We need Digital Tour Guides

We digital incomers exist in a foreign land. The natives - our students - leave us behind with their fluency.  How to keep an open mind and learn from them? I've just written a job description for a 'Digital Tour Guide' to help us understand this new world. I wonder if I can make this happen....

Wanted!  Recent graduate or current student. Passionate about the ways in which IT can be useful in life and learning.  An excellent communicator who can explain technology in an accessible, empathetic manner.  Be an advocate for the IT needs of students and help to improve communication and engagement between University planners and the community of students.

And here's where tact is needed......able to act as a mentor to senior staff, providing practical guidance and demonstrating the value of new technologies.

The network is the computer - new role for JANET

One of many important and succinct things that John Naughton says is his new book 'From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg' is 'the network is the computer'. I've not heard anyone call an iPad a 'dumb terminal' but that's what I had on my desk twenty something years ago, and that's what I'm using to write this post. OK so it's not so dumb, it's certainly prettier, better with pictures and music too, but it ain't that brainy.

I went to the first Advisory Board for the new JANET (UK) Brokerage this week. This is where some of the most important action is going to be. Now the cloud is real. It turns out that our staff and students didn't need to be told it was Bring Your Own Device to work day. We need to work out how to connect them from these devices to the stuff they need, and the stuff usually won't be on our campus.

JANET's job is to connect our people from wherever they happen to be to the resources they need, even if they are in a remote village with a grotty ADSL link (which I am). That's a challenge - a global one. But we want them to do much more to catalyse the cloudward shift. The new framework agreement for managed Data Centre and co-lo services is a start. Next, a co-ordinated discussion with Microsoft to help us realise the huge potential of their Office365 offering. This is the kind of help we are going to need to enable us to work with these suppliers in entirely new ways. Exciting for both sides of the relationship and plenty of space for JANET in the middle!

Goldilocks data centre

We have a data centre unworthy of the name. It's running out of power and cooling capacity.  We are blowing two kilowatts heating the atmosphere for every one that runs computers.  The occasional floods don't help. At last we have the budget to do a proper job. But here's the hard decision. How much to spend on our Goldilocks data centre - one that's not too big, not too small?

How many flops and bytes do we need on our campus now that cloud computing is real? Now that Google, Microsoft and the rest run their monster operations in forgettable places with their own power stations? Surely only a fool with a control complex runs their own data centre now? We've been round and round this one. We've done feasibility reviews and modelled scenarios. Too many variables. Eventually we will pick a number (£s, KWs) that's affordable and that isn't so obviously wrong that I get the sack!