Distributed Thinking

Brian Kelly has written a clever post about a couple of April Fool jokes that were published by the mainstream media this year.  Apparently the Times Higher Education supplement suggested that social media use will be included in the determination of university rankings.  Like Brian, I wonder whether this might come to pass sooner than the THES writer seems to think.  I'm pretty sure a Facebook presence is an important recruitment tool.  We use Twitter for emergency alerts.  Our graduation ceremonies are streamed live and on Second Life so that our distance education students can take part.  And my perception is that some universities are doing more than us. Who's the fool now?

I regret that I haven't been able to blog this month.  This isn't for a lack of suitable topics.  It's because I've taken on some extra work to cover for someone who is in turn covering for someone who is leaving. while at the same time negotiating with several people to plan for how to replace that person.  All this has been both complicated and time-consuming, and this blog is one of the things that I've had to drop for a while. Right now, I'm about to head for somewhere warm for a week with the family.  I plan to be incommunicado and forget about work for a few days!

I had a couple of illuminating meetings with Prof Ian Pirie, who is leading a university-wide project to improve how we support students and help them take more control of their learning within the university.  Ian has a bold and wide-ranging plan, of which the Personal Tutors system that we implemented over the summer is just the beginning.  He has been working with sample groups of up to 100 students, of all subjects, years and backgrounds, to find what works for them and where the university falls short.  Key to the project will be improving feedback, while other elements will include giving them a "one-stop shop" for inquiries and giving them better information about their course options.  Existing initiatives such as the Personalised Timetabling project also form part of the vision. To date, I've been somewhat on the periphery of this, although some of my staff have implemented the IT systems.  So I found it really helpful to learn how the work we have do...

We are still near the beginning of our journey into a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) although the pace is growing.  This is why I find succinct blog posts from others about their SOA experience to be very helpful.   An example is this one from jdubray . I particularly like his observation about reuse.  He suggests that you won't implement an interface now that accurately guesses what everybody else will want in three years' time.  Instead, people who use the interface now will benefit from the changes and improvements that are made in newer versions over the next three years.

We have a date for our move to new offices.  On April 18th, most of Applications Division will be moving from Old College to two refurbished floors above the Moray House Library, between Holyrood House and the Royal Mile.  The new space will be better equipped than our rather dated offices and will even include a staff room where people can eat their lunch, a luxury that we currently lack. The planning has reached an advanced stage.  Last week we reviewed the specs for the audio-visual kit.  Our new meeting rooms will have wall-mounted display screens, which will make a pleasant change from having to book and set up our portable data projector.  We will also be able to use the displays to join video conferencing calls using Collaborate or Skype. In addition, we will have wall-mounted displays in some of the team areas.  In Development Services, we will use these to show live database and system monitoring, which will help us visualise the behaviour of o...

For a change, I had a week with very few meetings, which allowed me to progress some of the items on my long list of outstanding actions.  One of the things I spent some time on was the reorganisation of our Applications Architecture wiki pages, which have been ably improved over recent weeks by   Richard Good. This work has had rather a long gestation and remains a work in progress but we have reached the stage where we have circulated the link and asked our colleagues for feedback on the formats.   At the current time we are particularly looking to confirm the format for the Data and Service Registry, and for the list of External Standards. We have simplified the top level page, which now links to the following sub-pages: Introduction : What is an “Applications Architecture”, and information about the Governance Group. Principles and Patterns : The core principles of the group and “patterns” of how interfaces should be designed. Data and Service Regist...

It seems simple enough.  The project sponsor tells the business analyst what they want; the business analyst structures these requirements and documents them; the systems analyst translates this into a technical design; the developer implements the design; everyone checks it and then it goes into production.  Only everyone knows its not that simple. The idea of a "User Story" seems simple too.  The project team, which includes someone from the business unit, identify a feature that someone will need in the system.  They write it in a simple format: "As a , I want , so that I get .  They agree how they will know when the feature is implemented satisfactorily.  They give an estimate as to how long it will take, decide its priority, and if the priority is high enough then they implement it. This idea of user stories originated in Agile project methods and have several advantages over more traditional techniques for gathering requirements.  They are wr...

