It’s not often that I trek up to London, spend a sunny day inside a conference centre and wish I could have stayed longer, but with #jisc10 I could happily have kept going for a few more hours at least. Here are some personal highlights of my day, and some pointers  to some of the things that caught my eye. For lots more info, visit http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2010/04/jisc10.aspx for a Virtual Goody Bag of presentations, social network and video recordings coming soon.

My first impression was the sheer size of the event – I haven’t been to the JISC conference for a few years and it has become HUGE. Wish I had done a bit more preparation beforehand and arrived earlier to get my bearings… Oh well, straight into the rousing opening session by Prof Sir Tim O’Shea, who spoke proudly of the value that JISC represents for the educational community, giving institutions access to facilities they could not achieve alone. The theme of collaboration in order to survive (and maybe even thrive) was to be a thread running through the day.

The first plenary speaker was someone I had long waited to hear: Martin Bean, Vice Chancellor of the Open University. An ideal keynote, he managed to inspire, provoke and entertain with his address on The Learning Journey from Informal to Formal Learning. Actually that title is a bit misleading, because what he asked us to consider was a learning journey where the informal and the formal are interwoven rather than a linear route. I won’t try and summarise all Martin’s points, as the slides are all online and a video recording will follow soon. The bits I found particularly interesting were:

- the likely growth of the private sector in HE over the next decade

- in a world where institutions are no longer the sole custodians of academic content, libraries need to focus not just on teaching students about access to content, and retrieval skills, but also the skills to make sense, and to transform information into meaning. Excellent point: though I’d argue that academics need to work with their librarians on this one rather than leave it all to ‘library induction’ Also on the information literacy theme, Martin stressed the importance of trusted content - he sees it as a huge upcoming issue.

- workplace learning – many of the barriers to this are of our own creation, he argued. We need to overcome them if we are to equip students for new kinds of work.

- there is a ‘crisis of relevance’ surrounding the purpose of HE in the UK. We looked at what characterises learners today in terms of their values (eg sharing, authenticity), priorities (eg self-presentation, ), likes (eg stuff friends like) and hates.  Apparently learners hate complexity, bad design, cost and “things that get in the way of expression”. So do most human beings I suspect, but I thought this comment was a useful reminder (and perhaps a consolation) to those who struggle to engage staff and students in the use of new technology.

- not surprisingly there was a mention of the OU’s work on Open Educational Resources, with things like OpenLearn and iTunesU. What I wasn’t aware of, was how Open Educational Resources could be used to enable teacher training in Sub Saharan Africa and maternity care in Ethiopia.

- we were urged to get comfortable with a future in which higher education would be less reliant on classic structures (likened to fixed staircases) and would include ‘ gentler slopes’  and ‘smaller milestones’ with accreditation through ‘mentors’ and based on web resources (this informal learning visualised as fluffy clouds…). Perhaps we should have had some questions at this point about where our existing systems of FE, ACL and public libraries fit into this vision?

- I liked the point that technology failure in universities is not down to technology but is because we fail to take account of people and processes. I wondered if this diagnosis might explain why, in this week’s JISC-sponsored Guardian roundtable report, eminent HE leaders appeared to take the view that technology is opposed to human interaction rather than a means to enable and enhance it; or why they seemed to view digital libraries as incompatible with physical libraries. I do hope some of those roundtable participants were at the conference, as they would have been able to see plenty of evidence that such views are somewhat over-simplistic.

Later in the day I attended three workshop sessions.

• What is the place of technology in research-led teaching? .

One of the projects shown here was new to me: Neil Chue-Hong of NeISS talked about JISC-funded work to develop simplified interfaces for complex research computing systems. This means that students can be introduced earlier to interacting with, and getting a better understanding of, real research data, and even members of the public can get involved. One example shown was the UK Snow Map project which used Twitter to get people to report snow in their area. This tied in nicely with a later session on community collections and crowdsourcing (see below).  Neil stressed that research data gathered and presented in this way needs to be Accurate, Appealing, Appropriate and Accessible.

In the same session, I liked Gilly Salmon’s point that if you want staff to engage with new approaches, in HE at least, then targets are not going to work; staff need to see evidence of real benefit. She also reminded us that engaging staff can be a slow process! I was interested to learn that the University of Leicester’s Media Zoo has a lot of new topics coming on stream including ”The Greening of Learning” – something to look out for.

