Month: June 2016

people know people

Issue 26 p. 1 front cover Illustration of hanging a sheet on a washing line Usage terms: We have been unable to locate the copyright holder for Hanging a sheet on a washing line. Please contact copyright@bl.uk with any information you have regarding this item. - See more at: http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/spare-rib-magazine-issue-026#sthash.qZnKW0Db.dpuf
Issue 26 p. 1 front cover
Illustration of hanging a sheet on a washing line
Usage terms: We have been unable to locate the copyright holder for Hanging a sheet on a washing line. Please contact copyright@bl.uk with any information you have regarding this item. – See more at: http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/spare-rib-magazine-issue-026#sthash.qZnKW0Db.dpuf

As part of the PlayFair Steps equality and diversity initiative in ISG we have been looking at our staff demographics and considering our recruitment practices.

There is many a cliche to be heard around how difficult it is to recruit women into tech jobs. Some of it is true, some of it is lack of imagination. As a large tech employer in this city we compete for the best talent against other tech employers in the city. The competition for new graduates, skilled software engineers, designers,  excellent IT managers and creative thinkers is hot*.

As an organisation we recognise that we need to improve the diversity in our teams to improve our insights and creativity, to draw upon a diverse set of ideas and experiences and to model for our own students the world in which they might want to work.

One of the things we’ve done is to start employing student interns. Dozens of ’em.  It’s been really invigorating. All the teams in LTW have benefitted and I am personally very much enjoying having the most up-to-date thinking and input from the interns in my office.  Dominique works with me on my gender equality plans and Polina works with me on digital marketing and recruitment. These two projects are linked. If we want to get more women into our organisation- particularly at senior levels- we need them to apply for our jobs in the first place.

I am not certain that as a tech employer we are very well served by our recruitment strategy currently. We have no specific graduate careers track in ISG, no ‘return to work after a career break’ initiatives and we tend only to advertise in ‘university places’ such as our own HR pages and jobs.ac.uk**.  I’ve never seen a twitter feed or anything similar pushing out our jobs (other than mine).

HR sites, and even jobs.ac.uk rely on the premise that a person wants to work in a university first and that they’ll be looking for a job and your ad will happen to be there at that moment.  I’m not sure that is the market we most need to be in.  I think we need to be digitally transforming our recruitment approach and reaching passive talent*** while they happen to be browsing.

I have asked Polina to investigate LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has company pages, where employers can gather followers and networks and get their news and jobs in front of people who already have jobs and are busy networking in their professional field.  Looking at Linkedin I note that as well as the University news pages, our business school is already using linkedin for their recruitment. Polina is a business school student so she knows her stuff.  My hope is that  we will figure out how best to use Linkedin in ISG to get our adverts to new eyes using  linked people, friends,  friends of friends, networks, news, alumni, students and interested tech followers to show them what a great place this is to work.

I’ll let you know how we get on. If you would like to follow our nascent company page, please do.

 

 

 

*this is what I learned when i recently chaired an Holyrood magazine event on Graduate Digital Skills.

**it turns out that 15% of working professionals are scanning their network at any given time, and  45% are totally open to considering a new opportunity when approached by a recruiter. I know this. It happens to me a  lot. In addition to the 25% who say they are actively looking for a new job, 85% of the global workforce are your oyster.

*** I’m also having trouble finding anyone who has any stats about how many views or shares our ads get. What I am finding is some anxiety amongst our HR professionals that I may be about to disrupt the status quo (again).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Microsoft has bought Linkedin and Lynda. So have we!

lynda_com_logo
Lynda.com brand logo. Fully copyrighted and trademarked. Many rights reserved by them.

We are soft-launching the Lynda.com service this week, providing the University with access to an extensive library of high quality video courses in technology, creative and business skills.

