My blog software has been complaining that my page of Friday messages had been going on too long.
I know how it feels.
Here’s a new page for 2024.
Friday 12 January 2024
Dear All,
Thank you for coming back this year and thank you for all your work this week.
If you missed the LTW all-staff meeting in December, please take a moment to do Katie’s follow-up survey Staff Engagement Survey Follow Up Survey
The winter closure period seems to have passed without any major technical incidents, but I’ve probably jinxed that now.
Thank you to all who cleared desks to make space for a USD team on Tuesday, clearly they did not get the memo, but I hope we will see them in next week.
In amongst the desk reshuffle some of you may have noticed that Kevin Brogan , our Head of LTW Operations has not returned after Christmas, and sadly I expect he will be off sick for quite a while. There are two ‘Get Well Soon’ cards circulating around our wing, both have pictures of the Castle view, and one also features the red arrows. If you would like to sign one of the cards for Kevin, please do. He’d love to hear from you. A reminder of the day the Red Arrows came to Kevin at Argyle House here: ArgyleHouseRedArrowsJul23 – Media Hopper Create
Speaking of flying, congratulations to Geoff, Calum and Juan, who all passed their drone exams and are now CAA accredited drone pilots. If you would like to do drone training too, let your line manager know at your annual review this year.
I am sure your January diaries are filling up fast. Don’t miss DST and LST in the University Trail today and Thursday Get to know your University trail | The University of Edinburgh
…… or Shivani speaking about online safety at the Apps Lunchtime seminar on 23rd https://www.events.ed.ac.uk/index.cfm?event=book&scheduleID=68660
…….or Ellie’s Burns Night inspired Wikipedia editathon on the 25th. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/women-in-red-a-burns-night-inspired-wikipedia-editathon-tickets-793378274777 If you are cooking a haggis or wearing a tartan ( is your tartan even on Wikipedia?), why not take a picture to upload to Wikimedia commons? If you have a favourite poem or are preparing your immortal memory quips about what the poet himself might have thought of Traitors on the telly (‘ a parcel of rogues’) or the post office horizon scandal (“that cursed Tax of Postage”), please do share your resources.
If you are quick, you can book to see the most ‘Brigadoon’ of the University museums in January. The anatomy museum opens for only a moment, once in a blue moon, and then closes again without trace Anatomical Museum Open Days 2024 | The University of Edinburgh
If you need a University of Edinburgh polar fleece to protect you against the northern winds, ask your manager how to get a voucher.
Have a good weekend.
-Melissa
Friday 19th January
Dear All,
Thank you for all your work again this week.
Welcome to our new colleague, Mahima Aggarwal, who joins us to help with recruitment, LinkedIn and training and events.
Thank you to everyone involved in organising our 10 years of 100 MOOCs event at the Playfair Library last night. It was lovely to see the combined video trailers and to hear the stories from the academic teams who have such a positive experience of working with you. Dave Reay pre-recorded his talk for us, so do take 5 minutes out of your day to watch his short talk here.
I am aware there is major rail engineering work coming for some of you https://www.scotrail.co.uk/plan-your-journey/service-alterations/major-engineering-work-in-edinburgh-park-area-monday-29 Talk to your manager if it is likely to impact your ability to get to the office.
I am pleased to see the relaunch of our ‘23 Things for Digital Knowledge’ course https://www.23things.ed.ac.uk/ which Paula and Charlie have been developing. If you would like to take the course or find out more about it just follow the link.
Looking forward to next week, please join Ellie and Ewan at their Burns Themed Wikipedia editathon. If you are new to LTW and have not learned how to edit Wikipedia yet, ask your manager if you can join. “Women in Red” – a Burns Night inspired Wikipedia editathon Tickets, Thu 25 Jan 2024 at 14:00 | Eventbrite
For those of you who have been here a few years you will know that it will soon be time to chose our 2024 LTW mascot animal at Edinburgh Zoo. Edinburgh Zoo Adoptions Mark suggested that we might find a Short Courses Plat-form-a-pus, but I’m not sure our Zoo has one. If you have other suggestions, let me know.
Have a good weekend,
-Melissa
Friday 26th January
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week.
Congratulations to all who participated and made it home in the University Winter Run last weekend.
If you are up for more cross-cultural active-activities, I do recommend the Chinese New Year Ceilidh at St Cecilia’s, it’s a lot of fun Edinburgh’s Chinese New Year Bilingual Ceilidh 2024 – Forever Edinburgh
Congratulations too to our Ada Lovelace Day organising team, who are shortlisted for a UCISA award. UCISA 2024 Awards – UCISA we seem to be up against an AI bot in the inclusion category, which may be a sign of things to come. No change in UCISA having an all-male line up for their CIO of the Year though.
Most exciting congratulations to Andres in EDE, for being named in the Guardian’s list of novelists to watch in 2024! Meet the 10 best new novelists for 2024 | Fiction | The Guardian Andres is off to the states for his book launching there. It launches in the UK in July and can be pre-ordered by everyone in LTW as gifts for family and friends here: https://saraband.net/contributor/andres-n-ordorica
Thank you all for your suggestions for LTW’s 2024 spirit animal. Candidates are being considered.
Thank you for the input you give to help your managers prepare the notorious ‘blue tables’ for the University planning round. Our ‘wish list’ of LTW projects came in at a cool £15m. Lets see what the high heid’uns say to that.
Thank you also to those who joined us to edit Wikipedia for Burns Night. New pages created for Macsween haggis, the Burns Birthplace Museum, and Robert Burns’ skull.
Have a lovely weekend,
-Melissa
Friday 9th February
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week.
Thank you to everyone who joined in figuring out how to open the pod bay doors on Monday.
Thank you to everyone who is helping to take care of our office plants. If you are unsure what your plant is saying to you: too dry, too wet, too hot , too cold etc, please do check out its photofit and instructions in the plant-care corner. If you can’t identify the plant or understand what it needs, seek expert advice from Fiona Hendrie.
Welcome to Edward Enejoh, who joins us to work in DLAM, and Riccardo Battilani joining Digital Skills as the SharePoint and M365 Trainer, and to another group of excellent captioning interns: Callum Rodger, Leyla Kaban Bowers, Azalea Drace, Archie Holmes and Euan Burton.
Great to see the relaunch of the newly updated Data Ethics, AI and Responsible Innovation MOOC EdinburghX: Data Ethics, AI and Responsible Innovation | edX Check it out.
You may have seen a message about a network outage on Tuesday 20th February. The general message is quite vague but we think they are effectively saying that the outage will span across our floor pretty much the whole day (although different bits at different times) and might be hard to manage if you are on the floor. So you may want to think about that day and work from home or somewhere else in Argyle House or Main Library. SUMMARY: Network (wifi and plug-in) won’t be available in H East on the 20th of February due to upgrade work. It will likely impact doors, phones, desktops that people remotely connect to and even fire alarms. So I’d stay safely elsewhere if you can.
This weekend, if you hear fireworks it might be Chinese New Year or the rugby, either way, have a lovely weekend,
-Melissa
Friday 16th February
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week.
Congratulations to Cari Romans who started her new Learning Technology Advisor role last week working on the Learning Analytics project for VLE Excellence. It’s always nice to see internal moves and new opportunities.
You will have seen emails about contribution awards, these awards are money ( increments and lumpsums) which the University uses to recognise the exceptional efforts made by staff in ISG so please do make sure you read that message. Managers can nominate individual staff or whole teams and individual staff can nominate themselves, as can whole teams, and I am in no doubt that there has been a lot of exceptional work going on. Last year 63 colleagues in LTW were recognised with Contribution Reward Increments, Lump Sum Payments or Reward Vouchers . That’s basically nearly half the department, so don’t be shy about talking to your manager about this.
You may have spotted that the students at Kings Buildings now have a new robot snack delivery service. The robots delivering takeaways to Edinburgh students – BBC News Your suggestions as to what robots could deliver in Argyle House are welcome. If you are having a snack, why not craft a paper flower at the same time?
If you’ve been watching the online telly, you may have spotted Old College looking like a party venue in the new Netflix drama One Day. If you haven’t been to visit Old College recently please do take a walk and check out the art collections in the Talbot Rice What’s on | Talbot Rice Gallery (ed.ac.uk)
You may also have noticed that the University has a new Rector. The Rector is an elected post and sits as Chair of Court. If you are interested in knowing who has been Rector in the past there’s a handy list on Wikipedia: Rector of the University of Edinburgh – Wikipedia Scroll down to 1988 to find the first woman.
