One of the common themes from the workshops is the opportunity to provide space and time for innovation, a sandbox hub for networking, learning and experimenting. It set me thinking, what would it actually look like? I am a visual thinker and learner and sometimes can’t understand a concept without a picture next to it. Then I found this link: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/146/the-idea-lab.html

Stanford’s Design School “idea lab”….. And my logical thinking kicked in and I can see the concept but how could it work in reality? Who would run it? Does it need organisation? Structure? How would you know who was working with what and whom? How would you match common interest groups? How would you deal with knowledge transfer?  

Surely the pure concept of an innovation sandbox would be to create space (and time) for thinking and playing to include anyone who wants to take part i.e. a history student looking at new forms of social media with a lecturer in Maths and Stats a Phd Modern Languages student and an administrator from the library – why not? Technology is moving far beyond the technical scientific sphere it once inhabited and is now more accessible and open to all for experimentation.

But I don’t quite get how you would control something this organic whilst allowing freedom to fail. Am I way off the mark?

I read Ian Pitchers blog about his children not “doing e mail” yesterday.https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/ianpitcher/2012/07/10/but-i-dont-really-do-email/

By coincidence at last week’s congregation ceremony I came across the problem first hand. A number of students turned up without tickets and instructions because they hadn’t been told anything. Of course they had, by e mail! I was working with some bright sparks last week and I tested Ian’s idea of a communication promulgation system (suspect that’s a hub in layman’s terms) that would sift messages and send them by an individual’s preferred method of communication. The younger contingent agreed that they only used e mail for work purposes and used other methods of communication at home. In other words they don’t do e mail either but they are constantly carrying and checking their phones for communications.

How far could you go with this? Tweet when someone is due at a lecture? A text reminder for an exam? IM when they are late? Megan Quentin-Baxter is organising a conference and if I have got this right, the communications during the conference will be done by SMS/IM?  e.g. Workshop 2 Room 29 3pm til 5pm. Apologies Megan if that’s not the case.

It’s a brave new world, are we ready for it? I read recently some conference notes (Cloud communications stuff) where the presenter asked participants under 25 to raise their hands. There were none apparently. Is there a lesson there? That under 25’s don’t get sent to conferences perhaps, or maybe that we are not listening or even exploiting young minds enough in emergent technologies and communications.

I wrote this last week and today I am told that 4500 students logged into their e mail since the end of term….

I met with some colleagues the other day over coffee and we came up with the idea of a “Digital Campus Working Group”. This would consist of ISS staff and computing officers from each of the faculties (not all would attend each meeting but an agenda would determine which one (s) would be most applicable). The working group would be concerned with IT policies and not strategy. Some suggestions for the meetings would be:

• Procurement
• Security
• Software
• Programming language
• Education
• Project management
• Communication
• Infrastructure

The initial challenge is how to get as many people as possible involved and not just the same volunteers? Or does it matter if its the same people? Who should lead/ facilitate the meetings? Do they need a chair or a more informal setting? And my final muse – should this group deal with operational issues of Digital Campus as they arrive over the next few years and become a more formal group as part of Governance?

all comments most greatfully accepted