Author: mhighton

nice weather for ducks

Liverbirds
Liverbirds
Pink echo
Pink echo

On some of the hottest days of the year this week,  I ventured southwards for two conferences, both featuring birds and both styled in hot pink.

EchoExperience25 at the University of Nottingham https://info.echo360.com/attendee-hub-echoexperience-emea

and

UCISA Women in Technology in Liverpool WiT25 – UCISA

Pink WiT
Pink WiT

 

At WiT Katie and I spoke about what works in our efforts to establish career paths for women into some of the areas of technology where they are currently under-represented. We presented a number of case studies from the last 10 years of LTW internships and trailed the research work which will be going on this summer to track the career paths and destinations of so many intern alumni over time.  We were un-phased by the fact that the conference organisers had failed to upload our slides sent in advance and so we had to just wing it for while.

At Echo I enjoyed a very glamorous evening of castle, caves, culture and canards about sagittarians and luddites before proving that I would say boo to a goose.

Nottsgeese
Nottsgeese

A Field Guide to Working in Higher Education

A Field Guide to Working in Higher Education
A Field Guide to Working in Higher Education

I am pleased to get my hands of a copy of this new book A Field Guide to Working in Higher Education

The book is designed to support new lecturers who are joining HE from a background in a professional area or career rather than a career in academia. These new teachers draw on different background knowledge and I think it has been a gap in professional development in universities to recognise that they need specific help to get up to speed in our cultures and languages alongside the expertise they are bringing in their area of practice. Too often academic colleagues try to exclude professional people by using academic jargon or referencing arcane local processes.

My contributions to the guide are about the IT support, learning technology, VLEs etc which new colleagues can find for their teaching.  Please do buy a copy and ask your library to buy it for colleagues.

how does your garden grow online?

another lovely slide theme created for me by the LTW Graphic Design team.
another lovely slide theme created for me by the LTW Graphic Design team.

I was delighted to be invited as to National College of Ireland to speak as part  of their  ‘Assuring Quality in Fully Online Programme Delivery’ event last week.  A lovely excuse to visit Dublin again.

I chose a gardening theme which enabled me to talk about the time it takes to grow online learning and the investments we make in ensuring that there are good growing conditions and that native plants can thrive.

To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow
-Audrey Hepburn

adult Jewish human female

It was my honour this weekend to be part of a Bat Mitzvah ceremony for the daughter of one of my oldest friends.  The Bat Mitzvah girl has  grown into an engaging, lively, curious and clever young woman and it was lovely to see her take this step into adulthood as she comes of age.

The service included many reflections on what being a woman in our community is, the importance of family, friends and individuality and the many names we gain as we travel through life.

The event also gave me an opportunity to go on a bit about  how bat mitzvahs were established and the wikipedia page I wrote in 2016 for the first bat mitzvah girl, Judith Kaplan Eisenstein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Kaplan_Eisenstein

As I was telling the story of the first in 1922 and referring to it as ‘fairly recently’, one of the young women of the party did point out that that is now more than 100 years ago. Time has gone so fast.

Nevertheless, I think the words of Judith Kaplan are still hopeful and relevant to the fight for equality   “No thunder sounded. No lightning struck. It all passed very peacefully.”

 

Looking at the Wikipedia page for Bat Mitzvah, I see that it is a subset of the page for Bar Mitzvah. I also notice that the pictures which illustrate the page could do with a refresh, so if you have pictures of your bat mitzvah which you would be happy to release, I may be able to add you to this article for worldwide fame ( but no fortune). Bar and bat mitzvah – Wikipedia

media, AI and students

Interns working on K.
Interns working on K.

I am pleased to be able to offer paid work to 20 student interns to work in ISG as captioners.

Alongside AI tools which generate automated captions and transcripts, the human captioners ensure that the standard of quality is good enough to support students with hearing difficulties.   This semester (to 5th March)  they have corrected over 100  pieces of media.​ The time spent captioning varies significantly based on the subject, but as the captioners gain skill and confidence the turnaround time and quality increases.  50-minute long lectures are usually turned around within 4 days. 

International Women’s Day 2025

It was my pleasure to sit on a panel of women leaders talking about our careers in tech. We had a friendly audience and the event was very well organised by Ellen, Fiona and Katie.  One of the questions from the floor was about women who have inspired us, and we all chose women who we knew or had worked with, not necessarily in tech, but who embody the character and behaviors that we aspire to.

I mentioned a colleague from University of Leeds who was my mentor briefly, before she went on to bigger things, Miriam Zukas. Miriam was/is a professor of adult and lifelong learning, and she didn’t have a Wikipedia page. But now she does. Miriam Zukas – Wikipedia  . Wikipedia pages are not really the place to celebrate the way people do their work and the impact they have on people because it is hard to cite, but this oration from Birkbeck’s master sounds a lot like the woman I knew. Miriam Zukas — Birkbeck, University of London .