Speaking of women, we will be celebrating International Women’s Day by naming rooms again. We have a full day programme of events and you are welcome at any or all parts.
We will start with the opening of the Bessie Watson Lecture Theatre in the Cowgate, featuring a lovely ribbon, some huge scissors, and several walls of original artwork by Gillian Kidd. Then on to edit Wikipedia in the afternoon Imagine a gender equal world – help write women onto Wikipedia! #IWD2024 Tickets, Fri 8 Mar 2024 at 13:00 | Eventbrite and hear from Amina Shah in the evening The University of Edinburgh International Women’s Day Lecture 2024 Tickets, Fri 8 Mar 2024 at 17:45 | Eventbrite
Thank you to everyone working on starting our sister projects, LOUISA and FLORA for our focus on how our systems are used to support assessment. If you would like to know more about some inspirational women Louisa Stevenson – Wikipedia and Flora Stevenson – Wikipedia
Thank you to the Decorations Styling Team and the #ISGBakers for making the place look lovely and welcoming on a very rainy week. If you have more ideas for spending the 2024 decorations budget let me know.
Have a good weekend,
-Melissa
Friday 23rd February
Dear All,
Thank you for your work again this week.
Warm welcome to Tallulah Thompson our new Media and Podcasting Intern in DLAM.
Goodbye and thank you to Jon Taylor, who returns to his home department after a year working with us in DST on Learn Ultra roll-out training.
Thank you to all you line managers who finished your Uniforum data reporting on deadline. That’s that done for another year.
Thank you to everyone who has written job descriptions and blurbs for our 2024 summer intern recruitment round. The jobs are now live on Unitemps: University of Edinburgh Jobs – Unitemps Once we have recruited to these summer posts we will have hit our target of having 60 students working in LTW this year. This is a huge contribution you make to ensuring that students at Edinburgh can access high quality paid work in digital roles while they study and a great benefit to us in ensuring that our systems and services are designed with insights from our users in mind.
Most exciting news is that the Argyle House Floor E Meeting Rooms and Reception are back! Any of you who started your role since June last year, may not have seen these spaces before. We have a suite of 15 meeting rooms and training rooms to use now , so no need to scrabble around to find spaces in ECA and CSH. Please do go down to say hello to the receptionists, and while you are down there, please do admire the trophy cabinet of shiny glass things- many of which belong to LTW- I am very pleased to see they have survived.
When you are in meeting rooms you will be immersed in an art installation by Fabienne Hess. This installation of images on the glass walls of our meeting rooms in Argyle House is a whole work by Hess, she was commissioned as part of the refurbishment the office spaces in 2017 to create a work featuring images of existing objects of University collections. She photographed and digitized almost 25,000 diverse items, from ancient manuscripts to musical instruments, anatomical drawings to historic maps. Throughout the process Fabienne also created a series of ‘sub-collections’- these groupings, put together in arbitrary themes such as those images containing a red dot, those featuring a person raising an arm, a triangular shape, a certain shade of blue, black and white stripes, etc. She created a fascinating set of ‘new’ collections. One of these new collections is the installation you are in. Did you notice?
If it is cold in the office today, please do take advantage of your winter-warming hoodie. If you have not yet had vouchers to get your hoodie, ask your line manager what to do.
Have a good weekend,
-Melissa
Friday 1st March
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week.
I am pleased to be able to share positive news about our colleague Kevin Brogan, who has been in hospital since the new year. He is recovering well from surgery and hopes to be able to get home in a few weeks.
We wave goodbye this week to Arthur Wilson as he is retiring with long service. Arthur joined the University in 1977. The year in which we celebrated the Queen’s silver jubilee, the Sex Pistols in the charts, and a New Hope for Star Wars. Long before many of you current LTW staff were even born. Arthur has worked in several teams, and had roles as service operator, technical author and senior web developer. He has mentored many of our current staff, alongside playing a core role in 12 years of the Napier University Student Placement scheme. His last day was the 28th of February 2024 after 47 years. He has a band, his music is published on Spotify, he is a blue tick verified artist, and passionate Hearts FC supporter. If you missed the chance to say goodbye and ask him about any of the things he has done, there is a proper party planned for 22nd March 3-6pm at St. Cecilia’s Hall, for everyone who wishes to attend, contact Stratos for info on cards and collection.
We also wave goodbye to Sishir Bhimavarapu who is leaving DST to concentrate on studies, and say thank you to Amanda Ferguson, who will no longer be wrangling my diary, as she has got a promoted post in ISG corporate team.
Next week marks the start of ‘Spring’. I look forward to seeing you all at the ISG All-staff meeting/lunch on Tuesday and at the opening of the Bessie Watson Lecture Room on Friday.
Have a good weekend,
-Melissa
Friday 8th March
Dear All,
Thank you for all your work this week and your contributions to celebrating International Women’s Day and Open Education Week.
The Bessie Watson Lecture Room looks gorgeous and it was lovely to see so many of you there for breakfast snacks. Our guests were very interested to know how rooms are named and how such lovely artwork is produced. I think there will be more room naming opportunities coming our way.
Thank you to Mahima and everyone involved in creating content for our ‘Women in ISG’ series on Linkedin. Please like them and share them. University of Edinburgh Information Services Group: Company Page Admin | LinkedIn
I am pleased to see that our Edinburgh Women in STEM trail, originally created as part of the Ada Lovelace Day in October, has found a new permanent home on the Curious Edinburgh website
Now that the meeting rooms are open we are able to have some more of our workshops face to face, so I hope you will join for a discussion of ‘Imposter syndrome’ on Thursday 28th March 12-1pm
I hope some of you will think about joining Jonathan Mori’s cohort of learning technologists working towards your CMALT accreditation. CMALT Programme 2024 | The University of Edinburgh
For those of you who are lucky enough to have tickets to Hamilton, I hope you will give a cheer for Thomas Jefferson, who visited University of Edinburgh when he was considering designing universities for a new republic and said “So far as science is concerned, no place in the world can pretend to competition with Edinburgh.”
Have a lovely weekend,
-Melissa
Friday 15th March
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week.
Thank you to everyone who came along to our EDWEB2 focus day. I have all the flip charts and post-it notes, and Stratos and I will be following up with each of you to ensure we all stick to the actions arising to ensure good decisions can be made. It was a long day, and I appreciate the insights which were shared. Welcome to Colin Liu who joined the Web Development Team this week and got thrown in rather at the deep-end.
Welcome to Sarah Bruce who has joined us as Learning Technology Advisor for the Online Course Production Service in EDE. Sarah has been working for the past 7 years at MacMillan Cancer Support, most recently as a Digital Learning Officer, and welcome too to Mhairi McEwan who has bravely taken on the job of wrangling my diary. You’ll see she is already putting in dates for our next LTW All-staff meeting in July.
Congratulations to Lesley, Alistair, Jordan and Susanne who have all been confirmed in their new roles following a period of secondments.
This week marks the fourth anniversary of our massive flip to online teaching. Quite a large proportion of staff in LTW have been with us for 3 years or less, so you were not here with us when we did that, but it was very scary and very large and I am still in awe of how well all of the service teams coped at that time and delivered for the university continuity of service in learning and teaching. We couldn’t have done it without you.
Well done to Emma for presenting at UCISA leadership conference on Pi Day. Our Ada Lovelace celebrations were shortlisted finalists for an award at this conference but we were pipped at the post by a ChatBot. This is how it starts.
In advance of Annual Review season, please do make use of the digital skills training programme. Search the catalogue and ask your manger. If you would like to ensure that your Photoshop skills are better than Princess Kate’s please do sign up to Christina Hussell’s excellent training session.
If you are organising events check out the new partnership with Eventbrite. Eventbrite partnership brings fantastic new opportunities for the Events Management Community. | The University of Edinburgh
It’s a good place to discover open events ( in nice venues) you can join such as
Please remember not to organise meetings on Fridays. Fridays in LTW are designated ‘Writing Fridays’ for concentration without interruptions to get that plan, that code, that bid, that blog post, that report, that case for promotion, written.
If you are new and did not realise you can have your own blog, get yours here: blogs.ed – Staff and student blogs for our connected learning community
Best wishes to anyone fasting for Ramadan in the face of the LTW baked goods. These are the tests.
Have a lovely weekend,
-Melissa
Friday 22nd March
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week. I hope to see you this afternoon at Arthur’s retirement party. 3-6pm St Cecelia’s.
