are some pockets encouraging creativity and innovative learning experiences, and hopefully these will grow.
Here are a some brief notes made during the session - happy to correct anything if I've misrepresented it. Please don't take this as a full official summary - just some notes I made as Steven spoke!
The talk was entitled 'Secondary Education: The cloning of a generation?
Steven started off with slides of pictures done by Vietnamese girls who he'd worked with - they had made pretty complex photoshop pictures with little help and no English - his point being that if something this good and creative can be be done with no teaching input then maybe we need to change teaching methods.
He then moved onto his view of Secondary education - pressure from central government - 5 A-C grades, league tables, national curriculum (getting increasing restrictive, but some teacher like the structure, others feel constrained)
This was followed by an anecdote - he'd asked children to draw pictures of family - they labeled them (eg head, body etc) even though they weren't asked too - is this because of focus on text/words within education.
He then moved on to the influence of technology. Money had been put into suites, servers etc. Some students and teachers use it, some don't. Why?
A quote: "The trouble with high-tech is you always end up using scissors" - Davd Hockney
(But sometime scissors are the best tools)
He made the point that originally IT had been taught just for the sake of teaching IT. Instead we need to look at appropriate use.
He then talked about the retooling agenda - realising that children are digitial natives. As an example he showed the toolbar in photoshop and how the tools represented old technology (ie rubber stamp tool). But that's because all of us IT people were taught a to use metaphors in interface design in the late 80s/early 90s!
He then talked about giving the children a space for personal expression (blogs, wikis). Good to hear somebody else saying this - if it had come from IT it would be seen as a geek thing.
This was followed by the idea of students/children being creators as well as receivers of knowledge. He talked about two projects that illustrated this:
"Enquiring minds" with Futurelab.
Designed to develop children as constructors and diseminators of knowledge. They started by getting children to create a collage of their lives:
www.enquiringminds.org.uk
Graphic Designers Project
Another project with young Graphic Designers at Steven's school. He felt there was a difference between needs of the school (grades etc) and needs of the students. Steven wanted to change relationship between student and teacher (remove the power) by creating a group work - they wanted to create a magazine. They worked in groups (eg design) and were allowed to make their own decisions). Also wanted to allow students to share - he asked about copyright (I say, lets all push Creative Commons). Other things - students should be allowed to move, leave their coats on etc.
He then showed the magazines - very much created by students for students - they understood what their peers want.
Looking forward - Steven says that there are pockets where creativity is allowed, and will be increasing, and these students will be coming our way at some point. There can be a lot of creativity in arts education as less pressure on results than things like maths.
The next two weeks are full of conference and course activity, which should be good.
Today we have a University's Teaching and Learning Conference - this year themed 'Teaching the Texting Generation - I'm on the Plenary Panel for that one.
Wednesday I'm speaking about Web 2.0 Strategy at the Institutional Web Management Conference.
Thursday I'm giving a similar talk at Gregynog HE IT Colloquium (probably go into the technology abit more there, although I'm on just before the England world cup game so I'll need to keep it short).
Then for three days next week we have an internal course/team building excercise within Library and Information Services - we've been asked to fill in Myers Briggs and FIRO-B questionanaires before, so that gives an idea of the content.
Hopefully I'll have time to give blog some record of events.
The University has signed up to the CLA's trial scanning and photocopying license, which allows us to make digital copies of parts of books, journals etc that we own, and make them available to students, for example in a PowerPoint presentation, or via myLearning Essentials.
This is potentially a really useful service, although there are a few restrictions. We are currently working through how to implement the license at the moment.
The first issue is that material can only be made available to the students on a particular course. Our current philosophy is that material made available via mLE can be viewed by any student, but this will have to change - we'll have to 'lock down' courses when we include material under this license.
The next issue is that the process for scanning material has to be very controlled. It looks like it will need to be via a request to the library, who will send back a properly referenced and recorded scanned image.
The other issue is that material has to be removed when the course is finished. I can see the reason why, but it does stop students referring back to previous work.
The amount that can be copied is also limited (although this seems entirely reasonable) - for example 5% or one chapter of a book.
Despite the above, I still think this could be of great benefit to students - lecturers could potentially make far more reference material available in an easily accessible format, so I hope we can get the process right and make a success of this.