If pushed to think of an inspiring woman in tech, I might mention Martha Lane Fox. I liked when she said  ‘It’s not ok not to know how the internet works’.

And  I agree with her again today.‘Musk? He’s horrendous’: Martha Lane Fox on diversity, tech bros and International Women’s Day | Martha Lane Fox | The Guardian

Another question from the floor was about specific things we each do, every day, to optimise our resilience and success at work. I said blogging, obviously.

 

who learns where?

Using the right platform for your learning activity

We’ve created an infographic which we hope helps explain the collection of platforms available for University of Edinburgh colleagues to use, the strategy for each and which should be used for different learning/teaching activities.  The graphic talks through the benefits of using each platform. Each platform is designed with a particular use in mind, providing features to suit the specific use-case/audience.  We hope you find it helpful. If you have any questions, please contact us via the IS Helpline.

 

 

Saying goodbye to VLEs we have loved.

I have written before about the sad death of Aggie Booth and the end of Bodington VLE.

Now it is time to wave goodbye to University of Oxford’s  WebLearn. There is a celebratory event this week to remember our time working with WebLearn and all the support and innovations we shared in running and using the system.

The Leeds and Oxford 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 (Blackboard) 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 Learning Management System, deploying it as WebLearn in  2008.

WebLearn Sakai was first installed at University of Oxford in March 2007 and I joined from University of Leeds in 2008, when it was just a baby.

My memories of working with the WebLearn Team at Oxford are from 2008 to 2014 when I was Head of the Learning Technologies Group (LTG) and then Director of Academic IT (Learning and Teaching).

  • Working with really talented open source development teams. Adam, Mathew, Colin, Roger and Colin taught me most of what I learned about open source and the potential for using technologies in unusual ways. I attended several Sakai conferences with them over the years and there always seemed to be people who really cared about the systems they built and the community involved in developing the product.  The nice thing for me about WebLearn was that it was flexible enough to not be built on the same assumption as the large proprietary systems. Oxford at the time was not driven by a module catalogue which rolled over and refreshed every term. It was based around the teaching which was done by colleagues over many years and with different students groups. The starting place- that one goes to Oxford to ‘study with’ -puts the academic colleague at the centre of the teaching and builds the online spaces around them. Some colleagues at Oxford chose to have a place in the VLE for all their teaching, with resources for first years, third years, post graduates etc  grouped within that. I was pleased that we were able to build that for them. It was nice that we were not in a ‘technology says no’ conversation’.
  • The Sakai Community was for me, a place to meet some very interesting colleagues and researchers, some of whom I still count amongst my friends (looking at you Nynke, Michael and Alannah). It was also a place with some big personalities, Fun evenings with Michael, Ian, Nathan and Dr Chuck.
  • I was also pleased in LTG and OUCS to have talented researchers who worked closely with as the WebLearn team to think about what we could discover about how VLEs and OER could support student learning. Liz, Joanna and Jill really were ahead of their time in bringing a bit of academic rigour to what we were doing.
  • The WebLearn training and support teams made sure our VLE met users needs and Fawei continued to promote and celebrate each use in departments and colleges. Adam has been continuously blogging it since 2009 2009 September | WebLearn Blog and projects using WebLearn regularly featured in the OxTALENT awards.

In recent years, after I left in 2014 to join University of Edinburgh, Oxford changed VLE again and opted for Canvas.  People sometimes forget that when we move to a new VLE  the learning technology teams still have to run the old one for several years to enable course to be taught-out and keep access to any materials which staff and students might need for archives, assessment or appeals.

After several years of running in parallel with the University’s new virtual learning environment (Canvas),  WebLearn was finally closed in 2022 and decommissioned in mid-November 2024. At its peak WebLearn at Oxford had 47,000 users and hosted 101,000 separate sites.

I am sad to see it go.

 

 

 

The role of profiles

Currently, all staff members within the University are able to create a profile on EdWeb which enables them to present personal information, including biographical and contact details in a number of fields. This allowed information to be shared across multiple pages from a single source by adding the staff’s unique user number (UUN). Colleagues were able to update their own staff profile which would then automatically be updated on the pages where that profile appeared. 

However, our research suggests that only a fraction of University staff make use of their online profiles, and of the profiles that do exist, many contain minimal or out-of-date information. This, coupled with the platform upgrade has provided us with an opportunity to reassess staff profiles and improve the feature.

Our next  new project will:

  • Explore the opportunity to improve the provision for staff profiles on the University website by using the functionality of the new platform to optimise this type of content.
  • Research the current use of staff profiles in EdWeb and the expectations and requirements of academic and professional services staff for the display and presentation of their profile content.
  • Research whether colleagues believe there is a requirement for staff profiles on the University web publishing platform (EdWeb2), or whether there is a desire to optimise the display and presentation of staff profile content hosted elsewhere e.g., on LinkedIn, Research Explorer (PURE), or other platforms, databases and repositories.  

Find out more: New Project will improve Staff Profiles