Welcome to our new joiners this week, Katie Spearman and Ellen Desmond are our 2 new Web Content Design Assistants in our excellent UX team.
Thank you to everyone in the EDE bake-off league who provided tasty cakes this week and thank you in advance for those providing more for our Spring Wing celebration on Thursday.
The Spring Wing celebration follows the lunchtime session on tackling imposter syndrome which features lunch, it’s booking up fast, so book your place now.
Speaking of cakes and lunch, it is looking good for the re-opening of the Argyle House kitchen and lunch space from 1st April. The furniture is back in and it’s being cleaned. Watch this space for more announcements.
Well done to Ewan McAndrew for achieving his Edinburgh Teaching Award route to Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy. That gives him some new post-nominal letters. If you would like to gain post-nominal letters too, please contact Jonathan Mori to see what’s on offer.
Thank you to everyone who is already involved in interviewing and recruiting our summer interns. I am sure we will attract and choose an excellent bunch, as always. If you would like to be on the panel for selecting the ‘Green Web’ intern, let me know asap. The purpose of the role will be to research the metrics of our digital/web estate environmental impact, so if you like data and you want to save the planet, help me find a good candidate.
Thank you to everyone working on our highest priority projects, EFI and Edweb2, and those setting up our next round of high profile learning and teaching projects: FLORA and LOUISA. I am please to say we have senior sponsors Profs Tim Stratford and Colm Harmon championing those.
Have a lovely weekend, remember to water your desk plants, and if you see Facebook and Instagram accounts promoting a free laptop with UOE online learning, I’m sorry to say, it’s just a scam.
-Melissa
Friday 29th March
Dear All,
Thank you for your work again this week.
Welcome to our new colleague, Nelly Iacobescu who has joined the Media Team as our Media and AI Service Manager and will be managing our captioning service, and welcome back to Keith Matheson who has returned to our Tech Enhanced Learning Team (after a few years away) as a Service Manager. Thank you to everyone who helps with recruitments and ‘on-boarding’.
Thank you to everyone who wrote reward and recognition recommendations. I enjoyed reading all the cases and hearing the detail of the excellent work you do. The cases now go forward to a panel who take some time to deliberate and decide. Watch this space.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to our many training sessions and workshops this week, I know there is always a crazy rush at this time of year.
Thank you to everyone who has been out and about dressed as Badgers.
Well done to anyone who managed to catch a glimpse of famous movie starts filming at Old College in the rain this week.
Well done to all the students who presented their work in their Edinburgh Award final showcase this week.
Well done to everyone involved in migrating schools’ websites over the line. This week we celebrated Schools of Chemistry, Informatics and Divinity.
Well done to everyone who works towards extending our online global reach. Despite the fact that I generally claim we have 5 million learners online already, this week was the week that we officially achieved 5,002,590 MOOC learners.
Good to see our services getting mentioned in various online articles this week.
Neil Mosely (external) wrote on LinkedIn about Hit or miss? Online student number targets — Neil Mosley Consulting
Allison Cullinane wrote on Teaching Matters about using PebblePad Embedding a reflective portfolio for student development in science courses: Challenges, suggestions, and solutions – Teaching Matters blog
And Gavin McLachlan wrote an article in Technology Foundations for Twenty-First Century Higher Education – HEPI ‘Technology foundations: the building blocks for excellence in modern universities’. Not sure who he is calling ‘modern’!
Have a lovely Easter weekend.
-Melissa
Friday 5th April
Dear All,
Thank you for your work again this week.
Thank you to all who brave the April showers to come into the office and those who are already enjoying lunching in the new/renewed comfy chairs.
Thank you to everyone who has been interviewing interns.
I am delighted to see we now have more than 5,000 followers on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/10497937. Please do list us as your employer if you are updating your profile.
Thank you to those who have been out and about. Cari has blogged about the HELF event on learning analytics: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/ede/2024/04/02/first-learning-analytics-working-group-session/. Katie has blogged about the Advance HE conference on EDI Advance HE EDI Conference 2024 (sharepoint.com)
The Digital Skills Team have been looking at their demographics. It turns out that you are most likely to attend digital skills training if you are an international woman over the age of 26.
Speaking of the Digital Skills Team, this week we wave goodbye to Jenni Houston. After 18 years with the University, Jenni is leaving on 6th April and will be taking time out to travel and pursue some personal interests in the coming months.
If you are thinking of travel and things to do this summer, don’t forget you can book cabins, yurts and family holidays at Firbush Firbush Outdoor Centre | The University of Edinburgh and you get discount on theatre tickets Staff discounts on Edinburgh International Festival tickets | The University of Edinburgh
The Changemaker Awards are open for this year Changemaker Award (open) | The University of Edinburgh LTW teams have won these in the past, so please do take a look.
Have a good weekend.
-Melissa
Friday 12th April
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week.
Best wishes to all celebrating Eid and Vaisakhi.
It’s that time of year again, if you would like to volunteer with ‘The Big Sort ‘ Edinburgh University Students’ Association Every June, thousands of students leave University of Edinburgh accommodation. They leave tons of items behind — weird and wonderful treasures, from clothing to crockery and more. The Big Sort has students and staff volunteering to keep as much out of landfill as possible. Help direct goods to Welcome Week’s FreeShop event, local charities and community groups.
This week we welcome John Wilson and Mel Batcharj to the Web Content Design team. Thus doubling the number of John Wilsons in WAC and the number of Melissas in LTW.
You will have seen an email about colleagues standing in the University Court elections. I hope we can rally LTW staff support for Lauren Johnson-Smith as our professional service representative. Watch your email for when voting goes live.
Also in your email you may have seen a call out for committee members for a big learning technology conference in Manchester in September. If you would like to join the organising committee, ask your manager. ALTC returns in September: Join the Committee now! | Association for Learning Technology
Also in your email you may have seen the sad news that Peter Higgs has died. If you would like to watch some videos about the work he did, you can find them on Media Hopper Create: The Discovery of the Higgs Boson – Media Hopper Create
You can also use Media Hopper Create if you want to make a podcast series, Media Hopper Create and Edinburgh Diamond if you want to publish a book About Edinburgh Diamond | The University of Edinburgh
Also in your email you may have seen an announcement about a full list of university policies Policy Directory | The University of Edinburgh There’s some crackers in there, worth a look.
Soon in your email you will see a message from Satu about the plans for our Mandatory Training Day (MTD) on May 17th. It’s a long email, but don’t be scared. On the day we will all work through our online mandatory training together, and it may take all day. There will be snacks. If you want to get a head-start, or you are particularly speedy, there will be instructions on how to get yourself on to the LTW MTD leader-board.
If you feel like you need a confidence boost or want to read some lovely messages, I notice that there is an Affirmation Jar on the windowsill in the kitchen area of our wing, next to the tampons. Colleagues have written affirmations and positive messages for you. Please take what you need , when you need it.
Have a good weekend,
-Melissa
Friday 26th April
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week.
I see from social media that a fine time was had at the Durham Blackboard conference.
Best wishes to everyone celebrating Passover and looking forward to Star Wars Day and Orthodox Easter.
Well done to everyone who managed to avoid falling into a massive sink hole in West Lothian. Busy railway line used by West Lothian commuters closed due to massive sinkhole – Daily Record
Welcome to Luke Howard, Digital Engagement Officer and Cassie Lefebvre, Project Administrator in the EDE team.
Welcome to Martin Wilson in the LST service team. Martin has a lot of AV experience, especially from his previous role at Audio Light Systems where he worked on installing and repairing AV systems in our teaching spaces at the University. So he’s seeing us from both sides.
For those in the know, if you ask nicely, our AV teams may be able to tell you what is going on up on K Floor.
Great to see massive demand for Edweb 2 training, not only for those involved in the migration project, that training is now open for anyone who wants it.
If you would like to contribute stories or features to the ISG EDI collection, please let me know. ISG Equality, Diversity and Inclusion – Home (sharepoint.com)
Well done to everyone involved in delivering the soft launch of our new learning platform. Learner enrolments have started and 18 courses ( with 250 learners) are open for business. Thank you to all involved in SCP Early Adopter Training, helping university staff get started on this new platform.
You will remember that our new platform is inspired by Edinburgh alumna, Jennie Lee who invented ‘the University of the Air’. If you would like to learn more about Jennie Lee there’s an upcoming cultural opportunity in Fife Jennie Lee play – KNIGHTS THEATRE
If you like a bit of culture there is also an opportunity to catch Andres at the upcoming University of Edinburgh creative writing conference. Creative Writing Conference 2024 | The University of Edinburgh
Have a lovely weekend.
