Higher Education

Learning from agribusiness and the value of looking outwards

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In my three years working at Flinders and the seven years before that doing consulting work across a whole bunch of other unis, it has struck me that the Higher Ed sector isn’t always brilliant at ‘looking outwards’. I’ve been guilty of it myself on many occasions – in the face of a problem, the first point of call is often to reach out to my counterparts in other Unis and ask how they’ve tackled a similar situation.

Not that this is all bad, in fact it makes perfect sense in a lot of cases to avoid reinventing the wheel. Where it falls down is the potential for having the same sets of eyes with the same knowledge and experience finding the same solution for a similar problem, leading to ‘institutional isomorphism’, i.e. every organisation ending up looking the same in how they operate (Simon Marginson talks about this at a more organisational level in some of his papers like this one, but it applies just as well on a smaller scale I think).

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The IT project governance group – kickstarting Agile behaviour change in a Digital Workplace project

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I scared an Agile coach this week.

I’ve recently taken on a project role as Product Owner for an IT project we’re calling the Digital Workplace project, which aims to more effectively leverage several collaboration technologies (such as live chat, document sharing/collaboration and project planning/management) across the professional services teams at the University. Although I’ve called it an IT project, there’s really very little new technology in it, and it should really be called a behaviour change project underpinned by accelerated technology adoption – or something. In fact, all three likely tech tools involved are already available to all staff, it’s just that very few people actually use them.

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Farewelling my smartwatch – a tale of data value

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I stopped wearing my smartwatch this week.

Or, to be more accurate, I stopped wearing the latest smartwatch that I have been wearing. I started off with a Fitbit Charge HR (arguably not a smartwatch, I’ll give you that) until that fell to pieces, then moved on to a Sony Smartwatch 3, and then had a brief dalliance with a borrowed Ticwatch S. They now all sit abandoned while I toy with the idea of putting them on eBay, taking them to bits or strapping them to the dog while I’m at work to see just how active he isn’t during the day (greyhounds are good like that).

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My writer’s block (aka Life at Flinders – three years on)

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Roadblock - https://flic.kr/p/fxFVgnI’ve really struggled to write for the last six months. Whilst looking at my blog from an outsiders perspective there’s a big gap between this post and the last one way back in September, what you don’t see is the handful of post ‘stubs’ that will probably forever remain unpublished that sit in my WordPress drafts, nor do you see the flickers of ideas that have popped into my head that have never even made it that far. This post attempts to understand why – and how it relates to my third year at Flinders.

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Designing for the Digital Divide

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Today saw the release of the 2017 Australian Digital Inclusion Index, which can be downloaded from the Telstra Sales Portal Digital Inclusion website. The report had some positive, although expected, conclusions in that digital inclusion is increasing right across the board, which is the good news. What caught my eye however were the specific mentions of the sociodemographic groups which are the most digitally excluded across the country, specifically:

“…people in low income households, people aged 65+, people with a disability, people who did not complete secondary school, Indigenous Australians, and people not in paid employment.”

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