The long good Friday – last day of Educause and trip home

Many of the 7000 have fallen by the way as I sit here at 8am on the last day – maybe it was the late night last night at the Museum of Flight …

 Either way, this session below (I insert this line after the event) alone was worth the air fair!

Susan Gibbons Librarian from Rochester – how do we engage with the net generation?

They employed an anthropologist! They used photography – take a picture of … then meetings. They also used a mapping exercise – show us where you go in a dayand what you do.  Involve them in designing your space – easy to move tables and lots of power outletsfrom plasma screens to staples.

THEY WANTED A GENERIC PERSON that could help them with lots of different things – a one stop where I go to and you figure it out for me.

They asked them to design a portable device that could do whatever they wanted – had an mp3 bed and lots of academic stuff on one tool – gives GREAT info about what they want in a portal for xample.

They did not ask – tell us what you want in a portal as its too constraining.

Then they did retrospective interviews – the time between asigning a paper and it being done. They interviewd students after submission and drew a diagram of how they went about it.picture after picture had communication with a parent about the paper.

And several emailed paper to Dad for advice.

So they had questions – laptops?They weren’t bringing them with them even though there is a high level of ownership.Reasons were power and lockers – they drew lockers – what a good point. Weight.

How doid they respnnd? They cant do lockers but they lend out laptop locks and extension cords to save moving furniture around.

What to do about helicopter parents? They dropped freshman orientation and hosted a parents orientation. Teh librarians sit down and talk to them and tell them that every class has a librarian. And they tell them that they are here for us and send your kids to us when they call you for help.

Rennovation of their space. Libraries were designed for quiet study but curriculum is designed for group study! Lots of tech in classrooms but they are locked out of session.

Diaries say they work 24 x 7 so we need to be open then.

FOOD AND DRINK is very important to them Now they are building this into the library. Comfortable seating and furniture that moves around easy – lots of big tables.. They gave the students scaled drawings of the space and of furniture and asked them to put stuff where they thought it should go!!!

GREAT IDEA. for example, the students uniformally put lots of tables in the window and not comfy chairs. They wanted big tables to spread out over.

They look at their space as a continual beta.Maybe the lighter furniture will break – but that’s okay as its cheaper anyway.

They built walls out of whiteboards and lots of screens to put laptops into to practice presentations etc.No control of space just allow self policing..

They are not going to put in a service desk yet as they want to wait and se how it looks.

Sumary then – easy.  Go into students union with free pizza and you have a captive audience. They thought it would be hard to get people but not hard at all if your timing and place is corrent – 11pm at night in the SU or in the dormitories.

They also did interviews with faculty – we want to hear more about your research – they are peacocks so apeal to that and they will talk for hours and hours.It helped them change their culture and approach.

They now empathise and they no longer guess – they always ask.

www.tiny.cc/GzthX

s.gibbons@library..rochester.edu

Next up - finale – Bruce Schneler the author …

Rumsfeld left out a forth – things we don’t know we know.

ten information / security trends:

1. information has value – think of amazon and law enforcement, info is now like property – its often cheaper to keep it than throw it away.

2. networks are not critical infrastructures – the mail is no longer important for info.

3. third parties control our information – eg our telephone logs

4. Criminals thriving on the Internet – spam, selling flaws, attacks.

5. Complexity – its THE worse enemy and its what makes security NOT get better. And the Internet is the most complex machine mankind has ever built. But we like complexity.

6. Slower patches and faster exploits. It has to work (a patch) and it has to be quick.  Well, you can’t have both and that’s why the are unreliable. Hence patch tuesday.This is good but leaves a window of vulnerability.

7. sophistication of automatic worms and blended threats. They are much smarter these days and sit quiet on your computer – you can subscribe to time periods on worms!

8. the untrustworthyness of the endpoint.  We still work on a WWII model of one sender and one receiver. We have lots of encryption but that doesn’t matter if the computer at the end of the line is hacked in some way.

9. the notion of the end user as the attacker – and this allows corporates to put stuf on your pc – either design security for you or against you – interesting legal battles – eg Sony

10. Regulations There’s two basic sales to get people to increase security – greed or fear. The problem of fear is that well, I didn’t have a hack last year so why …  Regulations seem to be the best approach to use a stick to get a budget. But its a mediocre proces.

So what does this all mean? Things are getting worse not better. Non-tech aspects are becoming more important – 4 aspects of economic effect:

1. networks effects – the value of a network increases with the number of users they tend to lead to dominant markets – big are more value cos they are big.

2. high fixed costs and low marginal costs.  In IT, the first one costs millions and the 2nd one is free – Windowsso normal economics fails in this type o market.(hot.com). So we build anti-capitalist defences – trademarks, patents, support agreements.

3. switching costs – coke vs pepsi is zero – but in IT, it can mean staff training, data changes, user disruption. This drives a lot of the IT market. eg the NPV of a software company is the total value of its switching costs.  The higher the switch cost, the worse service you can give! This is why companies fight cell phone number portability. Its also why itunes stuff only works on itunes. its why MS hates releasing file formats. so the ms stratey of throw it out there and get it right in v3 is a good one!

