Melissa Highton

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 2023.

Friday 13th January 2023

Dear All.

Thank you for finding your way back after all the festivities, and especially those who now head East rather than West each day.

I expect some of you have been experimenting with ChatGTP. I will be interested to hear your ideas about how we can use it to write code, strategies, blue tables, Wikipedia pages and annual reviews.

Welcome to our new colleague, Scott this week and several more new colleagues joining us through January. We are still searching for even more, and we currently have many job adverts out on many platforms: jobs.ac.uk, linkedin, S1jobs 4 University Of Edinburgh (Sgs) Jobs in Scotland in January 2023 at s1jobs, MyGwork University of Edinburgh Information Services Group – myGwork LGBT-Friendly Organisations  and WomeninTech The University of Edinburgh | Women in Technology jobs | jobs.womenintech.co.uk  Thank you to Juan , Geoff, Ari and Hazel for making us a snappy new recruitment video and shiny new recruitment graphics, we are gathering data and trying new places to see how we can make our adverts most attractive.

Congratulations to Marcello, Jenni and Kevin for their success in the ISG photography competition. Images can be controversial as you know and those of you tuned into world HE news may have spotted that a lecturer in America has been fired for using an image from our Edinburgh University library collections Hamline University professor fired for showing images of Muhammad (nypost.com)

Did you study at University of Edinburgh? One of the things I like about working here, is that many ISG staff have themselves, or family and friends who studied at Edinburgh.
If any of you, or people you know, happen to have an email last week( 4^th Jan) with the subject line: ‘University of Edinburgh General Council – Election for members of the Business Committee 2023’. I’d be most grateful and totally tickled to have your vote.  You can see me listed amongst the candidates. Only alumni can vote, I think.   If you haven’t heard of the general council –it is the assembled body of all the alumni and only the most ancient of universities have them.   Colleagues in LST will have fond memories of many times the General Council have needed complex AV at very short notice in very difficult venues. If you vote for me I’ll be sure to sort that out  J

Best wishes,

-Melissa

Friday 20th January

Dear All,

Thank you again for another week. Welcome to Vivienne and Alistair who have made good choices and come to join our team.

Thank you for coming in to the office in the face of strikes and snow. If you haven’t yet got your winter-warming-hybrid-working hoodie, ask your manager today.  UCU strikes begin again on 1^st Feb and may go on for several weeks so you should plan for the impact on your projects and services.

If you are interested in pension matters employees on grades UE01 to UE05 can join the University of Edinburgh Staff Benefits Scheme (SBS) and they are looking for a new trustee https://www.ed.ac.uk/news/staff/2023/call-for-new-member-nominated-trustee

If you are feeling the pinch in January you may find the staff discounts portal useful https://uoe.sharepoint.com/sites/human-resources/pay-and-reward/SitePages/Mylifestyle.aspx

Thank you to everyone who helped to push out our job adverts.  The Linkedin post which has had the most interaction this month is the one with the multiple job postings listed. It got shared and liked nearly 40 times and I gather that is a real boost for our algorithm.

It is coming up to that time of year when we look for the new LTW mascot animal.  To join our Scottish wildcat ( Lady Lawson) and our pancake tortoise (Watty) I was searching for a badger (Badger) but I am now considering a bison named Pudding. Thoughts and suggestions welcome. Edinburgh Zoo Adoptions

It’s not too late to get a tickets for the Chinese New Year Bilingual Ceilidh at our St Cecilia’s Hall https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/edinburghs-chinese-new-year-bilingual-ceilidh-tickets-505962526537  tonight!

Have a good weekend,

-Melissa

Dir, LTW

Friday 27th January

Dear All,

Thank you for another week. Warm welcome to Kat, Daniela and Eleanor and welcome back to Karen Beggs.

Thank you for sending me your suggestions about ChatGPT.

Thank you to Kevin and Lesley who continue to lobby at the Argyle House Accommodation Group ( A-HAG) for small works and new collaboration spaces. ‘some hae pods but cannae meet. Some wad meet but want it’…..

I trust you have all had your haggis and made your offal jokes. My favourite contemporary of Robert Burns is Mary Somerville.  Mary had a much-loved uncle who was keen on punning.  Burns publicly made fun of Mary’s uncle’s punning and the uncle never punned again. That is not a tactic which will work with me.

Speaking of inspirational women of STEM, I am reminded that Xia Peisu ( after whom we named our KB training room) will be having her centenary this year. She was the ‘mother of Chinese computing’ and she studied at Edinburgh. If you have thoughts on how we could celebrate her again, let me know.

Astoria has blogged about interpreting accessibility reports https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/website-communications/interpreting-little-forest-accessibility-reports-recap-and-recording/

Thank you to all (10) of you diligently undertaking ITIL training this week. You may have seen that I have put our LTW Mandatory training day (LTW MTD) into your diaries. This is the Friday of National ‘Learning at Work’ week please keep it clear of any other meetings.

Have a lovely weekend,

-Melissa

Friday 3rd January

Dear All,

Thank you for your work for another week.  Congratulations to Tracey  Madden for gaining her CMALT accreditation. Time to update this page https://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/learning-technology/more/professional-development/uoe-cmalt-holders

Perhaps we should also have a page celebrating the ITIL qualified members of LTW?  Congratulations this week to  Jen Smith,  Alistair Campbell, Joe Currie, Stephen Donnelly, Liam McCabe and Delia Georgescu.

You may have spotted that an individual meeting pod has materialised in reception for you to try. Colleagues with claustrophobia should give it a wide berth. You are very welcome to use other spaces for meeting though. Have a look at the LTW space on K west, and the Xia, Annie, Margorie and Irene training rooms https://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/help-consultancy/is-skills/bookable-facilities. I am sometimes threatened with a ‘use it or lose it’ scenario, so it would be a great help to our services if you make use of these spaces.

Thank you to those who came along to meet our guests from EdX and all of you who contribute to our many papers and reports at peak committee time. Thank you to you all for project and service reports, and for all who have created new folders for 2023.

I think you are all about to be asked to give feedback into an institution-wide staff engagement survey. Don’t be shy.

Have a lovely weekend,

-Melissa

Director LTW

Friday 10th February

Dear All,

Thank you for your work again for another week. Apparently it is nearly ‘Innovative Learning Week’ in the university, so if you are feeling especially innovative, that’s the week to do it!

You will have seen a few messages about the staff engagement survey. You know what to do.

There have been a flurry of recruitments recently, some of which have resulted in internal promotions. I’ll do a round-up of those soon. Thank you to everyone who is giving time to panels and processes.

Congratulations to more of our ITIL winners: Chris Dow, Richard Hogg, Cailan Campbell and Lucas Morris have all passed their ITIL exams.

Well done to everyone who is getting confirmations of conference papers, sounds like there will be a large group taking the OER highroad to Inverness.

Next week includes more strike days and also Valentines Day which gives me my annual chance to highlight that it is also the day to celebrate St Cyril and St Methodius, the patron saints of metadata. Cyril and Methodius began translating the Bible in the 9^th Century but ran up against the problem of the lack of a suitable alphabet. They had access to a substantial body of important information; they wanted to share this with a wider audience, and to ensure that it was transmitted accurately and preserved for posterity in a way that would be easily comprehensible. When they found that no existing encoding system was adequate for the task, they set about developing a new one. Cyril invented a new coding system. He invented a new alphabet. His work formed the basis for Cyrillic still widely used today. Methodius ‘s name was actually Michael but he changed it to reflect his key research priorities: persistent pursuit of truth conducted in an orderly and methodical way. Naming things is important.

Have  a good weekend,

-Melissa

 

Friday 17th February

Dear All,

Thank you for your work for another week.  I think we have to assume that Nicola Sturgeon and Jacinda Arden had a New Years resolution bet on to see who could exit their leadership job first. I expect they will now form some kind of touring supergroup.

As we approach pancake fest, Mardi Gras and Carnivale, congratulations to Miki for passing her ITIL exam, and to Juan who is now Adobe Certified Professional in Adobe After Effects, and to Ellen and Nikki who both passed their Association of Project Managers Project Management Qualification. It is great to see so many of you gaining and updating your professional qualifications and certifications. I hope you are all keeping your P&M learning record up to date. Nikki and Ellen have earned a whole 6 SCQF credits and a digital badge.

Exciting times for our MOOC course leaders. Our learning technology MOOCs are now on Coursera ( as well as FutureLearn). Stephen, Geoff, Callum, Lizzy, Andres and Marcello prepare for world domination.

