March 2007 - Posts
We had a couple of very lively sessions on day 2 of the UCISA Management Conference – one on
Green IT issues, and the other on
Learning Space designIn a
ago I confessed to a growing unease at the environmental impact of IT. The last session of today’s conference was called ‘
Building a Green Future’, and Simon Tindall from Sun put these concerns a lot more bluntly, calling our current IT model “
an appalling affront to humanity in environmental terms”. Obviously Sun had a product sell here, but the point is still valid and very forcefully put. Sun’s solution is a thin client type device that has the following advantages:
- Very low power consumption (4Watts)
- Long life (could last 10-20 years)
The debate became pretty lively, as Chris Cartledge from University of Sheffield challenged the 4W claim, and pointed out that the thin client device didn’t even have an on/off switch.
Chris Cartledge made a number of other important points – electricity cost approx £1 per Watt per year ie a server would cost £350 to year to run. Why aren’t all Pcs as efficient as the Mac Mini? We are putting more and more power hungry devices – for example VOIP phone – 7W - normal phone 1W.
Another very good session was called
Dedicated Followers of Fashion – Designing technology rich teaching spaces – chaired by Gill Ferrel as a panel session. Unfortunately I didn’t catch the names of all the panellists – apologies – serves me right for sitting too near the back - strategically placed plasmas still too small to read.
JISC have just released an info pack on learning space design that can be found here:
http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/learning-space-design
Les Watson made the point we have to be prepared to take risks when designing learning spaces, and maybe get it wrong sometimes (the impact of getting it wrong can be reduced by making sure the space is flexible). This is similar to a point I made at last year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop about the design of online learning spaces. Les also pointed out that work ethic is slowly being replaced by a play ethic – serious fun.. Also mentioned Richard Florida’s work on creative classes – see:
http://www.creativeclass.org/. Another quote – this time from Einstein – "we only need two things .... – imagination and knowledge".
Interesting reports on projects from the other panellists – here are some of the bits that I found interesting….
Don’t dismiss low tech tools – for example putting lots of white boards into spaces for students to use can be a great idea. Environmental factors are important to learning (seats too hard, temperature wrong etc all have adverse impact.)
Students really like round tables – when questioned about a newly designed area that included round tables that was the thing they most wanted to transfer to other areas. Tables should be semi circular rather than round though, so they can be reorganised to allow more private study as well. Lecturer reported that they felt less like an authority figure – however using the interactive blackboard breaks that, so more work needs to be done there.
Another radical new build, this time from FE. Only highly desk based staff (eg administrators) have own desk. No offices – 250 desk spaces for 400 staff. Even the Principal doesn’t have own office space. Prime driver was space saving (after all most lecturers in FE are usually not in their office – they are teaching). No sure how it would work for tutorials though. Main problem has been getting a telephone system that worked – (would soft phones solve that?)
A few bits from some of the other presentations…
Roger Snelling, from my old University, Plymouth gave a talk on the Plymouth’s current £12.5M IT projects, with a particular focus on Cisco projects. One interesting aspect was the concept of “IT Strategic Vision through Scenario”. Using this approach scenarios were created, (eg an applicant interacting with the University online, an overseas student living in the city, etc) along with how the IT would support them. Seems like a good way a giving a human touch to the vision.
Cardiff University and RM gave a presentation on their I
T Shop, which looks great. The University, the SU and RM have partnered to create a shop to sell/lease laptops, Pcs and perhipherals from a variety of manufacturers to students and staff. The aim is to provide good complete service, so the students/staff get all the staff they need if the laptop goes wrong. There is a slight premium on price, but it looks well worth it for the bulk of the non-techie students. Might be well worth seeing if we can do something similar.
Oh yes, and wine tasting last night was more like wine drinking with very little food....
So here we are again, at the UCISA Management Conference 2007, this time held in the Novatel Hotel in London. A lot less character than Blackpool’s Winter Gardens last year…
As for last year I’ll blog some notes as I talk - hope it's vaguely understandable...
Interesting start, lunch with no chairs forced us to mingle and look at the exhibition stands – interesting discussion with Sun about their thin (ish) client solution – this time focus on the environmental savings (ie lower power consumption, less need to replace hardware) as much as the cost savings.
Opening talk was from
David Rhine, City University, who gave a broad introduction to the range and complexity of IT issues in the sector, finishing with the point that the complexity means that University’s don’t need a director of IT, they need a high quality CIO as part of the top team – University business must be the driver. I imagine this theme will be taken up by David Taylor – the closing speaker for the conference.
A lot of things that David talked about were the standard ‘Digital Natives’ type issues, but I was particularly interested on his emphasis on disaster recovery , just because it was first hand – City University was hit by a major fire with headlines like “University Destroyed by Fire” – kind of focuses the mind.
Next was
David Eastwood, Chief Executive, HEFCE – “
Sustaining excellence in higher Education”. Obviously less directly relevant to us in Wales than to the English HE’s , but still lots of interesting points. One real key point –there is unlikely to be specific funding for IT projects in the future – IT will need to be funded by Universities.