4. A market for lemons – imagine a car market with some xpensive cars and some cheap ones but the buyer can’t tell the difference – bad products drive good ones out of the market. Wow. We rely on something economists calll signals – eg a warrantee in the car market, or product reviews etc. This explains a lot of historical stupid behaviour.

Tradeoffs – we make economic decisions and this means that we often make bad decisions.low risk high cost events – what if you have a zero risk of damage and infinite damage possibily, the maths doesn’t work. so you can’t do normal risk analysis and drop back into things like fear. There is also a poor understanding of costs – what is privacy worth? What’s the value of increased airport security?

Externalities – this is an effect of a decision not bourn by the decision maker – eg polluting a river doesn’t hurt YOU but the people downstream. So our security depends on the security of our Mothers’ computer – but she doesn’t care. Eg counterfeit money – we don’t care and don’t want to know if we have an in our wallet. So if we get hacked, the software vendor just doesn’t care – cell phones spend no money on voice privacy but lots on making sure we can’t buy a third party battery.. So if choicepoint looses my data, they don’t care as the security of that data is completely a n externality to them..

The way you manage this externality is to allow for litigation and regulation – and both of these raise the cost of polluting the river and encourages them to change.We may see this in software vendors soon -liability for bugs that wreck our data and/or finances. This is why laws making the banks responsible for fraud liability has had such a good effect on security. Aligning interests and capabilities is the trick. “your purchase free if you don’t get a receipt” is a mechanism to stop employee theft!!!

its a security device designed solely by jiggering the economics.  So when we think about security, think about economics.

He has a cryptogram monthly newsletter and a book beyond fear – schneler.com

Good conf !!!

Okay, lets fly home after hanging around for 8 hours.

Journey home – written when completed …

Had to leave the Hotel nine hourse before the plane was due to go so though I’d hand my bags into the airport then scout around for some “real” America for a few hours. So I caught a but that would take me through some subburbs and then to a Mall that was out of the way of the trouist track.

The street names (or lack of) get me as a cultural difference – at every turn, the lady bus driver would say things like “175th and 61st” at which point somebody would pull on a cord that ran the length of the bus along the top of the windows, a bell would ring and the bus would stop.  It cost a dollar 25 for a half an hour trip.

Spoke to the bus driver and people around – really interesting insight into things – found several people that had never heard of Wales and two asked me if I was sure I wasn’t from Australia !?

Shopping centre much like anything you’d find over here but with different names and slightly better prices – though like everything in the US, the advertised price is only really the starting point towards what you’ll pay.

The Mall contained a King County Library servcie point which I though was very well run/used – and I used it to update my facebook status.

Flying back was long and eventless really… 9 hrs on the plane and then a few hours getting back to Cardiff.  Monster Jam in Cardiff threw the lift home a bit but all’s well that ends well.

Educause Day 2 – who is Herb Buttermilk?

Okay. let the roller coaster continue! For some unknown reason, my day began at 4am with somebody trying to get into my room – as it turned out, it was a chemically confused woman looking for somebody else (I assume – as I never actually opened the door to find out…). Anyway, having naughtilly been up till 1am watching 24 series 6 on my macbook, I was ready to call CTU – and in fact did for a laugh…  I rememberd the number Jack thingy gives in one episode as 310 597 3781 but it just gets through to a recorded message. Hey ho.

Anyway. We had an interesting chat last evening around the variation of experiences that this excellent conference provides. Eveyone works hard and does great jobs but there’s still this air of “hey, we tried using a wikki last month” and “how many of you have a facebook account – oh, a few, right …’

Once more, there’s an 8am start to the presentations – this is a serious conference! 

First up today is Mary Somerville and collaborative information commons approaches …

Involve students from the very beginning in agreeing the purpose of the commons – a lesson for us???

The partner goals were to enable faculty innovation and to enhance student IT literacy by getting IT and Library staff to work together.

Students wanted flexible spaces to accomplish different tasks and cross disciplinary activities in an interactivity student/staff learning community. The recognised that information sharring is essentially a social interaction.

There was action research data presented showing immediate benefits in learning.

This could be seen as contradictory to yesterday’s presentation on authentic tasks and assessments – need more detail However, she sites a learn by doing philosophy – which is actually exactly what yesterday’s guy was talking about.

She defines learning commons as student centred research.

A low budget video spoke to students and had a tour – things like student projector facilities and displays on pillars that could be swung around appropriately etc.lots of power for docking laptops and tablets. TV and gaming area.

They realised however that they had designed to support  teaching over learning – so they designed a zone of innovation to rectify it.

They used the Educause student space survey tool and gave the sttudents a camera to take pictures of their favourite places to study – what a good idea!

As a side note – everywhere you look, there are people squirrelling around power points and sitting on stairs to use their laptops – and the conference sponsors are getting ever more outrageous in their attmepts to attract passers by.  We have several magician salesmen who do tricks and give sles patter, unicclists and jugglers – and even a massage facility and an  oxygen bar!!!  I wonder what we’ll all be doing during the breaks in five years time?!!

