Monthly Archives: May 2015

Real-time space usage monitoring #theta2015

A Real-time Step into Space (abstract)
Kim Tairi and Shane Skidmore

Swinburne a young, mid-sized university, focused on “science, technology and innovation”. Difficult times – needed to merge three collections into one and already getting feedback that students wanted more silent study space.

Worked with Facilities to open satellite spaces – outside library but managed by them and mediated by librarians shushing people – Kim’s not a fan of shushing but students want it! Lots of power, strong wifi, etc.

Other part of strategy was to create a student study space app. Derek Whitehead was at shopping centre that had just installed a parking guidance system and realised was dealing with same problem that libraries have. Came back, talked to people, budgeted for it.

With satellite spaces, marketing, and study space app, complaints dropped 81%.

Platform was Blackboard mosaic. Used html5 so a webapp [good for cross-platform usability]. Can bookmark favourites, link to maps. Simple – built by an IT student on placement. Built on “Cognimatics TrueView Counter system” cameras placed above entrance to area to detect when people move in and out, to create a count. REST API polls this once a minute, updates MySQL database with a count. (Cameras set back to 0 at midnight each day to compensate for any inaccuracy.)

Not aware of other universities doing this. [I think places in the US have? Also University of Canterbury (used to?) have a similar system but based on who’s logged in in computer workroom.]

Think there are broader applications – could put it on different rooms to indicate availability – use in conjunction with timetables. At Swinburne if not being used for teaching then students can use it, so lots of possibilities. Could be useful for space utilisation generally.

Some next-gen cameras can look at an area and count heads.

Q: How did this come up, politically.
A: Have a student rep group so worked with them, have checked in and will continue to survey if it’s working for them.

Getting to a tipping point re use of space. Numbers through the gates dropping. First generation this year where they’ve come through schools with laptops throughout their career. Shift is about to happen so have to be very careful how we use campuses and spaces.

Where does Campus Learning become Online Learning? #theta2015 #campus

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Where does Campus Learning become Online Learning? Emerging trends in learning space design and usage (abstract)
David Gunsberg, Lori Bowe, Richard Kerr and Merv Connell

(A panel discussion)

What makes a good space?
Julie: As academic everything needs to have been done so I can just teach and inspire students.
Lori: Students telling us needs to be adapted. So build barns, fill with props so students can adapt it to what they need.
Merv: Want to be the support person giving away $100 notes. “So the students want X, the academic wants it to work as it did yesterday, project mgmt add their constraints.”
Richard: Have to design for technologies that are constantly changing while building cycles take years. Flexibility implies moving seats around; adaptability requires moving things completely around. Typically buildings have small footprints which are harder to adapt.

Where is the line between on campus and online?
Julie: Can be teaching students in Tasmania on their lunchbreak or overseas on secondment and still studying. Want lectures to even be translated – foreign languages, Sign. An on-campus experience is great – provide simulated experience by bringing outside in.

Are you designing spaces for flipped etc?
Merv: Yes, but as Richard said, long lead-cycle. Get stuck in the middle of conflicting needs.
Richard: There’s no single pedagogy. Academics have different pedagogies.
Julie: Teaching = Tell them, show them, let them show you. But also lots of academics want to research but get forced to teach and need help.

Is recording a lecture and putting it online genuine online learning?
Julie: We’re far behind. Need to rethink – recording powerpoints isn’t online learning. Need to put an hour-long lecture into 8minutes or less – can be exciting, thinking “Maybe I can do it! Maybe I can do a picture instead of 10,000 words.” Keep them interested, that’s all they need.
Lori: Students learn online on a daily basis. They’ll take something designed for A and make it do B/C/D/E/F. Focus group at Griffith about bad teaching: are you going to show up? No, will ask someone who was there for the info and get a double-shift at work.
Merv: From same focus group: student says can find info elsewhere so only reason they come to class is to fill out paperwork. Despite that, they like being there – when appropriate / convenient for them.
Julie: Putting slides online can be a start – can make you think what you could do better. Also realising need to work more as a team with IT people (who shouldn’t be in a different location).
[Linkage here to Forging productive partnerships between learning, teaching, library, and IT]

Lori: Students want to leave their mark. If they say “I want red beanbags” and we get them that means a lot to them.
Merv: Whatever we do, make it as easy as possible. They’ll find the easiest way, often we just need to get out of the way.

Partnerships between learning, teaching, library, and IT #theta2015

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Forging productive partnerships between learning, teaching, library, and IT (abstract)
Caroline Steel and Elizabeth Coulter

Current university context – slow response to rapid tech change, constrained budgets, etc – how can we afford not to collaborate.

