It’s been over a month of events and workshops. I’m trying to reflect on all of the things that have happened; delivering a course in Manchester the morning after the tragic event of 22nd May, talking about Rhubarb as a metaphor for digital strategy in Southampton and about Digital Leadership in an age of supercomplexity…
Read moreAuthor: Lawrie Phipps
Rhubarb Strategy
Last week was both dreadful and energising. On Monday I travelled to Manchester to run, with colleagues, the second residential of the Jisc Digital Leaders course. It felt like a successful course, but we were viewing it through a strange lens; as we did our welcomes on the 23rd May the events of the 22nd…
Read more
Strategy is multimodal
One of the things I hear working with leaders in organisations is “I need to write the <insert term> strategy” — it doesn’t actually matter which strategy it is, or what flavour of a strategy it is. When you start working at a certain level, you have to start writing strategies, or parts of strategies;…
Read more
Of fiendish patches, and absent developers. An update to the previous post.
Last week I wrote a short story “Next Gen DLEs and Coach C on 15:11 from Cheltenham”. It recounted my struggles with the Crosscountry Trains on-board booking system, and documented a series of failures and usability errors, both online and face-to-face. When I tweeted it, and cc’d @crosscountryUK for comment – they did kindly get…
Read more
Next Gen DLEs and Coach C on 15:11 from Cheltenham
Bear with me. This story starts with a journey. 25th April 2017, 14:30: Bristol. It was a Tuesday. I was heading home from a meeting. There is a Train Service provider in the UK called CrossCountry Trains. They have a fleet of trains with LCD seat reservations. The seat reservation system downloads all the reservations…
Read more
Clickbait, Lies and Propaganda
So, this is not a new subject. Or a new phenomena. And what sparked me off this morning was a tweet from Eric Stoller. There are so many things going on in this tweet I actually struggled on where to start. But then I, like Eric, decided to challenge the headline; because I think it…
Read more
Development not Training: an approach to social media for leaders
The Jisc Digital Leaders course is running again in May. Whenever we have run the course we have always had lots of questions about social media, especially Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin (sic). These three particular platforms perhaps embody one of the key issues – and causes of angst – for many people both working in education…
Read more
Satellite tagging saving wildlife
There are times when my role in education technology and my personal life as a conservationist and Environmental Science graduate feel poles apart. But occasionally I am reminded how the affordances of technology impact across so many aspects of our lives, and how the advances being made can benefit things that we are passionate about,…
Read more
What cats taught me about project management
Recently we held a really fun day of internal talks around a variety of issues. I chose to build on the metaphor that Amber Thomas first suggested around “cats and dead birds”. I have used this before in workshops, but I wanted to build on it, and with limited time available (max 10 minutes) this…
Read more
Many Bothans died to bring us this information*
*(Spoiler) No Bothans were harmed in writing this post – but if Rogue One taught us anything its that archives and libraries are dangerous places Lots of colleagues and friends are writing blogs at this time of year, reviews and “top 10 tech to watch in 2017” type things. I really enjoyed reading Martin Weller’s…
Read more