Next up – Robert Mendenhall et al and The Role of IT in an Age of Access, Affordability and Accountability – Spelling Commission etc …  This was of some interest to non-US participants though I’m not sure that the many people leaving the room think it was worth a keynote general session …

(before that we had a presentation of the annual awards for innovation, collaboration and leadership in the sector p including one for uPortal)

And now for … Greg Jackson – things I’ve screwed up … This is the guy who wonthe leadership award this year.

 I got in when he was talking about type A mistakes – those you make and the outcome is predictable – eg turning up at the wrong time and missing the meeting.

Tppe B mistakes are the things you thought you did right that end in a different outcome Good design cannot compensate for wrong goals. Good design has different meanings.

We can make type B mistakes in our jobs – no matter how good we are … Reflection is essential

He recalled his early time at MIT where he was encouraged to say that he could do things in IT with budgets much lower than he felt or time showed would be achievable. What should he have done and what was best for the Uniersity.  Should he have fought and not accepted the myth?

Travel and its discontents… type  C mistakes – where doing the wrong thing yields the right answer! He gave several examples of each.

Lunch – well, that was hard – a 1.5 hour search of down town Seattle to find a shop I saw the other day that sold American Indian dolls. Eventually found it and when I told the bloke where I was heading (convention centre), he directed me up the stairs by the shop – and there it was!!!

Next up – a session on uPortal and its development. EEEK, NO – I’m going to join the number of people who session surf and I’m off next door …

Joshua Baron – riding the 2.0 wave successfully.

Over the last two years or so, their staff have used IT to really just do the same old things but with a bit more efficiency. He asked the audience  how we could use technology to enhance te toilet.  Some guys in Japan have integrated a urinalysis device that gives you a prompt to contact your doc if there’s anything wrong …

 He then shared his framework for learning interaction. content, subject matter, peers – then an analysis of how web 2.0 technologies might be used to innovate and change each of these.

Content -from the college textbook… don’t start with the technology, start with the pedagogical need. He used the experience of overseas placements and podcasting. They found that it forced them out into dealing with the local people to get good examples online.

Interaction with subject matter experts (does that ean “staff”?)… why don’t we do this with some of our international franchises???

He demo’d yackpack which was a good way of having online verbal conversations … they are using it with women in China from various generations interacting with their local students on a course …

Its been good for me to really take in during several sessions, that its the pedagogy that matters not the tech – and how we really examine our teaching to see what we can do with the technology to enable the pedagogy to evolve.

Next up – Julie Evans – are we ready for tomorrow’s students? … More on the technolgy of schools these days and the expectations of those coming out of them…

Evening spent at the Museum of Flight.  What a TOP PLACE to visit.  And a great flight sim – I’ve never seen a New Yorker scream as much as the one sat next to me while I flew!

Day 1 of the Educause conf – so what was so great about Abe Lincoln then?

Wow, this event is massive – there are seven thousand people here with another one thousand missing the opportunity of coming as it was full a few weeks ago. 

We began with a man who introduced a woman who introduced another man- who introduced the first speaker, Doris Kearns Goodwin – a Pulitzer prize winning author and historian who worked with Johnson in the Whitehouse, and is an authority on Abe Lincoln. Her talk was on Abe and his leadership style and how we as IS leaders can learn from that. At any time now, I think I could be in any one of around 20 different locations – there are lots of things I wish I could go to but there’s only one of me – regardless of appearances!

   

Anway, back to Abe.  He was a chap that had to educate himself, his Mother died when he was fairly young and his chief ambition was to leave the world a better place for his having been a part of it (good ambition!).  For him it wasn’t about the power but about overcoming and motivating himself in the face of comprehensive adversity.  He was often unpopular but didn’t have many long term enemies that he didn’t eventually win over. He liked gossip and was willing to have enemies around his table if they could do their job.  He wasn’t afraid of being surrounded by people who thought that they were better than him and disliked him. She gave illustrations of the following lessons from Lincoln’s leadership style:

1 Listen to different peoples opinion and encourage debate – but realise when to make a decision and avoid paralysis by analysis

2 Learn on the job and be ready to admin your mistakes

3 Share credit for success – you can do anything if you don’t care who gets the credit.

4 Be willing to take the blame for subordinates

5 Understand the weaknesses of others and work around them

6 Control your emotions and write letters that you may never send.  If you do, make sure you follow up with positive action. 

7 Always stick to your fundamental values and goals – its the long term not the short term

8 Know how to relax and shake off anxieties – have a great sense of humour

9 Get out into the field often.

She ended with his death and reconciliation with his wife – very moving and inspirational talk.  I have learned and will act. 

Next, Thomas Reeves, Professor of Instructional Technology, University of  Georgia

I have to get the slides from this one as there are great references. Some studies show that students are possibly more miserable than they were ever before. Today for example, most students know somebody who has cheated – much more so than fifty years ago. Technology is not sufficient as a change agent on its own. US national study of student engagement shows some interesting results. Faculty have fairly low demands on students but the study finds that less than half approach that requirement. So what kind of academic challenges are we giving our students? If it hasn’t been assessed then it hasn’t been learned – Bernard et al 2004 and others indicate that the use of technology alone does not enhance learning in any way – so we need to change he pedagogical interaction and focus on assessing the complete range of assessment outcomes. We can use some of this stuff at Newport and possibly even get involved with some research.

