A New Beginning

A new beginning
What do I do for a living, and what I get up to in the outside world?
I Work in a UK university as an Application Manager and my team are responsible for our student facing systems. We look after and develop applications. Our aim in these applications is to try to ensure our students and staff’s time at University is as productive as possible. Be it in the public or private sector large organisations tend to gather useful data in silos and the gatekeepers tend to guard their data jealously. Our aim is to unify this data and present meaningful information to our students and staff. We do this via a mixture of technological solutions and bridge building. It would be fair to say at first it hard, but once we had the first two or three integrations department saw the usefulness to staff and students and came up with their own ideas.
Below is a list of systems we have developed/support; each of these systems is personalized to the student by retrieving relevant information from a number of University systems   

·         Moodle VLE

·         Mobile App (based on Ombiel’s CampusM product)

·         Student Portal

·         A file repository system based on Equella

·         A video repository system based on Kaltura

·         A number of web services that tie our systems together and allow the students to see as much as we can a seamless approach

·         The Internal Student Survey that is run three times a year

·         PC Availability

·         Learning Technology (Technology for smarter working e.g. tablets, AR, QR codes with Learning Innovations)

·         Photo Upload as part of Self Enrolment

·         Student exam results on line

·         Student Resit results

To give an idea on usage our student portal had 4 Million login events during the first two terms on the 14/15 academic year and it had 98,840,954 hits.
To give an idea on how many different devices our students use the portal was contacted on 501,960 unique IPs addresses.

Public Art

When we visit new towns and cities I always like looking  at public sculpture I believe they tell us more about the place then all the official views put together. One of my favorites is the one above, if you dont know it, it celebrates the Last Alarm a roll call of Fire Service staff who give their lives to save others and of course its from Toronto.

Hello Again

Well as they say that was a long time between drinks!

Well playing badminton is over, the long battle with the knee is over and the knee won. In the end my physio offered me the choice of walking or carrying on playing badminton. But on the plus side she did introduce me to the rowing machine. I don't think she planned for me to work so hard at it, but that is one of the draw backs of being competitive, if you take out one way of  being competitive  you are likely to find another.
 

Juries in the dock in the UK

This is written as a response to an article in the Guardian 26/01/2010

Before the justice system gets all pompous about juries and their behaviour, it would be worth letting them see the world from the position of a jury member. The dingy waiting room, the food vouchers that don’t cover the cost of the food and of course god forbid you want fresh fruit. How about we make Judges and the barristers act as jurors as an exercise in seeing how the other half lives. But let’s be kind and only run it for two weeks no long cases for them.

Day one we start with queuing waiting to be searched. Sign in and wait. After a period someone will call names, it may be yours or it could be someone on the second week being called for a case. But you will be called. Now you get to see the video and a quick talk by someone who may have presentation skills but then again they may not, it’s the luck of the draw.

Now the waiting starts, the rest of the day some of your cohort will be called but let’s assume you don’t, you wait until 4pm then you are sent home. Next morning you come prepared you bring some work, book to read etc. but the search now takes longer and you get dirty looks from the security guards. Again you sign in and wait, did I say the room has the poor lighting and the chairs will have seen better days. You wait someone will call names, if you are lucky you will get a case, if not you will wait until 4pm, and be sent home. When I did mine I had 9 days of not being called then on my last day I drew a six week case!

So at last you are called, you are taken to a court and let’s assume you are sworn in and not send back to the waiting room (believe me you have seen more the enough of the waiting room). The judge warns you about talking to anyone about anyone the case, not to use the internet etc. Now you find you have a notepad and pencil if you are lucky to make notes. So you are ready to be a jury member but at this point and any number of times during the case you will be sent out of the court to the jury room while the judge and barristers discuss legal issues, this may be for ten minutes or two hours. But you will be bored, no books as you have left your bag in the court room.

