From the "Ridings" - cleaner to Headteacher

An inspiring story from the TES this week - not sure about the Bradford University link as I didn't think we covered PGCE.

Completed Minor Refurb

The paint is now dry and the artwork is now installed. Comments and feedback welcome. Poor quality images attached from a phone. With thanks to Caroline Hicks (Fellow in Arts) and Priscilla Preston for co-ordinating it all including the choices of colours etc. Thanks for the original inspiration provided by Jonathon Colam-French at East Anglia.

Student Colours Awards Evening 2010

It was great to go along to the 2010 UBU Awards ceremony on Friday night at the Hilton Hotel and present the awards in the media section. There were prizes for the Film Society and for RAM Air including the people who have made a big contribution over the last year to these particular events. Everyone was in smart ball gowns and black ties or suits. I had also bought a ticket for a guest who had been along two year's ago to the event in the Bradford City ground. Once again he was really impressed by the diversity of the sports and activities and also the diversity of the people taking part, from the Brunei Society winning the society of the year to the Scottish National trampolining champion to the basketball team national BUCS trophy runners-up. Bradord may not be renowned nationally for its sporting prowess but having just won the Varsity against Huddersfield and clearly having some teams that know how to enjoy themselves that doesn't seem to matter. It's the taking part that counts. We went on to CoCo's for the Friday Night Disco - there appeared to be a fairly intense police operation going on around the Alhambra district? We got home earliier than most I suspect.

iPhones making life easier for dyslexia?

This was an interesting article in the Guardian about using an iPhone as an e-book reader. I am not entirely convinced by the last paragraph of the article but it makes for interesting reading whether you are dyslexic or not.

IT Services Newsletter #18

Infrastructure Team

Successful “at risk” period

During the April period a number of actions were taken including the SAINT service upgrade, which was effectively a double upgrade as the users had postponed one upgrade from Christmas. The upgrade is a team effort including the supplier (Tribal), Sue Schmassmann and Richard Davis on the e-vision functions. It seems to have gone very smoothly. We were also performing a three day pro-active performance test on the Blackboard service with the supplier to predict the service capability when fully loaded and beyond. The tests which were mainly conducted overnight went well and we await the results. Finally a number of services were patched and re-started and this included a switching one of the fibre network channels which also went without a hitch. Thanks to everyone for planning another successful series of service changes and improvements.

ResNet and RoamNet reports

You might be wondering why end of year report now? Well March or April is usually the busiest month in terms of RoamNet (and ResNet) activity, depending on when Easter is. This year after March there's either holiday, exams or general lack of students on campus. Below

Headline figures are:

* Number of usernames logging on to RoamNet is 4162, breaking the 4k barrier for the first time.

* ResNet and RoamNet overall 4759 unique usernames used the service, also highest ever.

* JBP Building had 2176 usernames connecting.

IT Support and Telecoms Team

Saving Money ("low hanging fruit!")

We are reviewing and re-tendering a number of our long term support contracts with a view to delivering budget savings where possible. Roger Goodair has completed a successful tendering process for maintenance of the telephone switch (PABX) and telephones systems support, a two year contract (commencing 1.4.10) has been awarded. This process provided a budget saving to the University. We are currently completing the review of the corporate mobile carrier contract.

IT Services Monthly Customer Survey continues

We continue to provide a mechanism for the users of our services to provide feedback both as a result of specific “logged jobs” and also through the general feedback forms. We are continuing to including customer comments on our services which fairly reflect the feedback we receive both good and not so good, in the monthly IT servicedesk reports which can be found here.

Systems Team

Recent Award shortlisting

A recent project has been shortlisted for an award. It is for the for the Excellence in Knowledge Transfer Interdisciplinary Working Award (phew its a long title). Colleagues involved in the MEDS project have been invited to present to the judging panel on Wednesday 21 April with an invitation to the Awards dinner on 21 April. Congratulations to John Fairhall and colleagues Chris Dearnley , Stuart Walker and Jak Radice. We were not successful on this occasion for the submissions we made to the Times Higher Award or the Green Gown Award for the Computer Aided Assessment Project. It was worth making a submission but the competition is clearly very tough.