Next up, I attended Joanna Robinson on the pedagogy of participation.  She is a research assistant at British Columbia’s masers in digital media programme – and the conjunction of physical and virtual learning spaces.  Unfortunately, it was mostly about her and her programme and not much about pedagogy per se, though there were some interesting examples around what you should do if students turn up naked or shooting you in second life… 

Lunch …

okay – it took me 2 hours to get through the exhibition area – this thing is MASSIVE. – and there is no way I got to nearly all the stands.  Still, at least I don’t have to think about Liz’ Christmas present any more (she’ll just love this light-up pen, lol) …

Next up – Jennifer Stringer on setting up small group learning spaces – based on a med School experience. Some great work but with very local nuances me thinks.  Having worked for many years within a med school, I kow what a challenge it must have been to get “mature” clinicians to change their ways and adopt new methods.  They had sixty thousand slides scanned and choose some cool furniture – but just like us, they are finding that powered desks mean that you have to really reduce the flexibility.

Before the next talk, I had an opportunity to wonder around a little.  It is screamingly hilarious to see everyone gravitating to the powerpoints or electric outlets that exist in various locations and dark crevices within this vast centre.  Its gettin late and everyone’s batteries are getting drained, lol. As the lady next to me this morning commented, “there’s a lot of geeks in one building”. Oh yea.

Well, next up is Bas Cordewener looking at whether social software in the HE arena is an accident or the start of something big.  Lets hope I’ve chosen well – the last 2 weren’t that earth shattering …

Hey, take a peek at all the geeks gravitating to the powerpoints and see 3 macs in a ros! – that’s Chris S in the foreground …

 

Well, this started with an example of somebody using a wikki – or did I miss something? Then SURFgroups as a means of providing research blogs and forums as a means of allowing people to work together more effectively. Well, still not heard anything radical – I see where we are going now… Not where I had thought it might from the outline. Now the Educause Connect site – a show of hands indicates that not that many have joined in…

I wonder if we (HE) need to recognise that other people do some things so much better than we do and that we should use those.  However, and this is what they should be talking about – what happens when this use becomes a corporate dependency?  Do we rely on facebook – I don’t thnk so – but we can’t create anything near as good – and even if we did, nobody would use it because we have asked them to!  Maybe this is why MS are so interested in FB because it has its base and if you can then turn it into something that is backed up with a sla for institutions then maybe we’re getting somwhere – but the balance has to be fine so as not to loose the very thing that gives it value – the people …

We’re still talking in the room about terminology and taxonomy ugh. There will be a question and answer session but I wont ask – not because I’m scared but because it is completely ergonomically impossible for me to get a look in – literally – to the person with the mike …

Anyway, next bit is about the horizon report – how many people know about it? Nobody – well, lets move on  then.  Am I sounding grumpy?

The thing is, I know that it is hard to bring people along who are so so far away from what we are capable of today – but this room is not full of those – or it shouldn’t be anyway, should it?  We’re just looking at another basic example of a wikki! Hold on, its sounding a little more intersting – its a tool for bringing new tech in HE ideas together and voting on the – I’ll check it out – hz08 is apparently the key tag to use on del.icio.us etc

The (un)rest of Tuesday … or Super Tuesday !

[NB This blog post has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2008!] 

Sorry, folks, 2 posts in one day!  The visit to the oober library was not all that happened on Tuesday …

The (un)rest of Tuesday

As I write, I’m sitting alone (except for my Macbook), eating a stunning bowl of chicken and pasta at a table in a restaurant adjacent to my hotel and listening to Elvis on the radio. He is singing “When will you be mine” (if that’s the title) and just out the window is the car wash that he brought his pink Cadillac to every day when he was here in the early sixties making a film about the world fair I think.  This was one of the many facts that came out of the wild man who captained the amphibious vehicle I travelled on today – “Ride the Ducks”  As somebody who is feeling the lack of company while being surrounded by hundreds of people, I was wonderfully surprised to suddenly be part of an experience that was one to remember for many many years to come – and one that I would recommend to anyone visiting Seattle above all else that I’ve so far discovered (with the possibility of REI – see below).

A wonderfully entertaining trip through the streets of Seattle then around lake Union and back again – with an amusing commentary and lots of interesting facts along the way.

For example, Seattle is not only a city of bridges – but one of outdoor art. Do you know that every new corporate building has to contribute one per-cent of the building cost to outside art?  What a fantastic idea – and it really shows in downtown Seattle.

 

As well as seeing the “house” from Sleepless in Seattle (I don’t remember a house in the film – but then it’s a chic-flick so I may have allowed my mind to wonder), we also saw loads of house boats and floating homes (the latter don’t have motors or steering gear).  It’s true and it’s completely amazing that people pay 3 million dollars for a good floating house on the lake. I had no idea – and one large one even has the ability to be driven around – I just don’t get it.

Well, I did the shops in a big way today – walking for nearly 7 hours in total. But I couldn’t find a native American doll for Gwenny or anything for Martha.  Aaron is just too easy to buy for though and I could have spent a fair whack. I even eventually found Eddie Bauer – oh why did they leave the UK.  But it was unsurprisingly full of winter stock and, as a man who carries a fair bit of personal insulation around with him; I didn’t find anything of interest. I generally hate shopping with a perfect hatred but Liz made me promise that I’d look for some stuff for my (apparently) ailing wardrobe. Amusingly, I gave her a call while in EB and she was on the web looking at the shop stock, directing me to items for consideration!

