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Month: November 2015

Where’ve You Been?

Published 24th November 2015

I say, it’s been a little quiet on here over the past few months, hasn’t it? It has been a frightfully busy time for me! At work the start of the new academic year brought with it the usual amount of chaos and mayhem, and outside of work I have been moving home while desperately trying to do something, anything, with my dissertation! I’ve just popped in some posts about things I’ve done recently, but there has been plenty more I could have written about.

Clearning was, alas, a bit of a bust in the end. The core team were just so good, and so efficient that they left me with very little to do, and so I ended up just spending the afternoon doing general enquiry chats. Still, it was a nice break and I’m good to go next year.

I did some good work for the newly rebranded School of Law using Storyline to record some introductory videos to smarten up some of their programme spaces, and got access to a professional recording studio to record voiceover for the Anti-Bribery Act training module I have been building, a project which is now back in the hands of our Legal and Governance department for approval. They initialled asked for this to be ready for October. 2014. It’s still ongoing.

In early September we, as a team, were able to elbow our way into a number of faculty and department conferences to provide a crash course on changes to SunSpace, i.e. the new template and the Turnitin LTI, which was extremely successful. In one session we probably hit more people than all of the Technology Bytes sessions we ran last year. Those aren’t happening again this year; instead of planned sessions we are holding generic drop-in surgeries with colleagues in Academic Development in the hope that those will be better attended. Other teaching I have delivered has included some sessions to front-line Library staff on new things in SunSpace and, just a couple of weeks ago, some sessions to students on creating posters in PowerPoint to display their research proposals at a showcase event taking place in early December.

Also at the start of the new year the University went live with a new electronic attendance monitoring system that required all students to be issued with a new ID card, a mammoth operation for which I volunteered a few shifts.

At the beginning of October we had a conference call with colleagues at Texas Christian University, something we have to do because we are the only university in the UK trying to use LearningStudio as a VLE, only to discover that they are now well along the road in migrating to a new VLE and ending their relationship with Pearson. I probably shouldn’t say any more on this topic, but I can slip in a cheeky link to this article and let you read between the lines about what it means…

End of October was appraisal season and as well as my own I was invited to sit in and contribute to the team’s appraisals as per last year. Any moment now I will start on my middle-managers training course, which was supposed to happen this year, but it has been completely re-written and is now a fully accredited PG Cert which works out really well for me. Also approved in principle is my doing the PG Cert in Education next year.

Finally, last week I attended a consultation event from our VC where she discussed the plans and the direction of travel she wants to set for the next five years and her thoughts on the recently published Green Paper. One of her big themes or ideas was on cultivating an ongoing relationship with students after graduation to keep their skills current.

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Zapier Demonstration

Published 20th November 2015

Had a demonstration of Zapier today from a Pearson rep from their developers network. Zapier is a service that allows web services from different platforms to talk to each other, but in a very simple visual manner – no programming skills required. So, for example, you could set a new direct message alert from Twitter (the trigger) to send you an email to your Gmail account (the action). Triggers and actions can be chained together to create complex sets of actions. You could add a second part to my example which adds an entry to a Google Sheets spreadsheet from the Twitter DM as well for example. The possibilities are huge, and every modern web service you can probably think of is available on Zapier.

If this sounds like If This Then That that’s because it is pretty much the same, though Zapier claims to have more integrations available. Why Zapier then? Because Pearson have chosen Zapier to experiment with by linking up the web services which are available from LearningStudio to Zapier. You won’t find that advertised on Zapier though, as they are set to private at the moment, but we will be able to use them and can send them on to others. We could, for example, create a ‘Zap’ that sends an email whenever a new announcement is posted in a course site. We’re still waiting for full details of what the 17 triggers are, and there are no actions, so unfortunately this is going to be a one way thing; no possibility of setting a Facebook post to be pushed into a discussion board thread for example.

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FabLab Tour

Published 19th November 2015

We had a team visit to Sunderland’s new, very soon to open FabLab today, which has been built in partnership with the University. A FabLab is a low-cost workshop which is set up with a range of equipment designed to let almost anyone build almost anything. All FabLab’s have roughly the same equipment and facilities so that people and projects can easily move between locations, with one key piece being one or more 3D printers. Other kit available includes a bench of soldering guns and electronics for making circuits, a laser cutting and engraving machine, and a huge ShopBot CNC machine, which they had to knock a wall down to fit in.