-Melissa
Friday 3rd May
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week.
Exams started in earnest on Monday. Thank you to all who support online and digital exams in virtual and physical spaces.
Although campus is typically quieter at this time of year because of exams, it is upsetting to see reports of so many violent clashes of protestors on university campuses, particularly in the US and worrying that it may happen here too. Students occupy UK university campuses in protest over Gaza – BBC News. Any queries you get from the public, media, staff students (or anyone) about Palestine, Gaza, Israel, the protests, or how we procure our technology should be escalated to Gavin in the first instance.
Well done to the Digital Skills Team for their incredibly successful inaugural ‘AI training week’.
Last week we waved goodbye to Socrates Davidopoulos in WAC and Ellen Groen has ‘crossed the floor’ to lead the Edweb migration project.
Please welcome Viki Varga, our new LTSO in EDE.
Lizzy has written another article for the THE Crafting an inclusive curriculum: how to write programme learning outcomes | THE Campus Learn, Share, Connect (timeshighereducation.com) If you would like to write articles like this, let me know.
Katie has written about ‘digital shock’ Digital Shock and the International Student Experience (sharepoint.com) and has sourced some ‘First in Family’ badges First In Family Badges (sharepoint.com). If you are the first in your family to attend university, or to work at a university, please feel free to wear one with pride.
The QAA have published their view on what quality looks like Evaluating Excellence: TEF 2023 Submission and Panel Statement Analysis (qaa.ac.uk)
Voting has opened for court membership. Please do use your vote, everybody gets one. It’s great to see LTW’s Lauren Johnson-Smith’s name in the list of candidates, I’m sure she’d appreciate your support. Voting now open: election of professional services staff member to Court check your email for something from ‘Civica Election Services‘ that’s your personal link to vote. Voting closes on 8Th May.
If you have recovered from your mid-week Beltane celebrations, you’ll be looking forward to orthodox Easter Sunday and a bank holiday on Monday, traditional for green men, morris dancers and trade unionists.
May is also traditional as the time for the Art College Degree show, just across the road. Get tickets for your visit now: ECA Graduate Show 2024 Tickets, Fri, May 31, 2024 at 1:00 PM | Eventbrite
May is also time for national ‘learning at work week’ Home (learningatworkweek.com) and as is now traditional in LTW, we will be holding our Mandatory Training Day celebrations on Friday 17th May. Please ensure that your diaries are clear. The ONLY thing you have to do on that day is complete your mandatory training. You get a special day designated to do it all. You can do it from home or from the office. You can do it while chatting in groups or on your own. Choose how you prefer to learn. Complete it all by the end of the day. If you come into the office there will be snacks, lunch and crisps for learners.
Speaking of snacks, planning has started for our LTW bake sale. We will be raising money for a chosen charity and the ISG bakers will be flexing their baking muscles. If you would like to be part of the baking/bake-off team, please contact LTW’s award-winning baker, James Slack. The bake sale will include fabulous prizes. Get your creative thinking aprons on.
Have a good weekend and maybe Edinburgh will get some of the nice weather the rest of Scotland seems to be having.
-Melissa
Friday 10th May
Dear All,
Thank you for your work again this week.
Please welcome Ricarda Fillhardt who has joined the Digital Skills Team as our Training and Events Co-ordinator, covering for Laura while she is on maternity leave.
It was lovely to see so many students gaining their Edinburgh Awards for championing digital skills and editing Wikipedia. You can read more about the Wikipedia projects on Ellie’s blog Edinburgh Award 2023/24 Success! – Wikimedian in Residence
If you like a celebration, watch out for the Learn Ultra Party. I think it is important to celebrate the successes of our big projects and draw a line with pizza, as each project ends and another begins.
You may remember that last November we ran a digital collection day for Their Finest Hour, war memories project. Many of you contributed your own family memories. Since then Eden has been working hard to collate and upload 50+ stories and thousands of photographs to the University of Oxford archive. Lorna’s team also shared some of these remarkable stories with the School of History here at the University and developed an open educational resource about social history for schools, based on the event. After all the digital collection days around the country Their Finest Hour public archive will be launching on Thursday 6th June ( D-Day, 80 years). There will be an online launch event which you are welcome to attend Welcome | Their Finest Hour (ox.ac.uk)
Our social and civic activities continue. I5 of you from the Online Course Production Service attended Carbon Literacy Training. A great way to spend a morning as a team and you have some homework to do on what individual and work-based changes you will make in order to get certified by the Carbon Literacy Project, the certification body. Lauren also spotted that our OERs and MOOCs are included on this ‘UOE Zero by 2040’ promotional video https://www.ed.ac.uk/sustainability/programmes-and-projects/climate-strategy/zero-by-2040 . Carbon Literacy action may even earn you a badge.
Speaking of badges, to celebrate the success of our digital badging service, I was looking for a badger to adopt as our 2024 LTW spirit animal. Unfortunately Edinburgh Zoo do not (currently) host badgers, but I got us a wolverine, which is stoatally different but weasily recognisable. Watch this space for a chance to win free tickets to visit her.
Have a lovely Eurovision weekend.
-Melissa
Friday 17th May
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week.
I hope you had a chance to visit the exam stress alpacas and ponies at ECA this week. I encourage you all to check out the new ‘feels like I am underwater’ meeting pods and ‘Kinder surprise’ chairs up on Level K. Well done to the LST teams for wrangling the AV design and fit out. Please plan to spontaneously use that new space in creative ways and for short naps, but remember to be kind to your local claustrophobes.
Thank you for doing your mandatory training. At 12.00 today the MTD leader-board (attached) has LST and DST storming ahead and WAC bringing up the rear! Lunch has been delivered and there’s still time!
If you would like to express your views on the effectiveness of other professional services at the University of Edinburgh, please take the opportunity to complete the UniForum Service Effectiveness survey which closes at the end of the day on Monday 20 May 2024.
If you like a bit of training, or are preparing for your annual review, please make use of LinkedIn Learning skill evaluations which enable you to complete short guided self-assessments to assess your confidence in various skills. After finishing the assessment, LinkedIn Learning will provide you with three personalised course recommendations on topics related to your chosen skill, tailored to your proficiency level. There are 42 Skill Evaluations available for in-demand skills such as web development, data analytics, WordPress, Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, communication, time management, teamwork, problem-solving, and decision-making. Skill evaluations are designed to guide your learning, and as a result, your results will not be shared with anyone, including the University or your LinkedIn network, but it might give you something to discuss in your 1-1’s with your manager. Find out more about Skill Evaluations
Please also take a look at the 2024 Horizon report from EDUCAUSE 2024 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report | Teaching and Learning Edition | EDUCAUSE Library it is an easy guide to trends in higher education technology and very useful to quote in your slides, presentations, papers and business cases.
Our new cohort of summer intern colleagues will soon be joining us on H-East. I have ordered a set of Scottish-summer hoodie vouchers for them, if you are new and have not yet claimed yours, ask your manager what to do.
-Melissa
Friday 24th May
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week.
I am pleased to say I have heard from the HR panel who consider our nominations for additional pay increments and lump sum payments. More than 25 LTW staff have been recognised through this process and letters will be coming out soon.
Thank you for your efforts last week on LTW Mandatory Training Day. I know some of you who are contractors couldn’t log in to everything on the day. One week late and we are at:
|
Website and Communications |
82.35% |
|
Digital Learning Applications and Media |
88.00% |
|
Learning Spaces Technology |
94.29% |
|
Educational Design and Engagement |
97.56% |
|
Digital Skills and Training |
100.00% |
|
Director’s Office |
100.00% |
If a mass email comes out from someone else in ISG telling you to do some of this same mandatory training again, please feel free to ignore it.
For snacks next Friday Shivani is hosting a Digital Wellbeing Day, please do join her sessions at morning coffee, elevenses or lunch Event Booking (ed.ac.uk)
I see that Rishi Sunak has announced his general election in the same week as our LTW All-staff meeting. Book your annual leave now. if you are heading out of town for the school holidays make sure you book your one time postal vote online https://www.gov.uk/apply-postal-vote
Next week we welcome our first class of summer interns ’24. Please say hello and make them welcome.
Looks like Aberdeen may be on a shoogly peg. University of Aberdeen’s future was in ‘significant doubt’ – BBC News and if you packed away your wellies for summer , that may have been premature.