Then I thought I’d take a stroll up to a shop called REI that that dear lady on the plane had told me about. It’s an outdoor gear type place – kind of like Blacks – but on steroids!  It’s massive and fully equipped with so much great gear.  I found the shopper within me and I excelled!  If you are ever in Seattle, you should do the Ducks and then do REI.

ITS THE BEST SHOOP EVER – PERIOD!

The shop opens till 9pm and it was dark by the time I headed out down John St for Dexter Av where my rather uninspiring hotel room is located.  WHAT IS WRONG WITH JOHN STREET?

On the map, it looks like any other road – which I expected to bring me down the hill, back towards downtown and my hotel area.  Not so.  The street suddenly stopped at a car park – that happed to be at the top of a building! Okay, so we have a chap with a white stick and too many bags from REI standing in a completely dark car park in a foreign city thinking “oh”.

Needless to say, this is not the first sight-related situation I’ve found myself in on this trip – but its parr for the course and no blog would be long enough to mention them all – only the near death ones, lol! Have to say though, Seattle is not that good for VIPs (visually impaired people).  For example, some of the “cross now” lights are white and some green – just like the lights next to them that tell the cars to go. In general though, cars are very considerate and one can usually follow somebody else.

(Sidebar: I just recognised Brian Adams, Summer of 69 playing on the radio within the first 2 notes – how sad is that?)

Anyway, back to the car park … I found some stairs that went down and down, darker and darker – you get the picture… but they stopped at a locked door.  Long story short, I went back up the road a little, then across, then down the next one and am eating with all my body parts intact and a darn fine new pair of boots!

All in all, TOP DAY.  Good fun, good exercise, good food.

Well, they’re closing up now and I feel like an extra from Cheers sitting here. More (hopefully work related) waffle to follow tomorrow.

The oober library (Seattle Public Library) – RFID meeting

After popping to the Washington State Convention Centre to register early for tomorrow’s Educause conference, I went to a pre-planned meeting at the Seattle Public Library.

 

(note the glass cleaning truck that seems to live there!) 

It’s definitely an oober library! Today’s meeting was with Jackie Zajanc.  On the way, I popped into Seattle’s’ Finest Coffee to get whatever the guy recommended – which happened to be a large Maple White Mocha with an extra shot, whipped cream and sprinkles.  You can safely assume that I was UP THERE by the time I arrived at the library.  I arrived with my coffee cup (there are hardly any bins in Seattle) but was not alone as everybody in the library seemed to be carrying one… (a coffee cup, not a bin!)

Anyway, the large security guard (seated a long way from the exit) called my host who came within a minute.  This person was instantly engaging, with a sparkling sense of humour and witty rapport that frankly made my caffeine induced zeal appear somewhat introverted in comparison!  She typified the fresh, helpful and engaging nature of the whole building and I instantly felt at home.

Straight into the RFID then – I wanted to know the bad points and the things to avoid if/when we go down the RFID route within our new City Centre Campus at the mighty University of Wales Newport.

We began at one of the entrances – there are several and none of them have desks nearby them, which represents the first problem.  No physical barriers means that when the buzzer sounds, people can still just walk through – and in fact, when I was there on Sunday, somebody did (no – it wasn’t me!)  They feel that they do not lose any more stock than they did before RFID but they don’t really know. Anecdotally, some of their branch libraries actually turn the exit gates off because (I assume) it avoids having to not do something (or rely on the volunteers) when the buzzer sounds.

My utopian vision of RFID was a system that would allow a simple scan of the entire building to indicate what stock was mis-shelved and/or what was missing.  Not so – well, not automatically with their system any rate.  It would be possible to go along each stack manually scanning with a handheld device using their system, but they haven’t tried doing this yet. What’s more, their barrier sensors don’t pick up the detail of any tags that go through – only whether it has been deactivated or not – shame as they instantly know what had gone out this way.

They have an issues / returns desk but it is fairly small as 90 per-cent of their users self issue.  This works pretty well – bearing in mind that the system is now some 4 years old at least and we won’t be going live until 2010 – giving us about 7 years extra technology to do the things I want it to!

Since going live, a standard has emerged for the tags – and they are slowly moving across to the new standard.  They are also moving across to copper tags instead of aluminium (why do people in the US drop a vowel on that word?). The alu ones apparently aren’t too robust – yet to see about the copper.  Interestingly, one user (a member of staff) borrowed a paperback and, finding that it smelled musty, did her normal trick of putting it in the microwave – you can guess the rest!

At the start, it was hard to get people to use the self issue – and interestingly, the staff demanded that the barcode be retained! This was because it made it easier to look up a book when re-issuing over the phone.

The staff have also found other problems – namely, that users are making more of the reserve function and being able to monitor it over the web, now demand their books to be trolleyed and ready for pick up in a much shorter time than was the case before RFID etc – gobbling up much of the freed up staff time from self-issue.