Thank you to all who are writing jobs descriptions for this year’s summer intern intake. We seem to be on track to recruit another 50 people from the university to work with us this summer. You may be interested to take  a look at this survey published by JISC about the digital skills of professional services staff working in universities, it seems to suggest quite a different profile from academic staff or students.  Survey: professional services still operating under pre-pandemic conditions | Jisc

Speaking of working conditions. As ever LTW are ahead of the game because we have LST.  LST are piloting an ‘all in one’ device designed for use in a hybrid working environment, giving a potential solution for collaboration and informal ad hoc meetings. If you want to check it out, the NEAT Frame is currently located in booth 13 in Level H East and further information and guidance can be found here. Give it a go. If you would like more space for collaborative meetings there are now special LTW collaboration desks – 8 additional desks (imaginatively named 1-8) on Level K West ( near the Brenda Moon Board Room). Located on the castle side you will find a pool ( not an actual pool) of desks dedicated for collaboration / quiet area – each desk has a screen and connections available for laptop connectivity. All LTW teams are welcome and encouraged to use that space.

I am aware that any period of sustained industrial action can be exhausting for all involved. I am a strong believer that if you are a member of a union you should remain a member of that union even when you become senior management. The reason for this is that I believe you get better decision making when there is diversity around the board table, and union members are part of that diversity of thinking. Having some managers in the room who are union members means you get better management which is more inclusive and considerate of a range of staff views. I blogged more about the role of learning technology during times of strike learning technology leadership and strike action – .

Have a lovely weekend,

-Melissa

 

Friday 24th February

Dear All,

Thank you for your work for another week.  It’s been another busy one.

The accessibility data which has been gathered as part of the Learn Ultra Project is really impressive. It shows that care is being taken by you and by our colleagues in schools to ensure that the learning experience for students is accessible and inclusive. If you haven’t seen this data Lee-Ann is working on drawing out headline messages.

We have more new colleagues to welcome: Keir Lavin has joined our AV team bringing a background in colour, sound and time travel. Claire Panella has joined our witch hunting data team to find the few remaining ‘impossible witches’. We are also advertising a fine set of interesting looking summer internships https://www.unitemps.com/branches/university-of-edinburgh/  please use all your social media channels to make this look like a cool place to work. We aim to attract the best and brightest students to work in these roles.

Looking forward to Open Education Week and International Womens Day, it is great to see a range of activities being planned. This is your monthly reminder that if you like to contribute to open knowledge and address structural imbalance, you can join Ewan’s wikipedia editing event this afternoon.

For those of you who are working on your CMALT portfolios I am pleased to say that University of Edinburgh will be the first university in Scotland to try to develop in-house accreditation for CMALT.  https://www.alt.ac.uk/news/all_news/cmalt-internal-accreditation-pilot-gets-underway
This will mean we can celebrate and assess the portfolios and professional experience of learning technologists here, in the context of the Scottish HE sector and regulatory environment. Any of you who would like to include something about developing assessment strategies in your portfolio might want to join those of us thinking about how we will do this!

Have a good weekend,

-Melissa

Director, LTW

Friday 3rd March

Dear All,

Thank you for your work for another week.

You may have seen that the closing date for the staff engagement survey has been extended. At last count the return rate from ISG was nearly 60%. It has to be said, that is significantly higher than any other part of the university, but that’s still only a 2.1, lets aim for a First and get to at least 70%  Last chance to complete the Staff Engagement Survey

I promised you news about internal promotions. Don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t possible to get promotions and development opportunities in professional services. Very well done to those who have applied and been successful: Lucas Morris, Jamie Smith, Robyn Pritkzer, Rebecca Morris, Paul Smyth, Ed Lithgow, Alastair Taylor and Susanne Knowles are all moving or seconding to new roles in their teams. Thank you for choosing careers with LTW, we are lucky to have you.

As we are now at the start of March, thank you to all who continue to feed data into our service and project reports. Thank you to those of you who continue to try to chase down data which no-one seems to know.  Speaking of data, Jon Power tells me that there are nearly 90 square meters of chalkboard fitted into the new Nucleus building. Old technology is sometimes still the best.

As we head into Open Education week the media studio team have been finding new ways to help others reuse our resources and have created a Pexels account with some of our studio b-roll footage and in just a few months its seen nearly  half a million views and 4,000 downloads. https://www.pexels.com/@university-of-edinburgh-328305910/  They also created a short video to help promote the studio and show how it can be used  https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/1_tjsc1mpg

In health and safety news, following my accident with the badge maker Lauren has produced useful video on how to use it properly.

In actual health and safety news I received an update which highlighted that the ISG first aiders and firewardens are now mostly ‘clustered’ in one wing. If that’s you, thank you for volunteering and taking  on these important roles.   There is also now a handy video to show you the right way to get out of AH fast  AH Fire Evacuation FINAL V2.mp4

Speaking of important community roles, remember to add your name to the LTW (Light, Temperature and Water) care rota for our foliage friends.

Have a lovely weekend,

-Melissa

Friday 10th March

Dear All,

Thank you for all your work in a packed week of Purim, Holi, Lailat al Bara’ah, Fravardiganfestival, Digifest and International Womens Day.  Best wishes to everyone in LST who are giving things up for Lent.

For IWD the LTW badge machine was going full tilt and the digital signage was seen all across campus. Even giant Ada ‘Lego’ Lovelace came out of her cupboard. Thank you to all who helped including Julie, Nicky, Jordan, Lesley, Lilinaz, Lauren, Fiona, Fiona, Lorna, Satu, Shivangi, Ari, Ewan and a special mention for Jordan’s excellent ribbon twirling skills. So many hidden talents in LTW.

Thank you to all of you working against the clock to get our Learn Ultra training programme in place. Thank you to all who spent some time on our recruitment stand at the careers fayre.

Welcome to  Michael Lindsay, who joins our AV teams. Some of you may have experienced ( and appreciated)  his previous work if you did jury duty ( as I did) during lockdown.  https://thinking.is.ed.ac.uk/melissa/2021/01/17/buffering-justice/

After all those internal appointments I mentioned last week we are left with a number of vacancies.  Thank you to Wesley for taking on the task again of attracting more Learning Technology Support Officers.  Hopefully we’ll have more new colleagues joining us before the summer.

You may have spotted that in Gavin’s absence I was allowed to write the blurb for the ISG staff newsletter this week, in which I highlighted the shocking gap/lack of women and girls in Scotland studying computer science.  These stats show that those women who do study and go on to careers in IT are remarkable and rare. We are lucky to have you. And we must do all that we can to support careers via school work experience, internships, careers fayres job boards and celebrations.

Have a good weekend, wrap up warm.

-Melissa

 

Friday 17th March

Dear All,

Thank you for your work for another week.

Congratulations to Alan, another internal promotion in EDE!   Well done to everyone who got papers and posters accepted to the University of Edinburgh Learning and Teaching Conference. Even if you are not presenting, you may wish to attend. Discuss that with your line manager.

Thank you to all of you who continue to champion and chip away at the accessibility challenges in your presentations, your software, your platforms, your documents, your websites, your course materials. It is just another area in which we must be vigilant.

In early March we passed Equal Pay Day 2023, the point in the year when the average woman stops working for free. Pi Day is a good day to check how much of the pie you are getting.

https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/gender-pay-gap-means-women-work-free-two-months-year-tuc On the Ides of March a lot of people were on strike: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62134314   Although we have worked hard to tackle the pay gap in LTW it is still very real for many family, friends and colleagues. The employers are making offers to the unions this week. If an agreement is reached pay, pensions and conditions will improve for all.

You will be aware that every year in ISG we recognise and reward staff who make an exceptional contribution to the work of the university you can find out more: Contribution Reward (sharepoint.com). The deadline for nominations to be sent to me, via your manager, is today, 17^th March, so if you haven’t done it yet, now is the time. If you are interested in how we analyse and use data about pay and reward, I’ll arrange a presentation session soon.

Also coming up soon is our Mandatory Training Day, the day on which we do our mandatory training. Last year we managed to all get most of it done in one day, all at once. If you come into the office on that day I will provide snacks and you can tell me what you think of the elearning packages we have to work through. We have changed the line-up of the training offer this year to feature less about consent and more about escape. You can see the MTD playlist here:

https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=561277707

We have our summer student intern adverts out, and we are really seeing the impact of having an interesting job title. Applications are up to be a Chat GTP or witchfinder intern, less so for some of the other roles. Speaking of AI and accusing people, Turnitin AI detection may be rapidly rolled out by the vendor whether we like it or not. Given the current hysteria it is likely to be a widely used feature and I suspect it will not remain free for long.

As we head towards Ramadan and Nowruz, times of feasting and fasting, but also springtime bake sales and all-staff lunches make sure you bring a small Tupperware ™ box if you need to time-shift your snacks.

Happy St Patricks Day, be sure to eat your greens.

-Melissa

Dir LTW.

Friday 24th March

Dear All,

Thank you for your work for another week and welcome to even more new colleagues.

LST are pleased to announce the addition of Jack Simon, Matthew Henderson and Alex Jones to the team of service technicians. Drawing from their expertise gained from working in various educational institutions, event industry, and commercial AV companies, they bring a diverse range of AV and IT knowledge to our fleet.