-Melissa
Friday 31st May
Dear All
Thank you for your work this week.
We seem to have made it through exam time without major mishaps. Thank you to all who keep a close watching eye on these high-stakes experiences for students.
Thank you to all who prepared papers for the last rush on all the university committees this week. Take a breath, before we start preparing for the next rush in September.
Thank you to all who have been facilitating workshops, usergroups and digital skills sessions.
Welcome to our new EdWeb Interns who joined LTW this week: Anthony Skerik, Krithikha Sivaraj, Li Ren Chin, Margaryta Tsugorka (Margo), Namjote Singh Dulay, Rhea Bose, Samad Ali, Sean Craigmile, Shivangi Prashant Kamat and Yiping Gu (Star). With so many new colleagues we will make light work of these migrations. I am looking forward to meeting all our new summer interns at our welcome lunch on 10th June.
If you would like to be part of the pilot group trialling the’ healthy aging at work app’, contact Katie Grieve. It’ll ask you to keep daily track of whether our workplace is wearing you down or invigorating you, or both. Should be interesting. The data gathered will give your employer some ideas for how to improve wellbeing. All ages welcome.
Have a good weekend,
-Melissa
Friday 14th June
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week.
Thank you to colleagues from Digital Skill teams who spent their volunteering day helping with The Big Sort – Edinburgh Impact | The University of Edinburgh last week.
Welcome to our new summer Learn Foundations interns: Shruti Bose, Altu Bozyaka, Eugenia Paz Nunez, Katherine Scott, Isaac Lee, Lucy Walter, Milo Campbell, Ishrat Rahim, Eden Muller and Elise Fletcher .
Also welcome our Digital Skills AI intern: Chunxi Luo, and our new Green Web Estate and Design interns: Catalina Rincon, Oisin Doherty, and Christopher O’Neill.
Reuben Forman is our new summer intern in Learning Spaces Technology and Adrián Cordero Rodríguez and Connor MacDougall join us from Napier University for their ‘year in industry’ placements in our web team. Thank you for choosing us, we feel lucky to have you.
In this week with so many international sporting events underway, congratulations to our WooClap service team who are finalists in the ‘Versatile Champion’ category of the first Interactive Learning Olympics . Medals will be awarded next Thur 20th June at 4:30pm. If you would like to join the LTW Euros sweepstake contact Fiona Buckland.
Please take a moment today to complete the ISG Equality, Diversity and Inclusion survey. This is your chance to tell us what kinds of events and initiatives you would like to see in ISG to celebrate our workplace as inclusive and diverse. If you would like to see more alpacas to support mental health, more culturally themed festive snacks, or visiting speakers for diversity themes, let us know via the survey. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Survey 2024 (sharepoint.com) Student interns are very welcome to do the survey, even if you are new.
Please also take a moment to consider nominating your colleagues for staff awards. ISG Staff Recognition Awards | The University of Edinburgh You can nominate as many people as you like, for as many categories as you like. There are around 800 staff on ISG and last year LTW had around 40 nominations, and it was lovely to see so many people writing supportive comments about what they appreciate about teams and colleagues.
You will have seen a ‘hold’ in your diaries for our annual Charity Bake Sale on 2nd and 3rd July. We will be raising money for Paths For All. The Paths For All charity is close to our hearts in LTW as we remember Richard Lawson. Richard was an avid walker and saw the benefit for supporting health and wellbeing. There will be cakes for all and fabulous prizes to win. Last year we raised £800 for Beatson Cancer Charity and I am sure we can do similar again. If you are interested in taking part (as a baker) contact James Slack or Eloise Jacob.
Have a lovely weekend,
-Melissa
Friday 21st June
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week. It is great to hear how fast and well our summer interns are powering through their mountains of work.
Great news from the WooClap Olympics this week, Alan and Craig put on their best online lycra and WON a gold medals as ‘worldwide versatile champions’, ‘Teamwork Titans’ and ‘Adoption Athletes’.
In total we won:
- Global Gold: Versatile Champions
- Global Bronze: Quick Adoption Athletes
- UK Gold: Versatile Champions, Teamwork Titans, Quick Adoption Athletes, Asynchronous Leaders, Marathon Questioners, Rising Stars
- UK Silver: Interactive Grand Masters, Question Creation Masters
Congratulations to all the WooClap service Team. If anyone knows of any other edtech Olympics we can enter, let me know.
Congratulations also to Jasmine who has won a Changemaker award ISG Intern Wins EDI Changemaker Award (sharepoint.com)
Thank you to all who take time to write your service reports. I read them and appreciate them and a lot of decisions are made based on them, so please do keep sharing them. The data we have about who uses our services, how much and how often is crucial when deciding how to allocate resources, staffing and investment. I am particularly interested to know if some services are used more in some schools than in others and to track usage across the life-cycle of the academic year, so the more information you have, the better.
I hope you are all taking the time to check out the new EFI building , and the new EFI café. You may want to suggest to your manager that it would be a nice venue for a team meeting.
If you like music and beautiful venues, I hope you are joining Ewan and Ellie to edit Wikipedia for World Music Day at St Cecilia’s this afternoon. The Hidden Women of St Cecilia’s (sharepoint.com)
23rd June is Women in Engineering Day International Women in Engineering Day #INWED24 please enjoy some blogs from our colleagues Karen AI is exciting, the risks are boring… so why should we care? – The witterings and musings of a learning technologist (ed.ac.uk) and Nenna Re-Imagining MyEd: My experience working as a User Research Intern – Website and Communications Blog
Also blogging about AI is Bartek First steps with AI – new guide to help you best use ELM, our internal AI tool. – Website and Communications Blog (ed.ac.uk)
I am looking forward to the LTW bake sale LTW’s Charity Bake Sale (sharepoint.com) and our LTW all-staff meeting on 2nd July. I have asked each of the LTW Heads to send me their list of team achievements, so if you think they might have missed any, now is the time to remind them.
Have a good weekend,
-Melissa
Friday 5th July
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week.
Thank you for voting in the General Election, Bessie Watson would be very proud.
Thank you for nominating your colleagues for Staff Awards.
Welcome to Ségolène Gallus , who has joined DLAM as our new Service Coordinator.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to the baking and fundraising and everyone who came along to the LTW All staff meeting. More information will follow about the winners of the Bake-off competition, the raffle and the money raised.
You may have seen in the news the announcement of some new Space Bridging Courses. Edinburgh University offering ‘groundbreaking’ training courses for space industry | STV News These will be some of the first courses born on our new Short Courses Platform.. If you have expertise in building space bridges, please make yourself known.
Best wishes,
-Melissa
Friday 12th July
Dear All,
Thank you for your work again this week.
Graduations are in full swing and I hope you are taking your chance to enjoy the prosecco bars in Bristo Square and the emerging food trucks in George Square. Congratulations to all LTW staff who are graduating this summer, whether you work full-time and study part-time , or study full-time and work part-time, it’s a massive achievement in balancing time and energy.
Thank you to the LST teams who are working to take all the teaching AV out of 70+ spaces around campus in anticipation of the book festival and fringe venues coming in. This is more spaces than ever before and when teaching starts again they will work all hours to put it all back in!
This week we wave goodbye to Karen Bottomley who has been helping me with ‘ CTP’ and the second of our Portal Services User Research interns Nenna Nwawudu. For the last year Nenna and her colleague Ana Ma have been carrying out user research for MyEd, helping us work out what changes will most help our users. You can find out more about the interviews, workshops and other work Nenna’s been doing in her blog post: Re-Imagining MyEd: My experience working as a User Research Intern
Thank you to all interns who are blogging. Elia has written about accessibility Elia Müller – Initial thoughts on doing Accessibility Checks – Information Services Group: Student Employee Blog (ed.ac.uk) and Chris has written about green design Diving into sustainable UX: my first 4 weeks as a Green Digital Design Intern – Website and Communications Blog (ed.ac.uk) Our green work is urgent and timely as Edinburgh tops emissions and energy use table for fourth year – Research Professional News
Thank you to everyone who joined in with our Charity Bake Sale. We raised an impressive £952 for Paths to All. The winner of tickets to the Zoo to visit the BadgED wolverine was Segolene Gallus in her first week in LTW! Congratulation to all who won the various fabulous raffle prizes of baking equipment and cute Lego, and to our star bakers Delia and Magda Bake sale – thank you to everyone!! – Digital Learning Applications and Media
Congratulations also to Satu Kapiainen, in her new role as Head of Digital Skills Design and Training. Satu will be bringing her new, expanded teams together in August, as part of an LTW internal restructure which I hope will bring new ways of working, some new teams and potential for some new services as we head into a busy time for digital skills in the curriculum, open educational resources, open courseware, open e-books and graphic design for our new short course platform. I am very pleased that Satu will be leading this work and I am sure you will all help to make this a success.