We then went to look at the returns sorting function.  Now this is a piece of work!  It used to sort onto trolleys but that didn’t work too well so they recently replaced the trolleys with purpose designed bins – where do they get all the money? CyMAL take note   The drop bins automatically sort via the conveyor belt and RFID into appropriate bins for trollying and shelving by hand.

I overcame my British reticence (not) to talk to several people – staff and students – within the library.  They were from all walks of life, culture and society – using the library as simply a place to be and/or drink coffee/chat – or else, to use its resources, even if this extended only to sitting with a laptop and ripping CDs

It’s easy to see why people fall in love with this place – I did in a very short period of time – which is very much unlike me. Maybe it was the coffee, but I don’t think so.

 

Notes from Redmond

Monday is Microsoft day.  Off to Redmond where 35,000 of Microsoft’s 75,000 employees work. Its about half an hours drive from Seattle, across Lake Washington where the road seems very near to the water!  Breakfast here was good – MS eggs are very compatible with their bacon but I can’t get to appreciate the placement of savoury and fruit plus sweet pastry on the same plate.  And why can’t Americans supply ordinary tea? 

 As I found out much later during a shuttle ride to see the Microsoft store, there are over 100 buildings in the area that the shuttle company (driving Prius cars and other vans) ferry people around to with nothing more than a call on 39000.  The driver showed me a huge hole in the ground that is intended for 5000 cars to be parked under what is to become the new headquarters building apparently.  Yahoo are also moving here but frankly, I don’t see where they would go! Its just an incredibly large beast of a setup!  The shop was very good value mind you – MS employees can get things like Halo 3 for 25 dollars and all manner of hardware, software and everything you can imagine with MS written on it for a reasonable price.

I’m jolly pleased to be here but was made to think by a comment from one of my favourite colleagues, Chris yesterday.  She said that she was not coming to the trip because she didn’t think that any supplier deserved a whole day of her time.  Me?  Well, I’m in it for the experience and the networking – plus the chance to visit the MS shop and get a copy of Halo 3 at half price!

The lecture theatre is very nice with powerpoints, network sockets and wifi all present.

Well, we started with Anthony Salcito who introduced MSs vision to align the mission with users’ needs. Its no longer about technology but about people and improvement.

Ralph Young , vp for global public sector.  MS has chaged its mission to helping people achieve their potential.  It has “changed the dial” from microsoft drive-by licensing experience to see how the company can learn about helping people work and play together.  Education is MSs biggest business with 23 percent of software leaving the doors going there. As part of his presentation, he put up a slide that showed how much money MS employees had given to external companies.  There was something odd about this – my employer had no idea who I give my tithe or other giving to – and neither should it know or tell anyone imo.

Next up, Anoop Gupta – another education VP who was once technical adviser to Bill himself.  Hey – each speaker so far has spoken without notes and each mentions Bill – there is obviously a rigorous presentation methodology here …  He went way over time – and over my head!

Break – microsoft cake, yogurt and lots of it plus free coke etc blah  …

And next, Olaf Hubel and the collaborative campus with live demo… 

Olaf went through to complete toolset of MS web 2.0 type technologies and how they might work within an organisations governance framework inside and outside a University – including skydrive.  Look forward to the demo now …

First, Walter Hard speaks about Windows Live @ edu  <—- looks interesting, we’re going through the objections of outsourcing a major app like this …  in use by 6 million students in 35 countries. Looks like a combination of facebook and MSN live – apps and widgets can be inported to create a rich info page for students etc.

I think that what I really like is the orange background on the slides, lol!

Along comes Eric Gilmore, senior product manager for office live – www.officelive.com to give a demo.

The uniform is definitely open neck shirt, no tie and a jacket.  Phew, I dressed okay, lol!

Okay, here’s the demo being given now…  shareview – codename tahiti – ooooo! A good demo of collaboration bringing lots of collab tools together including voice etc.  Dunno why they insist on sticking to using the term office – students don’t work in an office. And I’d say that you really need to be familiar with the individual applications before you would dare to jump into the combination scenario.

Back to Olaf and his talk about integrating non-MS environments with sharepoint …

Unified communications – Olaf has presence awareness wherever he is now – phone and outlook amend his presence status.

He showed the MS roundtable camera …

Then collaboration and the full sharepoint suite – more than you get with the free version of course. One bit I liked was the slide share thing that unpacks slides of you and your colleagues then allows you to pick and choose  and updates the list etc.  All workflow managed of course.  Groove client allows external people to collaborate with docs within your security structure.  Demo of workflow generally within sharepoint and office apps.  “We really do support all the different browsers”.  Right. Comprehensive search index facility including ability to integrate pdf filters etc. and a what did you mean functionality – whatever that means!  Social ranking methods included.

And so to lunch – no way, can’t eat any more.

Daniel Rasmus – future guy. .. What are the things we could not possibly predict over the next 10 years and what are our options for dealing with them?

Battery going – grrrr … I wonder if anyone here will have a mac power lead? 

4×4 grid with middle line from centralised top down at the top to decentralised at the bottom.  Bordered local on left to borderless international on the right.  top right is proud tower, bottom right is freelance planet (as in Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind), bottom left is frontier friction and top left continental drift.

