Here's a capture of my talk yesterday on practical cloud computing for the Loughborough Students Union Computer Society (LSUCS):



(see how quickly I recovered from the Beachball of Doom there :-)

In the last couple of weeks I have lectured this year's intake of Computer Science undergrad and postgrad students at Loughborough on Cloud Computing - the challenges it poses and the opportunities it creates. If you're interested, please see below for my slides. This blog post looks at some of the issues I raised in a bit more detail, and in a way which I hope will be interesting to both attendees of those lectures and readers from elsewhere on the net. Please do leave a comment and let me know what you think.

In this post I'll pull together the key themes that emerged in our "Cloud Learning with Google Apps" workshop at the ALT-C 2011 conference.

I was pleased that we had some 70 attendees express an interest in this session, making it one of the most popular parallel sessions at this year's ALT-C. Unfortunately we only had seats for 50 people, so my apologies to those attendees who had to stand, sit on the floor etc!

In this blog post I'll return to our project to "field test" the JISC Strategic ICT Toolkit, with a round up of results and recommendations. If you haven't come across the Strategic ICT Toolkit before, please see the S-ICT area on the JISC website, and the JISC toolkit itself.

To kick off, here's a Prezi which I produced for the programme meeting in August 2011:

JISC Strategic ICT Toolkit Field Test at Loughborough on Prezi

I thought it would be interesting and fun to make my plenary session at IWMW11 a bit more interactive than simply me standing up and waffling in front of a bunch of slides. Here's a few words about what I did and how I did it, plus some feedback from the interactive parts of the talk, and a few observations about this year's IWMW event.

I'll be talking at the Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2011) this week about institutional attitudes to "Web 2.0", i.e. social media, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc. As I've written before (about the iPad), the key question is: Are you progressive, or regressive? At Loughborough we are trying to take a progressive approach to Web 2.0 - taking in the feedback from an earlier crowdsourcing exercise.

This material first appeared as a guest post on the IWMW blog - thanks to Brian and Marieke for the opportunity to write for the blog, and to speak at IWMW.

"Institutional maturity" for Loughborough's IT Strategy

I've blogged in the past about a little project on IT Strategy that we are doing with JISC, exploring the potential of the Strategic ICT Toolkit at Loughborough. This is just to give people an update and pull out a few points that have come up during the course of this work.

In this blog post I'll spend a few moments looking at the institutional maturity self-analysis process (as illustrated above), and discuss some of the issues that this and the wider toolkit material have raised at Loughborough.