A reminder to anyone if you would like to add new string to your bow/CV as a voice-over artist or actor, the online course production and digital skills training teams are always looking for people to be in videos or do audio narration for our online content, so if you would like to volunteer to give that a try, please do let me know.
I am pleased to see that our new SharePoint training has been so popular with students- it’s a useful thing to know how to do. I am also excited to see the impact of our new ’ essentials’ course in Learn. Andrew has shortened it to 4 steps focusing solely on digital skills and renamed it ‘Digital skills check-up for new students’.
Remember to enjoy July, the whole business kicks off again in August!
-Melissa
Friday 19th July
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week.
There seems to be a global IT outage today , possibly as a result of the ongoing AI wars. I suspect there is a power struggle between Clippy and Co-pilot for supremacy. There’s nothing we can do but hold on tight.
Good to see that all the graduations happened with only a few disruptions and the weather improved for some.
Speaking of improvements, according to the PTES survey, studying online PGT from Edinburgh is still 11% better than studying on campus. Last year it was 16% better, so the on-campus experience is finally starting to catch up. Thank you to all of you for the work you do helping on-campus teachers to improve the way they use technology to enable learning and improve the student experience.
Also improving are pay and conditions. 61 LTW staff received a pay increase in April and 64 will receive an increase in August as part of the Grade Scale Review. If you are one of them, enjoy. But don’t spend it all at once!
Looking forward to next weeks Olympics starting in Paris. If you would like to know who to cheer for Selections Continue for the 2024 Paris Olympics | Sport (ed.ac.uk)
Have a good weekend,
-Melissa
Friday 26th July
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week.
It was lovely to see Blackboard users from other universities join us in AH for SCOTBUG.
Thank you to everyone who helped answer two very similar, yet slightly different FOI requests about plagiarism detection which came in this week.
Thank you to everyone who completed the EDI survey, the results seemed fairly positive and I’m looking forward to a new programme of EDI events this coming year.
You’ll be aware that July is Disability Pride month in the UK, and I am pleased to see all the work that is being done in our media teams to lobby the University to get captions switched on by default for all our recorded lectures and other media. This will make a huge difference to the student experience. Thank you as ever to Nelly and all her team of human captioners who work alongside the AI robots to make these captions the best they can be.
Thank you to everyone working on the MyEd new ‘Welcome to the University’ portlet which will have content to support new students which will change weekly up until week 5.
Staff News would love to hear about your volunteering. “There’s still time to win a £25 voucher by simply sharing your volunteering experience. Please send a photo and a quick description of what you did to local@ed.ac.uk”
Technicians week is coming up 2nd – 6th September Technician Events | Support for Technicians (ed.ac.uk) book your place at these events now.
Good to see some new blogging about open textbooks Music open textbook: An interview with Dr Nikki Moran – Teaching Matters blog (ed.ac.uk) since publication in 2021, Fundamentals of Music Theory has been downloaded over 26,000 times . if you have ideas for other open textbooks we could make, let me know.
We have been doing some analysis of how students prefer to gain their digital skills. Our Edinburgh students have a choice of whether to work through online materials in LinkedIn Learning at their own pace or to attend synchronous teacher-led sessions with our Digital Skills Training team, in person or via webinars. Or both. The data show that students from CSE use LinkedIn Learning at a higher proportion than they were represented in the overall population, and at nearly double the rate of those attending Digital Skills Training sessions. Whereas students from CMVM were more likely to take Digital Skills Training than use LinkedIn Learning. Students from CAHSS were slightly more likely to attend Digital Skills Training than use LinkedIn Learning, but the difference was not as significant as for the other Colleges. I’d be happy to hear thoughts on why this might be, or how we can adapt our service to respond to these findings.
It is great to see that we have surpassed 50% of website migrations. 83 done 78 to go. https://wac.ed.ac.uk/edweb-web-publishing-platform-migrations It is important that we migrate all these sites, but equally important that we figure out how to measure and communicate their value. We have 1.5 million web pages and perhaps around 83% of webpages had under 10 views, and 45% gained 0 views over the year. Exploring Digital Sustainability: Insights from the Start of My Green Web Estate Internship – Website and Communications Blog (ed.ac.uk)
I am sure you are all looking forward to reading along with our 2024 festival BOOK MOOC How to Read a Novel – Online Literature Course – FutureLearn
If you would like to learn more about the history of ISG book your place at the launch of our online exhibition Event Booking (ed.ac.uk) If you would like to read about the work LTW have been doing for 10 years There’s always my blog: Melissa Highton –
Have a good weekend,
Friday 2nd August
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week.
As we embark on this new financial year, thank you to everyone who has been keeping spending up to date and that last push to get all last year’s payments through. Finances for the start of term are tight and we are still racked with the headache of crumbly concrete work which will mean several large lecture theatres in Appleton Tower are out of action again.
It was good to see so many of you tune in for the bespoke AI training Bart Pohorecki and Pragya Modi delivered for us. A recording is available for those who missed it. How to start using AI now – LTW Training session – Media Hopper Create
Sadly we have to wave goodbye to Bart, he has been working with us all this year as our ChatGPT and AI intern and has been the driving force in helping us to stay ahead of the game and up to date in how AI can be useful for our work. Please do look at the resources he has created for us https://uoe.sharepoint.com/sites/AISite .
Not good news for our local supercomputer though Government shelves £1.3bn UK tech and AI plans – BBC News Your suggestions as to how we can use a new, large, empty, £31m, flat-floor building with world class air-con, on a postcard please.
We are also waving goodbye and thank you this week to Mbikwa Sitembo, from the Digital Skills Training team where she taught popular courses in R and Creating Academic Posters in PowerPoint.
Next week we also lose Mahima Aggarwal from the Directors Office. Mahima has spent this year valiantly keeping our LinkedIn pages up to date and pushing our job adverts as widely as we can to attract a diverse range of talent to our teams. https://www.linkedin.com/company/university-of-edinburgh-information-services-group/ Speaking of which, we have another AV technician advert live at the moment if you know anyone…
If you can fight your way through the festival crowds in George Square, August is a good time to get trained in all the very cool tech available in the UCreate MakerSpace in the Main Library. Open to all staff and students: Makerspace events August 2024 | Makerspace (ed.ac.uk)
If you like BITS of nostalgia, please book to join us at the in-person launch of the BITs Magazine Online Exhibition https://www.events.ed.ac.uk/index.cfm?event=book&scheduleID=72381
If you are attending any Fringe events this week, remember to take your handy digital skills fan with you. I’ll be hot in there.
-Melissa
Friday 9th August
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week.
Running totals on the web migration project just in: 86 sites migrated, 75 left to go. The elephant in the room is the ISG website, a behemoth of gargantuan size which only a few courageous souls are brave enough to look at directly. Thank you to lead publishers across LTW who are taking on this challenge.
This week we welcome Leanne Thomson who joins us to look after our Short Courses Platform project and becomes our second Senior Project Manager named Lee-Ann.
As news from nearby England is grim, the University is offering extra support Recent UK events – support for students and staff | The University of Edinburgh
Also in the news, other universities allegedly detecting their students cheating with AI Hundreds of students at Scottish unis caught using AI to cheat (sundaypost.com)
The Principal has issued a statement about the stolen supercomputer.
From the archives this week, our lovely new online exhibition of our BITS back catalogue ( Jasmine’s version) available to visit now: University of Edinburgh Exhibitions | Preserving BITs Thank you to everyone who was involved, right up to the last minute, in making the launch event a success and in producing new, curated content for the exhibition. Speaking personally, I always enjoyed producing BITS. It was a pleasure working with the members of the BITS editorial team and the excellent graphic design team who know how to take a theme, develop a concept and produce a design which worked all the way through the magazine. It was a joy to me that visitors to Argyle House could be seen reading it and many people said to me they had no idea ISG covered so much. I am also aware of the importance of an archive. I regularly receive emails from the legal deposit team at the National Library of Scotland asking if there will be a next BITS issue to deposit, and I am often contacted by the families and friends of past members of ISG looking for more information about what their loved ones did in their jobs at the University.