Back to the court room, the barristers may be good. Sometimes you want to shout ask the bloody question and stop waffling. This of course is repeated day in and day out, a mixture of trying to follow the witnesses and being sent out

Again you take notes by the way you can’t take your notes out of the court room and write them up. Two days, or six weeks later this is all you have to go on. And no you can’t have a transcript of the case.

The case ends, the judge does their summary. Now you have a decision how much weight do you give the judges summary? Do you follow them blindly if so why have we spent x days trying to follow the case, on the other hand they have significantly more experience then you.

Back to the jury room where you debate the case, it can be quick or it can be a long time but your decision will affect the accused and others it’s not something you can take lightly. And now you find out how good or bad your note taking is as the twelve of you try to recall the ins and out of the case

Your time as a jury member is up; you will have been bored, paid too much for food and drink spent way too much time sat in the dingy jury waiting room

An update at last

Well folks its a long time between blogs. I been a bit busy, new job working hard at the allotment at the weekend but not playing badminton.
I am now working on two new projects live@edu A Microsoft hosted email solution for education and Share point acting as a portal both good fun, but like all IT projects sometimes you just want to bang your head on the nearest wall.
Badminton is bad news, the knee is not getting any better, this may be my last competitive season with a max of 2 or 3 games but I have found rowing machines

All England Badminton Championship

Just spent an enjoyable week watching the All England at the NIA. I think the NIA is a great venue but the seats and the food are terrible. Junk food for 6 days is more then a person can stand. The one thing badminton fans have in common is that they take exercise and most likely look after their diets. So please NIA more fruit, salads and decent bread please. And as for the seats they are an exercise in torture; they may be OK for a gig but when you are there for 5 or 6 hours for a number of days it is a right pain. For those who don't know the seating at the NIA you cant fit your feet on the floor unless you have very small feet or are willing to have your legs angled under your seat for hours at a time. Or you can put your feet on a 2 or 3 inch high thin separator but that means your legs are at an odd angle and your body weight is not spread on your bum but centred on one part so a numb bum!

English Nationals Badminton

On Friday (1st Feb) is the start of the nationals and the start of a three day badminton watching marathon. If you get the chance I would strongly recommend going, they are held at the Velodrome in Manchester. Not sure if this is the case for the players but for the fans it is a very relaxed event and you can find your self drinking coffee with Gail Emms (who sadly has just dropped out this year) or discussing tactics with a national coach

Help Desk

For my sins today I have been on the Helpdesk, (staff shortage since you kindly ask).
So what do I think of my customers?
They are nice, say please and thank you and just want a little help so they can get on with their work.

There is one major difference form my time as a student. They do a lot more group work and of course they need to talk to their co-workers. So in our Drop-in (just under 190 PCs) there is a steady hum of conversation and I can see how it would annoy some people. On the plus side I think these young people are better at communicating then was my generation and of course jaw jaw is better then war war.

Badminton

Do you folks ever think you are going round in a circle? For the last few months I have working hard in the gym three nights a week to get my knee back in shape so that I can play badminton again. Everything was going well, two weeks ago I played on a Thursday night at the club and had some good games, but on Sunday my knee went again and I back at stage one. Lots of knee pain, lots of exercises and the need to see the physio again. Some times you cant win.

Allotments

My wife and I have a new hobby, we have taken over an allotment. Now when you think of allotments do you think of neat rows of veg maybe with some flowers adding a little colour? I wish ours was like that! Maybe one day it will be, but now its a waste land of brambles grass and very compressed soil. Last weekend we removed a seven year old Birch tree from the middle of the allotment now I love trees and will be planting Apple and Pear trees but I ask you a Birch tree. I have a feeling that our plot has not been worked on for at least seven years. But its taking shape it may take a couple of years to get it into shape but who needs to hurry

Weekend in Cardiff Millennium Magic

As well as playing badminton, all my life I have been a Rugby League fan and a fan of Wigan in particular. So this weekend I and few thousand others will be taking the trip down to Wales to see 6 games in one weekend. We play St Helens our local rivals. Its odd how things go in sport, at one time we could not lose to Saints, but now I think its 5 wins on the trot for them. But with a bit of luck its our turn to win.

