Behind the headlines of the new Jisc Techdis tools – a personal view
It isn’t often that when I am delivering a plenary session at a conference that the audience is moved to tears, but that is exactly what happened at ND2012 . Let me explain what happened.... It was the final plenary on 30 May in Old Billingsgate. I was on stage excitedly introducing the video of John Hayes MP, Minister of... >>
Where there's MOOC, there's brass?
Why bother paying inflated fees to attend university? Why pay to spend three years living on a campus, attending seminars and tutorials, running up debts? What if you could get it all for free, online? This is the compelling pitch offered to millions of prospective students from a bewildering array of start-ups and initiatives. Building on the open educational resource... >>
Jisc and crowdfunding
What links an e-paper watch , a statue of RoboCop and an open alternative to Facebook ? The answer is that all of these ideas have been funded via the crowdfunding site Kickstarter . Crowdfunding is an exciting new approach where individuals can choose to dedicate some of their own money to an idea that piques their interest. Here at... >>
The value of local developers
The higher and further education sectors in the UK are fortunate to employ talented and dedicated software developers. Without them, many kinds of technical innovation would be significantly more difficult, more expensive or even impossible. While the patterns of employment of 'local' (locally employed) developers varies considerably between higher/further education institutions, it is rare for such institutions to invest strategically... >>
Developers value to higher education
There is a great William Gibson quote, ‘The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed.’ I believe that working with developers to share experiences, ideas and expertise will help distribute those slices of the future that are carved out by innovative developers in individual institutions. Dev8D is Jisc's annual event for software developers working in higher education... >>
Co-operation of the fittest: a decade for institutional dialogue and collaboration?
1. Demographic changes. As any fan of Freakonomics will tell you, the impact of demography can be easy to miss but difficult to overstate. Universities and colleges will face demographic concerns on two fronts. a) A declining number of young people. The Office of National Statistics age cohort information indicates that the East and West Midlands face a drop of... >>
Isn't Google digitising everything anyway?
Since Google embarked on its scanning of major world book libraries, there has been the assumption that there is little more to do in the field of digitisation. Yet this is far from the truth. Opinions vary, but it is probably fair to say that more than 95% of the world books, magazines, newspapers, videos, films, documents still lay hidden... >>
Turning eyewitnesses into experts
It’s amazing how our collective memory of many events has been shaped by images taken by ordinary people – like mobile phone footage of political protests in oppressive regimes or tragic pictures of national disasters. The exponential rise of social media has created a new landscape of interaction and collaboration where the boundaries between professional practice, citizen journalism, the subject... >>