With the festivals in full swing, please do go along to support our LTW Andrés N Ordorica | What’s On | Edinburgh International Book Festival (edbookfest.co.uk) and ISG colleagues Is AI for Real? | Garry Scobie | Edinburgh Festival Fringe (edfringe.com) and watch out for the Red Arrows over Argyle House again at 6.15 pm on Saturday.
Best wishes,
Melissa
Friday 16th August
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week.
As we head into the new financial year and hurtle towards the start of term a fleet of yellow ducks have appeared in our wing.
We welcome Stephen Bremner to the LST Service Desk team this week. Stephen brings a wealth of experience in AV technology, events management and customer service. In our search for patterns, this now means that more than 10% of all LST employees are called Stephen.
Don’t forget to use your annual leave entitlement before end of December.
We will have our ‘End of Summer Internships’ lunch on 21st August and I am very much looking forward to hearing about the work which has been done. We have been lucky to have such a good group of interns this year.
I am very pleased that we now have an evaluation report arising from the Learn Ultra Learn Ultra Evaluation (sharepoint.com) please do take a look at the findings and recommendations. Kenny has worked hard to draw it all together in a useful way. The report combines qualitative and quantitative data sources to provide a comprehensive analysis of the delivery of the Learn Ultra upgrade project and recommendations for change in universities .I hope you can see how your work contributed to making the project a success we can learn and build upon.
Well done to Ruby and Ewan for getting safety back from Wikimania you can see their presentation here: Wikimania 2024 Day 3 – Room 20+24 Warsaw – YouTube
Thank you for your work on improving the student experience. The DLAM team have created a new course role for learning technologists and support staff, which will be there, but not be visible to students, we hope this will reduce confusion for students when they are looking for who to contact to ask questions about their course. More info on improvements here August 2024 Release Overview – Learn (ed.ac.uk)
Thank you to everyone participating or delivering in Learning Technology Week (Monday 26th August to Friday 30th August) – find out more on the Digital Skills website
Thank you to everyone making ruthless choices about how and where we spend our time and money. Hoarding and storage of old stuff indefinitely is a challenging user behaviour for several of our platforms. Users may be unaware of the need to align with data protection rules and to reduce our impact on the environment, every little bit helps and we have a huge amount of cloud storage being used. Our first batch of deletions resulted in the total number of courses in Learn being reduced from 91k to 65k courses.
For a dose of local creativity, ECA graduate show is on across the road ECA Graduate Show 2024 | Edinburgh College of Art Graduate Show 2024
Best wishes,
-Melissa
Friday 23rd August
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week.
I am happy to welcome our new Web Migration Project Assistants Peter Hedditch, Martin Ng, Eniola Onafowokan and Sundus Saeed, and congratulate our 10 ( count ‘em) web migration interns Anthony Skerik, Li Ren Chin, Samad Ali, Krithikha Sivaraj, Sean Craigmile, Yiping (Star) Gu, Margo Tsugorka, Shruti (Rhea) Bose, Shivangi Prashant Kamat and Altu Bozyaka who are staying with us through the big push. It really is all about migration, migration, migration. It’ll be all over by Christmas. Also newly joining our Web team is Angelina Lai as our new Web Governance Admin intern.
Meanwhile Lewis has been blogging about AI and captioning Lewis Forbes – Automating Caption Evaluation – Information Services Group: Student Employee Blog (ed.ac.uk) and Ruby has blogged about Wikimania Wikimania 2024: A Conference of Collaboration, Learning and Culture – Witchfinder General – Data Visualisation Internship (ed.ac.uk). Karen has blogged about the impact of our services on the environment The impact of our services on the environment – The witterings and musings of a learning technologist (ed.ac.uk) 69 thousand items of media uploaded but never played, what’s that about?
It was lovely to see so many of our summer interns for lunch this week. As your time with us draws to a close, please do keep an eye out for new opportunities. We’d be happy to work with any of you on a student partnership project if you have one. Student Partnership Agreement Small Project funding | Institute for Academic Development (ed.ac.uk). I am pleased that Chunxi is staying with us to look at how AI can be used in our L&D activities, and that Osh Doherty will continue to be our green conscience.
Thank you to Catalina Rincon, Christopher O’Neill, Jasmine Patel who have made such a difference how we think about our our digital estate and heritage.
Thank you for the work being done on captioning. Zosia Kniter has finished with the Learning Applications Development team last Friday and Melany Munster closed out as Captioning Team Supervisor.
Thank you to all our Learn Foundations interns Zoebird Fabian, Shruti Bose, Altu Bozyaka, Eugenia Paz Nunez, Katherine Scott, Isaac Lee, Lucy Walter, Milo Campbell, Ishrat Rahim, Eden Muller and Elise Fletcher, who will never look at learning materials in the same way again. Thank you to Katherine for leading our EDI book club discussion on whether the Olympics were as gender equal as the organisers claimed. If you have ideas for future topics let me know. If any interns would like to keep hanging out with us for reading group lunches even once term starts, you are very welcome. For those with a new interest in accessibility it is sad news that Euan McDonald who did so much in the university to establish SpeakUnique and Euan’s Guide, has died. A message from Professor Siddharthan Chandran, Director of the Euan MacDonald Centre | The Euan MacDonald Centre
We wave goodbye this week to Shivani Rao, who has been doing really great work as our Digital Safety Officer. She’s been bringing a fresh approach to thinking about how the online world is experienced differently by different groups and how toxic it can be for some. The Digital Safety “Supporter” Toolkit | The University of Edinburgh We wish her best of luck in her PhD and she leaves us with a new video on how to protect against scams and frauds. Useful for us all. How to protect against scams and frauds – Media Hopper Create
Also leaving us for new opportunities in the Big Smoke down south, our Diversity and Attraction intern Mahima, left us last week, but you can read about the work she was doing and her impact in using Linkedin for recruitment. Using LinkedIn to diversify recruitment (sharepoint.com)
It was lovely to see Kevin back in the office this week and don’t miss your chance to see Andres in the spotlight at EFI ‘How we named the Stars’ at Edinburgh Book Festival in EFI. (sharepoint.com)
Nice to know we are not the only university with a crumbly concrete problem. University of Leicester facing ‘major incident’ over crumbling buildings | University of Leicester | The Guardian Always remember to wear your hard hat.
-Melissa
Friday 30th August
Dear All,
Thank you for your work again this week.
Well done to Eva for climbing 6250m (20505 feet) up Kang Yatse 2 in north India.
As we head into the chilly ‘ber months and we have another Olympics to watch, we wave goodbye to Maksims Galkins. Maksims graduated successfully and will no longer be delivering our training in Python, Coding Club and practical machine learning.
If you are about town this weekend don’t miss the opportunity of Open Doors Day Doors Open Days | Edinburgh. Some very interesting University of Edinburgh buildings open for a rare glimpse. Including the Anatomy Museum, the Ashworth Labs, The Genome Foundry, IASH, The Grant Institute and FloWave. Please do bring families and friends to visit. If you see the LST teams in hi-vis unloading vans, that’s the start of a busy week restoring 72 rooms in preparation for Welcome Week.
Thank you to everyone involved in Welcome Week. Watch out for a huge migration of yellow ducks from Argyle House to locations all around the campuses. Thank you to everyone who will be on call for any systems outages or overload as 40,000 students all log in again.
Thank you to everyone who has been working on papers for senate and court committees, September always brings a new set of committee dates. Thank you also to everyone involved in forecasting spend for the coming year. Budgets are now set and locked and Heads can begin to spend.
The ISG website is still huge. If you can spot pages which really should be gone, please let me know.
Good news that in November EDE and DSDT will host colleagues from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. If you would like to be involved in talking with them about online and open education, let Stuart Nicol know.
The autumn season is busy with religious festivals, please do make use of a handy multi-faith calendar to find out what your colleagues may be celebrating or remembering. Multifaith Calendar | Harvard Divinity School (HDS) Decoration or baking ideas for our wing are always welcome.
Best wishes,
-Melissa
Friday 6th September
Dear All,
Thank you for your work again this week.
We sadly waved goodbye to Bruce Darby from the Web Team last week, Aryan Jagtap left this week and we will take another loss again next week when Ryan McIntosh leaves us too. It is always sad to lose colleagues who have been with us for many years, but we wish them all the best for new adventures.Well done to everyone who worked alongside Bruce, Aryan and Ryan to deliver our shiny new EdWeb 2 platform. That project is now closing successfully and we will publish our new service level description to describe how we will offer our new managed service to the University.
