Jisc Digital Leadership Workshop

Semi-live blogging from the Jisc Digital Leadership project Workshop (Twitter #JiscDigLead. in Bristol at the Hotel Mercure, 22-23 October 2015.

Day 1

Lawrie Phipps opened the day mentioning the “dynamic online offer” from the Jisc Digital Capability service appearing maybe January time: “Online service moving into beta in the new year,” says Lawrie. I wonder if Jisc’s digital capability model

might assist in evaluations. And, I became exercised over a conflation of competitive comparison with evaluation. Just because s/he does it…

Clearly we want to Improve outcomes for learners and are trying to get our heads around the idea of adding value. Asking ourselves, what is learning gain? It is suggested there is an HE skills gap and that this goes top down. We are asked: Are you capable enough for the role you are undertaking? Who knows! I get a sense that Richard Francis and I, for Brookes are doing as well as many might hope. I suggest that there needs to be IT proficiency in the environs. You, the individual also needs to have to have some. What you don’t have others need. It is not only an individual good, it is a shared social good: education as well as the institution-digital. that is: the epistemic project rolls on.

See digital capabilities blog.

Moving on: Dave White asks why engage with technology? Is technology axiomatic? Is the digital being prefixed to everything? Why do we have a VLE? Can we reframe the discourse? What is the actual value? Dave is working with Donna Lanclos, who works at UNC Charlotte, NC, USA. Anthropologist studying the practices of  “the academic” in order to inform “the library”.

People are invited to question “George style”. Fame at last? Modelling practice? Or just annoying?

Dave and Donna show different pictures drawn by school kids asked to draw the Internet and my home in it (the internet mapping project).  Dave will want us to map our place on the visitor-resident continuum/a. He suggests, in response to questions that there are more than one dimension. Will we get near Hilbert space? Some of life plays out online. Other people are there. Social media, discussions all leave traces. Dave and Donna want to reassure us that modes of being online do not overdetermine our behaviours or experiences of the phenomenon of being online. We are asked to Google each other.

Dave raises the weak anthropic principle and the strong self-selecting assumption but doesn’t notice. Higher education so readily does the subject-object split to which is added an environment and within that (even going back to Lucretius) the waveform or quanta: movement and change. If the reference class is all people who might be invited and supported to attend this meeting then (as Wikipedia reports Brandon Carter says): “Although our situation is not necessarily central, it is inevitably privileged to some extent.”

And we dive into a Boston Consulting matrix style 2D representation of digital leadership.

• x axis= Visitor-Resident
• and y axis is Personal-Institutional.

In some quarters we “decompartementalise”. Richard Francis asks whether

• Visitor = Consumer
• Resident = Producer.

This seems plausable equivalence. I wonder how many more axes are possible and if two-d is really useful. They acknowledge the incompleteness of any model.

We are asked to map an “observer moment” of our life in the digital.

Here is mine.

It is later presented by Dave and Lawrie among four or five others  and comment invited from each of the mappers. It is messy. In one construction, the embodied world envelopes a digital space. But this gives the impression of focusing on “the digital”. We might use two axes to make a small spider diagram: or a dream catcher for the internet maybe? In respect of my map, I noticed the four foci on public writing. I acknowledged visitor status in much other multimedia. I observed how my use of email, Twitter, Facebook and a VLE worked: how it was all generally squashed down to the right: institutional resident. How metaphorical is the location and name of that quadrant?

Next James Clay is took us onto personal effectiveness: our effectiveness at using digitech, and how we build our capacity with technologies. We are asked: “You on your own, define the term: digital university.” I suggest teaching is the core project of the digital university. It seems to me that the digital still has the power to force questioning.

I suggest:

the digital university is immersed in the capacities and contexts of its world using and misusing as well as rejecting “the digital”. In particular the digital university is not slave to an external “digitality” but shapes and enables the shaping of the wider institution-digital. The institution-digital is a “moment” in the emergence of tools, practices and places within which the epistemological project takes place, transforming and also resisting the transformation of society.

A university that constantly evolves to

… the consensus distilled by reps from each table:

We then do PESTLE analysis (badly-can it be done well? The categories are so broad) on our digital university.

• Political
• Economic
• Social
• Technological
• Legal
• Environmental

… sort of.

Our table asks “Why are we doing this?” several times. Someone suggests: “marketing”. Of what? By whom? For whom? I might conflate legal with social, otherwise we more or less agree that leadership is all about:

1. the political/economic/technical and environmental (society and culture)
2. the personal (individual experience of society and culture)

I return to the question of embodiment around the breakfast/coffee/lunch/tea breaks. The problem of embodiment is seldom mentioned in higher education gatherings. The presumption of an embodied self-aware narrator is strangely persistent.

Day 2

This morning I am anticipating sessions on social media, cybersecurity risk, persuasive narratives and more mapping before we conclude with building a digital vision and strategy. This will be an opportunity to sanity-check Brookes’ new TEL Framework.

I am in the stoirytelling workshop on creating persuasive narratives.

Keep it lean and focussed. Is the story always an elevator pitch?

Link to strategic policy working document

I wandered off into Medium and pen and book.

The narrative continues here.