Jack, Matthew and Alex are joining us 3 years since my ‘messages to my staff during lockdown’  began. https://thinking.is.ed.ac.uk/melissa/messages-to-my-staff/

It was difficult, back then, to think about how we would ever be having workplace gatherings.  Now we are settling into our new ways of working and taking care to create a safe, welcoming and flexible environment in the office I am pleased we are able to gather again.  Next week we will have a wing lunch on Tuesday and a bake sale on Wednesday.

In conjunction with the bake sale you all have the chance to take part in the ‘LTW Beatson Bake Bison Basin Birthday Bonanza’. By guessing the birthday of the bison you have the chance to win: a) a pudding basin, and b) free tickets to visit LTW’s Pudding Bison at Edinburgh Zoo.

I am pleased to see the Principal has taken onboard a suggestion from Rab and Chris and is now rocking the graduation stage wearing his ‘Madonna mic’. No comment on the other elements of costume which were suggested.

I am pleased to hear from KSC (Knowledge Strategy Committee) that ‘you would have to have been living under a rock not to have heard about Learn Ultra’ #commsgoals. No comment from LTW’s pancake tortoise at Edinburgh Zoo.

Have a lovely weekend,

-Melissa

Dir, LTW

 

Friday 31st March

Dear All,

Thank you for your work for another week.

Thank you for a spectacular display of baked-good excellence for a good cause. Thanks to Lee Ann, Fiona B, Fiona H, Nikki, Marcello, Paul, Elaine, Karen, Kat, Myles, Delia and Miki our Beatson Bake Sale table was replete and groaning. Thanks to your generosity and your guesses in the Bison Birthday Bonanza you have raised more than £800.  There are still some badges (pins for your pinny) left on Fiona’s desk for your Easter styling.

I am delighted to announce that the winner of the chocolate-filled Pudding Basin and tickets to the Zoo is: Kat Neuman!

We have waved goodbye this week to Ari Cass-Maran, but she left us a blog to think about. https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/website-communications/cherish-inclusive-design-standards/

Speaking of blogging, Emma Horrell published a series of blog posts sharing our approach and reasons, the latest of which links out to our Mega Menu visualisation tool playground. Huge credit to Nick Bush, who developed this tool from scratch.

This week we welcome new student trainers to the Digital Skills Team. Sishir and Mbikwa started this week, Maksims and Mustafa are starting next week. Between them they give us much needed support for Python Training and Coding Club.

In the ongoing AI Hysteria Shadow Wars Karen Howie won a small victory by adding her ( our) voice to the many universities lobbying Turnitin at an international level to allow us an opt-out of their imperial imposition of black-box untested CHAT GPT detection tools. After much protest and bluster Turnitin learned how to make an on/off switch. We hope.

Congratulations to Lee-Ann and Marcello for being nominated in the CAHSS and CMVM staff awards respectively as team players and top collaborators.  This is real testament to the work that you do in partnership with colleagues in schools across the Colleges.

If you like old testaments, next week I will be mostly grinding walnuts into paste and telling stories of exodus. If you like messages from the past, the Estates department have planted a huge rock. https://www.ed.ac.uk/estates/news/news-archive/swedish-runestone

If you like awards and feel inspired to nominate your colleagues ( or selves) https://www.scotwomenintech.com/swit-awards2023, https://www.apereo.org/node/5383/, https://ukitindustryawards.co.uk/ukitindustryawards2023/en/page/categories, https://www.alt.ac.uk/about-alt/awards, https://inclusiveawards.com/nominate/

Thank you as ever for your help in sharing job adverts on Linkedin. We now have more than 4,000 followers. I don’t know if that is a big number comparatively but it is certainly many more than we had before.

Thank you for your responses to the Staff Engagement Survey. ISG submitted the most responses by a country mile.  There is an ISG All-staff meeting next week at which Gavin will talk again about his plans for our hybrid workplace, I am confident that the thinking you and your managers have already done on this has put LTW in a good position.  If you are interested in the latest emerging research about hybrid working, pop along to this https://www.business-school.ed.ac.uk/event/the-positive-impacts-of-hybrid-work-on-the-quality-of-working-life

Have a good weekend,

-Melissa

Director, LTW

Friday 7th April

Dear All,

Thank you for your work again this week.  Well done to everyone who made it through Lent and can now eat chocolate again. Welcome to  Ema Morabito and Abdulrazak Osuntokun who have joined us to help with Learn migrations.

Thank you to all involved in internship interviews and selections. We got loads of applications for the roles and I am confident we will get an excellent group of summer workers again this year.

Teaching has now mostly finished and the real work begins, without the students around in our lecture halls we can get down to renewing and improving them. During exam periods our systems and platforms provide high stakes support as thousands of assessments are submitted and processed.  Some of our colleagues will be taking part in a boycott of assessment and marking.

April weather can be a bit unpredictable. If you are on campus and out and about and you think you might need a hybrid working hoodie, let me know.

It was great to see so many of you attending or tuned in to the ISG All-staff meeting. I know that the ‘new ways of working’ policies raised many comments. Thank you again from me for working together so well to establish the hot-desking and desk-sharing within your teams.  All of this feeds forward into discussions about the future of ISG space.

I noticed someone in the Q&A asking about experimenting with AI in work time.  In LTW the answer is yes, and I want to hear any suggestions on how using it can make our lives easier, how we can combat the biases inherent with in it , how we build our own, improve our services and how we train others to have the skills to use it in ethical ways. Just be careful not to put work/data/content into it.

If you have ideas how AI can infiltrate our workplace through our pets using their cute and cuddly appearance please do blog about it like Karen has  https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2023/04/04/an-introduction-to-ai-in-teaching-learning-and-assessment-told-through-the-medium-of-ai-generated-schnauzer-pictures/

Have a good weekend.

-Melissa

Friday 14th April

Dear All,

Thank you for all your work this week.

Welcome to Scott Coutts who joins us as Marketing and Communications Manager for Online Learning. The experience of our online students is very important to the University and currently the online students report a more positive ‘sense of belonging’ score than the on-campus ones do. Ari has written an article for THES about the importance of including online learners in marketing and communications. The aim is to make sure everyone at your institution knows that online students exist, even if the majority of students on campus never see them. We want to make sure our university is equally known for being a top online learning destination. How to showcase your online courses in university marketing (timeshighereducation.com)  If you would like to write articles for the THES, don’t be shy, contact Lauren J-S or Fiona H today.

Thinking about the growth of online learning I was remembering that it was 13 years ago this week that I started planning for hybrid. 13 years ago this week a volcano with a difficult name erupted in Iceland and a huge cloud of ash spread across the skies of northern Europe. All flights were cancelled and students and staff of the university I worked at were all stranded wherever they were having their Easter holidays/visits home/research trips/conferences.   That is when I realised that online learning infrastructure was going to be a big thing for HE business continuity on this island.  The cloud of ash could have lasted a thousand years and knocked Europe back into ‘the dark ages’.  (Year Without a Summer – Wikipedia) Luckily it didn’t. But it did make me find out more about video conferencing, virtual classrooms and media asset management. Speaking of which, March saw an increase of 1 million minutes of content viewed (3.2 million) in Media Hopper Replay compared to March 2022 and current forecast shows that we are on track to deliver more captures than any previous year.  Alongside this the number of support calls from the lecture theatres are rising again, Teaching Spaces Technology Support saw an increase of 36%  compared to the same period last year, showing a return to pre-pandemic levels and the Nucleus and EFI Test spaces coming on-board this year.​

Have a good weekend,

-Melissa

Friday 21 April

Dear All,

Thank you for your work again this week.

The LST team will be busy today rapidly flipping the Gordon Aikman Lecture Theatre into a top concert venue for Scottish pop superstar Lulu. Musselburgh: The Brunton ‘heartened’ by response as new venues added | East Lothian Courier  If you see them down there, give them a shout.

If you have missed out on your Lulu tickets there is still time to book for the L&T conference instead. Learning and Teaching Conference 2023 | The University Of Edinburgh (eventscase.com)  Ask your manager before you book.  I can see a privacy statement but no accessibility statement on that site.

If you haven’t used your one day of paid volunteering yet this year, and you like a bit of a jumble-sale vibe you could join ‘The Big Sort’ Edinburgh University Students’ Association Every June, thousands of students leave University of Edinburgh accommodation and they leave tons of items behind. Students and staff can volunteer to help keep as much out of landfill as possible and to direct goods to Welcome Week’s FreeShop event, local charities, community groups and our sustainability partners. You may find a treasure.