We'll be finalising the procedures and publicising them shortly.
Google announced a new lab product -
Google spreadsheetsIt's a limited trial, which means you have to register and wait your turn to try it, so I haven't had a chance to have a go yet (but think about it - people are queuing up to try a spreadsheet! That can't be good). The killer feature is the ability to share the spreadsheet with others - I'm sure most spreadsheets have information that needs to be shared.
Bill Gates may or may not see Google as
Microsoft's biggest threat but applications like Google Spreadsheets should really start people questioning the point of a feature rich operating system (and big desktop office applications). You can now really can do much of your day-to-day work through a browser. For example why use a word processor when you are only going to share the document electronically anyway? You can blog it, CMS it, or type it straight into email. And email, file sharing, messaging etc all work fine with through a web browser. All of which is beginning to make the launch of Microsoft Vista one of the least needed (or wanted) OS releases since Windows ME.
I've been using Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta 2.0 for the last few days. What a huge improvement over 6.0!
I'd taken to using Firefox, because I found browsing without tabs a nightmare, however they are now present in IE 7.0, along with a great button that shows small icons of each page that you have open for easy navigation (very MacOS!).
It's also got a reasonable RSS reader. It's good because you can subscribe to a feed with a single click of a button, although as far as I can tell there is no mechanism to get any sort of overview of numbers of unread articles, notifications of new articles etc (may be wrong though), so I'll be sticking with RSSReader for the time being.
I went to the Hay Festival at the weekend (a literature festival in Hay-on-Wye in Wales). My family (including my two year old daughter) were with me, so I couldn't go to any of talks, but did manage to pick up a pile of books, including signed Lemony Snicket and Darren Shay books for my son and a great book on football stars of the 70s!
On an semi-IT related front, Douglas Coupland was there to launch his new book JPod. I'm a huge fan of Coupland, (and not just because of Microserfs a fictional story of Microsoft employees - sounds terrible when put like that!!!). I think Coupland is probably getting better with each book (although he's probably more famous for his early work, espcially Generation X), so I'm really looking forward to reading JPod (subtitled Microserfs for the the age of Google) - I'll post a short review when I've finished it.
A couple of blogs relating the the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006 (where I'm talking about Web 2.0 Strategy on 14th June) have been set up:
Adrian Stevenson: http://iwmw2006.blogspot.com/
Brian Kelly: http://reflections-on-www-2006.blogspot.com/
I'll also be posting a few bits and pieces, although unfortunately I can only stay for the first day as on the 15th I'm giving a similar talk at the Welsh HE IT Colloquium at Gregynog.
My postings can be found here:
http://blog.newport.ac.uk/blogs/michael/archive/category/1010.aspx
I'm currently representing the Welsh HE procurement group on the national Server and Storage Tender group.
The idea behind this is that the sector has a single tender for servers and storage, to help the University's get the best deal possible, and also stop each University needing to tender seperately.
I voluteered for this as part of my background is server management, and I have managed SAN based services at two Universities, including here, where we have an HP EVA 5000.
We've decided to split this into two lots, Servers and Storage. We are currently working on the technical specifications.
The server side is relatively straight forward - we are specifying three different types of server - low end, mid range and high end. The only sticking point at the moment seems to be the definition of these. To my mind these can be defined as single, dual and quad processor boxes, although there is some debate at the moment about whether people really buy quads. We do, and a quick poll of the other Welsh HE's shows that they also do.
The storage side is much more difficult. We've had a lot of debate about whether Universities would actually use a nation tender for such a large expenditure (ie £100,000s). If we can get our process right then Universities could use their own mini-tender process against our successful suppliers - far more time and cost effective than a full EU Tender.
Again we are trying to split it into three groups - workgroup, departmental and enterprise. Perhaps I would define this as NAS/direct attached, Basic SAN (eg HP MSA range), Enterprise SAN (eg HP EVA range). I think we'll need to define this in terms of functionality rather than storage volume (eg virtulisation, HSM, replication etc). We are doing this by email at the moment - we'll probably need to get together in a room (electronic or physical). with a few more technical people. The group is a mix of purchasing people and techies at the moment. We probably need to get into a fairly detailed debate about what exactly we mean by enterprise storage (I think the answer is obvious when you've actually worked with the technology).
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