Once the Lab properly opens to the public you will be able to get a 3D scan and print of your head for only £30. What a great and unique Christmas present for the loved one in your life!

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Leading from the Middle

Published 13th November 2015

At my appraisal last year it was suggested that I attend the University’s second line manager’s development course. This was delayed by a year because the course was under redevelopment by HR in conjunction with our Business School’s Corporate and Professional Education (CaPE) team. The new course, now branded as ‘Leading from the Middle’, is a fully accredited post-graduate module resulting in a Postgraduate Certificate in Leadership and Change upon successful completion. I don’t have a lot of information at the moment but I suspect that assessment will involve a portfolio of evidence, and in any case I’ll want to blog about the course as it develops, so I have created a new page specifically to collect these posts together using the ‘LFTM’ tag. The taught sessions on the course are as follows:

  • Induction and Academic Skills
  • Knowing Yourself, To Lead Others
  • Strategic Leadership and Culture and Context (2 parts)
  • Emotional Intelligence
  • Coaching at Work (3 parts)
  • Understanding Finance
  • Collaborative Conversations
  • Creativity and Entrepreneurial Learning
  • Leading Change and Transition
  • Leading High Performing Teams
  • Leading Equality and Diversity
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The Slow Death of Twitter?

Published 10th November 2015

There have been a few times recently when I’ve found myself conscious of the fact that I rarely use Twitter these days, often coupled with resolutions to tweet more. Then today when I wanted to tweet something about a problem I was having in El Capitan I fired up the app and this is what I got:

  • 1 Tweet
  • A ‘Suggested apps’ panel which filled most of the screen
  • The ‘While you were away…’ section with 5 tweets of dubious interest
  • 2 Tweets
  • The ‘Who to follow’ section with three bad suggestions
  • Then my actual Twitter feed proper.

Then I realised part of the reason why I’ve moved away from Twitter.

Coincidently I stumbled on this article in the Guardian about Twitter’s woes during my lunch break. It has given me an idea though, with a drastic trim of the accounts I’m following perhaps it could become more useful and relevant again.

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It’s Not Easy Being Green

Published 9th November 2015

Possibly a first today, I read a government paper. Specifically, if you haven’t been able to guess, Jo Johnson’s green paper on the future of HE (a good overview can be found on THE’s website here). It has some good in it, but also a lot that worries me, and of course there is no question of anything that undermines the ideology of market good, public bad.

The big thing in the paper is the new Teaching Excellence Framework of course, something I think is basically a good idea, but it will succeed or fail on how good and useful it is, and on how difficult it is for universities to complete; qualitative measures are notoriously difficult to define and measure. The paper promises that the TEF will not be an administrative burden, which sounds to me like it is going to rely on reductive measures that will be taken to infer teaching quality, and I’m not sure that there’s a lot of value in that.

The expansion of private provision and speeding-up of degree awarding powers is the most worrying part of the paper for me. This has been tried in FE and it has not being going particularly well, with huge amounts of public money disappearing into the profits of private companies with very little student benefit. It’s going back to the underlying ideology of the government which believes that private is always good and public always bad, and all evidence to the contrary be damned. I welcome the acknowledgement of the need for exit measures of some kind in case of a course being withdrawn or the failure of an institution, but this area of the paper is extremely light on detail. A transfer to a similar course at another institution is fine, but I think there needs to be additional financial support available if someone has to relocate or travel so that the student is not left worse off, and the suggestion of a mere refund of fees paid if there is no transfer option is grossly insufficient, as the withdrawal of a course can have a devastating effect on someone’s life and career plans. I think this needs to be acknowledged and appropriate compensation offered in addition to a refund.

The best thing in the paper is the shake-up of the degree classification system with the introduction of a complimentary GPA. I kind of like the traditional honours degree classifications, but there is no question that they have lost a lot of value when 70% of students get either a First or an Upper Second, so I like that the GPA is being introduced as a supplement rather than a replacement.

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