Video confession 12

Opportunity, organisational culture  and innovation

IT is renowned for pace of change and as life is increasingly mediated by IT we find that the pace change in our lives is increasing.

There are two coping mechanisms for dealing with change.

Be defensive, inward looking, backward looking and entrenched in what you are and have been doing. Use organisational systems to delay and stifle change. Build barriers and obstacles to fortify your position. Bury your head in the sand and dig a hole.

Be open, outward looking, forward looking and find new ways of doing things and find new things to be doing. Use organisational systems to encourage and embrace change.  Reduce barriers and include others. Go out and find opportunities.

IT systems technician Raz has recently started an evening table tennis club in the student common room. What grabbed my attention was that if an opportunity is provided then people will collaborate and participate. Raz’s table tennis club has people from all areas of the college – students, admin staff and lecturers from different divisions. Raz gives training but at the same time is not afraid to be beaten the students – it’s a good example of teacher as facilitator and of participation and communication working across boundaries.

Raz’s table tennis club made me realise the significance of opportunity in innovation and organisational culture and the importance social networking across boundaries will play in the future.

In the video we see two IT systems tehnicians Raz and Abdul playing at the end of the sessi0n. It’s interesting to note that the students have so far always beaten the staff.

   

video confession 11

Social Spaces and Innovation

I’ve been working on our Exchange email system upgrade and pop down to the staff common room to get a cup of coffee from the machine. I notice Rachel and Kathy using their laptops in the staff common room – they are joint tutors on a course and are working together to update the “paperwork” they share on the network pool area.  

The shared pool area has been available from the “dawn of networked personal computing” in colleges and schools (around 1985) and it’s mapped for all our staff as the P: drive – it provides a shared file storage area which is familiar and relatively easy to use. The wireless laptops have been available for most of our staff since about 2002.

There is nothing new in the video but what struck me is the ease and familiarity with which people now take for granted what was once extraordinary – access to our IT systems and the Internet from anywhere and without wires.

The objective of our staff laptop provision program was to develop just what we see in the video – the normalisation of IT mobility. Being able to work in the staff common room instead being of “chained” to the wired desktops in our own area offices is an advantage in its own right but provides the opportunity to work and share more easily across boundaries.

We often consider architecture as a way of influencing behaviour but in many cases we could let behaviour influence our architecture – in this instance it could be that we should provide more open social networking spaces.

With developing globalisation there is an increasing motivation to boost our ability to innovate – to compete in the higher levels of the global economic “food” web and the ability to innovate and develop innovation in education is a key to our future.

Innovation is the introduction of something new and useful, for example introducing new methods, techniques, or practices or new or altered products and services. Innovation is the active, implementation of creativity and invention. Creativity and invention often come from crossing boundaries – for example the recent Terahertz security camera is based on work from astronomers studying dying stars.

Boundaries exist in organisations to facilitate management – this is necessary, the problem arises when boundaries are used defensively and used to drive management – we end up with a rigid structure which is more likely to break than to bend in the “winds of change”.

In a sense innovation is like the creation of compounds in chemistry – you have to start with a mixture and then add energy and or catalysts to create a new product. The higher and the more rigid the boundaries are then the more energy that will be needed to cross them – the less likely that innovation will be able to happen – the more likely something will break instead.

Open Social networking spaces provide the conditions for people to mix and come up with creative and inventive ideas from which innovation can happen. We may not all be able to build Google style workspaces but I strongly argue that we consider the significance of the social in work and education.

video confession 10

 ”The Network is the Computer” – we have always connected everything but are preparing for a paradigm shift to “The Network is our computer” (1) by anticipating and encouraging the use of web 2 systems. Such use will demand more of our network and of our systems.To prepare the college has started some major upgrades and developments – over the next 12 months we are:

* Upgrading inter-site circuits from 100Mbps to 1Gbps (to cope with higher demand)

* Installing physically diverse inter-site and internet backup connections (to improve continuity)

* Re-engineering our routing and Internet access (to offer new features)

* Installing new core switches from Extreme (to cope with higher demand, improve reliability and add features)

* Installing new Wireless access from Aruba (to cope with higher demand, improve speed, reliability and coverage)

* using Virtual systems (to offer a quicker response to new system deployment and improve continuity).

Virtual machines have proved to have real benefits and at the college we have been using virtual servers and desktops in development, to deploy services faster and to improve continuity.

