Tag: play

Playful and PlayFair

Lovely illustrations for our playful engagement website by the LTW Interactive Content Team

 

One of our innovation projects over several years was to develop a Playful Engagement Strategy for ISG and to test some playful approaches. We know our Information Services Group (ISG) staff are innovative and creative, and they have developed a variety of fun, creative, and engaging ways to provide and deliver our technologies and services.

We want to ensure that this continues and that ISG fosters an environment, and culture, where innovation, playful learning, and creative engagement are embedded in our practices. This is in line with the University’s aim to offer an educational experience that is inspiring, challenging, and transformational.

To this end, we have established playful engagement themes, strategy and goals.

Our goals are to:

  • Facilitate the development of playful innovators, researchers, and creators
  • Promote creative, playful, and innovative use of technologies and tools in ISG services
  • Utilise our world-class libraries and collections in innovative and engaging ways to enrich our services
  • Support a healthy work life balance, and a positive, engaging and inclusive work environment
Lovely illustrations for our playful engagement website by the LTW Interactive Content Team

Our 6 themes are:

  1. Digital technologies
  2. Libraries museums, galleries and collections
  3. Communities of practice
  4. Reflection, development and innovation
  5. Exploration and innovation
  6. Work–life balance

I am very pleased that Charlie has been able to spend the time to really think about what playful engagement could mean for a large IT and libraries service.  Her work draws upon a whole raft of  team, game, maker, challenge and enjoyment activities which all combine to make working here much more fun than it might otherwise be.

She and I will be presenting about this at the UCISA leadership conference in Edinburgh.

Read more about it: https://thinking.is.ed.ac.uk/playful-engagement/

media hopper

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper 1942.jpg
“Nighthawks by Edward Hopper 1942” by Edward Hopper Licensed under Public Domain via Commons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nighthawks_by_Edward_Hopper_1942.jpg

When people ask me why the new media asset management system at University of Edinburgh will be called Media Hopper I reply:

‘because it will gather together all the mixed up multitude of video material from all over the University; bring it into one place; channel it into our VLEs, websites, portals and courses; apply standards and metadata ; and be very cool’.

You will know the following definitions of hopper:

hopper ( agric) :  a container for a loose bulk material.

hopper ( minecraft ):  a block that can be used to catch item entities, or to transfer items into and out of other containers.

channel-hopper( tv) : quickly changing from one channel to another to find something you want to watch.

Grace Hopper ( rolemodel) : an inspirational computer scientist. She developed the implementation of standards for testing computer systems and components and coined the term “debugging” for fixing computer glitches when she removed a moth from her computer.

Dennis Hopper (role model):  just cool.

space hopper ( toy ):  just orange and bouncy.

Handling your hopper
We plan to launch Media Hopper in pilot form before Christmas. In practical terms this means that whilst the service will be available for everyone to use, there will only be a basic set of help materials available, and no supporting training courses.  We realise that there are a number of staff around the institution who are very experienced users of media and we want to make the service available to this early adopter community as quickly as possible. If you are a less experienced user of media, we invite you to take a look and send us your feedback, but if you plan to use it for core teaching and learning activities, we would advise you to wait until more support is available.

The project team will continue to work on the service over early 2016, expanding support materials, developing training courses and finessing the service based on early adopter feedback. The full Media Hopper service will be available from May 2016.

Over the next 2 weeks, we have scheduled open sessions across the University. We’re very excited about the new service, and we’d like to share more info about the rollout plans, as well as demo the basic service and hear your feedback. Don’t worry if you can’t make it along though – this is the first of many opportunities and we will be scheduling more in the New Year.

Search for Media Hopper in MyEd Events Booking (https://www.myed.ed.ac.uk) for details of a session near you.

We are currently targeting the week beginning 14 December 2015 for the Media Hopper pilot launch.

we hold these truths

Picture taken by me, mask of young president Lincoln. No rights reserved by me.
Lincoln data. Picture taken by me, 3d printed mask of young president Lincoln from SmithsonianX. No rights reserved by me.

Four score and seven hours ago  I arrived at the NMC conference. I am learning a lot about maker spaces and how they are used by libraries and universities to support the development of digital skills.

The University of Edinburgh is committed to people development and digital skills. With apologies to Thomas Jefferson:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all members of the University  are created equal, that the University  is endowed by our benefactors to deliver  certain unalienable  acts, that among these are teaching, learning and the  pursuit of research.–That to secure these activities, IT Services are instituted among (mostly)men, deriving their just powers from the consent of PSG –That whenever any form of IT services becomes disconnected from these ends, it is the Right of the directors to alter and restructure it, and to institute new IT/digital skills training laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect your Safety and Happiness online.

 

Actually, what our University’s people strategy 2012-16 says in relation to new technology is:

“The rapid technological developments in the modern world demonstrate the need to be able to review our approaches to teaching and research on an ongoing basis…… The challenge is not only to be able to invest in the continual costs and development of our technology, but to be aware of the potential of new and emerging technologies, so that we can exploit them effectively. Ensuring that staff know as much about these technologies and their capabilities as our students is vital.

We require the skills to use these technologies in new and differing ways, in order to maximise their benefits across our varied areas of work, significantly enhancing our efficiency. To this end, we need to embed digital literacy and digital wisdom across our workforce, to cover the breadth of our activities and functions.

The role of technology in undertaking research and delivering teaching will continue to change and may transform the manner in which teaching will be delivered in the future.

……. By increasing the skills of our workforce in the use of digital technologies, we will also embed good practice by ensuring good health and welfare is an essential consideration, in moving to new ways of working and learning”

Information Services currently has an IT skills training team of about 6 people, but the manager post is vacant. The plan for this summer is that that team will join  LTW services division and we will begin the search for a new head.