some scans

Pod not iPod

Hadrian's Wall

Last week we spent three days in Northumberland national Park visiting Hadrian's Wall. This is the first time we have visited Hadrian's Wall although I can remember doing it in a history at school etc. The weather was great and we only had Billy with us as the others not around. Billy reserved the word "LEGEND" when he saw the Google camera car in Todmorden. This is us on the 8 mile circular walk along the wall from Steel Crag to Housesteads and Vindolanda on Thursday. The beer in the Once Brewed Inn" is highly recommended (called once brewed bitter rather imaginatively) and helped improve the Folk Group that were playing in the corner in more ways than one.

IT Services Newsletter #14

Finance Business Services System (FBSS) Project
At October’s FBSS Project Board there was a message of thanks and appreciation to IT Service teams in delivering the COA system infrastructure against tight time timescales to enable the training and development work to commence according to schedule. There was a particular appreciation from COA on the ease of use and capability of the Sun Global Desktop (SGD) set-up that they were provided with during this process. Thank you to those involved for making this part of the project happen so effectively.

Award for ALPS - Supported by IT Services at Bradford
A University project - The ALPS CETL – won the 2009 Handheld Learning Awards for Innovation & Best Practice. This involves colleagues from across the University and our participation is led by the School of Health Studies. We are particularly pleased that this award is shared with John Fairhall and Zee Miran who provide the pioneering “shared support service” on behalf of the consortium based at the University of Bradford. Congratulations to everyone involved and especially John and Zee.

Shared Services and Collaborative Working Project
Geoff Bell and I attended a full afternoon’s workshop with KMPG the facilitators. The results of that workshop have just been circulated – basically there are a number of significant hurdles in respect of IT collaborations because the Council have outsourced to IBM (two years into a ten year contract), the Health Trust have ruled IT “out of scope” and the West Yorkshire Police service already act as a regional collaborator within the Police service and have a number of policy (not technical) issues with sharing data networks for fairly obvious reasons. On this basis, the potential areas that the group came up with were fairly limited but included less controversial areas such as printing/copying (where all participants have “spare” capacity including InPrint and Design at Bradford University) and also shared call centre operations. Our interest was in Clearing/Enrolment and potential plans to contact alumni for fundraising in the New Year.

Leeds College of Music (LCM) Merger
There has been a lot of activity in the last month preparing a bid to the Funding Council (HEFCE) for the set-up costs of merging the University with the College of Music. This has been done in consultation with colleagues at LCM. There are a number of new opportunities from closer collaboration with what would become a new “Academic School” and there are also a number of challenges with merging a wide range of corporate and support services and systems. We have identified a wide range of services that would be affected, and this could lead to a significant project for us, if the project is approved towards the end of December by the HEFCE Board.

Student Account Provisioning Workshop
Russell Allen facilitated the first of several workshops with representatives from every Academic School and colleagues from IT Services. We are looking at how we currently provision IT accounts for new students, with a particular focus on the needs of flexible, distant and “non traditional” student entry. This is going to be a growth area in the new Corporate Plan for the University and we are trying to facilitate some more streamlined and effective working procedures. It is already clear that the current approaches in Schools can be fragmented and sometimes down to individual preference – and we reached a consensus that there were some opportunities to make this better in terms of both student experience and reducing our manual administration. The next workshop takes place in late November.

New University IT Strategy 2009-14
The new IT Strategy was approved at Information Strategy Committee (ISC) - subject to a inclusion of Research requirements.

Improving the student printing experience
The self-service student printing facility is continuing to work very effectively. We will hopefully be able to compare the print volumes with the new service compared to the previous system and see if there has been a reduction (as forecast) in the volume of paper that is being printed. We will need to factor in the additional student numbers on campus – it seems even busier than usual, perhaps affected by the closure of the Communal Building for refurbishment. During the last month an additional printer was fully commissioned on Level Zero, potentially increasing capacity by 50 percent. There are plans to further increase capacity for the busy end of calendar year assignment deadlines.

