Blog
IWMW17 Micheal Frantzis
Interesting range over ways in which universities can understand Student behaviour better, by thinking a bit more about their experiences at university and what might be best for them as individuals, with some ideas how that might be achieved. Bloom’s sigma 2 problem sounds mysterious, but looks interesting.
IWMW17 Richard Prowse
Rich is always an engaging speaker, and in this session he had plenty to talk about. I’ve seen him describe the journey through content strategy at the University of Bath, and this talk was about the experience of building tools to support that. There was plenty of good reminders that the landscape content is being released into is changing fast, and so they’re trying to build a tool that accommodates that. The standout for me was incorporating user needs into the content creation process, to remind people that there needs to be a reason for the content to exist, and a measure of how successful it is against that goal. I’ve advocated a goal based reminder in CMSes for a while and it’s nice to see it happening - I think we’ll see it more and more.
IWMW17 Ruth Mason, Matthew Castle
This felt similar to the Cardiff talk in explaining a real world problem they faced - A scary security situation caused by lots of sites - and how they are dealing with it. I almost felt they covered too much. There were tantalising things about how the Lean Startup book was influential, how they were rebuilding a live product and the development setup to enable them to ship to product every 2 weeks.
IWMW17 Graham Bird, Jenni Taylor, David Hopkins
Some of the team at Cardiff University presented a roundup on how they’ve tackled the thorny issue of CMA compliance by some wrangling their course information into a Single Source of Truth. It felt like lots of people in the room were at various stages of this with their own peculiar problems of their own setups, but it was interesting to hear a story from the front line. Was tickled by the heartfelt “Get a Project Manager” that someone said.
IWMW17 Gareth Edwards
I was looking forward to Gareth’s talk, despite a pretty dry title, I enjoyed his talk from last year and was expecting good things. I wasn’t disappointed - his lovely slides had plenty of good nuggets to take away as a well as a nice introduction to a way of thinking about information management.
IWMW17 Melanie Read
Melanie’s talk was quite a departure from St Andrews’ since she explained how much restructure and change that the university has undergone, and that she has been tasked with sorting out a pretty big mess.
IWMW17 Carley Hollis
Probably my favourite talk of the whole conference.
IWMW17 Andrew Millar
Andrew talked a bit about the various organisational changes that they’ve undergone that universities are so fond of, and how that process has created opportunities to tackle some pretty fundamental problems.
IWMW17 Bonnie Ferguson
Interesting opening around the particular effect of Brexit on the very European facing University of Kent. The University has taken a conscious decision to continue emphasising it’s commitment to ‘remain European’.
Running into a Data dead end.
A Wise man once said to me that blogging is a about the journey, not the destination so I’m trying to document this journey such as it is. It starts with a realisation which provoked a question, which led to some action.
Sometimes the data is boring
For reasons unknown to even me, I was looking at the UCISA website whilst watching an interesting stream from the event held recently.
Designing charts to learn about designing charts
In my previous blog post I explained how I’ve been logging my film watching with a google spreadsheet hooked up to some simple tools, now I’ll describe how I took that info and turned it into a visually appealing chart.
Fun with Google Sheets and APIs
I watched a lot of films this year.
WDC2016 - Ruth John
I’ve seen Ruth talk once before, when she talked about the fiendish sounding shadow DOM. Obviously some kind of mascohist, she attempted live demo of technology and was beset by technical glitches with the in-house projector. Whilst annoying, she pressed on and gave a really interesting introduction to MIDI, focusing on the ‘Digital Interface’ bit of the acronym.
WDC2016 - Nicholas Alpi
I am very much an IT salaryman having been in-house for a *long* time so Nicholas’ talk about his journey to running his own agency wouldn’t seem to be that relevant to me, the talk worked nicely. Talks with a strong narrative thread are always nice to follow, and this had that.
WDC2016 - Lightning Talks
Three very good talks about switching activities, making things and recruiting well.
WDC2016 - Jack Sheppard
Empathy. I liked Jack’s range around psychology and interactions with people, though it did meander a bit for more, which goes with the territory when talking about such an interconnected topic. Not to say I didn’t enjoy it, but perhaps covered TOO much.
WDC2016 - Harry Roberts
Packed with useful and relevant info for work we’re doing in work right now, I really liked the balance of specific tips and broad principles. Lots to take away and work on.
WDC2016 - Dan Edwards
Good reminder that efficiency isn’t the only thing to consider when doing good work.
Creative Mornings Cardiff - Gavin Strange
A cracking way to spend a Saturday morning. The lovely people at Creative Mornings, Cardiff put on another cracking speaker, and the Saturday Morning format was great for me, meaning I could hang around a little after. Gavin Strange’s talk was a whirlwind journey through his work and some of the stories behind it. The joy he has creating such a varied range of cracking work really came across. I scribbled out just a few of the things that had particular resonance for me - not sure that anyone else would find them any use, but Gavin said to share, so I am.