Of Cows, Books and Other Animals

Continuing the series of articles covering my time as Head of I.T. & M.I.S. at Myerscough College, a land-based (agriculture and horticulture college but rapidly diversifying into other areas).

It's early April 2000 at Myerscough - well it was early April everywhere else I suppose but I probably won't be mentioning many other places in this article so we'll stick to Myerscough College for now. I had by now been at the college for six months and at last things seemed to be moving in the right direction. The first phase of the new network had gone in. Some of the dafter "innovations" that the older network had installed were still there but at least were not causing problems.

One of these was an experiment with computer card-controlled access to rooms. These are familiar now to lots of people. In hotels for instance, instead of having a physical metal key that you turn in a lock, there's a pad on the door; you press your keycard to it and the door unlocks for you to simply push open. In 2000 these were innovative to say the least. They had been installed in the college in just two places. My office and the door leading to the technician's office and server room. These doors had no handles, no keyholes, just the pad and a prayer that the card would work. If it didn't then it was tough, because the computer that controlled the system was behind those locked doors...

But anyway, on this bright April day, Jayne and I during our lunch break took a walk half a mile up the road from the main campus to Lodge Farm, which was the college's dairy farm.

Cattle can breed all year long, but some 70-75% of cows are born March to May so we were in the middle of that season. There were lots of calves in the sheds, sheltering from the odd shower and cold spell that April is prone to in our neck of the woods.

We were walking through here alone. The staff knew that we were college staff and left us to our own devices. What we hadn't known until then was just how human sounding a cow's cough is. At several points, particularly in a darker part of the sheds a cow would cough and we would jump out of our skins!

The milking shed. Although students were, I think, still taught how to milk a cow by hand, most were milked using modern machinery. It was all the same to the cows. One minute they were in place, hooked up and the next they were walking out with a look of relief and satisfaction...

It amused me how many students were amazed at the process. At the start of any given academic year you could ask students "where does milk come from?" and the answer would be, "a bottle." "Yes but where does the milk in the bottles come from?" Pause for slight confusion, then "the supermarket..." The next question would totally baffle them.

A bit ago in an earlier article I promised you a look at the Animal Academy. This was opened formally by Lord Shuttleworth on Wednesday, 26 April 2000. Here he uncovers a memorative placque, watched by Kathy Kissick the Head of Animal Studies, Principal John Moverley and the Chair of Governors.

On another occasion the Mayor and Mayoress of Wyre were shown round. The Mayor was treated to a close encounter with a blue-tongued skink by one of the staff and here the Mayor and Mayoress admire the intricate tunnels and pipework enjoyed by the guinea pigs or hamsters. Can't quite remember which they were now, but I do remember just how vocal the guinea pigs were with each other. "Alright Fred? Been down that new bit of piping yet? Oh, hey-up, one of them big two-legged things has just come in to look at us..."

The aquaria room. Tropical, cold water and sea water tanks. I loved it. There's something very relaxing about looking at them. Though something very exacting and exhausting about looking after them all...

The college was training vetinary nurses, so needed an operating theatre. This large fluffy doggie was equipped with large fluffy internal organs that could withstand dire things being done to them. Never said a great deal, never complained, but was totally hooked on pretend anaesthetic...

I was still writing my articles for the National Information and Learning Technologies Association (NILTA) - in fact was one of their Directors by then.

In the summer of 2000 they had been commissioned to survey colleges with regard to the extent, suitability and effectiveness of their I.T. networks. This was to identify any problems around capacity, management and maintenance, suitability and security. It was to be published under the umbrella of something called the National Learning Network of which several centrally-funded agencies had a hand in supporting: Becta and JISC amongst them.

By early summer the draft was completed but unfortunately there were a few issues with grammar and with the fact that there were lots of graphs with all shades of colours, but the eventual book would be published in black and white only. I wasn't told exactly why the original author wasn't asked to re-write it (though the deadline was one issue) and I was asked if I would re-write it over the summer.

So we didn't take a holiday that year until the second half of August. I changed all the different types of graph (especially the 3D pie charts that weren't easy to evaluate) and made them all into bar charts with lines in descending order so that you could see the difference between bars of very similar values, using patterns instead of shades that could be distinguished one from the other. It went off to be scrutinised by the Further Education Funding Coucil and JISC who would then think of something else that they wanted in it and it would come back with a request for either a change or an insert. Time and time again.

I was heartily sick of the thing by the time it was accepted but accepted and published it eventually was. I still have a copy, but you won't find my name in it at all. But I know - and now, so do you! At one of the conferences I attended early in the following academic year, Keith Duckitt of the Further Education Funding Council (FEFC) found me one evening at the bar.

"John, come and join us on our table - we have a bottle..." Well the bottle was champagne and I found myself seated amongst the great and powerful folks of both Further and Higher Education. One of them would later have a great significance in my career, Malcolm Read, who was the Executive Secretary of JISC, one of which's Advisory Services I would later work for. The re-write of the book may have driven me half-mad, but it became obvious that it was thought I had done a good job.

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