• Next stop was Jam Jar Funding: strategy in a potted economy.

In this session about shared services, I was pleased to hear Helen Workman give an account of SCONUL Access (a collaborative system whereby students have access to libraries other than that of their ‘home’ institution). While it did not develop as a technology-driven project (Helen acknowledged that indeed many issues around “e-access” remain to be resolved) and was not especially driven by cost-saving, it has worked because it has been built up steadily from small beginnings, and with a clear eye on reciprocal benefits for all concerned.

Dan Perry who has recently moved from the private to the public sector, gave a good account of how his organisation, Janet UK, has reviewed its operations to become more agile. His recipe for success:

• know your business, look at the life cycle of products, do they deliver value for money
• know the numbers - something we are not very good at in the public sector
• strive to be trusted, consider your values
• empower the team through delegation and cross-functionality
• don’t be afraid to look over the horizon

Shared services are a big area of interest for Higher Education at present. There was some discussion around the barriers to shared services, and topics such as the pros and cons of dependancy on external and commercial suppliers. Unfortunately no one had any easy answers. It’s clearly a dilemma to work out what an institution can afford to share, and what it should protect as its own unique provision. I felt we  only scratched the surface of a complex topic, but there is wealth of explanatory material in the Virtual Goody Bag which I can now get to grips with.

• My last workshop was probably the most inspiring of all: Community collections and the power of the crowd. Three different projects provided evidence that technology can bring about co-creation of knowledge by people who would otherwise not have met, and it can also make a real difference to quality of life.
  • We heard about Oxford University’s Great War Archive and the RoCoCo project which will soon be providing training and support for others who would like to develop community collections. I hope they can come to Wales at some point!
  • Galaxy Zoo is a project which has enabled members of the public to get involved in astronomy research.
  • William Perrin talked about how he was inspired to develop an online community as a response to the social and economic decline of his local area. He gave us an entertaining tour of lots of so-called ‘hyperlocal’ sites for small communities both urban and rural, and pointed out how, unlike the local press which strongly resists public archiving, they stand a chance of being digitally conserved by libraries.  I liked William’s analogy that these sites can be a bit like following The Archers! He has a support site here and a personal blog also. I decided my colleagues supporting Adult Community Learning and the Voluntary Sector would find much of interest in this session 

• The closing plenary was Bill St Arnaud talking about about Greening ICT and the responsibility of universities to reduce our carbon footprint. At the close of a very long day I resolved not to risk brain overload by noting all the details, but to review the presentation later online. Bill, a Green-IT consultant from Canada, spoke passionately about how universities in North America are tackling the environmental cost of big data centres (described as the ‘new heavy industry’). The main message he gave was: being more energy efficient, while it can mean financial savings, is not the answer to climate change (you make things more energy efficient, so they become cheaper, and simply get used more). The way to minimise the damage (since it can’t be reversed) is to adopt a zero carbon strategy.  Bill spoke enthusiastically about JISC’s Greening ICT programme and I’ll certainly be referencing his powerful presentation when I’m preparing support materials for our own upcoming  Smarter Greener Learning conference on 29 April (sorry fully booked - but email events@rsc-wales.ac.uk if you’d like to go on the waiting list).

As with most face to face conferences, some of the biggest benefits are the chance encounters with old friends, the cementing of new contacts, and the sense of fellowship and renewed purpose that come from being part of a crowd. Given the high cost (financial, time and environmental) of running and attending face to face events, I feel we do need to keep weighing up the value of physical vs virtual attendance, and I spent some of the long journey home reflecting on this in the light of my experiences at jisc10. I think this question deserves more space and time than we have here, so I’ll return to it another time.

I look forward to the next JISC conference in Liverpool in March 2011, and in the meantime I gather that there will be a JISC research conference in the Autumn which will be worth looking out for. Check here for lots more JISC events that may be of interest to Higher Education (and others).

HEFCW has recently announced that it is providing funding, through JISC, to assist institutions in meeting strategic concerns in enhancing learning and teaching through the use of technology, building on, and learning from, the HEFCW-funded Gwella Programme. Information has been sent to Pro Vice-Chancellors for Learning and Teaching, or their equivalents, in Higher Education institutions. (Source: HEFCW February 2010 Newsletter)