Why do we give an employee a pc?  We don’t by them cars or bicycles?  Trends do not point toward destructive events. One world, always on, transparent, evolving workforce. Babybomers about to retire, gen x’ers looking at 19 jobs and world population falling. The digital generation mixes it all up and blurrs all the lines. Lack of corporate trust and personal success focus only.  Internet trust more than normal social trust. They don’t want to be told how, just what.  When they come, the bring their network with them – and they chat!  No boundaries. 

He has formed an information worker board of the future. Open learning environment not constrained to a classroom. Parents in the classroom and helping educaoters to learn too via reciprocal mentoring so that the kids can see the teachers learning too. Learning style alignment with tools and people.

Rethinking the school year and staying connected to learning. Couple of images of the desktop of the future for teacher and student - indicating status and activity.

The task is not what have we not seen – but what have we not though of about what is here now?

Now, Patric Heversi regarding infrastructure platforms (oh no, what a contrast of topics, lol). Server cores getting better blah blah, more security etc, easier upgrades …

Behrooz Chitsaz on Research and Innovation.  Put off by his first slide that was aimed at showing the new types of technology available but showed an old xbox and some fairly out of date phones. Check out http://research.microsoft.com for more info.

Lots of research ideas but nothing radical mentioned. They are working on indexing video and voice plus still feel that tablet PCs are the thing of the future.  No mention of table computers oddly – and there’s a whole lot more on offer in some of the older TED talks (www.ted.com)  He thought that if cost profiles continued to fall, it would soon be cheaper to buy lcd tvs than whiteboards …

Dr Jim Ptaszynski has a name stranger than mine and told us how Halo had taught him to be a better teacher.

His talk began with a Halo 3 trailer with the words “You are all vermin …” coming from the mouth of a slaying monster.  Ah, I thought, at last we’ve gotten honest with eachother after all!  Sorry, couldn’t resist.  Shouldn’t grumble – if you come to MS headquarters, what do you expect from them apart from the PR machine in overdrive?

Anyway, his main point was that 3000 hours of gameplay had been analyzed to find the “golden mean of fun” within the game and make it bigger than any box office release on its first day or even week.  Why aren’t we finding the golden mean of learning with as much zeal?  Well, I’m suggesting that most lecturers I know don’t have multi-million dollar budgets and 3000 hours to user test their learning materials – but I get his point.

He referred to Derk Bek’s book Our Underachieving Colleges and the fact that there was no incentive to achieve built into the system. Today’s students have changed the way they learn but teaching has remained largely the same.  He ended as we’d begun fwith a reference to the fact that “we’ve changed and we deeply want a relationship with you”.  Some resources from him:

http://microsoft.com/higher_education

http://innovateonline.info

http://microsoft.com/education/hec

Below are some spare pics including Microsoft tree – note the special soil block your garden must be made of to run it – and other pics …

 

 

 

Slipperless in Seattle

Well, it’s a stupid title – but its true – I had my slippers all out ready to travel but then forget to pack them and I’m already missing them!

Now, this is going to be a combination of work and non-work info as I’m attending the Educause 2007 conference in Seattle from Wednesday through Friday (see how I’m learning the language?!) but have Sunday and Tuesday to myself while visiting Microsoft’s head quarters on Monday.

Okay then, since I last had enough sleep (seem to have missed a night somewhere), I’ve experienced several personal firsts.  First time in Seattle, first time trying out Vista – and it’s on a mac (which I haven’t tried for 10 years) – and today was my first try of an American super Church!

Well, I’ll begin with a little about my journey.  Having used my mac to watch 5 episodes of 24 while travelling, I had my first experience of Vista…  Put the DVD in and it moaned about codec drivers or something and just wouldn’t work – this is s fresh install of it.  So I turned to Mac OSX and well, it just played.  Wish I’d brought a mouse though as the Macs only have one mouse key on the keyboard.  The plane ride was okay but sitting for 9.5 hours in one place next to a lady who really wasn’t in the mind of the seat designer, isn’t my idea of relaxation.  The lady was very friendly and she told me about her trip to Scotland and how nice people were.  She feared that I would definitely find American people unfriendly in comparison with the Brits.  But the entertainment system was okay – watched 4 films – the latest Die Hard (well, what can I say – as expected), a forgettable film about somebody building an ark (okay, single acts of random kindness are good things), sunshine (rubbish – seriously, from a sci-fi fan, don’t bother), and Ocean’s 13 (felt like I’d seen it before).

So, way too much TV, way too little sleep and a breakfast that almost killed me – when did “egg and bacon” become a large slab of steak with several days efforts from a chicken piled on top of a huge mound of fried somethings?  And it costs so much less than in the UK.

Okay, after breakfast, I managed to drag my stuffed body to Mars Hill (www.marshillchurch.org).  I’d been thinking of where I should go on Sunday morning but the choice seemed endless.  A friend recommended Mars Hill, and I’d read about it because the Pastor (Mark Driscoll) has his fans and his fervent critics.  I was warned that I may not like the music   Well, here’s my experience of it…

The Church meets on several campuses that all take relays from the main one (the one I went to) and then have local elements.  There are 5 services per day that I was told all have the same sermon but a progressively livelier band!

