In this post I'll pick up on and amplify a few of the themes from the talk that Parmjit Dhugga and I did about the JISC Strategic ICT Toolkit at the recent JISC 2011 conference in Liverpool.  But first, a cheezy video that I made to introduce the toolkit... :-)

The Strategic ICT Toolkit is a new resource from JISC, developed by the University of Nottingham Graduate School in partnership with the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education. It follows on from a report by Duke and Jordan that identified significant variation on institutional approaches to IT strategy. Fundamentally the toolkit is an aide to reflective thinking about IT strategy, with a wealth of background material and case studies, and a self-analysis component that you can use to "rate your IT strategy".

In January 2011 I surveyed IT Directors in FE and HE on their approach to email filtering (scanning for spam, viruses etc) and archiving. The results of this survey will feed into a discussion at our IT Committee (IT governance body) later today. 33 responses were received, mostly in the first couple of days. 31 of these were from Higher Education institutions - so this is effectively a survey of mail filtering and archiving in HE only. Read on for an analysis of the responses, qualitative feedback from the respondents, and my conclusions.

At Loughborough our current approach is to use Google's built-in filtering for students and alumni, coupled with in-house filtering on our mail routers with SpamAssassin and ClamAV - and Forefront on our Exchange servers for staff. We also operate a locally developed archiving solution for staff which grew out of a JISC project on records management (see our EDUCAUSE 2007 talk on email archiving by Garry Booth, Graeme Fowler and Carys Thomas) and Kochi, an innovative solution to the problem of targetted "spear phishing" for users' passwords (see Graeme Fowler and Mike Cardwell's Kochi presentation to the UK Network Operators Forum).

Last summer I blogged about amplified events and using this blog for engagement, which is a topic I returned to for the recent Web 2.0 guidelines crowdsourcing experiment.  I've not had an opportunity until lately to try putting together an amplified event, but this has now presented itself in the form of the first Google Apps for Education UK User Group meeting.  We're hosting this at Loughborough's Holywell Park Conference Centre next month, back to back with the UCISA Cloud Computing Seminar.

Holywell Park Conference Centre at Loughborough

I'd like use this blog post to do a bit of crowdsourcing around perspectives on institutional Web 2.0 guidelines and policies. This is a theme I'll pick up on for my open mic slot at the 2010 JISC CETIS Conference. It would be great to get some feedback before the event that I can fold into my talk, so please feel free to comment via my blog or add your thoughts to this Google Docs shared document. I'll take the results to our E-Learning Advisory Group meeting later in the month for discussion, so this is a good opportunity to influence policy.

First off, here's a quick recap on Web 2.0, courtesy of Michael Wesch:



Pretty upbeat stuff, isn't it? Some key Web 2.0 themes for me are: Encouraging people to share experiences (both positive and negative) of services, in addition to sharing ideas and content; choosing copyright/open source licenses strategically; use of techniques such as hash tags and RSS to build something which is more than the sum of its parts; your Plan B for if a service folds or ceases to be useful; traps for the unwary, e.g. sharing more than you intended - and the intersection of teaching and learning, research and admin. [As publicly funded University outputs, are OERs inherently different from research publications? Perhaps both have a place in the Institutional Repository?]

I'll expand on these points below, then hand over to you for some audience participation... :-)

This blog post describes some work that Garry Booth and I have been doing at Loughborough to prototype a Mobile Web site as part of our student portal project. It expands on the themes I raised in my talk at the recent Developing for the Mobile Web workshop hosted by UKOLN and the ILRT. My slides can be viewed below via slideshare.net...

Mobile Web at Loughborough

In this post I will present some stats around our students' choice of browsers and operating system which I have been gathering for the last month, as we begin a new academic year. These figures were arrived at in a similar way to my recent analysis of this blog's readership, using Google Analytics. Google Analytics stats were collected on visits to the login page for our student Google Apps domain.

Of particular note is that Internet Explorer is now at a rather meagre 42% take-up, with Chrome and Firefox vying for equal second place in the browser league table at 23% each.  In reality we may have any number of people who use more than one browser, but I'll quickly gloss over that and move on... :-)

The stats also sound a note of caution around any assumptions that Windows Vista can now be safely ignored - 40% of the machines using our service were running Vista. The digerati may have written it off and moved on, but people out in the real world are actually still running this stuff.

I’ve blogged in the past about our project to create a student portal at Loughborough this Autumn. This post is intended to provide a quick update and also to explore some of the architectural issues that have arisen.

In a previous post I introduced the concept that a portal did not necessarily equate to “a portal system”, i.e. a dedicated piece of software. This is a theme that I want to pick up on here. If we had been putting a portal in a few years ago, then we would almost certainly have surveyed the market and looked at packages like uPortal, Sakai and Liferay. Why not simply put one of these systems in now?

Here's why...