On Monday, undergraduate and taught postgraduate students returning for the new semester were greeted with a new e-mail service.  Using Microsoft's cloud-based system, Office 365, this new service gives students a modern web interface and a maximum mailbox size of 25GB each. The service also provides a new student e-diary. In due course, this will become an important source of information, as further projects will automatically populate students' diaries with personalised timetables and other key appointments.  In addition, students also have access to web versions of Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, Excel and OneNote; and space to create a personal web site. These are currently not explicitly supported by IS; we are simply giving students access to this functionality for them to use if they wish. A lot of work went into this move.  Last semester we moved research postgraduate students onto the staff e-mail systems, as feedback from the schools showed that this was the o...

For the past few months we have been investigating whether Drupal might be a suitable CMS for our university's web presence.  Several people in the university already use Drupal for smaller sites and we use it ourselves in that way.  It is popular and highly flexible.  It has been used for a number of highly visible sites around the world and so would likely handle the number of page hits that our central web site receives. The big question for us was whether the large number of modules that are available for Drupal could be managed in a consistent way across our large, devolved, institution.  The university has over 500 people who can edit some part or other of our central web site and we need mechanisms for managing this access.  We want to be able to share information between different parts of this distributed information architecture, a requirement that is very different from running a more centralised operation.  Meanwhile, Drupal modules are wri...

Over the last month or so we've been busy with our annual planning process. This is when we invite the service owners across the university to put forward proposals for work in the 2013-14 academic year.  Development Services have the task of giving a rough estimate of how much effort might be required for each proposal, so that the service owners, college registrars and heads of support group can decide what would make the best use of our time. This year we have tried to make the annual planning more "light touch".  For my management team, this means that we have given each project a simple estimate of Small, Medium or Large, rather than trying to assign a precise figure.  This makes a lot of sense, as the proposals are usually quite general at this stage and a detailed estimate would require far more time spent in understanding all the details of the potential implementation.  It also means that we can get the estimates done sooner and produce a first draft of th...

Several EDUCAUSE sessions tried to guess how changing trends in both society and in IT will affect the future of Higher Education.  One such was the second keynote session, which combined two presentations and a discussion on the theme of how the worlds of academia and work combine for students.  The point was made that only a third of post-secondary education takes place in universities (in the USA), with the other two-thirds happening in the corporate world.  On a more prosaic note, it was also noted that many students have to work just to support themselves during their degree, which can constrain when they are able to engage with their courses.  Both speakers suggested that a more flexible model of education may be needed, sometimes (often?) in collaboration with corporations. I wonder what my academic friends would say to this notion.  Many of them are strongly opposed to the idea that university education should primarily about preparing people for the w...

Learning analytics and business intelligence were major themes at this year’s EDUCAUSE conference . I attended a couple of sessions to see how other institutions are using these technologies and to learn more about these areas for myself. Our learning technologists are all engaged with these ideas but I personally didn’t know much about it so this was a good opportunity to learn something about it. John Doove gave a very interesting overview of several small projects funded by SURF , the Dutch equivalent of JISC . These were deliberately experimental, aimed at bringing people together to see what they could do. The results were both varied and neat and will form the basis for further work. This gave me a good overview of the sort of issues that learning analytics can investigate: Project 1 gained insight in the use of Learning objects (e.g. short instructional videos), showing that use of certain materials correlated to successful student outcomes. Project 2 compared course ...

I'm at the EDUCAUSE conference in Denver, learning about how other universities are using their IT.  This conference is a broad church, covering everything from corporate systems to learning technologies, with sessions on leadership and user engagement as well.  It's a useful forum to informally assess how well IT at the University of Edinburgh compares to other institutions around the globe (particularly in North America).  On the whole, we seem to be pretty good. The sessions on the first day were a bit of a mixed bag.  Clay Shirky gave a good opening talk about the power of open data in a connected world - the sort of thing he covered in his TED talk but covering more material.  The main point I took from his talk was that you can't judge what value people will put on your data before you make it available, because you don't know who will be interested in it for what reasons. The best talk was about change management at the University of Kansas.  ...

We (meaning the Applications Division of Information Services) have been in discussions with the Academic Registry to find a new way of working together.  It looks like the outcome is likely to be a joint team, combining staff from both divisions, to work on the core functionality of our student record system (EUCLID).  The new team will be colocated and will work together on the design, implementation and test of EUCLID projects. Some of the people involved are also looking at using Agile development techniques for some of these projects.  For example, we might ensure user representation on all projects, following an approach we used in a recent project for Finance.  We might base our requirements and prioritisation around "user stories".  And we might organise build work in short cycles with a higher emphasis on testing (both automated test suites and user testing). We have used Agile methods successfully on a couple of other projects in IS Apps and alread...

