From where I stood, the Jisc Digital Festival 2015 aka #digfest15, was pretty good. Some excellent sessions, engaged delegates and I also had the small matter of a debate to chair. I’d like to start right off by thanking everyone who attended the debate, I was blown away by the number of people that were…
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Cost of studying: a web based tool for student budgeting
Jisc are initiating a small development project to provide the sector with a web-based tool that will aid students in understanding and budgeting their finances whilst studying. This post represents initial consultation to begin the scoping work. Following comments and other feedback we will begin a more structured consultation before designing a tool and testing…
Read moreHow the dinosaur got his nose!
I hadn’t gotten excited about 3D printing. It’s great, love the idea, understand how artists can use it, or engineers can build prototypes etc, but I hadn’t got that excited. That changed for me when I met a project in which Jisc is a partner from the British Geological Society at the Jisc Digifest in…
Read morePresentation: Digital behaviours and their impact
This blog post supports the presentation at Imperial College, 14th November 2013. The conference is organised by Panopto, a software company that provides lecture recording. I agreed to speak about some of the things that we have elicited from working with students in the Changing Learning Landscape Programme, the Visitor and Residents project and the…
Read moreNaming a problem?
Is the way we use language in technology having a negative or positive effect? It’s a debate that’s been going on a while, but a discussion over the weekend with a new student prompted me to put something down about the authority that jargon seems to carry. It’s been interesting discussing some of the issues…
Read moreIs Digital Different: A discussion at SEDA Summer School
This year I was invited by SEDA to talk to delegates at their annual summer school about the idea of digital in an academic setting. As I’ve previously posted, I’m not a huge fan of the language in this area or the way I feel that technology is sometimes pushed over practice. I decided that…
Read moreThinking about Badges?
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 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 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 moreEngaging staff in technology enhanced learning: Workshop write-up
This is the write-up of a workshop I ran for the HEA’s Gwella programme in November 2009. The programme is a change programme supporting e-learning units to embed technology enhanced learning (TEL) at their institutions. As with all workshops I run, I got the delegates to do most of the work, so a big thank…
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