In Birmingham for the AoC Conference, November 2003

Tuesday 18 November 2003. I was in Birmingham with a colleague for the annual 3-day conference of the Association of Colleges.

This would be JISC infoNet's first showing at the conference and I was manning a stand in the exhibition hall with a colleague, Jacqui.

We had a few give-aways to draw people to our stall and lots of leaflets about topics we covered and areas where we could provide advice and support.

There were quite a few people I knew at the conference, representatives of various suppliers and software houses, a few college principals who I had known from previous work with NILTA, itself now part of the AoC, and also some college staff I knew from working with Management Information Systems software as I had been one of a small team that trained Lancashire Colleges in their use of Oracle and Oracle-based packages.

There were also familiar face from other Further Education support services such as Becta and other JISC Advisory Services and we went out for food at night as a fairly large group.

The back of Birmingham's ICC - International Conference Centre - backed onto a canal basin with hotels, restaurants and shops. It was quite a vibrant place.

It was my first visit to the AoC conference which for me would become an annual event.

Work Index

Hobnobbing November 2011 Part One

Last week saw me in Birmingham for much of the week for the Association of Colleges annual conference. It's an event populated by the movers and shakers of the Further Education sector and a chance to sit in front of Government ministers, Lords of the Realm (and a Baroness) and some great inspirational speakers. Add in a huge exhibition and a number of workshops debating all sorts of things from use of technology to literacy and numeracy. Plus as an added bonus for me, the chance to catch up with friends who I tend only to see here once a year these days and you can see why I look on it as a chance to recharge enthusiasm and chip in with my pennyworth every now and then to remind people that my organisation (JISC infoNet) has something to offer. The venue is Birmingham's International Convention Centre which backs onto Brindley Place with its canals and restaurants. I was however keeping a close ear on what was going on at home as my daughter was being whisked into hospital with a baby arrival imminent! More of that in another entry!

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A Week on the Road

It was a hectic old week last week. Early Tuesday morning I was on the motorway, heading for Birmingham for the Association of Colleges conference. This was at the ICC, the International Conference Centre.

Over the three days of the conference I spoke to lots of old friends from my 18 years in Further Education colleges, met and chatted with Ruby Wax who since leaving the world of television has retrained in coaching skills and is now qualified to coach executives and spent some time on the exhibition stand with my colleagues from the world of JISC (it used to stand for Joint Information Systems Committee, but it's best to just to think of it as "JISC" these days in the same way you don't try to work out what FORD is an acronym for...)

I sat through some interesting sessions from Lord Peter Mandelson, Minister Ian Wright and Leader of the Lib Dems, Nick Clegg and an absolutely spot-on assessment of the world recession by a Swiss chap, who managed to make it utterly entertaining.

There were lots of student demonstrations (of work, not of students getting uppity). Barnet College had a diversity display. I signed my name in Gujerati, feeling ridiculously pleased with myself when they pronounced it readable...

My hotel was a bit too far away and the receptionist asked if I wanted a room "with a bath?!?", managing to imbue the question with outraged astonishment as I checked in.

The Big Wheel outside the ICC looked nice but didn't actually spin round very much. Time did though and so on Thursday I left the delights of Birmingham and headed for Shrewsbury where I was to meet up with Clive and run a Process Review workshop on Friday.

The Lion Hotel in Shrewsbury has seen a few distinguished visitors in its time. Kings, Prime Ministers, stars of stage such as Paganini, stars of the written page, such as Charles Dickens whose favourite room bears his name. He wrote The Pickwick Papers there.

Our favourite spot is in front of the log fire in winter. As yet, it was just too warm for the fire to be lit. We sat in the bar and yarned and planned the following day. The event went well. The delegates seemed pleased and possibly relieved to find the day was not going to be as dry and boring as they had feared. Clive and I split up. He was heading back north to home. I was heading south, to join Fran, Gill and Eddie in London. More in the next entry!

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A Bit of Rain...

Phew! I was in Sheffield yesterday at the AoC NILTA CIS Conference for managers of College Information Services.