Here’s a quick summary of some of the other points.
The drivers for change include the following.
• Increasingly diverse student body
• More demanding students (paying customers – eg Wireless everywhere the norm, very efficient registration etc)
• Blur between full and part-time (IT can help make learning 24/7) - (Newport as a University is in a great position to exploit this because of our experience with part-time studies).
IT can only delivery cost savings if processes are re-engineered as well (I think this is a really important point, and explains why IT often doesn't deliver cost savings)
A Big Question – what is the role of the University when there is universal access to ‘Knowledge’? Answer – maybe not all knowledge is equal. Still need to rethink role of University.
Next Speaker –
Roger Barga from
Microsoft – “
Trends in Data Storage and Management.”
A fairly technical talk on the future directions of storage. He pointed out that storage is easily beating Moore’s Law.
Nice comment – “Free storage is like free puppies”! Ie operating costs are much higher than capital costs.
He then moved on to talk about Tiered storage – something we will need to move to. The idea is that you only put regularly accessed data on expensive drives (eg SAN), and move other data to cheaper drives.
Gartner Group – ‘Power and Cooling will be top priorty”
Interesting fact: Server power: 1996 – 120W 2006 – 450W
Soon won’t be able to cool data servers without a change of tact.
• Flash requires much less power, so maybe that has a place.
• Air cooling will be replaced by water cooling
• Virtualisation has a key part to play
• Environmental laws and drivers will force us all to look t engery use.
• Storage management staff skills will need to evolve. Few education programmes cover this area.
The final session of the day was a presentation on the
UCSIA Top Concerns Survey…These are areas of concerns as voted for by Universities (I voted in this). 72 insitutions voted.
Results:
Most imporatant to strategic success1. Funding and Resources For IT
2. IT Strategy and Planning
3 e-Learning
What is going to be imporatant1. Funding and Resources For IT
2. IT strategy and planning
3. Green Computing
Where is the spend1. Business systems
2. E-Learning
3. Systems Availability
Consolidated list:
1. Funding and Resources For IT
2. IT Strategy
3. E-Learning
4. Business Systems
5. Service Availability.
Overall thoughts on the top concerns list - governance is emerging as a key issue this year (in many of the top 10s), and eLearning continues to a key issue (this doesn't suprise me at all - it's our core business!) Its also interesting that we are all finally waking up to the enviromental impact of IT, with 'Green Computing' being the third placed issue that likely to grow in importance. This ties in well with the previous talk - obviously cooling and power consumption is one other the areas with high enviromental impact.
Our evening dinner is at a wine tesing venue... looking forward to that!
I thought this article was pretty interesting...
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,2040025,00.html
Generally the press only focus on the negative aspects of Wikipedia, so I thought this more balanced article tucked away in the arts section of the Guardian was worth noting. It tells how muscian Mike Scott (from the Waterboys) intially failed in his attempt to correct his own Wikipedia article due to intervention of the editoral team (how were they to know it was him?)
I've no idea how common this level of editorial control is in Wikipedia (maybe there just happened to be a few Waterboys fans...), but assuming it is common then I'm impressed!
Our plans in our IT strategy were to deploy Microsoft Vista fairly soon after it was released, which means Summer 2007 for our student PCs, earlier for our academic staff, and later for our administrative staff. The main reason for this was to make sure we continue to provide a modern computer environment. But is Summer 2007 too soon? I think it may be - we'll make a formal decision shortly but here are some of the issues. We are considering Office 2007 as part of the Vista rollout, so I've included thoughts on both Vista and Office 2007 here.
Application support (Vista)
Like any University we run many applications. We are currently testing our core applications with Vista, and have found a few problems, particularly with old applications. I'm sure more issues will crop up as more people use it, particularly with 'one-off' applications. If we deploy too early we may be in a position of not giving software providers enough time to fix issues. My view is that if they haven't fixed them in a year they never will, so waiting until Summer 2008 for the main student roll-out will resolve this.
Peer support and training (Vista and Office 2007)
Users rely on a mixture of formal training, peer support and formal support to learn how to use applications. Very few home users will have upgraded to Vista/Office 2007, so there will be very little peer support based on skills brought in from outside the Univesity.
Hardware (Vista)
Any OS upgrade requires more hardware, and Vista is no different. We'll need to upgrade RAM in a lot of PCs just to run it. But will it run as well as XP on the older machines? We are testing this at the moment, but the answer is unlikely to be 'yes'. And there is nothing worse than IT coming along and 'upgrading' a perfectly functional PC only for it perform a lot worse after. If we wait a while then we will have replaced a lot of the older PCs.
Aero Interface (Vista)
Much of the 'Wow' factor in Vista comes from the so called 'Aero' interface - a user interface with lots of wizzy effects like transparent title bars. It look great. The problem is it requires a fairly decent graphics card - more than has been needed for standard PCs in the past, and more than we have in most of our PCs. So at the moment we'll have to run the 'Windows Basic' interface. This doesn't change how Vista works, it just doesn't look as good in basic mode. How much of an issue is this? Would we be better waiting an making sure that a least the bulk of our student PCs could run the Aero interface?
