February 2007 - Posts
Dell have launched a site call Dell Idea Storm - http://www.dellideastorm.com . It's a pretty interesting idea - hopefully brave, maybe stupid.. Basically anyone can submit an idea for Dell products and services and then other users can vote for them. The ideas with the most votes float to the top, therefore gather momentum, much like http://www.digg.com/. No idea whether this will be a winner for Dell or not - I guess it depends how many of the ideas are viable, and whether it turns in a list of very publically visible gripes. The site is really well done - I wonder if something similar would work in the University sector?
In the meantime, lets vote for this one:
http://www.dellideastorm.com/article/show/62318/silent_allinone_PC
At the moment we've had to run Windows on Macs to do this...
Some good news - the University will be taking part in Phase II of the HE Academy e-Learning Benchmarking excercise. This project will allow us to reflect on the impact of e-learning on the overall learning experience. Hopefully this will be a very valuable and timely excercise - particular given the energy and resources we have put into technology to support learning in the last few years. Details of the project can be on the HE Academy web site.
28 Universities will be taking part in this phase. The idea is to allow Universities to evaluate their own use of e-learning rather than compare themselves to other institutions.
In order to do this obviously we need to define e-learning - we've come up with a fairly broad definition:
"the use of technology to enhance learning in its broadest sense. This would include the obvious, i.e. use of our online learning environment (myLearning Essentials) but would also include the use of e-Journals, simulation/learning software (online and offline), presentation tools, email, web, Web 2.0, streaming media, online assessment, SMS etc, but not the use of IT as a professional tool (e.g. it would not include learning to use video editing software as a future professional skill)."
We'll be using a methodology called 'Pick and Mix' for the excercise (not terribly scientifc sounding name really!) - details can be found here:
http://elearning.heacademy.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Pick&Mix
As part of the project we need to keep a blog of our progress, so I'll be posting future news updates there. In the meantime, contact me if you would like any more info. I've also attached our Expression of Interested document that gives a little more background as to why we are participating.
RSS is great - if you aren't familiar with it it's a way of getting notified when content on a web page is updated - assuming the web page itself provides what is known as an RSS feed. You've probably seen these on a lot of sites - they'll usually have a little orange symbol. It's commonly used on news pages and blogs, but can be used for any rapidly changing site (our forums and wiki program RSS feeds for example).
The problem with RSS is that it is still a little bit too 'techie' for most people - particularly as you need a seperate RSS reader (either an application or web provider). This might be solved for a lot of users (particularly those that use Exchange) by Outlook 2007. Outlook 2007 has an RSS reader built in, and allows users to handle RSS feeds just like email:
I'm sure that this will make RSS a lot easier to 'sell' to users, and a lot easier to use as there is very little extra to learn. It also helps reduce the number of places that people need to look for information - particular as the RSS feed are fully intergrated, so show up amongst your email as unread messages, and appear in the Outlook Web Access web view.
(btw yes, I know other mail systems like Yahoo have done this for a while!)
Great news! Joanna Newsom is to headline this years Green Man Festival. Robert Plant has also been confirmed (not really my cup of tea though...).
The Green Man Festival is held in Crickhowell, about thirty miles from the University - this Google Maps image gives an idea of the stunning location.
Joanna Newsom's Ys album was probably the most critically aclaimed of last year, coming out top in HMV's 'poll of polls' - my personal favourite album as well..., so it's great that she's playing.
Tickets usually sell out sometime before the event, but are still available at the moment.
Here are some Flickr photos to give you an idea of what it's like.
A beta version of the Opera brower is available for the Wii, and it actually works really well. You can zoom in and out off the page, so the text is actually readable on the TV - here's a video of using the Wii to read myCommunity (sorry - it's a bit ropey - I just pointed my camera at the telly!)
[YouTube:FCDXrfk54QU]
The browser also works really well with YouTube, as it supports Flash...
I guess the point of that is that we really are going to have to stop thinking of IT services being delivered to solely to computers, as other clients, such as consoles, phones, handhelds etc really are becoming viable web access devices at last. I know that's been talked about for years, but this time I think it may be for real.
I thought it worth sharing a few initial thoughts and plans on Microsoft Vista (the new version of Windows) and Office 2007. This isn't supposed to be an in depth technical analysis!
From a user perspective Vista isn't a radical departure from XP. The user interface has changed quite a bit - new icons, new effects, items rename or moved, but most users should get used to it very quickly. It certainly looks a lot better than XP, and I'm sure most users will like it and not want to go back once they start using it.
On the face of it the new security model seems good - I won't go into it in any more detail here - but I guess only time will show how effective it really is.
Office 2007, on the other hand, feels like a much more radical change (for the better), especially with the user interface.
Computer monitors are now generally much larger than they were a few years ago, and Microsoft have clearly given a lot of thought as to how this can be used to make Office easier to use. The new interface largely replaces drop down menus with a tabbed interface with icons for most activities (there are still the odd drop down menu for less commonly used tasks), meaning that is should be much easier to find items. This is a complete reversal of the strategy in Office 2003 whereby items that you rarely used were hidden. making them even harder to find when you do need them!). I've not had time to explore the new features yet, so I'll comment on any specific bits that look useful as I find them. One inital observation though is that most users would probably benefit from an hour or so orientation training session with Vista and Office before getting starting.
A quick thing to note is that it uses a new file format (.docx for example for Word). Again, not the place to go into the technical detail here, but this can't be read in Office 2003 without a converter, and can't be read at all on a Mac yet - if you do have Office 2007 I'd recommend saving in 2003 file format for the time being.
The plans in our IT strategy say that we'll upgrade to Vista/Office 2007 as soon as possible in order to maintain a modern IT enviroment, upgrading academic staff first, then the student open access PCs. Our Microsoft Campus license means that there isn't any extra software cost to us for this, although we will have to upgrade some hardware. We're still finalising our plans, but hopefully we'll be able to upgrade all student machine this Summer - let me know if you have any views on that!
Finally, we hope to make Vista available for staff to purchase through the University for a smallish sum (our Campus license allows us to do this), so hold off before buying your own copy!