The Ballard campus (main or “equipping”) venue is a little like a medium sized conference venue.  It has a main hall with seating for what I’d say is around 500 poss more – with lots of reception desks, ante-rooms, foyer facilities etc.  The main hall had a stage up front and two large projection screens either side and several large plasma displays all around the hall – each displaying the activity on the front stage.  The ceiling was black and the lights dimmed and rose according to what was happening.  The lights on the side walls also changed colours – blue, red etc to change the ambience occasionally. It was all controlled by a central mixing desk and people would occasionally pass with cameras – I presume in order to get different shots – as the sermons are systematically placed on the Internet.

Anyway, to the service itself…   It kind of just began – I say “kind of” because far from everybody was seated when the person at the front started speaking and saying why we all come together. In fact, people passed my seat throughout the service and returned with cups of drink from the excellently serviced drinks areas that I found afterwards!  There were two songs to begin with – all heavily accompanied by electric guitar and drums – but more on that later…

The preaching was good and lasted for about an hour all in all.  Pastor Driscoll appears to be doing a series on “The Rebel and …” which this week was looking at Philippians 4 v 12-17 and focused on our reactions to suffering, personal and in general.  It was the kind of thing that Wyn Hughes (my own Pastor at Heath www.heath-church.org) might have preached himself!  Very good and useful sermon.  I may have missed it – but it didn’t appear to distinguish between the sufferings that may come about as a result of being a Christian specifically (i.e. “take up thy cross and follow me”) as opposed to the more general category experienced by all.

Near the beginning, there was some video footage of this week’s news bulletins as the Pastor felt that many of us simply avoid the suffering that takes place in the world and wrap ourselves in our little cocoons of joy.  It also ended with a video (I presume made in-house) about Charlotte Elliott (1789-1871) who wrote “Just as I am” while suffering great pain and bed bound for many years.

We then went on to “sing” that great hymn to close.  I say “sing” but here’s where I get off the Mars Hill bus because I was so sincerely disappointed at this.  Some may find it odd that “I” say this – but I’ve nothing intrinsically against electric guitars and drums per-se.  However, my problem is that one could hardly hear one’s self sing let alone the other people in the hall.  The whole thing was dominated by very loud banging, crashing and twanging.  The musicians and the lead vocal guy were really talented but it was just so out of place in my opinion.  Don’t get me wrong – an organ can do just as much damage and often does (oops, did I really say that?!) – but this didn’t give the people a chance.  Again, it’s honestly not that I have anything against that type of music – it’s just that it was totally out of place.  This was a group of people gathered together for worship but the only thing that could be heard was the noise being made by the few people on the stage.  I just think that they are missing so much by doing it this way.  If it was quieter it might have been better – but I doubt you can do what that chap did with a drum kit in a quiet manner.

Communion was available during this singing and people were randomly wondering to the front to get their stuff and return to their seats to take it at their own pace (or so I found out afterwards). 

Frankly, it didn’t seem too friendly I’m afraid to say.  I would have loved to have gone to somebody’s house for lunch and to have experienced a bit of real America.  But, in spite of writing to the Church’s email address a couple of weeks before coming – and in spite of approaching 11 people to speak to them and say Hi myself, nobody returned my email and nobody engaged me in conversation or tried to find anything out about me beyond answering my questions regarding where to sit etc.  I sat by 3 young people who I was delighted to chat to for a few minutes after the service, but that was it.  I approached several others after the service but again, factual responses with no desire to find out anything about me or whether I was hungry!

(the sermon as preached in the evening is available to watch / download etchere: http://www.marshillchurch.org/sermonseries/philippians/week_03.aspx )

My afternoon was spent wondering around down town Seattle which was fun if a bit unusual for me on a Sunday!  I wanted to see if I could find my rendezvous for the bus that is taking me to tomorrow’s meeting at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters.  I spent a good while in the Seattle Public Library which is excellent – and I have a meeting there planned for Tuesday to find out about their use of RFID.  I took the liberty of updating my facebook status on their public PCs but was curious to note that while they are password protected, you could approach a desk and pick up a piece of paper with the day’s password on it! 

I was also  surprised to note that there were so many people using the PCs but when I asked two different members of staff about whether there was any analysis of the type of people that use the equipment, I drew a monosyllabic blank.

Maybe it’s me or maybe the lady on the plane was right.  Americans are normally completely besottingly friendly and polite when providing you with a service but not necessarily always so when not serving you – which is maybe the other way around to the UK!  Who knows?

In fact, I have had several good chats today with non service providers!  There were a couple of guys in the library that I asked why they used it.  They told me that they came with their laptops to rip music! Then there was the chap who complimented me on my The North Face fleece, saying that they are very popular in Seattle.

Everyone says that you have to go to the market by the bay.  I did have a wonder down there but it was pretty much like Cardiff market – which I suppose is fairly unusual for the US so fair enough.

This evening I met up with some really lovely UCISA colleagues.  Funny how facebook meant that certain people I had never really spoken to before were aware of my house move and and what the location of the new one looked like!

Speaking of which, its nearly midnight here so must be around 8am at home.  Think I’ll phone wifey and the kids to wish them a good day …