Badminton or the lack of it

Well folks, I back not playing. I was still having problems with my knee, so off to the physiotherapists. It looks like I have patellar tendinosis. So no badminton for me for a while, and minimise the number of stairs I walk up and down in a day. So I have gone from 40 or more flights a day (I work in a multi story office block and I would normally use the stairs rather then the lift) I hate to think what this is doing to may my general fitness) Lots of exercises from the physio,

Badminton Part 3

On Thursday I will be going to see a physiotherapist about the my knee. Its been on the cards for a while. It will be good to see what their view is

Playing Badminton Part 2

Its the day after playing Badminton for the first time in 3 months. And How do I feel? I was right in that I am limping round work, the knee is giving me some stick. But I enjoyed playing even though I only played two games. The first game was an odd one I thought I was going on for a mixed, but the ladies who play for our first team wanted to play as a pair. So Mike who I have never seen before, never mind played as a pair were on a hiding to nothing. We should win but given I was careful about stressing my knee and Mike and I did not know who was going to play what shot. Well the women were kind to me making Mike do the running and allowing me the time to get to the shot we won, but I think they could have made it much harder by making me work. Then I went for a mens that was hard work we lost 15 -12 and the pair we were playing do play for the the C team and some times for the B it went well

Playing Badminton

Well this week I will be playing Badminton again for the first time in about 3 months. I picked up a knee injury and thinking about the time I realised it was the first time in over 40 years I have gone 3 months without playing some form of competitive sport. Like most people who play sports, time away from the game is a pain and for me it has been very odd. I have missed the challenge, the wins and the losses but most of all I have missed the rush of playing the game. So come Friday I will be limping into work no doubt, taking stick from the team but in my heart I will know it is worth it.

The role of IS managers in the brave new world

Well where do you start? As IS professionals we grow up in a rigid system with a specific subset of people having rights to machines, file stores etc while the rest have little or no rights. The PC revolution with people having “their own” PC on the desk started to weaken this stranglehold, but it didn’t take long for the system people working for Microsoft and its competitors like Novell to work out how to bring these unruly, unco-operative souls back under the domain of the IT department. We now have Group Policies running under active directory or E-Directory and we control the experience the user has. Yes some IT shops are more liberal then others; they let their users set their own screen saver and desktop, but others the corporate look and feel is king. But we are still very much in control and we feel good.

I think I will upset a number of you now, I think we are wrong. The user, the customer should be able to use the PC as they see fit. Does it worry me that Joe down the hall has Itunes installed and is listening to music while he works, or that Jackie writes excel macros that make my hair curl. Nope if it makes them happy let them do it. They are working harder, the PC becomes their tool to do their work in the way that is best for them. Sure we need to protect the PCs against virus and spyware attacks but we would need to do that anyway. Virus and spyware writers don’t care about out our group policies they attack weakness in the O/S

Ok allowing the users to do things does mean we have to monitor the software installed to make sure we are not breaking the law, but if we find out that half of our users are using Winzip evaluation edition we know we are not meeting the needs of our customers and we need to go out and buy Winzip or teach our users about the joys of uncompressing in XP. Whatever we do we have found a need. Think about it, how often have you seen a new building put up with formal pathways laid out, and how long before informal pathways develop taking the quickest or most needed route?

And now web2 with blogs, podcasts etc where the user is king how do we face up to this new challenge. For most of us we like to control, just look the systems we design and administer for examples of how we like things to be. Web2 is going to move us out of our comfort zone. Sure we can ensure they can’t do it at work, but as more of the population has access to PCs at home and broadband internet access we are in danger of having two cultures a vibrant dynamic one outside work and a conservative safety first one inside. Is this the best approach? In these competitive days we need to get the most out of our staff, harness their skills creativity and if they have a little fun on the way all the better.