Wolverhampton weekly newsletter #14

This week began with preparing a monthly highlight report and potential items for the next DAS Newsletter.  The subsequent Leadership Team meeting was followed by a conference call with Fruition who are the integration partners for ServiceNow.  As part of its pre-sales function we obtained agreement to Fruition's assistance with developing a roadmap for future stages of implementation. This will take the form of identifying opportunities within the University to enable ServiceNow capability for other core business processes (ie beyond IT and HR). Fruition say they have an approach based on recent work with other agencies and I understand we may be the first University to have approached them. I also took the opportunity to invite them to join the Digital Advisory Board for our technology partners.  At present we have positive responses from a number of others too.

I travelled down to London in the evening for the BETT show which opened at Excel on Wednesday.  A fuller report and feedback session will be arranged - I will tie this into the "Tech Talk" series. I took quite a few photos as backdrop to such a session.  In summary, this event brings together a wide education community from primary, secondary, FE, and HE in the UK together with some overseas contributors.  As well as a significant supplier exhibition there are also demonstrations, seminars and an arena program.  As well as taking in an overall tour I also spent my time at around 15-20 key stands ranging from the start-up entrepreneurs in the BETT futures zone, through to the big corporate stands like Microsoft (primary sponsor) as well as investigating some new suppliers that I hadn't heard of before.  I also attended the keynote Microsoft session (Anthony Salcito VP Worldwide Education).  The Secretary of State was there but I didn't bump into her or her entourage.   Key take-aways:  lots of Virtual Reality in the classroom, launch of Google's VR Expedition technology (field trips to anywhere), quizzes and assessments linked to big data analysis, Hololens demonstrators, Apps aplenty, a guided tour of the HP intelligent classroom of the future etc.  One launch of particular note, given how close Land Rover are to us, was the launch of a life-sized "HumaGram" which chief designer Oliver LeGrice demonstrated live - short clip available and on page 11 of the Evening Standard that night. I came back with a cardboard VR set with links to the Youtube VR channel. We should be considering how we can utilise and be first to use these new channels at pace - they make paper prospectuses and web pages look very dated.  As you can perhaps sense I found it an inspiring event!

While there, I also took the chance to meet up with one or two of our key partners including Adobe and Microsoft (the HE education team were all there). There are some interesting links - which may already have established of course - with local showcase colleges like Shireland.  We may wish to explore an invitation through Microsoft to a future forum e.g. Digital Advisory Board.

Finally, I spent some time in a seminar session on the free Adobe Spark technology by the University of Lincoln - here is my attempt at turning the blog entry into a Spark!