As the BBC report University student complaints hit record high in England and Wales for fourth successive year – BBC News  the Jisc report  International students’ digital experience phase one: a review of policy, academic literature and views from UK higher education – Jisc is now available. It may be of interest to all of you who design student facing services and try to minimise ‘digital shock’.  The shock of the UCU marking boycott will also hit our students hard. WonkHe has thoughts Could the marking and assessment boycott break the magician’s code? | Wonkhe

Thank you to all of you who have been chatting with me about Chat GPT. I managed to cause some controversy at a conference in Leeds this week ChatGPT ‘experimentation’ puts universities in ‘dangerous position’ | Times Higher Education (THE)

Happy Eid,

-Melissa

Friday 28th April

Dear All,

Thank you for your work for another week.

In the seasonal reshuffle of interns, we are waving goodbye to Chiaojyun Yan, Ismail Toba, Matthew Spence and Sophia Blum, but just to keep us on our toes some are re-joining as new interns in a few weeks. In other appointments the WAC team are chuffed that we are the first UK University to appoint a Web Archivist to preserve 21st century history.  We are also chuffed to see the Edinburgh Awards ceremony had 5 students who achieved the ‘Digital Skills Specialists’ Edinburgh Award and 10 students who achieved the ‘Volunteering with Wikipedia’ Edinburgh Award and others, including Sophia, who won other Edinburgh awards for other good work. Well done, all.

Speaking of winning, the Online Course Production Service team have won ‘Changemaker’ award 2022-23 Changemaker Award recipients | The University of Edinburgh for social responsibility. Congratulations to everyone who helps to make change. You know how much I enjoy recognising LTW achievements, I managed to get a proper journalist to help with that : Frog soup: HE’s anxieties about AI’s advance | Times Higher Education (THE)

Coming up in May are a raft of bank holidays, a Eurovisison sweepstake and the LTW Mandatory Training Day. I know you are excited. So much bunting, so little time.

Have a good weekend,

-Melissa

Friday 5th May

Dear All,

Thank you for your work for another busy week.

Thank you to the teams working right now on a major incident which may impact delivery of exams today. An IT outage on top of an assessment boycott will be hard on students.

Welcome to Magda Dundas, Cari Romans and Louise Dutnell who joined EDE this week as Learning Technology Support Officers, you join us at a busy time!

Well done to  Sean Sweeney and Joe Currie in the Learn team who managed to roll over the new courses in record time with no glitches. Learn has been rolled over and all new courses for next year have been created in the new template and are now ready to be populated. Another important milestone reached and I hope to see a rush of colleagues getting trained and  piling in from their sandboxes into their new teaching areas.

Thank you to the Graphic Design team for producing some splendid  bespoke desk decals, which I hope will help us all experiment with different kinds of working in clearly identifiable desk ‘zones’  I’ll be glad of your feedback on this new way of working. Thank you to the plant care team for your vigilance.

Thank you to Lauren, Jen, Stratos and Tracey for presenting with me this week. Thank you to Paula and Shivangi for presenting about their work with the web publishers community.

Well done in advance to everyone who has been successful in gaining an additional increment or lump sum or voucher. Your managers nominated you in recognition of the work you do. The panel has met. The letters are NOT out yet, but I expect the formal letters to be coming soon.  In the spirit of fairness we analyse the spread of reward  nominations across all of ISG: The split of nominations for additional pay increments this year sits at exactly 50:50 women to men.  The split of nominations for lump sums for women has moved a bit – 41.6% from 40%, Overall the proportion of nominations for women has increased to 44% from 41% – which is closer to our overall proportion  of women within ISG (47%). We wait to see how rewards reflect nominations.

I know you will all be looking forward to LTW Mandatory Training Day, just a reminder that we chose the date carefully to align with national ‘Learning at Work Week’ Home (learningatworkweek.com) A reminder of the LTWMTD instructions will be sent soon, but it is important now that you keep that whole day clear, we will all do all our mandatory training together in a one-er. Like an INSET training day that school teachers get.  It’ll be fun!

I hope you had a forceful Star Wars Day and brightly coloured Cinco de Mayo.

I trust you have your coronation street party baking and bunting well under way.

Best wishes,

-Melissa

Friday 12th May

Dear All,

Thank you for your work again this week.

Thank you again to Joe and Sean who kept Learn on the up. My apologies to Kevin and Anna for springing a conference presentation on them at v short notice.

You may have noticed that the Educause Horizon Report 2023 is out. 2023 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report | Teaching and Learning Edition | EDUCAUSE Library  this is  a good one to read, partly to check that we have projects or plans in each of the key trend areas, and partly to include in your evidence and citations in your business/investment cases.

The marking boycott by UCU members at Edinburgh is attracting media coverage, including on the BBC radio 4 Today. For those interested in fairness, another good read is the Equal Pay Audit which has now been published, along with the latest outcomes from the EDMARC report and both can be found on the EDI monitoring pages Monitoring and Data | The University of Edinburgh.  Senate Education Committee considered this week Neil’s suggested changes to the Accessible and  Inclusive Learning Policy (AILP) which draws upon knowledge gained from our services ( media hoppers) and project (learn foundations and ultra) and our regular training delivered by EDE.

Jenni reports that the 5th most watched course on LinkedIn Learning (by UoE users) last month (April) was ‘How to Research and Write using Generative AI Tools’. Find out what the other top four were by looking at DST monthly service reports.

Also reporting excellent take-up within LTW is Fiona B’s Eurovision Sweepstake . All countries are taken. Sad losers voted out in the semi-finals include  Ireland, Malta, Latvia, Azerbaijan, the Netherlands, Greece, Denmark, San Marino, Georgia, Iceland and Romania. Our resident Eurovision critic Alan Hamilton is tipping Austria and Croatia with having catching songs, but it’s anyone guess who will take home the jackpot of £37 this weekend.

-Melissa

Friday 20th May

Dear All,

Thank you for all your work with week.  I hope you enjoyed the alpacas at ECA on Tuesday. Welcome to Nick Daniels who joins our UX team and congratulations to Lesley Greer who has been nominated  for a CAHSS award.Well done to all who completed their mandatory training today. The leader board at lunchtime looks like:

• DLAM 14
• DST 12
• EDE 21
• LST 22
• WAC 7
• DO 2

These are early numbers, the LTW data team will be crunching percentages at the end of the day, and fabulous prizes will be awarded to teams who achieve 100%. Remember, all LTW staff, interns and contractors should have completed training by today at the latest and submitted their MS Forms once completed.Well done All.  Excellent work.

Have a good weekend.

-Melissa

Friday 2nd June

Dear All,

Thank you for all your work this week.

It is that time of the year that we can welcome (and welcome back) even more of our summer interns.  Joining us this week are: Claire Fraser ( Digital Skills), Ashlin Mathew (CPD Research), Wietske Holwerda ( Chat GPT & OpenAI), Bartlomiej Pohorecki ( Chat GPT & OpenAI), Jasmine Patel  (Digital Preservation), Ally Mckay (Colouring-in Book), Zofia Kniter (Web Development), Lewis Forbes and Ryan Zhang (Digital Learning), Adela Palanova, ChenChen Zha, Dagmar Danielsen, Hayden Maudsley-Barton, Ismail Taouba, Ivanna Martinez Amarilla, Julia Coney, Mantas Litvinas, Matthew Spence, Sean Craigmile, Kathleen Swinglehurst, Ellie McTimoney, Keira Crafts, Claudia Earl, Huiran Xie. Richard (Jialong) Zhang, Oliver Spalding, Atene Jonauskyte, Mantraay Patil and Margarita Boyko ( all Learn Foundations)!

With us for the long haul are  Anna Sikora and  Łukasz Galik (12-month industry placement interns from Napier).

This is now the 11^th year we have hosted interns from Napier and the 8^th year of hosting Edinburgh interns and it just gets better and better. Thank you for choosing us, we are lucky to have you.  Apologies to anyone working without a net/power/deskchair.  More interns and high school work experience colleagues will join us soon.

In our rush to make space, we’ve been tidying up H east we’ve had to move a few things and if anyone is looking for those special personal items, tennis rackets or dusty coats that have been on the coat rack for the last few years, they are in the coat cupboard with Ada Lovelace.

On the hottest week of the year so far, please make sure you have access to a handy Digital Skills fan, and let me know if you would like a voucher for a nice warm LTW hybrid working hoodie.

I am delighted to see the success already of our new Badger service. This has been on my list for a long time. digital badgers – Melissa Highton (ed.ac.uk)

Happy National Fish and Chip Day, don’t forget your salt and sauce. Awareness & National Days Calendar – 2023 Marketing Events Planner (awarenessdays.com)

Best wishes,

Friday 9th June

Dear All,

Thank you for all your work again this week. Congratulations to all who have received contribution awards and thank you vouchers.