I see that the nominations for ISG staff awards are out, please do take a look. I think there are around 50 nominations for LTW people and teams ( some duplicates). Well done to all nominees and thank you to everyone who wrote those nominations, that’s a nice thing to do. With 50 nominations, that’s around 28% of all nominations when we make up only 18% of ISG. We seem particularly dominant in the ‘ISG in the community ‘ category. I am very proud. Book your place at the ceremony, it’ll be a fun party.
Also nice to see our Library colleagues shortlisted in the Times Higher Times Higher Education Awards 2024: shortlist announced and the plans for the new Darwin Building Plans submitted for ‘New Darwin’ tower at Edinburgh Uni | The Herald (heraldscotland.com) which LST will have to fit out. Here’s a picture of the old one being built in 1967 Darwinbuilding1967 – King’s Buildings – Wikipedia
Congratulations to Riccardo on a hugely successful training roll out. Since launching our SharePoint training service in May, we have trained nearly 300 staff. These are clearly the digital skills people have been waiting for!
I know you will all be looking forward to Tuesday 8th October, celebrating Ada Lovelace Day 2024, an international celebration day of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). We have an afternoon of talks, activities and Wikipedia editing planned. All welcome Join us in celebrating Ada Lovelace Day 2024 (sharepoint.com) Thank you to Ari for some lovely new graphics.
-Melissa
Friday 13th September
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week. MyEd, Media Hopper Create and The General Assembly Hall are all looking great for the start of term.
We will be waving goodbye and thank you to Sarah Bruce from EDE and welcoming 2 new MyEd Research assistants Charlie (Cezary) Konrad Myszkowski and Christina (Xinyi) Xu.
In advance of Ada Lovelace Day Stewart has blogged about Ada’s green credentials and land management plans Ada Lovelace on BBC Countryfile – Ada Lovelace Day and the online course team have updated our football MOOC to give it more of a women’s football focus A focus on women’s football in the Football: More than a Game MOOC (sharepoint.com). Alastair will be walking the Kiltwalk on Sunday in support of Hibernian Girls Alastair Taylor is fundraising for Hibernian Community Foundation (justgiving.com) and you know they need all the help they can get.
Thank you to the Digital Skills and Design Team who are out and about staffing stands at Freshers Fayres across the campuses. The little ducks are flying off the stand as the students grab them to chuck into puddles and use in fridgescaping tableaus.
Next week, as well as the start of term, we will be celebrating International Talk Like a Pirate Day. It is important to remember that it is an international day, not all pirates are from the west country. Ask Stratos about Queen Artemesia and have a think about how AI can help or hinder us in media piracy wars.
Make sure you have booked your place at the various ISG all-staff events. Information about our LTW festive lunch extravaganza and December all-staff meeting will follow soon.
Have a good weekend,
-Melissa
Friday 20th September
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week. Thank you to everyone who spoke like a pirate yesterday.
Start of term teaching is never plain sailing. Thank you to the LST and DLAM teams who are hand stitching rigging to fill gaps.
We wave good bye this week to Mark Henderson from our project management team, he’s going back to SPS. And sadly we will also wave goodbye soon to Marc Jennings from DLAM who has been seduced away by the vendor, but I am sure we will see again.
Congratulations to both Andy Todd and Tess Higgins who have been successful in gaining promoted positions in our new DSDT restructure and will join Satu’s management team.
I am delighted to see a strong showing from LTW in the ISG staff Oscars shortlist. 10 LTW nominees – 10 out of 35 (29%) of shortlist. we have nominees in 6 of the 9 categories (67%). Well done, All.
- Fiona Hendrie ISG in the Community Award;
- Eden Swimer Student Staff Member of the Year;
- Mahima Aggarwal Student Staff Member of the Year;
- Mahima Aggarwal Outstanding Student Experience;
- Mbikwa Sitembo Student Staff Member of the Year;
- Satu Kapiainen Inspiring Role Model;
- Ellen Groen Team Player;
- Their Finest Hour (LTW Team) ISG in the Community Award;
- Tess Higgins Excellence in Customer Care;
- Zohra O’Doherty – ISG in the Community Award
You may have noticed that captions have been turned on by default on Media Hopper Create and please take a moment to admire its new front page Media Hopper Create – Media Hopper Create .
Still on Media Hopper, you can revisit memories from the IndyRef MOOC which we launched to support the independence referendum in Scotland 10 years ago The Scottish Independence Referendum 10 years on – Open.Ed
Also on Media Hopper, our ‘Witchfinder General’ student intern Ruby shows in this 3 min video how to take part in #WikiLovesMonuments photo competition https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/Wiki+Loves+Monuments+-+How+to+upload/1_1fx8cl5f
- Take a photo of a listed building (interior or exterior)
- Upload it
- Upload more than the Welsh
You’ll be familiar with my advice always to ‘bring a Tupperware box’ Tupperware (2) – Tupperware – Wikipedia whenever there is lovely LTW bakery to be had. Sadly it seems like Tupperware boxes have breathed their last burp as they have filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, Tupperware: Embattled food container firm files for bankruptcy – BBC News but so have Edx, so you never know.
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The first Space Bridge Course – Sensors in Space begins tomorrow, 31 learners will be enrolled on Friday and have the weekend to familiarise themselves with the platform before the first week of the course starts on Monday. This is the first course to be designed and built by the OCP team for the new Short Course Platform in collaboration with the Bayes Centre and Prof Iain Woodhouse. This is the first of 5 courses, funded by the UK Space Agency, designed to upskill and reskill the workforce to launch into careers in the space sector.
Well done, All.
-Melissa
Friday 4th October
Dear All,
Thank you for your work this week.
It was lovely to see so many of you at the ISG staff awards, especially those who came back specially for the event. Special congratulations to Zohra, Ellen and Eden who are winners! And thanks to the LST teams who helped out at short notice.
This week we waved goodbye to Jacquelyn Armour our Business Analyst for the Short Courses Platform and welcomed two new Project Management colleagues Kirsty Waddell and Jackson Corey Duff.
You will have noticed that last week’s Friday message was lost when we suffered an embarrassing network outage. Thank you to everyone who worked hard to bring our systems back and respond to users who needed our help. Although this was not a security incident, it is timely to remind you that an action from the IS cyber security plan was raise awareness of steps everyone should be taking to maintain personal and self managed devices to reduce security risks to our university network https://infosec.ed.ac.uk/how-to-protect/configure-devices-securely
I know that many of you enjoyed Tuesday cakes to celebrate the formal creation of our new DSDT team, and to congratulate Andy Todd on becoming Training Manager leading our extensive digital skills programme, Tess Higgins on becoming Design Manager to lead us towards a design-led society. Sonia Virdi is embarking on her new role in the UX team bringing her expertise in Service Design and UX. She will initially focus in supporting University’s Web Estate Governance and activities. We will be imminently welcoming back Bartek to rejoin/join our training teams and I’ll have a proper slide with a new LTW structure on it for our all-staff meeting in December.
Emma has been out and about presenting and representing at DrupalCon https://youtu.be/z1zXXdavwgs?si=rbof4Q_mGty0uXuH
Ewan has been blogging 7 years of Wikipedia and the Translation Studies MSc – Wikimedian in Residence
Thank you to Wesley and his team for all the work done on the SADIE project SADIE – Home (sharepoint.com)
Please come along to welcome our guest speakers from around the University. I am looking forward to seeing you all on Tuesday for Ada Lovelace Day Ada Lovelace Day – A celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). and at our EDI seminar for Black History Month about library initiatives.
Other events for Black History Month Events mark Black History Month | The University of Edinburgh And if you like a bit of naming spaces, there’s a new book out about Chrystal McMillan, come along to the launch Book Launch: Chrystal Macmillan, 1872-1937, Campaigner for Equality, Justice and Peace | School of Social and Political Science (ed.ac.uk)
If you are new to LTW and need a winter-warming hoodie to protect you against the chill on your commute, ask your manager how to get a hoodie voucher.
It’s that time of year, I see that pumpkins are in the shops, Lorna’s tumshie is still on Wikipedia Open Tumshies for Hallowe’en | Open World (lornamcampbell.org) and we are have a fab new Version 2 of our witches site ready for our busiest time The Final Countdown: New Features and Nuxt 3 Upgrade – Witchfinder General – Data Visualisation Internship (ed.ac.uk)
Best wishes for sweet apples and honey,
-Melissa