File Formats (Office 2007)
Most people could do everything they wanted in Office 97, so any new version of Office isn't going to transform people's productivity. However Office 2007 does look to be a step forward in particular making some of the more advanced functions easier to use. The main issue is the new file format - .docx. Most people won't be able to read these files without additional software, and Mac users won't be able to read them at all for a while. Whilst we could try to get everyone to work in backwards compatibility mode, saving as normal .doc files, I'm sure .docx files would start to appear.
I've concentrated on the reasons why not to here - it's worth saying that Vista itself appears very stable, and on a brand new machine runs perfectly. Cosmetically it's a lot nicer than XP, and the new security features are welcome.
I'm collecting links to other University's plans in del.icio.us (tag Univista) so we can compare our plans with others - http://del.icio.us/michaeldwebb/univista
Thoughts?
A couple a things prompt this posting. Firstly, I've just registered with for a UCISA event: Green IT: Meeting the environmental challenge which looks at issues such as power saving, disposals etc. The second thing was an advert I saw in the weekend papers (Guardian 24th Feb). There were actually a series of adverts, and I thought they were pretty powerful - one showed an African family wading through a flooded area, with the caption 'Be a love, switch your computer off at the end of the day'. There's more about this campaign here: http://www.climatechanged.org/.
Over the last few years I've been increasing concerned that I'm working in an industry that maybe does a huge amount of environmental damaging, although on reflection I've realised that IT has great potential to help too.
Let's look at some areas of damage first. This is a pretty superficial view I guess, but bear with me. The most obvious problem is that the IT industry is based on progress, and with that obsolescence. Computers function for many, many years (my ZX Spectrum from 1982 still works!) but they become obsolete in around 5 years, or when the technology changes (hello Microsoft Vista!). That means that huge quantities of perfectly functional electrical equipment are at best recycled and at worst dumped. Thankfully legislation on this is changing to make manufacturers (and corporate users) responsible for their waste, and ensure it's recycled in a responsible way, but it really would be better if the equipment was just used for longer. We try to help with this in the university by re-selling our old equipment wherever possible.
The next area is paper use. I don't remember a time before word processors, but I'm sure when things were hand written/typed we all produced a lot less paper! I guess on one hand paper consumption encourages the planting trees, but a lot of energy and chemicals go into its production. I think this is short term problem - I'll explain why later.
The next one is power consumption and carbon emissions. There's a great page here http://www.aber.ac.uk/ensus/what/what.shtml (from University of Wales, Aberystwyth) that helps you calculate the carbon emissions of PC activity. What's immediately clear is that there an awful lot of computers in the world (can't find an accurate figure, but well over a billion have been sold) and a lot of those on and consuming power, even when they don't need to be. (As an aside, I was horrified by a piece of environmental advice in this month 'Sky magazine', encouraging people to put their Sky box to standby when it's not being used as it 'only' used half the power! Don't put it to standby, switch it off!!!)
On the face if it, those are some pretty serious problems, but I started thinking that maybe it wasn't all bad...
Let's start with the paper thing. I think the days of huge quantities of paper are being printed are coming to an end. My observation is that it's a generation thing. I wasn't quite brought up with IT, my first encounter being the the ZX81 when I was 11. I'd picked up the habit of wanting printed material before this (the Beano and Shoot! probably), and I still have this habit, even though I'm perfectly comfortable with reading on screen. I've realised that I very often go to the shop and buy the Guardian, and then sit there with it folded up, and read it off their website - two conflicting habits, one of which younger generations may not have. I was talking to a lecturer from a sixth-form college, and he was telling me that he has real problems getting his students to print work out (these were design students), because for them design was screen based, and they just hadn't got into the habit of wanting paper. So maybe there is hope that the paperless office will arrive as the generations of 'paper-people' move on.
Another positive IT contribution is the way it allows small, local, environmentally friendly companies to compete with bigger organisations, because IT and internet based retails is so cheap and easily available - a great leveller. A good example of this is Riverford farm - a provide of organic vegetable boxes. Riverford were local to me when I lived in Devon, and now cover a wider area. All my interactions with them are via the web (paying, changing my order etc), and I'm sure it would have been impossible for Riverford to grow with IT. Crucially, for me as a consumer it's just as easy for me to order from Riverford as it is from Tesco.
The next one is eBay. The best form of recycling has to be reuse, and eBay must be the biggest re-use network the world has ever seen. Without eBay my old TV would have ended up in landfill (I replaced it with a small LCD - much lower power consumption - Plasmas are an environmental nightmare!), as would have enormous quantities of other (often obscure) items.
I'm sure there are lots of other examples, so having thought about it, I feel a little more comfortable about working in IT. However we can all do our bit to reduce the impact we are having. Here are some easy ones, taken from the 'ClimateChanged' sites:
1) Switch your computer off at the end of the day! We'll try and enforce this via technology at some point, but we aren't there at the moment!
2) Switch you monitor off when you aren't using it.
3) Switch your printer off at the end of the day. I'm sure proportionally far more printers than computers are left on unnecessarily.