This week we welcome two more EDE interns, Rowan Brady (media production) and Mayu Ishimoto (Open Content Curator Intern).  Zohra O’Doherty joined us this week to project manage some of the short courses projects. Zohra has previously been a student intern within the sharepoint service and we’re delighted to welcome her back now she’s finished her studies.  Also finishing her studies  and waving goodbye is Annika Sybrandy who has been working with us as our Nudge Intern, to help us identify how to apply nudge theory to user engagement in LTW services.

Apologies to any of our new interns who missed last week’s message, you’ll find it below.  If, for some reason, you find yourself wanting to read all the back copies of my Friday messages for the last three years, you can find them on my blog: 2023 – Melissa Highton (ed.ac.uk)

If you would like to write a blog, you can join the 10,000+ members of the university who do by starting your own: blogs.ed – Staff and student blogs for our connected learning community

As mentioned at the Intern Welcome on Wednesday, we have an intern blog (https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/isintern/) and we encourage you to blog during your time with us.  Lewis Forbes is our new blog editor for the summer and Lewis will be in touch with interns and their managers to request blog posts soon.

Thank you to the web team working on Edinburgh’s AI website. Edinburgh AI | The University of Edinburgh  Thank you to the Course Production team working on the OCPS site Online Course Production | The University of Edinburgh

As we hurtle through June watch out for the ISG All-Staff Summer BBQ next week (14^th) and the LTW All-Staff meeting on the 29^th.  Both of these are opportunities with food to meet colleagues and exchange ideas.

Have a lovely weekend,

-Melissa

Friday 16th June

Dear All,

Thank you for all your work this week. Remember to keep drinking to combat heat exhaustion. Designs for a LTW hybrid working summer sun hat are welcome.

Thank you to everyone working on the Learn Ultra training stats and the Learn Foundations accessibility audits. I do love a school-by-school league table.

Welcome to more new colleagues. Tracy Reilly has joined DLAM to kick-start our new ‘Craptions to Captions’  project (except that no-one will let me call it that) and Shivani Rao has joined Digital Skills as our e-Safety Officer. Online safety is a hot topic for everyone at the moment so there will be plenty to do Online safety | Jisc. Thank you to everyone spending time on the new short courses platform procurement.

Today is Open Day on campus with around 5,000 visitors.  Today is also a UCU strike day, so there will be pickets and there are more to come at the start of term. For those of you new to LTW it is useful to know that it is not only academic staff who strike, many IT staff and learning technologists are in that same Union. Strikers are campaigning for better pay for all. ISG has one of the largest gender pay gaps in the University, and that’s not Ok. If you are not on strike you should still have no meetings on a Friday and use the time to catch up with writing. If you are a CMALT candidate, spend some time on it today.

Best wishes,

Melissa

Friday 23rd June

Dear All,

Thank you for all your work this week. As others celebrate mid-summer by walking sacred paths , lighting midnight fires and joining a common riding, LST will begin the ritual stripping the tech out of 53 rooms to make them available for festival venues.

Thank you to everyone involved in doing annual reviews and ongoing recruitment. LTW continues to grow.

This week we say welcome to Amelia Page who has been joining us to gain work experience in our media production studio and August Enger who has joined our Open Content Curation team.

Apologies to all staff who have been here more than 5 years and suddenly discovered on Wednesday afternoon that their door access cards had been cancelled. Apparently the expiry date on your staff card is actually a thing. The person who accidentally cancelled all the cards has now fully re-instated them.

Congratulations to Ari Badlishah who has won even more awards for her digital marketing campaigns. And congratulations to Robert Chmielewski for achieving distinction and preparing to graduate yet again!

Thank you in advance to everyone attending and presenting at the Learning and Teaching Conference. University of Edinburgh Learning & Teaching Conference | The University of Edinburgh We are contributing OER, Digital Skills and Learn Ultra exhibit tables, workshops on story boarding and digital badges, presentations on accessibility, and posters about captions and Ally. If you haven’t visited the KB Nucleus yet, now’s your chance.

Karen Beggs has been doing some sleuthing to find out how many different systems are used in the university for feedback and assessment. You can see the full list here: on your marks – Melissa Highton (ed.ac.uk)

I’m looking forward to seeing all of you at the LTW All-Staff meeting on 29^th. It is hard to find a venue big enough for us all on campus so I have booked Edinburgh events venue & meeting room hire | Nicolson Square Edinburgh (nsevenue.com) If you arrive early there is a café there which Amanda Ferguson has inspected and says is very nice. In advance of our meetings I always ask all the Heads of LTW to send me their list of team achievements  and I can certainly say the list is looking impressive again this year.

Also impressive is a new report which declares the value of the University of Edinburgh’s teaching and learning activities to be £857 million and the impact of the University of Edinburgh’s educational exports  £1.8 billion. Economic Impact | The University of Edinburgh As learning, teaching and web services, I like to think we are adding a big part of that value.

 Have a good weekend,

-Melissa

Friday 30th June

Dear All,

Thank you for all your work this week. Moodle had a wobble this morning, but it was swiftly fixed and I think we got away with it. The cleaning teams are  in, doing a deep clean on all the open-access computers around campus,  which is as grim as it sounds.

It was lovely to see you at the LTW All-staff meeting yesterday, Cream tea – Wikipedia  Thank you especially to Wietske and Bartek for their presentation, it certainly gave me some ideas of how our new robot colleagues will become part of LTW service teams.

This morning I got access to the long-awaited staff engagement survey data. There were no questions about AI and we will need humans to analyse it.  The survey went university-wide in February, nearly 6,000 staff took part, that’s a 36% return rate. Needless say ISG had the highest return rate of any area of the University at 66%, because we loves a survey.

Best wishes to everyone celebrating Eid.  Best wishes and congratulations too to our several staff who are also students and are graduating over the next couple of weeks in the Summer Graduations. If you would like something added to the LTW Graduation ceremony Spotify playlist, speak to Lukas. Our new graduands this time will be:

• Patricija Mendelyte, Learning Technology Support Officer, July 3rd
• Astoria Detunq , Web Governance Administrator, in absentia July 6th
• Annika  Sybrandy,  Nudge Intern, July 7th
• Hazel Chui, Diversity and Attraction Intern, July 13^th
• Zohra O’Doherty, Project Manager/Business Analyst, July 13^th
• Robert Chmielewski, Online Assessment & Feedback Advisor, July 14^th

Well done to Neil who has managed to  progress another important policy through the university governance  systems. accessible_and_inclusive_learning_policy.pdf (ed.ac.uk)

Thank you all for your contributions staffing the LTW stalls at the Learning and Teaching Conference, and for the quick thinking and resilience when the network went down. There’s a feedback survey for all: https://edinburgh.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/university-of-edinburgh-learning-and-teaching-conference-2023

As ever, on the last Friday of the month , if you would like to join us editing Wikipedia, sign up here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:University_of_Edinburgh/Events_and_Workshops/Women_in_Red

Midsummer has passed and the nights are fair drawing in. Ask your manager about a hybrid working hoodie.

Remember to take your annual leave.

Best wishes,

Melissa

 

Friday 7th July

Dear All,

Thank you for your work again this week. It’s been all go at Argyle House. The front portico and reception area have had a facelift and the reception desk has grown and switched sides. I am looking forward to seeing what new flags will be run up the poles and if anyone salutes.

To celebrate the new look for Argyle House, the opening of The Nucleus building and higher-than-usual numbers of royalty on campus,  the Red Arrows delivered a spectacular fly-over display on Wednesday. If you missed it,  get Kevin to show you his video.

This week we welcome new colleagues Jose Garcia in DLAM and Mark Henderson and Jacquelyn Armour in EDE.

Graduations are underway and we have seen some protests in the ceremonies. The prosecco bars have opened in Bristo square and AN Other Edinburgh university has rebranded one of our locals. https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/lifestyle/food-and-drink/edinburgh-pubs-edinburgh-university-opens-its-very-own-city-centre-bar-in-honour-of-the-class-of-23-4208142

Mark and Jaqueline will be helping to launch the online short courses platform which I intend to name after Jenni Lee – an alumna of Edinburgh who invented ‘the University of the Air’ which later became the Open University. Jenni Lee’s husband  Nye Bevan has been having a bit of an anniversary this week as 75 years of founding the NHS. Aneurin Bevan & Jennie Lee | Politicians | Blue Plaques | English Heritage (english-heritage.org.uk)

For those who follow developments in social media you’ll have noticed Meta have launched Threads, thus massively triggering anyone who was at school in the 1980’s and forced to watch Threads ( movie) which scarred us for life and is the reason I never go to Sheffield.

Having a happier time are our online learners: according to our Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES)  survey, overall satisfaction of online students at University of Edinburgh in 2023 is 16% higher than for on-campus, that’s a credit it to you all, and a challenge for future work on campus.

I am very pleased to see from the data in the staff survey that 90% of you say your manager is supportive, 83% say you are encouraged to innovate  and 78% of you feel you have a good work/life balance. These scores are all higher than the average across the university.