This exciting and versatile new resource can be used in many ways to develop staff and student skills, support curricular teaching, assist in software and systems rollouts and enable our training providers to expand their subject range and online provision. It supports the strategic plans of the University and Information Services, and will make a key contribution to digital transformation by increasing our capacity for digital skills development, helping to develop a digital culture and supporting staff and students to improve their skills for work, study and life.

Today’s soft launch provides access for staff and students on a largely self-service basis and will allow early adopters to immediately start using Lynda.com and begin to explore the possibilities it affords. The full launch in September will offer access to visitors, integration with Learn, engagement events and more comprehensive support resources. Care has been, and is being taken to consider where your data goes and how it is used, but if you do have questions, do ask.

To create and access your account, follow the instructions at www.ed.ac.uk/is/lynda

sad loss of an open VLE pioneer

Photograph of lillies taken by me in my house. No rights reserved by me.
Photograph of lillies taken by me in my house. No rights reserved by me.

I am sad to hear that Professor Andrew (Aggie) Booth has died. Aggie was a VLE pioneer. His work influenced mine and that of many colleagues. This news, coming as it does so soon after the recent loss of Sebastian Rahtz reminds me how much we owe to the original thinking of these clever, quirky, open practitioners.

Aggie Booth was one of the first, maybe THE first ‘Professor of e-learning’.  If you have not heard of him, or perhaps have forgotten, here’s my story of Bodington at Leeds and Oxford:

Bodington was originally developed at University of Leeds by Jon Maber and Aggie in 1995. It was subsequently released as open source*.  Oxford was the first HEI outside of Leeds to offer it as an institutional VLE . The University of the Highlands and Islands also used Bodington.

Bodington was a VLE ahead of its time**. This history of online learning  lists the first scaled deployment of Bodington in 1997, the same year WebCT 1.0 was released and Blackboard was founded. A year later Martin Dougiamas began preliminary work on Moodle.  I joined the learning technology team at Leeds in 2002. The Sakai project began in 2004.

The design of Bodington was based around a metaphor of space, people and place. It was originally  developed as the ‘Nathan Bodington Building’. University of Leeds campus is full of buildings named for people. Sir Nathan Bodington was the first Vice Chancellor of the University of Leeds having been Principal and Professor of Greek at the Yorkshire College since 1883.  Jon and Aggie imagined that students would find/navigate to their materials and classes in ‘rooms’ on ‘floors’ in the virtual environment just as they did in the physical.  Similar to the design of later virtual worlds such as SecondLife.  When a proliferation of virtual buildings  emerged at Leeds the virtual environment was renamed as Bodington Common.

For the open sourcing of software to be effective it is necessary to build a sufficiently large and vibrant community so that the product can become self-sustaining and progressively develop to include new ideas. Oxford was an early adopter of Bodington and was a keen supporter of a wide range of developments including various marketing exercises and attracting external funding for innovations; however, whilst the system was adopted by a wide range of institutions, the number of those prepared to commit development effort never reached a sustainable level.

The teams met in Oxford in 2005 to  discuss development of Bodington in collaboration with Sakai. When Leeds University opted in 2006 to select a proprietary system for their next VLE, Oxford was left as the sole large-scale developer of Bodington and this situation was untenable. It was at this point that Oxford decided to seek an alternative platform (with a bigger and better community) and chose Sakai, deploying it as WebLearn in  2008.  By this time I had moved from Leeds to join Oxford.

Many good things came out of working with Bodington and Sakai, the Oxford developers and gained vast experience in open source software and community development. Oxford ran Bodington and Sakai in parallel for four years, Bodington become read-only in Sept 2012.

Personally, I enjoyed teaching using Bodington very much and there are pedagogical tools in there I still miss.