CAUDIT top issues survey found “Supporting and enabling teaching and learning” at top of list. So sent out own survey (15 L&T respondents, 7 IT, 2 library)

Asked about

perceptions of role of IT in supporting T&L – plurality thought valued business partner (many still thought: IT expert; gatekeeper; administrator).
Perception that IT and T&L working collaboratively – “to a moderate extent”
Perception that library and T&L working collaboratively – largely “to a moderate extent” but some “to a large extent”

Enablers: need to trust each other; have clear roles; leaders that get along

Barriers: territories; role ambiguities; funding models; lack of shared goals; different perspectives on institutional goals

Strategies: need to “speak more than one language” and translate between different cultures.

Ideal partnership: enabling leadership; shared goals; cross-functional working groups; valued/rewarded partnerships; encourage risk/innovation/experimentation

Panel discussion:
Q: Does a collaboration between these groups really matter?
A: (Mark Gregory) Services we’ve long offered are now being offered in different ways. Need to move on, work together so don’t overlap / get in each other’s ways.
A: (Wendy Abbott) Teaching has IT underpinning, library input; library has IT underpinning. Need to collaborate to avoid wasting effort/time
A: (Caroline Steel) Often not aware of what each is doing. Often doing same things as each other.

Q: What’s gone well?
A: (Wendy) Revamping curriculum – team involving academic lead, IT staff, library staff, T&L staff. Everyone brought expertise in, worked as a team from beginning instead of pulling in people halfway through. Required broad experience so librarian had to know pedagogy/IT skills etc: demonstrated much expertise that impressed the academic on the team. Builds trust and understanding of benefits.
A: (Caroline) A community of practice put together – recognised incredible schools at other universities. Started with teleconference then a get-together. Has grown to all Australasia and across sectors.

Q: (audience) Many library spaces are more collaborative now – where does IT have most impact here?
A: (Wendy) Mostly behind scenes, working with library staff to meet requirements. Also customer service assisting students with basic enquiries. Core skills for all staff whether IT or library to support users.

Q: What are most important aspects of change?
A: (Caroline) Leadership: acknowledge we have different cultures across institution(s). Needs to come from top that we value these all so can set combined goals. Students don’t know who’s behind a service, need fantastic experience regardless.

Q: (audience) Do partnerships help academics create content or confuse them?
A: (Caroline) Very confusing. Get phone calls about how to install TurnItIn and don’t know who to put them onto. Want to make it easy for teachers.
Q: (audience) So need to set role definitions?
A: (Caroline) Work in progress
A: (Mark) If started with blank sheet of paper today wouldn’t create three separate organisations – instead a “blurry sort of service organisation”.

Q: (audience) As leaders how do you motivate a reluctant collaborator?
A: (Wendy) Organisations create silos. Once people see benefits, that’s what encourages them.

Q: What do we need to do next?
A: (Caroline) Encourage risk – need culture and reward system to break free of current system.
A: (Mark) Anything innovative looks like play therefore not serious. Need to push past this. Treat risk as appropriate cost and appropriate action.
A: (Wendy) Need to get senior management to understand that sometimes things will fail.

Take part in the survey

264 students, 8 courses, 792 hi-def video streams, no walls #theta2015

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264 students, eight courses, 792 High Definition video streams, no walls (abstract)
Jim Cook and Warren French

New Charles Perkins Centre at University of Sydney – opened in 2014, multi-faculty research and learning hub focused on obesity, diabetes and cardio-vascular disease. Includes IT, engineering, maths as well as medicine, public health and vet science.

The X-lab is a wet (ie hands-on) teaching lab with 264 seats – about the size of a football field. Wanted to maximise space utilisation. ‘X’ represents cross-faculty teaching paradigm. A way of teachers learning from each other. Needed completely innovative approach to enable up to 8 classes to operate in same space without disturbing each other. “No walls” reflects this and collaborative process between ICT and teaching academics.

Teaching stations around the edge: based on standard touchscreen AV-control system so teachers would be familiar with the idea. Just added features. Select what lab benches (anywhere in room) will be teaching to, for routing of video/audio. Select video source for student screen display (PC, laptop, facecam, camera for objects/notes, or microscope). Integrated highly-directional speaker technology – so only students at appropriate bench will hear it.

Directional speakers mean “We used to shout at students now we talk to students” (quote from lecturer). Minimises impact of classes being taught next to each other.

Has been a supreme success. Lecturers have found “instructions provided in live or video format were easier to follow and facilitated engagement”.

Lessons learned:

Worked well: stakeholder engagement and inclusivity; leveraging TechLab; leverage existing AV standards so easy for lecturers; dedicated relationship manager and program manager team
Power of prototype: thought they were just shaking out the bugs, but even better achieved joint ownership between academics and ICT so they became the ones to sell it – word of mouth
Would do stress testing to avoid first day anxiety
Would put more focus on support funding in business-as-usual. Had to use project funds to pay for support staff, took much haggling to get a sustainable support model.

Integrating user support for eResearch services within institutions (AeRO) #theta2015

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Integrating user support for eResearch services within institutions. Lessons learned from AeRO Stage 2 User Support Project (abstract)
Hamish Holewa and Loretta Davis

AeRO = Australian eResearch Organisations – cooperative to deliver national services to researchers. Set up a user support project.