I note also that the WAC team have put a date in the diary for their next team-womble litter-pick. If any other team would like to use their free, paid, day of volunteering, let me know.

-Melissa

Friday 14th July

Dear All,

Thank you for your work again this week.

I apologise profusely for last Friday’s antediluvian comments. I had no idea my positive thoughts about Argyle House reception would summon the roof to literally cave in.

Thank you to everyone who has helped to manage this major disruption and thank you for all being able to do a quick switch to working from home.

The dust is starting to settle and the dry-out has begun, but it will take a while. We are lucky in LTW to be mostly based in an East Wing, and we can get back in on Monday,  but things will become quite crowded in there now ( no meeting rooms), so if you are happy and able to work from home in July, please do. I would like to prioritise office space for interns, interns’ supervisors, major summer projects on-campus, new staff, and anyone who prefers not to work from home.  You will have seen high-level communications from our CIO. Pay close attention to your managers as we need to spread time in the office across teams and across all days of the week.

Into the wreckage we welcome Jonathan Mori joining the digital skills team to help us with professional programmes and Eden Swimer who will help us deliver the Edinburgh part of a WW2 memories project ‘Their Finest Hour’ (Welcome | Their Finest Hour)

I am pleased to hear that planning for Ada Lovelace Day is getting an early start this year any additional suggestions and volunteers contact Karen Howie please.

Have a good weekend.

-Melissa

Friday 21st July

Dear All,

Thank you for your work again this week.

In the week that Edinburgh researchers proved that badgers ate dinosaurs for breakfast, our Wikipedia images are being used in Assassin’s creed  and the world ran out of pink, there’s never a dull moment.

It’s that time of year , as university staff you get a discount on expensive festival tickets, Discount for Edinburgh International Festival 2023 | The University of Edinburgh (I’m not sure if that discount also works in the Hub café, but worth a try)!  Can you spot the ISG staff in the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas  Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas 2023 – The Stand Comedy Club The Book Festival will be right next door Home | Edinburgh International Book Festival (edbookfest.co.uk) so the likelihood of bumping into a literal literary celebrity over your morning coffee increases significantly. If you are choosing your summer reading the James Tait Black Prize for fiction announcement will be on Weds 26 July and our Book MOOC is now open for enrolments and run commences 7 August: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/how-to-read-a-novel

ISG Reading Group welcome you to their roundup/catchup meeting at lunchtime on 31^st July  ISG Reading Group – MS Teams  If you haven’t been to the ISG Reading Group this year, this is what you missed: July 2022: Generation Z in the workplace, August 2022: The Fun One! (we shared all our festival recommendations in this meeting), September/November 2022: Music, December 2022: Authenticity on Social Media, January 2023: The Shifting Tech Landscape: Keeping up with Multiple Crises, March 2023: Privilege, April/May 2023: The Ethics of True Crime, June 2023: Wikipedia. If you have topics to suggest for the coming year, drop them into the channel on teams.

If you are itching for something to do before that Coding Club is back on Wednesday 26th July, 3:30pm – 5pm. Free & open to all UoE Students. Book your place: https://edin.ac/3rDKXCQ

Or join our Wikipedia editing on Friday 28^th  Women in Red event – adding inspiring women missing from Wikipedia Tickets, Fri 28 Jul 2023 at 13:00 | Eventbrite

If you have media which might benefit from some human corrected captioning (preferably not with a tight timeline to get the captions corrected) send a request to captions@ed.ac.uk. We are collecting together media to train our new captioning interns and robots.

If you like to use filters, try our new accused witch filter and panics  witches (ed.ac.uk)

Have a good weekend.

Friday 28th July

Dear All,

Thank you for your work again this week. It has been nice weather for ducks and Lesley has ushered them into Argyle House (AH) to stop them frolicking in the crossroads.

The surveying of damage and adjusting of loss has begun in AH. I have been allowed to my desk to retrieve my Secret Santa ‘LTW is the place to Bee’ mug, but many of my ‘menopause fans’ were sadly lost.

With the building up and running again, please do come back and use your desks now as before, from the start of August.

No longer needing desks this week we wave goodbye and say thank you to Astoria, our web governance admin for over 3 years, who has keeping a very good eye on our web estate, and to Hazel, our Diversity Attraction and Recruitment Intern, who has spent this year wrestling with various online jobs-board platforms to ensure that our adverts reach a wider audience. They are both going on to exciting new graduate things.

In edtech news there are a few big merger and take-overs going on as our vendors try to gain AI advantage. I note that Elon Musk is still naming everything ‘X’. Wait until he hears about EdX.

In union news, from 1 January 2024 those of you on grades 1-5 will now receive an extra 4 days of annual leave each year. Don’t spend it all at once.

Best wishes,

Friday 4th August

Dear All,

Thank you for your work again this week.

As we draw to the end of ‘Summer Intern season’, I hope you are  all ready to reflect on what we have learned together.  It has been lovely to see the blogs written over the summer https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/isintern/ and to wander down memory lane with back-copies of BITS https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/isintern/2023/06/23/welcome-to-the-world-of-digital-preservation-jasmine-patel/.  I am pleased that we were able to prioritise space in Argyle House for  interns and I hope to see you all ( interns and managers) at our end of internship event next week.

The Fringe is on, and the flyering has started. If you are travelling through George Square in the rain be careful not to get papier mache’d.

Thank you to everyone who has given time toward the scoring and procurement of our new short course platform. Thank you as ever to the LST teams racing to down the line for EFI, replacing and upgrading lecture theatre PCs and anatomy lab AVs. Thank you to everyone working to ensure Learn Ultra is ready for the start of term. Thank you to everyone getting ready for the start of term. Thank you for your summer service updates.  Only 4 weeks until the change freeze starting on 5th September.

I see that the Main Library teams have updated their Library tour video https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/Main+Library+tour/1_1zo5u723 which is a good reminder to you all to check that the videos on Media Hopper which show students and staff how to do things at the start of term, getting started with IT or using Learn, media hopper , or teaching room AV, are up to date.  If you would like to make your own ‘day in the life’ videos https://www.instagram.com/reel/Co_9iE3o7bh/  or promos for your services, please do re-use, or contribute to, our collection of re-usable assets https://media.ed.ac.uk/channel/Open+Media+Stock+Footage/

After that, we will be moving seamlessly into our era of ‘Interns for All Seasons’ and I hope that some of you will stay and work with us to help us keep innovating. In the recent all-staff engagement survey, 83% of you said you felt you were encouraged to innovate. Your score was well above the university average (66%). Thanks to all your efforts LTW is performing a lot better than (the rest of)  ISG and University averages on many items in the survey, most notably, on ‘Encouraged to Learn’ and ‘Encouraged to Innovate’, the average LTW agreement levels are 24% and 17% higher than both ISG and University levels respectively.

Speaking of above average, nominations are open for the ISG staff awards with a tight deadline of 5 pm, Thursday 24th August.
Everybody can nominate anyone, so please do. It’s only a couple hundred words.  Last year LTW colleagues won in a number of categories. Interns are included, so don’t be shy.

Things planned for Autumn include Ada Lovelace Day and a World War 2 digital collection day. https://open.ed.ac.uk/starting-the-their-finest-hour-internship/ . If you would like to be involved in the organising teams, let me know. If you would like to attend EDUCAUSE online, ask your manager. https://events.educause.edu/annual-conference-online/agenda

In August  you all get a small pay rise. I hope it helps  https://mailings.ed.ac.uk/t/58S0-TPFW-729011E72225D1E5ZIK0ZJ471E80379DB0D9C7/cr.aspx?utm_campaign=internal_comms&utm_medium=dotdigital_email&utm_source=1386829_Essential%20updates%20July%202023&dm_i=58S0,TQ31,1QZ9SF,3ID3M,1

Have a good weekend, remember to wear your high-viz so you don’t get hit by a fast-moving  elite cyclist.

-Melissa

 

Friday 18th August

Thank you for your work again this week.

This week we welcome Derek Ridley, who has joined our LST Service Team. With a robust background of more than 12 years working as an Events Technician focusing on lighting and sound, Derek’s expertise is a valuable addition to our team supporting the technology in our teaching spaces.

We wave farewell to Lilinaz Rouhani who has been our Data and Equality Officer for the past few years. Many of you will know her as the host of the ISG Reading Group, she has also done amazing work to wrangle all kinds of data about people, and given sage advice which has helped the senior management team to design services and support to make ours an inclusive workplace. We couldn’t have done it without her. She’s written a last blog about how people experience our services in different ways. to see ourselves as others see us – Melissa Highton (ed.ac.uk)

We raise congratulations to Rebecca and Fiona  in EDE who have made it through to the next round of Women in IT Excellence Awards!

