UCISA / UKOLN / CETIS Workshop:Talks
UCISA / UKOLN / CETIS Workshop:Four plenary talks were given at the Initiatives & Innovation: Managing Disruptive Technologies workshop.
Oleg Liber gave the opening talk on Challenges for Institutions in Adapting to the Global Information Infrastructure" at the workshop.
So far institutions have been able to incorporate technologies within their existing modes of practice, automating some processes, improving some aspects and making some worse. However the twin challenges of globalisation and the exponential uptake of ever-improving Internet technologies are making it difficult for institutions to adopt these without structural changes, and resistance to these is becoming evident as more and more technologies are proscribed within institutions. Institutions need to find ways to transform themselves to become viable in the new world, or risk becoming educational ghettos.
Robert Sherratt gave a talk on "Meeting Expectations - the Web in the 2(.0)1st Century".
Today, students and staff now have an expectation that institutional content, services and applications are readily available via the Web.
Building on an innovative organisational structure, Hull has attempted to satisfy these requirements via the provision of a flexible presentation layer, the University portal. This gives us the potential to take on the challenge of the anticipation of Web 2.0 and deal with diversity in location, device, and role as well as providing a standards based means of incorporating the outcomes of SOA activity and JISC projects in the future.
John Dale gave a talk on "Being Agile".
'Agile' refers both to a software development methodology and an aspiration many institutions and IT departments have about the way they work. In this session, we'll look at what happened when one institution - the University of Warwick - decided to adopt an Agile software development approach, both as a way to deliver high quality software, but also as a way of becoming more responsive and flexible in supporting the institution and its staff and students.
Brian Kelly gave a talk on "Managing The Unexpected: Facing The Web 2.0 Challenges".
Once upon a time, the major vendors of applications used within our institutions held user forums and outlined road maps which described future developments of their products. Nowadays predicting the future is far more difficult: we now have major new developments emerging from the Internet development community, and we may find the our user community evaluates such technologies ahead of IT services, sometimes embedding such technologies in teaching and learning courses or in research support before central services have fully evaluated such technologies.
How should IT Service departments respond to such changed dynamics. In this talk Brian Kelly will provide a number of case studies, including various Web 2.0 technologies, are outline possible strategies for addresing such challenges.
A real-time discussion room was available during the sessisons. You can use this to discussion the content of the talk with other delegates.
Note that one room may be set up as a 'back channel' - which may be used by the speaker during the talk.
An experimental IRC chat service was available during the sessions.