User support is often fragmented. Wanted to make a joined-up network. How-to guides, who to go to if there’s an issue, how to support services being designed to provide service to end-users.

Presented a maturity model to ap service providers for increasing maturity. For ap developers at first it’s about getting the ap and running (many have only been released in beta). AeRO user support say they understand this but here are some things you need to think about moving forward.

Outcomes – service maturity model and the “AeRO Tick” for service maturity in practice (self-assessment tool that shows you where you can grow). Incident management and ticket transfer framework. Uni IT Research Support Expert Group formed. Service catalogue definitions – how do you describe these services?

Lessons learned:

Maturity models work well: non-accusatory, acknowledges efforts already taken, and gives people a clear pathway forward
Sector-wide progress is gaining momentum: approx 65% of services have level 2 maturity (of 3 levels)
Value of cross-sector initiatives: wanted a central ticket system but though this sounds like a good idea heaps of work and doesn’t work well, but better to invest in templates, protocols, communication so can transfer tickets to other providers in a standard way.
Enable representative groups to inform/change project
eResearch Uni IT Expert Group: informed outputs of the maturity model and ways to integrate into institutions. Pointed out not all institutions work the same or even care.

Future: Possibilities to expand the maturity model, expand services in the service catalogue and further engage institutions.

Changing times, emerging generations: a snapshot of the megatrends affecting higher education #theta2015

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Changing times, emerging generations: a snapshot of the megatrends affecting higher education
Mark McCrindle

[More details on changing demographics which tends to be of little interest to me because so abstracted from personal reality – it’s hard for me to get beyond “Yeah so?” especially because any “And so”s developed from this tend to be such vast generalisations about Generation [letter] that I’m automatically sceptical. When you talk about the “Facebook Generation” – not that Mark does but to follow my chain of thought – you miss out all the people who didn’t grow up with computers in the home which is really dangerous in terms of equality. However I did like the saying he quoted that “If you’re leading and no-one’s following, you’re just out for a walk.”]

Waves of the Future: Possibilities for Higher Education #theta2015

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Waves of the Future: Possibilities for Higher Education (abstract)
Bryan Alexander @bryanalexander

Now always need to assume possibility for a backchannel – need to be prepared to take advantage of this.
Battle of the brands – the i-devices, Microsoft’s, Google’s, Amazon’s… But humans like to cut across vertical stacks (giving IT departments many challenges)
Post-Snowden: “Humanity has awoken to an Orwellian nightmare with a great ‘…Meh.'”
Smaller trends: digital video, cloud wars (a few years ago a frenzy of “What is it, what does it mean, is it dangerous” and then we all just moved there), augmented reality, automation and artificial intelligence. Social media (vs ‘anti-social media’)
More: crowdfunding/crowdsourcing; copyright battles; Moore’s law continues to work; office vs web office
Design for mobile first. PCs getting crowded out. Mouse and keyboard use declining. 3D printing enormous – may cause decline of shipping containers.
Neat image of computing being broken into little pieces that we “smear around our bodies” – devices clipped on shoes, around wrists, in earbuds, glasses, ….
Ebooks and print books existing side-by-side – don’t know if this is a plateau (e-textbooks haven’t taken over) or ebooks will continue to dominate
Demographics shifting from pyramid (more young, few old) to stack (about the same number in each five-year slice). Economy changing from one job/career to a series of gigs. Inequality on the rise again — huge impact on education.
How do we respond to this? What do we prepare students for (other than student debt)?
Teaching and learning and tech: blended classroom, gamification, companies starting up to make money in education (“which seems crazy but there it is”), growth of digital humanities research, MOOCs – gone through a media crash but still grow though we don’t know how to assess them or pay for them but we keep making them and people keep taking them. How much reading is being done; (how) are literacies changing?

Which of these trends are most reliable? Which are most unpredictable?

What if Open wins? -> rise of the sharing mindset; gig economy, sharing labour as well as content; global conversations increase, more creativity, information cheap, academic content unleashed on the world, industries collapse, authorship mysterious. Some higher costs, tech challenges, outsourcing and offshoring
What if Closed wins? (eg if user preference for simplicity and convenience; failure of open business models, closed source outperforms open) -> huge content industries; ferocious IP policies; surveillance and intrusion protection; simpler computational hardware; anti-hacking policies; elaborate identity mechanisms; widespread micropayments; on campus publishers are locked in and powerful, security protocols in place, large role of business
What if automation wins? -> tutoring software, commodity AI, boom in CS/robotics departments. News articles are being written by bots – what happens when they’re writing books?
What if a renaissance? -> boom in creativity through storytelling, gaming, mobile devices. Games for teaching, game studies as academic field, libraries archive games, ‘gamification’ is taken for granted