This week we have chuckled  as the University shop have had to withdraw a whole range of new merch because they spelled ‘Nobel Prizes’ wrong. Grab your tote-bags and oven-mits now as they will become rare collectors’ items. And check your own start of term merch carefully. It could happen to anyone.

You will have spotted that it is only 129 days until Christmas and we have begun planning our LTW Festive Event in time to celebrate St Andrews Day, Advent, Bodhi and Channukah  in a one-er. If you would like to be part of the Secret Santa or quiz setting team, contact Kevin Brogan.

Speaking of holidays, you may have spotted that University of Edinburgh does not close or impose the occasional all year round bank holidays. You are welcome to take them as part of your annual leave, but if you chose not to, pleased do come into the office as usual, it is only the building of Argyle House which requires an extra swipe card on those days.  The Bank Holidays at Christmas are a different matter – on those days the university does close.  If you are new to this, ask your line-manager.

Have a good weekend.

-Melissa

 

Friday 25th August

Dear All,

Thank you for your work again this week.

Our LST team continues to grow, please welcome Rob Suttie who has transferred over from the Edhelp team to join our busy Service Desk. Rob has worked for the University for 6 years and brings with him a wealth of inside knowledge……and also kindly donated a rather fancy looking coffee machine to our kitchen on H East.  Caffeine-fuelled LST teams are still climbing the walls in EFI and will soon begin their race through the night to flip the campus back from being a festival venue to a top teaching estate.

We wave good bye to Ashlin Mathew, online education research summer intern, and Shivangi Bansal, website content intern for the short online courses website and wish them both the best for what they do next.

Thank you to Ashlin for her excellent ‘Future of Lifelong Learning’ report Ashlin Mathew – Online Education Research: What does the future of lifelong learning look like? – Information Services Group: Student Employee Blog and to Bart and Wietske  for their ‘Future of AI in LTW’ report. Both of these reports will be used by me and the senior management team to decide what to do next. It is a real privilege to have up-to-date on-the-ground research done for us. Thank you to Lewis for the work on Latex and accessibility Lewis Forbes – LaTeX and Accessibility – Information Services Group: Student Employee Blog (ed.ac.uk) and to Jasmine for her work on BITS Jasmine Patel – Things I’ve learnt from working with the BITS Magazine – Information Services Group: Student Employee Blog (ed.ac.uk) They have both spent much of the summer wrangling documents and formats to try to recover locked information and make things easier for users.

If you would like to nominate an LTW colleague for a staff award, please do. ISG Staff Recognition Awards | The University of Edinburgh There’s a category for student interns, and I hear that the ISG in the community category doesn’t have many nominations yet so all of you who do community volunteering or fundraising, sit on boards or publish OER for Good, may want to try for that.

Speaking of volunteering, we are taking a summer break from editing Wikimedia this month, but we’ll be back in business in September if you would like to join in. Wiki ‘Women in Red’ event – adding inspiring women missing from Wikipedia Tickets, Fri 29 Sep 2023 at 13:00 | Eventbrite

Thank you to all who helped write this article  Lessons from 10 years of MOOCs| THE Campus Learn, Share, Connect (timeshighereducation.com)

If you would like to contribute to some research on hybrid learning please visit https://uofg.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0HDi6SnXNylp3dc  If we get a good number of responses from Edinburgh I’ll be able to ask the researchers for their insights which may help us design our services.

If you would like to help  plan and create a Curious Edinburgh walking tour of Scottish witchcraft,  contact Ewan or Ruby.

Have a good weekend,

-Melissa

Friday 1st September

Dear All,

Thank you for your work again this week. Thank you to everyone coping with another network MI.

Our celebrations this week include the online learning marketing team who were invited to an award winners’ lunch at the Council for Advancement and Support for Education conference at the #EICC to celebrate being 2023 Bronze Winners in the CASE Circle for Excellence. The team won two awards, one in the video on a shoestring category, and one in the photography series category.

LST extend another warm welcome to Ranald Neilson, the latest addition to their growing team. Ranald is now a member of the Service Team, arriving at a crucial time as they gear up to organise our teaching spaces for the start of term. With extensive expertise in the realm of audiovisual technology, Ranald brings with him a wealth of experience in managing AV equipment. His impressive portfolio encompasses a wide array of projects in both live events and television.

If you have more new colleagues who you would like to welcome warmly, be sure to tell them about the #hoodie #vouchers.

Great to see close working with our partners.  the new version of our #witches #wicca #data website includes lots of exciting new information and features such as accusations of #shapeshifting and ritual objects plotted on a #filterable #map , custom timeline searches, a #Histropedia timeline where you can do name searches and filtering by age of accused and a new historic map layer using the 1750 Dorret georeferenced map from National Library of Scotland.

Very pleased that our Edinburgh MOOCs ‘Learning for a Sustainable Future’ and ‘Live at COP’ will be part of a new #sustainability education initiative from #Coursera.

We wave goodbye to a group of our Learn Ultra Interns: Margarita Boyko, Oliver Spalding, Richard (Jialong) Zhang, Adela Palanova, Claudia Earl, Atene Jonauskyte, Ivanna Martinez Amarilla and Dagmar Danielsen. You’ve been brilliant. We couldn’t have done it without you. Please carry with you the Word of #Learn and Values of #Accessibility as you re-enter the student body.

Speaking of entering, it seems like the university may finally have got the keys to the #EFI building, finger crossed, I won’t jinx it.

Speaking of jinxing it, my mention of the fab new coffee machine Rob brought us, has resulted in it being captured by facilities and held in the pokey until it can be sent down for PAT testing. #FreeTheFrothyOne

EFI have also launched a new website https://efi.ed.ac.uk/

You will have seen in your diaries, our next All-Staff Wing Lunch on Tuesday 26^th Sept.  Please come in to the office on that day to have a free lunch, meet new ( and old) colleagues and share your summer stories. We will also be doing a review of cupboards and locker-space, so if you have opinions about that there will be extra sandwiches. #WingingIt

Speaking of Lunches remember to note interest in attending our LTW Festive Event by 15/9/23. LTW Festive Event Form  For anyone who has not attended before, this is lunch/afternoon/evening to which all are invited (interns and contractors, too). It is subsidised by the department so that it is more affordable for all and if the Heads are feeling generous there is often a sizable float behind the bar, so please do not be put off registering interest – this gives us an idea of numbers and prizes.

Next week follow #alt23 for updates from the national learning technology conference.

Thank you for your patience and perseverance on  the final stretch of securing Jenni Lee.

Best wishes,

-Melissa

Friday 8th September

Dear All,

Thank you for your work again this week.

The national news has been full of stories about crumbly vintage concrete ( RAAC), Unsurprisingly large parts of Kings Buildings and Appleton Tower are now being closely inspected.  Argyle House though is apparently an entirely different kind of concrete.

In EDE we welcome Andrew Ishak, Learning Technology Support Officer joining our growing team. In the Director’s Office we welcome Katie Grieve, our new Data and Equality Officer. She is joining us from The School of Maths and is already getting to grips with our staff survey data. If you are interested to know how LTW is different from other parts of the university in our staff engagement survey returns, please do ask her. She’d also be interested in your suggestions on areas we can improve.

Good news from across the university as the marking and assessment boycott (MAB) is ended and Horizon Research funding is on again. Hopefully both these things will make life easier ( and happier) in the Colleges.

Good news from the Association of Learning Technologists Conference, our Lorna Campbell was awarded Life Membership in recognition of her role as éminence grise and the team from Engineering won for their virtual labs using classroom tech.

There’s a new report out, Beyond blended: Post-pandemic curriculum and learning design: lessons from the higher education (HE) sector authored by friends of LTW Helen Beetham and Sheila Macneill.

Next week  many of us will gather to plan our roll-out of the first new VLE Edinburgh has purchased in 20 years. The Short Course Platform project gives us an opportunity to get it right from the start, I am keen to have your input on how we can do it best.

Looking forward to October, booking is now open for our celebrations of Ada Lovelace Day Event Booking (ed.ac.uk) I hope to see you all there. We will have several guest speakers- including Professor Frauke Zeller , inventor of the world’s first hitchhiking robot. Hitchbot’s decapitators avoided capture by the hitchhiking android’s cameras | Robots | The Guardian and opportunities to edit Wikipedia and visit the Ucreate MakerSpaces in the main Library, George Square. If you haven’t done that already, this is your chance.

The NSS results for the university have been shared The National Student Survey 2023 results (ed.ac.uk) widely. If you are involved with work in specific schools it is always worth checking on the areas we can help them improve.  Guidance on accessibility has been updated Accessible and Inclusive Learning | The University of Edinburgh

For start of term the Digital Skills Team will be out and about on campus with all their new Digital Skills merch, spreading the good word to new students. If you would like to help to staff the stalls, contact Satu Kapiainen now.

As we enjoy such a warm start to the ‘ber months, remember to use your Friday for writing, try not to send emails before 8 or after 6, and don’t mess with the settings on the Change Freeze.