If you are reading this from the UK, you will have seen the news images of the horrendous flooding. The rain was hammering on the windows and skylights of the hotel venue all day without any let-up.

Several of us were travelling back west from Sheffield and we got to a very crowded railway station to see rows of cancelled trains on the announcements board. Luckily we managed to get onto a train heading for Manchester, but it was a very slow journey home. The knock-on effects of so many cancelled trains was having its effect on trains all over the country and the second stage from Manchester to Preston was a journey of long waits before approaching stations.

Ironically, my final train from Preston to Blackpool was almost empty as can be seen above and it reached Blackpool as the sun came out and I could hardly believe how bad it had been until I got home 20 minutes later and saw the TV coverage.

There must have been a lot of people unable to get home - nothing was travelling south, we saw lots of very agitated people talking into mobile phones and huge queues of people at Sheffield forming in front of any railway official they could find.

For all that the conference seemed to go quite well. I delivered two workshops, one with my colleague Andrew Stewart on the use of Web 2.0 social software, concentrating on Wikis. Only a couple of the delegates in the session had tried it but we got some quite good discussion and ideas from them.

My other session was on Risk Management and that too stimulated a lot of interest.

AoC NILTA Conference 2007

I'm currently at the AoC NILTA Conference in Leeds and it has been an excellent conference this year. This has been the 19th NILTA Conference if you count the "parent" organisations of NILTA, namely NAITFE, the National CMIS Board and SCITFE the first incarnation of all.

One or two people present have been at all 19 of them. I can't quite claim that, I started out in 1993 as Associate Chair of the National CMIS Board so have been to enough for people to look at me with concern, wondering whether I'll collapse with age... or perhaps waiting for me to grow up - no chance of that I'm afraid! Lots of people yesterday were saying nice things about me to my boss, some without realising who she was, so my thanks to them!

Some good and pertinent sessions and keynote speakers. I especially liked a couple of phrases by Barbara Ganley from Middlebury College in America who was speaking about the use of blogs by her creative writing students. She spoke about "learning in cycles of disruption and repair" and the need for building into your courses some opportunities to fail, so that learning can come from it. Initially this might sound strange - we want students to fail? Well not in the long run of course, we want them to achieve their qualification, but walking away with a certificate is not the only goal I hope. It's when we fail in something that we take a step backwards, assess things like what went wrong and why, learn to identify and solve problems and learn what is repeatable and what should not be repeated.

The second keynote was from Nigel Paine who gave a very enjoyable and thought provoking session. He focussed on Change and the rate of change and the slowness of many educational cultures in dealing and accepting change and embedding new ways of learning. "We have got to let things from the past go," he said - a phrase that might challenge a few cultures perhaps. The tendency can be to evolve slowly, adding and supplementing but without always reviewing, releasing and discarding those things which have become tired, outdated or no longer relevant to today's young people in Further Education.

JISC infoNet, my own organisation, is currently involved with a series of one-day workshops on Change Management, delivered by myself with Clive Alderson, which introduce strategy and techniques for supporting Change in organisations. Another of our resources which has been generating lots of interest is the Planning & Designing Technology-Rich Learning Spaces infoKit. With many colleges currently involved in new building projects or refurbishment, the kit, released last week is timely and contains many resources, including a database of images of college and university innovative building projects, hosted at Flickr.

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Two in a Bed...

Cats I mean... This normally spells trouble. I got up this morning, despatched to make the coffee as Fran was in work for 7:00am and the cats had decided to bunk up in one bed rather than use the other (larger) bed.

Normally Jess has a thing for standing, sitting or lying using Tigger as a pillow, but this morning she was sprawled out on top of him, bum hanging over the edge of the bed and Jess looking just a touch resigned at the unusual state of affairs...

It's been a bit of a musical morning for me - the band have a gig tonight so I've been getting ready for that, more about that on the band's blog. It's a busy weekend all round as tomorrow we have the family coming round - there's a few birthdays in March and three of us will have had or are about to have one! Next week will see me in Leeds for the AoC NILTA conference and then rushing off to Taunton to give a session at a seminar on bidding for project funding.

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