Evey project we undertake has a sponsor.  This may be someone in Academic Registry, in the Finance Department, a College, or any other area of the university.  The sponsor is the person who requests the project and in some cases also provides the funds to make it happen. Until recently, we called this person "the customer".  Which made sense in one way, as they were requesting and possibly paying for the project.  Calling them the customer encouraged us to focus on satisfying their requirements and steered us away from a purely IT-based view of the world. Of course, these people were usually senior managers and usually did not actually use the systems we were building or buying.  The users, or sometimes "end users", were a different group entirely.  Although I've never met someone who called themselves an "end user". The downside of these terms is that they aren't accurate and they obscure the requirements of the systems rather than illuminate...

When writing this blog, I'm always tempted to write about a current project, or a new IT technology, or some aspect of the service we provide.  This belies the fact that a lot of our job is about people, whether they are the people who use our systems, the people we work with in other parts of the University, or the people in our own teams.  One of the most important aspects of my job is to support my staff as they do the actual development work.  As development staff, we tend to immerse ourselves in the current interesting (or frustrating) problem, then the next project.  We focus on how we can improve systems, or processes, or ways of working. That is why this week I organised a small social evening to say a personal "Thank you" to everyone in Development Services for the work they have put in over the past year.  This was a time for looking back rather than forward, for considering the whole rather than the part, and for taking stock.  More prosaically...

We always plan to have the IT systems run smoothly at the start of the academic year.  This is the time when many new students first come to the university and find their way around, when personal tutors discuss their students' academic plans, and when the new systems we have implemented over the previous year come into full use.  It is usually this last point that can throw a spanner in the works.  This year, we installed a new learning environment, replacing the aging WebCT with Learn 9; we applied the annual upgrade to the EUCLID student record system (which is needed to cope with changes in government regulations, let alone improvements in functionality); we rolled out the first version of software to support personal tutors; we upgraded several databases from Oracle 9 (which is no longer supported) to Oracle 11, and we continued to upgrade our Cold Fusion servers. Although we test each of these systems, we can be caught out when staff and students start to use the ...

I was perhaps tempting fate with my previous post on this blog , as we had a crash on our student record system yesterday, in the middle of Freshers' week.  As the staff were mainly using the Personal Tutors system at the time, they saw this new system as the problem, and indeed we were investigating that as a potential cause ourselves. In fact the new system was not the problem.  The cause of the crash was actually a change we made to the database parameters back in May in order to improve the performance of a search operation on the student hub - the part of the student record system that gives academic staff information about their students.  Although we tested the change at the time, it was not possible to exactly duplicate the usage we see at the start of the new academic year.  It turned out that the high load on the student hub, combined with the high load on other areas of the system, was overloading one area of memory and causing the whole system to back u...

Our new system for Personal Tutors system launched last week, as part of the University's Enhancing Student Support initiative. From now on, each student will have a Personal Tutor who will help them get the best from their courses, become more confident learners and meet the challenges and opportunities of University life. Applications Division have implemented a simple IT system to support scheduled and ad-hoc meetings between undergraduate Students and their Personal Tutor or Student Support Team.  Both tutors and students can record notes of their meetings, which will then be available to those parties to view. From our perspective, this project was made challenging by the tight timescales and ongoing discussions about the requirements.  The Personal Tutors system will affect staff and students throughout the university and was initiated late in the academic year, which left us little time to find out how people wanted it to work.  Different people had different ...

One disappointment in the run-up to the new semester was that the upgrade to our university portal failed its load test.  In other words, when we tried running ithe new version with automated tests that simulated the number of staff and students who would be using it in real life, the time it took to display the login screen was too long to be acceptable. Hence we decided to delay the upgrade. The good news is that we have found the cause of the problem and we have a fix. So we should be able to give staff and students the enhanced version sometime around the middle of the semester.  An underlying point is that these tests are an important part of our quality assurance process. The portal is used every day by thousands of people and the poor performance we were seeing would have significantly affected their work.  We can take some satisfaction from the fact that we did catch the problem before putting the new system live. Ideally we would have run the load tests ear...