The University is targeting an improved student digital experience by investing several million pounds in a state-of-the-art lecture recording system to cover 400 rooms in over the next 3 years.
We want to make sure that your thoughts and ideas on lecture recording are gathered so they can be used during our investigations with suppliers. Having your thoughts included within the process will make sure we make the most of this opportunity to enhance the experience for students and academics at the University of Edinburgh.
The ability to watch lectures again as an aid to revision is immensely popular with our students already and capturing video and audio recordings of lectures at scale will supplement the rich set of online resources that already exist to support learning.
There are many proven benefits to making recordings of lectures available including supporting students for whom English is not a first language and ensuring that our face to face lectures are available in an alternative format for students who require it. Not having to take notes at speed allows students to focus more on what is being said and use valuable contact time to ask questions, knowing that notes can be reviewed and improved later.
We have created 18 use cases for lecture recording. We want you to look at these use cases and think ‘how should this work?’ We want you to think of this in terms of usability and your workflows when using the service.
The creation of policy around lecture recording at this scale will form a separate piece of work, these workshops are about the functionality.
We also want you to tell us which use cases are your priority.
Finally, ‘what are we missing?’ We want you to suggest any use cases not covered.
Picture taken of me at #ald16eduni . No rights reserved by me.
Back in the days of Web 2.0 we used to describe things as ‘perpetualy beta‘. For me this perfectly describes Wikipedia. It’ll never be finished: we must add to, and improve it, early and often. Users are co-developers and it’s developed under open source principles of collective intelligence.
Yesterday I wrote a provocation piece for the Dangerous Women Project. Today a bunch of colleagues and students engaged in dangerous practice and we were featured on the telly. I’m the one wearing the Creative Commons badge.
Picture taken by me of a window in Budapest. No rights reserved by me.
I am participating in the University of Edinburgh digital skills course ‘23 things for digital knowledge‘. Thing 6 is about accessibility. I was listening on Radio 4 to ‘tweet of the day’ this morning while scrolling through Twitter and I mused on the possibility of having tweets actually tweeted, as in spoken outloud. A quick google search revealed instructions on Instructables on how to make it so.
I am participating in the University of Edinburgh digital skills course ‘23 things for digital knowledge‘. Thing 5 is about diversity.
As well as being one of the ISG change themes through which we are looking at our organisation and changing it to be fit for the future, equality and diversity is part of a larger consideration of digital transformation going on in the university, being championed by our CIO.
Our CIO challenges us to think about the ‘internet of me’, where each of us is at the centre of a web of services tailored to what the internet knows about us and what it anticipates our wants and desires to be as a result. Examples given of Uber, Airbnb etc certainly seem to make life easier for some.
I’d suggest that we cannot think about digital transformation without considering privilege and bias. For some people, their experience of the internet is not as positive as it may seem to be for white, wealthy, north american or british men. For some it is toxic, biased and perpetuates unhelpful stereotypes. It is up to us as tech professionals to consider all our users and ensure that we create an internet for all. It is up to us not only to consider our unconscious bias but also to check and recheck that the services we build are inclusive.
The best way we can do that it to have diverse teams working on every project and provide safe working environments for colleagues to share their experiences which can inform our thinking. The risk if we don’t is that the more our services become personalised, the less we are able to empathise with the experience of others.
Picture taken by me. Typesetting by Penguin. No rights reserved by me.
I am participating in the University of Edinburgh digital skills course ‘23 things for digital knowledge‘. Thing 4 is about digital security. I have checked the security permissions on my phone and ipad, but I am particularly freaked out by the idea that your own camera can be used to watch you without your permission. My laptop is often open around my house and that’s not a kind of knowledge I am keen to share.
Even the FBI- an organisation well known for unwarranted surveillance- suggest covering your webcam. I suggest using a cheerful sticker, perhaps one you have collected from an Adalovelace Lego, Wikipedia editathon or even the 23Things course. Perhaps the University’s information security team will issue a sticker of the perfect size.
I heard James Comey interviewed on the radio discussing who the targets for such privacy invasions usually are. I think he said young women were particularly targetted by this kind of phish/malware /hack. In an attempt to find that reference I made the mistake of googling ‘young girls webcam’. Mistake. Now that’s in my internet history.
Picture taken by me of a troll in Norway. No rights reserved by me, but I admit I didn’t ask his permission to use his image on my blog, so he may come after me.
The first thing to do is to think about blogging. I have been blogging for about 10 years now. I have always had a university hosted blog rather than a personal one. I enjoy the opportunity for reflective writing that it gives me and for thinking ‘out loud’ about ideas I am still forming or testing before they become formal work positions or plans. I see blogging as part of open practice in sharing ideas but also giving insight into the thinking behind some of the decisions I make in my leadership role.
I have no idea how many people read my blog and I’m not sure I want to know, but occasionally I get messages and comments or retweets and links, so that’s always nice.
Task: Use your blog to write a short post about:
A) what you hope to gain out of the 23 Things programme.
I have participated in 23 things programmes before, but the lovely thing about them is, the things are different in each institution and I plan to learn something new.