One of the pressures on IT systems these days is the tremendous demand for storage and I anticipate that virtualisation can help with this too. Interestingly, networking plays a key role in recent virtual storage scenarios.

One form of storage virtualisation is to treat it as a service and make use of massive external systems like Google (use Google Docs, Youtube video), Flickr for photo’s and Microsoft Livespace for file storage. However, the pressure for ever increasing internal storage continues and I will be looking at two systems.

The easiest place to start with standard file storage where space rather than performance is the issue – things like user home folders (Z: drive), shared file storage like our “Pool” folders (P: drive), technicians storage area and the media storage areas (where marketing and the design team keep lots of photos and videos). For this standard large NAS (Network Attached Storage) should give us what we are looking for and I shall be looking at NAS first.

Another interesting option is to look at virtual storage for virtual servers where performance is not crucial – for this NAS could also be used but I will also have a look at iSCSI systems.

In the video

Our senior management team are away on a budget conference meeting which means that all their offices are empty and available- I managed to bag the principal’s office to hold a meeting with suppliers to talk about network and storage virtualisation.

Kevin from Vanix gets in a good plug for his company as “one of the UK’s premier network integrators – Guildford, Paris, Peckham”. Kevin briefly describes the work of Vanix on our Extreme backbone network and their work on our early installation of Aruba 802.11n equipment. 

Jon from Onstor distributor Zycko talks about “off-loading our budget” – storage virtualisation has many advantages but could be a little expensive by the sounds of it – the Onstor NAS systems are certainly big and impressive.

The link here explains virtualisation and provides the explanation below.

“In general terms, virtualisation refers to the abstraction of computer resources so they can be logically assigned. It is a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources from the way in which other systems, applications or end users interact with those resources.”

 (1) Thanks to Mark Gobin for the phrase “The Network Is Our Computer”

 

Video confession 9

The video confessions are recorded on a small smartphone and the sound quality is quite poor –the video demonstrates a technology to improve the sound quality with such devices.

This Video confession comes from a classroom in Hammersmith 6^th form centre – the location could be regarded as symbolic. The classroom has 10 desktop computers and 10 laptops – a combination of traditional IT suite and “laptop classroom”/innovation zone.

There is increasing demand for “laptop classrooms” where laptops are used instead of desktop computers but unless we teach and learn differently with them then this turns out to be a more expensive and difficult way of doing what we already do. The idea must be to use the laptops to do something we can’t easily do with desktop computers – to do something different.

When considering “laptop classrooms” we have three options:

1. Install special laptop suites

This recommended as security, power, networking and logistics are easier to manage.  We already use this system in some areas but it doesn’t scale well.

2. Use laptop trolley’s where a teacher or support person pushes this to the classroom. This is a common solution to providing flexibility but creates problems with teachers having to push the heavy trolley to and from the classroom and then unpack and pack the laptops.

3. Provide a laptop loan scheme for the students where the students arrive at the classroom with their laptop. Given the predictions of a future where students will have their own IT this option looks like a useful experiment to test out students having their own IT.  

Jane Franklin describes a project in the Hammersmith 6^th form area to provide a central pool of laptops where students can book out laptops for certain lessons and at other occasions. If the teacher alerts the students that a laptop session is going to take place then the students will take responsibility to book out and pick up a laptop for that session. Jane also talks briefly about some ways to use the laptops in collaborative projects and with webcams to make presentations. There will be a future video confession talking about how the laptops can be used with some of the new more practical based syllabi.

Abdul creates a nice “back of the envelope” design and talks briefly about a system he will write to book the laptops out for students – it will need to scan a student ID cards together with a laptop tag to book out the laptop to the student for a period of time a record the return of the laptop in the same way. We will probably have to write a “timetable” element so that staff know when laptops are booked out for sessions – so that a teacher doesn’t ask students to bring a laptop when they are booked out by another teacher. We will also need to fully develop the wireless capabilities in the areas of use and somehow address the battery charging issue with the laptops – it could be that we will need to provide “power islands” in these classrooms.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this project develops as it offers a controlled and manageable exploration of a very different model where IT is with students – a student centric approach. It looks ahead to the time when students will increasingly have their own equipment, indeed there will be nothing to prevent students using their own laptops in this project if they prefer.