Best wishes,

Melissa

Friday 22nd September

Dear All,

Thank you for your work again this week.  Thank you to everyone working on figuring out how to deliver lecture recordings from emergency contingency spaces in which there is no lecture recording equipment present.

Well done to everyone who has been nominated in the ISG staff awards. 200 nominations were received!

We welcome more new team members in WAC: Aryan Jagtap, Web Governance Admin, Ana Ma, Portal Services User Research Assistant and Nenna Nwawudu, Portal Services User Research Assistant.

Good bye to Learn interns: Mantas, Mantraay, Mathew, Sean, Ellie, Huiran, Hayden, Julia and Keira who have now finished their spectacular 16 week mission.

This weekend, if you would like to see some of the other sides of university life the Scottish Varsity Rugby is on https://scottishvarsitymatch.com/ and the buildings’ Doors are Open Doors Open Days 2023 | The University of Edinburgh Your chance ( if you haven’t already) to visit the Chapel of St Albert the Great or the Great FloWave sea tank.

Watch out for strike action by UCU colleagues next week planned from Monday 25 to Friday 29 September and for strikes by school teachers on some of the same days.

Remember to follow ISG on LinkediN    https://www.linkedin.com/company/10497937 and let me know if you would like to make content for our Linkedin feed this year.

Have a good weekend,

-Melissa

Friday 29th September

Dear All,

Thank you for your work again this week.

Some of us have been striking, some laid low with the lurgi and some at home with stranded school pupils. Thank you to everyone who has kept the show on the road and tackled the unidesk queue as the first weeks of term have ramped up. The big investment of time and effort over the summer has delivered robust updated services  for 60,000 new and returning students.  Great to see Wooclap  launched successfully. The number of student accounts in the system is higher than the total of new accounts in Top Hat in semester 1 last. By the end of week 1 we had ~74000 responses made since the system went live. Of those ~46000 were from activities in week 1 of teaching.

Congratulations to Paula Sivandan  who is crossing the floor, leaving EDE to start her new role in WAC to help build EDWEB 2 and Abdulrazak Osuntokun who is away  to do his PhD in Education.

Stuart Nicol has been spreading the word about our online impact in Norway.

We are recruiting more interns to join us for the coming year.

Neil McCormick has blogged When is a student not a student? – What’s your policy on EdTech?

Plans for Ada Lovelace Day are looking good. Ada Lovelace Day 2023 – Ada Lovelace Day

A women in STEM colouring book and campus tour are imminent

Also a historic witches tour. Ask Ewan about the University of Edinburgh Principal and the witches (not witches) he condemned to death.

The University has launched a gin Official University of Edinburgh Single Malt Whisky (edinburghwhisky.com)

The Talbot Rice have an opening night for their new exhibition if you would like to attend Time Traveller: Charles Lyell at Work Exhibition Preview Tickets, Fri 27 Oct 2023 at 16:30 | Eventbrite

Teviot has closed for a refurb and a new Study Hub has been built at 40 George Square. Teviot Row House is the oldest purpose-built student union building in the world. Fingers crossed she will emerge beautifully and sympathetically restored.

Have a good weekend,

-Melissa

 

Friday 6th October

Dear All,

Thank you for your work this week.

I have been in Washington DC at the 2U/Edx conference, and I know that the fort has been well held here. The conference focused on the disruptive power of AI in education, very similar to the disruptive power of MOOCs hailed 10 years ago. I am very pleased to see so many teams in LTW moving forward with thinking about how AI can enhance our services and the training and support we can offer to others to help them understand these changes.

More locally I am pleased to see that Scotrail pilots have scrapped their peak fares Peak ScotRail fares to be scrapped in pilot scheme – BBC News and that the university would like your feedback on how you commute  https://edinburgh.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/2023-commuter-travel-survey.   If you are a fan of Parks and Recreation, Historic Environment Scotland would like your ideas A new future for Edinburgh’s Holyrood Park | HistEnvScot (historicenvironment.scot)

Term time is always full of project and governance boards. Thank you to all of you who spend time preparing and presenting papers for these. The papers, pragmatism and process get us to where we want to be.

Ahead of Ada Lovelace Day I am delighted to launch our new PlayFair Steps digital badges for everyone who contributes so much to making our workplace inclusive. PlayFair Steps EDI Colleague – The University of Edinburgh (badgr.com)  I am pleased to see so many people signed up for our celebrations next week. Ada Lovelace Day – A celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).

See you on Tuesday for Ada Day and on Wednesday for LTW Lunch on The Wing.

-Melissa

Friday 13th October

Dear All,

Thank you for your work again this week.

It has been incredibly sad to lose a colleague. Anyone who would like a meet to talk about Richard and what he meant to us, the University Chaplain, Harriet Harris has offered us her time.  We can meet her individually or she and Karen Howie have agreed a face-to-face session on the 25th of October at 10am (room TBA).  We will share our stories and discuss ideas for ways we can commemorate Richard. Please email Karen or message her on Teams if you’d like to be added to the invitation.

It was good to see so many of you gathering together for lunch on Wednesday and at Ada Lovelace Day on Tuesday. Our guest speakers Bhargavi Ganesh , Ruth King and Frauke Zeller told us tales of  hitchhiking robots, crime writing, space elephants, tree rings and steam boats.  HitchBOT already had a Wikipedia page, and by the end of the afternoon Frauke Zeller had one too! Thank you to all the organising team, don’t forget to collect your digital badge from Katie Grieve.

The new EFI spaces on campus are starting to take shape and everyone is learning that high ceilings and bare walls are not so good for sound baffling, which will not be  a surprise to any of you who are living in Edinburgh tenement flats. Please do make use of spaces in ECA and Evolution house for meetings, you can book rooms Guidance | The University of Edinburgh and some of them have views nearly as spectacular as ours.

Cheery news this week for :

• The Student newspaper https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/11/europe-oldest-student-newspaper-saved-from-closure-edinburgh-robert-louis-stevenson
• The pay gap Nobel economics prize awarded to Claudia Goldin for work on women’s pay – BBC News
• The supercomputer Edinburgh to lead new era of UK supercomputing | The University of Edinburgh
• Data analysts Getting ready for a data driven future at University of Edinburgh | LinkedIn
• Student project funding Student Experience Grants | The University of Edinburgh

Less cheery news coming out of Israel and Gaza. Sympathies to all of you who have families and friends there.

October is one of those months which has a number of featured celebration days. It’s Black History Month, and includes Halloween and World Menopause day to name just a few.  If you have decorations or themed items you would like to display, let me know. LTW have a strong track record of success in the ISG pumpkin carving/window decoration competition.

I hope you have booked your place to attend the ISG staff awards. Your Heads have now seen the text of the peer nominations. What a lovely bunch of people you are. If you check out the Staff Recognition Awards Shortlist  you’ll see the (7) categories in which we will cheer for a LTW winner.

Best wishes, take extra care today.

-Melissa

 

Friday 20th October

Dear All,

Thank you for your work again this week.  Will you be attending Higgs Fest? Higgs Festival – Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics (ed.ac.uk)

I can only apologise for the ongoing lack of meeting space in Argyle House and thank you for the effort you are making to find other spaces on campus and meet in groups in our booths. For the near future, Microsoft’s new AI assistant can go to meetings for you https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67103536

We continue to grow, and this week we welcome Socrates Davidopoulos as Web Migration project manager, and we have some more student jobs advertised now for Digital Skills Trainers, 23 Things interns and Playful Engagement consultants University of Edinburgh Jobs – Unitemps

You will have seen a message go out about pumpkin carving comp Pumpkin Carving Competition and the university winter run Edinburgh Winter Run sign-up  which I hope will get your competitive juices flowing yet again.  If you have already this year achieved an impressive sporting achievement running, jumping, climbing, cycling, golfing etc, let Fiona Hendrie know so we can celebrate in our festive round–ups.

Since we are now in ‘breathing week’ – that time in the middle of the semester when the services all seem to be running suspiciously well- it is time for you all to sign up for multi-factor authentication (MFA) on your Office 365. Once registered, you will be asked to sign in using MFA when accessing Office 365 Services at least every 30 days. This step significantly enhances the security of accounts and helps prevent unauthorised access, ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of our sensitive information.  So please don’t ignore the message when it comes. A number of LTW brave souls/guineapigs/early adopters have signed up already and seem to have aced it. Thank you.

You may have seen in the office some purple stickers for ‘ISG award nominee 2023’, if you or your team was nominated please do take one to wear/decorate… and we will see what happens on Tuesday when winners are announced.

We have two of my favourite Samhain and Navaratri in October so whether you are marking ‘the start of the dark half’ for one night,  or worshipping goddess for nine, do enjoy.

Stay safe from storm Babet, wrap up warm and wear your wellies out and about.

-Melissa