 

 

*On 3 October 2006 Bodington released version 2.8.0 on SourceForge. This brought good will with it from those in the open source community who may have felt Bodington had been trading on the open source moniker unfairly in the past.( OSSwatch)

** This became important when Blackboard much later filed their patent in the US for various VLE features which were on record as having been part of the Bodington functionality.

sea the elephant in the room

Salvesen Photo Album
Sea Elephant (c) Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh https://www.flickr.com/photos/crcedinburgh/17180464078/

Last week, as part of our PlayFair Steps equality and diversity intiative in ISG, we invited Dr Rowena Arshad to talk to ISG staff about ‘Race Matters at Work’. The presentation was excellent and thought provoking. Attendance was low though, in comparison to an earlier talk in the same series about age.   I wonder whether colleagues hear ‘age’ and think ‘that’s me‘, they hear ‘race’ and they think ‘that’s someone else‘.

Rowena’s presentation helped us to ask ourselves questions about how we see people as ‘other’, and provided valuable insights into real, recent examples at University of Edinburgh.

As well as being one of the ISG change themes through which we are looking at our organisation and changing it to be fit for the future, equality and diversity is part of a larger consideration of digital transformation going on in the university, being championed by our CIO.

Our CIO challenges us to think about the ‘internet of me’, where each of us is at the centre of a web of services tailored to what the internet knows about us and what it anticipates  our wants and desires to be as a result.  Examples given of Uber, Airbnb etc certainly seem to make life easier for some.

I’d suggest that we cannot think about digital transformation without considering privilege and bias.  For some people, their experience of the internet is not as positive as it may seem to be for white, wealthy, north american or british men. For some it is  toxic, biased and perpetuates unhelpful stereotypes.  It is up to us as tech professionals to consider all our users and ensure that we create an internet for all. It is up to us not only to consider our unconscious bias but also to check and recheck that the services we build are inclusive.

The best way we can do that it to have diverse teams working on every project and provide safe working environments for colleagues to share their experiences which can inform our thinking. The risk if we don’t is that the more our services become personalised, the less we are able to empathise with the experience of others.

Some articles worth reading:
Airbnb’s ‘belong anywhere’ undercut by bias complaints
Can computers be racist? Big data, inequality, and discrimination
Research reveals huge scale of social media misogyny
Trouble on the Tracks: Susan Calman on internet filters

Update:

Rowena encouraged us never to be a bystander. Following  a reported rise in racist incidents in the wake of #brexit, this is also a useful resource on social abjection.

 

design led society

Cover image of Spare Rib Issue 171. Check http://www.bl.uk/spare-rib for copyright details.

My trip to Sweden was enjoyable and informative, despite being very brief. What I learned though, was that the Scandinavians would rather the UK didn’t leave the EU. We also considered the challenges of figuring out how MOOCs fit in a higher education system which is already free and open to all and already offers online courses.

Once again, I continued my good work of pointing out to AV tech guys that not all keynote presenters wear pockets or a waistband, or wish to have a headset put into their hair. Universal design does not seem to include women 🙂

 

east for EDEN

http://www.eden-online.org/2016_budapest/
http://www.eden-online.org/2016_budapest/

This week I’ll mostly be in Budapest for EDEN16. The conference is called ‘Re-imagining Learning Environments’. It’s my first time to EDEN, and I’ll be keynoting in the theme: ‘Opening up education’. I’ll be talking about the initiatives , projects, examples of good practice and the new business models we are championing at University of Edinburgh.

 

FYI UOE UK EU OER MOOC CC BY SA

EU referendum MOOC https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/eu-referendum/1
EU referendum MOOC
https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/eu-referendum/1

What’s your favourite  digital learning university doing in the face of the EU referendum? Another one of our just in time MOOCs, of course!

The EU can often be confusing and the UK’s relationship with the EU over the years has been complicated. This three-week course breaks down the key facts and guides you through the referendum.

We look at how the UK ended up having a referendum on EU membership. We then consider the campaign issues, public opinion and alternatives to being in the EU. After the vote, we reflect on what the result means for the UK and for the rest of Europe.

Course opens 13th June, join us as we explore one of the biggest decisions facing the UK in a generation.