My thoughts on the social media guidelines for staff and researchers are that they seem very focussed on protecting the university from any risk that might result from what we might write, but there is nothing about the risks we might personally be taking in putting ourselves ‘out there’ and nothing about how the university will support us if, while we are using social media, we should happen to attract trolls, abuse, harassment etc.
Given the dreadful things Labour party members seem to be saying to each other online these days, I wonder whether the university should have a good behaviour pledge too.
By Centre for Research Collections University of Edinburgh – Gerardi Mercatoris Atlas, sive, Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47041923
A 17th Century map of Iceland became our most popular OER for football fans during Euro 2016. The image ‘Gerardi Mercatoris Atlas, Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura ‘ which belongs to our Centre for Research Collections was added to Wikimedia in February as part of our Wikimedian in Residence partnership project. It was then used to illustrate an article about Iceland on English and German Wikipedia. It has now been viewed more than 2 million times.
Iceland’s Euro2016 matches were on 14 June (1-1 with Portugal), 18 June (1-1 Hungary), 22 June (2-1 victory over Austria), 27 June (2-1 win over England), and 3 July (2-5 defeat to France). Around each of these events people all over the world were keen to learn about this surprising nation. Viewing numbers ( numbers of hits) show appreciable spikes for the matches against Portugal, England, and France.
Issue 26 p. 1 front cover Illustration of hanging a sheet on a washing line Usage terms: We have been unable to locate the copyright holder for Hanging a sheet on a washing line. Please contact copyright@bl.uk with any information you have regarding this item. – See more at: http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/spare-rib-magazine-issue-026#sthash.qZnKW0Db.dpuf
As part of the PlayFair Steps equality and diversity initiative in ISG we have been looking at our staff demographics and considering our recruitment practices.
There is many a cliche to be heard around how difficult it is to recruit women into tech jobs. Some of it is true, some of it is lack of imagination. As a large tech employer in this city we compete for the best talent against other tech employers in the city. The competition for new graduates, skilled software engineers, designers, excellent IT managers and creative thinkers is hot*.
As an organisation we recognise that we need to improve the diversity in our teams to improve our insights and creativity, to draw upon a diverse set of ideas and experiences and to model for our own students the world in which they might want to work.
One of the things we’ve done is to start employing student interns. Dozens of ’em. It’s been really invigorating. All the teams in LTW have benefitted and I am personally very much enjoying having the most up-to-date thinking and input from the interns in my office. Dominique works with me on my gender equality plans and Polina works with me on digital marketing and recruitment. These two projects are linked. If we want to get more women into our organisation- particularly at senior levels- we need them to apply for our jobs in the first place.
I am not certain that as a tech employer we are very well served by our recruitment strategy currently. We have no specific graduate careers track in ISG, no ‘return to work after a career break’ initiatives and we tend only to advertise in ‘university places’ such as our own HR pages and jobs.ac.uk**. I’ve never seen a twitter feed or anything similar pushing out our jobs (other than mine).
HR sites, and even jobs.ac.uk rely on the premise that a person wants to work in a university first and that they’ll be looking for a job and your ad will happen to be there at that moment. I’m not sure that is the market we most need to be in. I think we need to be digitally transforming our recruitment approach and reaching passive talent*** while they happen to be browsing.
I have asked Polina to investigate LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has company pages, where employers can gather followers and networks and get their news and jobs in front of people who already have jobs and are busy networking in their professional field. Looking at Linkedin I note that as well as the University news pages, our business school is already using linkedin for their recruitment. Polina is a business school student so she knows her stuff. My hope is that we will figure out how best to use Linkedin in ISG to get our adverts to new eyes using linked people, friends, friends of friends, networks, news, alumni, students and interested tech followers to show them what a great place this is to work.
I’ll let you know how we get on. If you would like to follow our nascent company page, please do.
**it turns out that 15% of working professionals are scanning their network at any given time, and 45% are totally open to considering a new opportunity when approached by a recruiter. I know this. It happens to me a lot. In addition to the 25% who say they are actively looking for a new job, 85% of the global workforce are your oyster.
*** I’m also having trouble finding anyone who has any stats about how many views or shares our ads get. What I am finding is some anxiety amongst our HR professionals that I may be about to disrupt the status quo (again).
Lynda.com brand logo. Fully copyrighted and trademarked. Many rights reserved by them.
We are soft-launching the Lynda.com service this week, providing the University with access to an extensive library of high quality video courses in technology, creative and business skills.
This exciting and versatile new resource can be used in many ways to develop staff and student skills, support curricular teaching, assist in software and systems rollouts and enable our training providers to expand their subject range and online provision. It supports the strategic plans of the University and Information Services, and will make a key contribution to digital transformation by increasing our capacity for digital skills development, helping to develop a digital culture and supporting staff and students to improve their skills for work, study and life.
Today’s soft launch provides access for staff and students on a largely self-service basis and will allow early adopters to immediately start using Lynda.com and begin to explore the possibilities it affords. The full launch in September will offer access to visitors, integration with Learn, engagement events and more comprehensive support resources. Care has been, and is being taken to consider where your data goes and how it is used, but if you do have questions, do ask.
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