The projects in the wider programme cover a diverse range of research fields including local history, historial maps and climate change. For full details see the JISC website.

The idea of finding new ways to open up the world of university and college to those outside, to mutual benefit, certainly seems to be closely in line with priorities of the Welsh education sector for widening participation and economic regeneration. Congratulations to all the projects and good luck!

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).

The events are online, last 30-60 mins, and use the Instant Presenter webinar system which is very straightfoward to join in. During the session you will be able to follow a short presentation and ask questions via online text chat.

Further details are here:

www.instantpresenter.com/techdisonline78

No special software or equipment is required, though a headset will be useful. There is no need to book in advance. Looking forward to seeing some of you online at one of the appointed times!

PS JISC Techdis are also running a series of “Xerte Fridays” – Instant Presenter sessions about the accessible learning object creation tool Xerte, developed at University of Nottingham. These range from introductory to more specialised and you can find out more at http://www.techdis.ac.uk/index.php?p=3_28_3

If you’ve missed earlier sessions (I recommend the Introductory one for complete beginners) then recordings are  available from the above link.

Anyway, back to the ESCalate conference: it is open to staff and students in all fields of education. RSC Wales have gained great benefit from joining in past ESCalate events and we’ll look forward to attending this conference too. The deadline for bookings is 19 March.

The disability awareness tools are being developed by the Accessibility Research Centre at Teesside University.  They are still in progress (apparently a tool based around dyslexia is coming soon) but you can try out the tools for cognitive disabilities, motor disabilities and visual disabilities at http://rime.tees.ac.uk/ARC/simulations/. The project team would welcome your help with completing their questionnaires (available from the home page) so they can further develop the tools.

.    Strategies for agile institutions: scenario planning

.         Relationship management and business intelligence

.         Research rigour, accessibility and impact

.         Alternative business models for higher education

.         Enhancing the student and staff experience

The publication is available for download here both as a simple pdf and as an interactive version with video. Alternatively, you can view a summary page with invitations to ‘take three steps’ plus video clips on the JISC website.

Ewart Woodridge CBE, Chief Executive of the Leadership Foundation for Higher
Education, welcomed the publication, commenting that the agile university  required “a strategic and entrepreneurial approach to the use of technology”.

As well as providing food for thought for leaders, this resource provides a clear summary of some of the key tools available from JISC to support university managers, and brings home the importance to the ‘agile university’ of integrating IT strategy across the organisation.

The Simshare project, one of the projects under the HEFCE-funded JISC Academy Open Educational Resources programme, has been looking at bringing together simulation resources and enabling them to be shared. Simshare is based in the UK Centre for Legal Education at Warwick University, and evolved from an earlier project SIMPLE, which focussed on legal education and attracted various awards . Now Simshare has taken this work beyond the field of law to include simulation learning in all subject areas.

The Simshare team, whose partners include University of Glamorgan, are now offering a series of free one-day workshops. One is taking place in Cardiff University on 15 March and is designed for academics in any discipline who are interested in knowing more about simulation learning and how to share resources. You will:

1. Learn about OER (Open Educational Resources), and how you can be a part of it.

2. Have access to a wealth of free resources for teaching.

3. Have help in getting started in using simulation as a form of teaching, learning and assessment.

4. Practise assembling a simulation on paper and have access to online resources to help you do this.

5. Know how to download and upload resources to the OER website.

Full details are available at http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/simshare/workshops.html and the contact for more information is patricia.mckellar@warwick.ac.uk. You can also download an event flyer.

I’m grateful to Karen Counsell at University of Glamorgan Law Department for letting me know about this event (she also put me on to an evaluation which her department carried out for JISC Techdis, of the accessibility benefits of the SIMPLE law simulation in assessment – thank you Karen!

We know from the feedback from our current Barrier Busting Roadshow events about Accessibility and Inclusion - attended and enjoyed by staff in all supported sectors, HE included – that lots of people are interested in how to use technology to improve effectiveness around inclusion and accessibility, not just for ‘disabled students’ but for all students and staff.

Not only is the HEAT4 funding highly relevant to current concerns, it also has the big advantage of enabling small, manageable projects within the reach of any staff. A HEAT project can achieve great benefits without demanding large amounts of time or resources in the application process or the running of the project. Take Newport University’s HEAT3 project for example, which got staff using vodcasting to give students feedback, or Lampeter’s, where staff in Classics digitised image collections to make their teaching materials more inclusive and engaging.

The JISC Techdis website offers full details of previous projects so you can see the kind of thing that’s possible. So if your reaction to project funding is “but I don’t have time to bid” or “we’ve never done anything like this before” then I suggest think again – HEAT4 could just be the way in.

Proposals are particularly welcome in these areas: Lifelong Learning, Work-Related Learning, Employer Engagement and Business & Community Engagement (see www.jisc.ac.uk/bce for more information about this whole agenda) but no theme is excluded. Funding of £1200 is available per project and is to purchase technology.

We’re looking forward very much to working with colleagues at JISC Techdis and Academy Wales on evaluating the bids (due in 22 February), and seeing projects evolve and share their experiences with the sector so we all benefit.

(By the way, if you’re interested to know more about what Swansea University Medical School have been doing with clickers, there’s also an interview with Sam Webster about his project on the Swansea University Learning Lab, as part of their podcast/vodcast series.)

All the best for the future to SALT! If you work in a university learning and teaching development unit or e-learning team in Wales and you have something you’d like to share with other organisations in Wales, why not send it to us here at RSC Wales and we’ll do our best to cover it in this blog.