According to the Mozilla Open Badges project “A ‘badge’ is a symbol or indicator of an accomplishment, skill, quality or interest.” I’ve been discussing their role in education and personal and professional development with a few colleagues for a couple of months. Whilst I am still undecided whether or not I really like the idea…
Read moreAuthor: Lawrie Phipps
My #OpenEdSpace
This week is Open Education Week, myself and some JISC colleagues have spent some time thinking about what that means to us in our practice and more generally. Amber Thomas and David Kernohan have also created diagrams of what there open education space looks like, and building on their ideas and some of my colleagues…
Read moreA possible lens for deployment strategies in institutions for JISC artefacts
The Visitor and Resident project is yielding important data about behaviours in digital environments and the real world. Understanding behaviours around technologies is not new and work around digital literacy is an ongoing theme across education. But digital literacy is only the start of the process and many people are no longer identifying skill sets…
Read moreIncremental or Radical Change
I’ve been working with some of the new JISC Transformations Projects and looking back at the previous Building Capacity Projects, both of these programmes are based around deploying JISC resources to bring about organisational change. Following a conversation with a someone from Gartner late in 2011 it got me thinking about some of the peripheral…
Read moreOverwhelmed
“the Internet, is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts…” with apologies to Douglas Adams.
Read moreSupport isn’t just “noise on a spreadsheet”!
Recently I was chatting with a colleague working in the sector who reflected: “When I worked in IT support in a Computer Science Department (nearly 20 years ago now), the department was up for a re-organisation. My role, and those of the rest of the IT admin people, were described by the then Head of…
Read more7 top tips for giving 10 top tips about social media in education
I gave a presentation around Dave White’s resident and visitor principle this week and over coffee I got to talking to several academics who raised some of the issues below, so this with thanks to them and to other colleagues like Dave Cormier and Neil Witt. 1. Make sure you’ve used the tool Don’t just…
Read moreResponding to “Student perspectives on technology – demand, perceptions and training needs”
Responding to “Student perspectives on technology – demand, perceptions and training needs” This report to the Higher Education Funding Council for England by the National Union of Students had the remit to “gain a broad overview of the level of demand from students – new and potential – for online learning provision in UK higher…
Read moreSix ways to ensure sustainability for technology based interventions
Over the last two years I’ve been very lucky in working with some excellent projects in three JISC programmes; Users and Innovation, Institutional Innovation and Building Capacity. This community of projects hold a vast core of information and knowledge about the use of technology in institutions and how to get the most of it. In…
Read moreMaybe 42 is no longer the answer
The seeds of many initiatives present in institutions today were sown in 1998 when Dearing published his report into higher education, which was to have wide ranging ramifications across the higher education sector for the following decade. It included reference to ‘systems for teaching and administration’, the ability to ‘teach across continents’ and we also…
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