JISC Conference 2008

Yes, I am sad.  It’s 23.15 and after finishing watching shameless I can’t seem to sleep with thoughts buzzing around my head about the JISC Conference I’ve just returned from today.  I thoroughly enjoyed the day and thought it was excellently organised and the idea of including social applications an excellent step forward demonstrating its use within our community.

However, one thing that did bug me a little was that there was no wireless access in the main lecture theatres and parallel session rooms which meant that I couldn’t actually use them.  If I was really clever I would have enabled my twitter account to allow updates through text messages (doh).  Follow the upcoming link to see the days twitterings along with aggregated user generated content.  I also thought that this could have been explained a little bit better on the day with no real mention of its use throughout the conference.  I’m quite keen on improving the way I use these tools and picked up on it from the conference pages but many wouldn’t have given this the slightest thought.

A really interesting point that came up in the parallel session I attended on Business and Community Engagement was from some guy who previously worked in the education sector.  Although he’d retired he decided to work as a consultant but realised access to any information/knowledge, he knew existed within institutions, was extremely difficult to come by.  Now this was strange because a fair whack of institutional income is gained through funding councils i.e. government i.e. tax payers money.  So why on earth should Joe Bloggs be paying money to fund education which includes research that he/she can’t use?  I know I’m probably being slightly naive here (go easy, I’m still young) but I believe that there is something fundamentally wrong in this whole process.

This then ties in with the fact that JISC are promoting Federated Access Management (FAM) which effectively locks down information/knowledge/resources relating to this sector to those that work/study within it.  Quite strange considering the closing keynote was all about Wiki’s which in essence promotes an open and trusting culture and the opening key note told us that in order to succeed, UK Further and Higher Education had to increase its partnerships with the relevant European and international bodies/associations.  I’m attending a course at Netskills on FAM soon, so hopefully I will be able to shed some more light on this.  The other parallel session I attended was with regards to the ‘Google Generation’.  Now I came out of this session with more questions than anything else but I hadn’t had time to read the publication beforehand.  Will do this asap and again feedback any useful thoughts.

During coffee breaks and lunch one of my roles was to help man the JISC infoNet stand.  I’ve felt that personally, one of my weakest attributes is my ability to network (shy and nerves) so I made it my sole purpose to try and fully engage with a wide variety of people and I have to say it was absolutely brilliant.  Not only did I gain further understanding of some of the issues that institutions are facing from around the UK but gained some really valuable feedback regarding our resources and workshops.  Our most recent publication seemed to go down a storm too which was nice (is that off the Fast Show, hmm) and seemed a timely answer to a longstanding issue throughout the sector – Exploring Tangible Benefits of e-Learning: Does investment yield interest?

Feel like I’m being quite negative about this event within this post but I don’t mean for it to come across like that.  I really did think it was an excellent event and it’s really got me thinking.  I’m happy for anyone to contribute their thoughts but overall one of the best outcomes of an event is to promote discussion and spark off people’s thought processes which this post is evidence of.