Leading-edge computer aided assessment
Hopefully you will have seen the article in the current News and Views around learning and teaching. It’s a very positive piece. The University is hosting a major UCISA seminar on e-assessment on November 4th with John Dermo as one of the keynote speakers, and involving other colleagues from LSS and IT Services. We are establishing a very positive position in the HE sector around e-assessment and should continue to be proud of this association.

Update on Library Management System (BradFinder) project
All the major modules are now implemented, with telephone renewals now operational. Next steps are transferring Virtual Scholars records to BRADfinder (the project starts in November), implementing the Electronic Resources module to allow better management of the Library’s electronic journals and databases packages (starts January) and lots of new functionality for BRADfinder (email alerts for new items based on saved searches, RSS feeds for items on order etc). For the photocopiers in the Library, a trial has started of the Ricoh iMFP software, that will enable printing via Pharos on a photocopier.

Launch of CampusM

On Monday went to the launch of the oMbiel product called CampusM (I learnt on the day that oMbiel is an anagram of Mobile doh). The University has procured the system for set-up and launch early in the New Year, initially on Iphones and Touch, and by Spring available cross platform (smartphone). The attenders didn't get complimentary iPhones but I am now the owner of an apple ballpoint - looks of envy all around. Bradford already has a dotmobi site and has been a pioneer - we will be active members of the inaugural University User Group. The early adopter is Sheffield. There are other people blogging about this - about 70 people attended. We also got an update on iTunesU which is growing fast however, the key enabler of this is great content - providing the full platform for free is an interesting gesture and I liked the way that John Hickey described "rock star academics" and the analogy between U2 (the University), CD (the course), music track (the module). Yes. Quite. If anyone is interested in the session notes then they're available. Key message: more and more students will have access to this sort of mobile technology. It enables new ways of accessing a wide range of University services. We will be part of a pioneering club that will improve student experience. We may also save student's time and also University staff/resources through mobile and self-service. We are continuing to invest in new technology at Bradford Universtiy.

First IT Managers "Away Day"

Well to reassure in these budget conscious times it wasn't away (it was Horton Building) and although it included a sandwich (menu A) I went to the co-op and provided the biscuits, croissants, chocolate twisty pastries and crisps - and the supplementary food was definitely needed after 6 straight hours with only comfort breaks thrown in. We had a presentation from Richard on his recent asignment from the PGCert module covering an IT Services marketing audit. We discussed the Leeds College of Music in order to provide an updated document to the project board later that day with updated costs. We spent the majority of time (2.5 hours) on going through the draft plan and the individual team plans developed so far for 2009/10. Sara joined us for an hour to cover the governance and "account management" discussions which was really productive - we may have an emerging plan. Finally we covered some further areas around the new structure including some labels (which are being slept on). So overall a very good use of time. At the end, it felt like a very intense day - and we also seemed to generate a productive set of ideas, actions and agreements. Thanks to all.

Another campus tour - pretty in pink?

Last week three of us took another look around some of the areas that are associated with IT provision on campus across three buildings. It took us nearly two hours. One of the group was a critical friend who is Fellow in Arts and we asked for an opinion on the spaces - how they could be improved or modified to respond to student criticisms the last time we took a tourist group. I started out thinking that we could do something with student work and/or art display. What I discovered is that the rooms (especially the ones that have just been built or refurbished) are all rather good in terms of colour choice, flooring and general ambience. The main proposals were to highlight the space outside the rooms on the entry and exit points, where sometime students wait between classes or maybe take a break for 5 minutes. Toalso provide a small "oasis" space with calming colour, soft furnishing (for one or two people only) and maybe plants. These changes could be done with feature walls in plain colours and perhaps a temporary transient exhibition. We are going to investigate the photographic exhibition which is on display in the atrium and was commissioned by the University using its own students (with consent) and campus spaces. These are colourful and bright and "people" oriented. I think the most controversial recommendation could be the flourescent pink (matt finish) proposed for the entrance lobby on level 01 - the colour chart arrived today and we are going to get some costings. Watch this space!