Self-Service for annual leave

The MyView service was extended to include the Annual Leave module. This is part of the HRX project developments. It initially allows staff to request holidays online and receive confirmation (or rejection!) from their line manager. This replaces the current variety of paper and electronic systems across campus, and also allows the added functionality of viewing annual leave details online for both individuals and teams. The service was prepared for launch during March with support from Paula Burnett, and went live from 1st April.

New service to streamline annual research monitoring

A new system has been released to support collection of management information from researchers. The Individual Research and Knowledge Transfer Monitoring system (IRKTM) which provides a web-based data collection and validation mechanism for the Individual Research Monitoring return. This has been released initially to a small group of users before full rollout. Tamsin Holt in RKTS is very pleased with the system and thinks it is a great improvement on what went before. She’s particularly pleased with our plan to bring disparate R&KT data from across several University systems into this one for checking in future years. Thanks to Andy Walmsley for making great progress on this project.

Boards of Examiners

As the academic year moves towards is final stages and exams are approaching there have been some further developments to exam board processing. Peter Jones has now completed the Board of Examiners reports to support Foundation Degrees.

UK Border Agency

We have completed the first electronic transmission of data between the University and the UK Border Agency, with thanks to Rick Graves. This uses the new module which provides student data from SAINT to the UKBA’s SMS database.

General Stuff

Green Impact initiatives

Following up the recent national student initiative called the Green Impact assessment, we are now working our way through the departmental green impact worksbooks Initially we have a representative from each of the three IT Teams in this assessment work and (Andy Walmsley, Christine Thacker, Dave Ewen). More information is available here. Please expect a few targeted emails from us over the next few weeks about all things Green as we promote various things that are going on around the University.

UCISA Conference 2010

The annual conference at Harrogate is now available to view on-line at the UCISA website – this includes the videos of each presentation. There is a starring role for our Vice Chancellor Mark Cleary and if you are able to find the time I can recommend a browse and a look at the presentation from Larry Hincker of Virginia Tech about the challenges they faced before during and after the terrible massacre three years ago – including the impact on IT Services in ways you might not have imagined.

Andrew Marr Show features UCISA guests!

This Sunday's Andrew Marr show featured guest speakers at the last two annual UCISA conferences. So I have had the pleasure of hosting both Ruby Wax (2010) and John Sergeant (2009) at conference dinner. I thought that Ruby was back to her usual self this Sunday - completely off the wall! I wonder if she is still struggling with the iPhone?

The ducks are back

It is a long time ago that I reported about ducks but three were spotted last Friday - the same three? You will have to look closely!

Painting Stage is Completed

There was a little money found in the "minor works" budget for making some cosmetic improvement to the student space in JBP Building. We proritised the entrances and the corridor/waiting areas outside the largest of the PC Clusters and the Learn Higher teaching room. These areas are probably the highest student footfall. In about a weeks time the rolling art exhibition will begin along these spaces. The colours for the blank canvas were chosen by our Fellow in Arts - I am colour blind. It already makes a difference to the look and feel I think.

L2P4HU

In 97 days me and three friends will be setting out on a fantastic cycling trip from London to Paris (centrepoint to centrepoint) to raise money for MIND in memory of Hugh. If you want to find out some more and maybe give us a donation towards our target then please take a look. All the money we raise will go directly to MIND so please be generous if you are able. Thanks.

The links to the sponsoring pages are here!

By the way L2P4HU means London 2 Paris 4 Hugh

Gorple Reservoir

A view of the top of the world above Gorple Reservoir. Quite an interesting trek to this place which is a bit of a mountain bike mecca. Can't think why!

Pace Egg Play

Every year at Easter there is a tradition called the Pace Egg Play which takes place in the villages around Hebden Bridge including Heptonstall and Midgley. This year I managed to get along to the Midgley bus terminus in time to catch it. Here is a photo which includes the rather irate bus driver who could not turn round and had a long queue of traffic behind them. Quite nice to think that all the usual Health and Safety and risk assessment and public order stuff can go out the window just occassionally (and the play involves all kinds of stabbings, beatings, be-headings etc!).

Mrs Mills and the Library

Caught my eye this Sunday.