Sketchnotes Digifest19 Sketchnotes

Tagged: Live | Posted: Tue, Apr 02, 2019 approx. 2 min read

I attended day two of JISC’s DigiFest having heard lots of good things about the range of sessions on offer, covering lots of the pressing issues around Teaching and Learning tech. @JoysyJohn from Nesta gave a keynote that raised the issue of skills gaps across lots of economies, even accounting for the massive predicted changes in economies across the world. All very optimistic for learning organisations if they (we) can grasp how to deliver these things, and figure out how to get the ‘non AI’ skills we need. Joysy’s slides were all very interesting and I think the video could easily have been longer and delivered at a more leisurely pace and been great. The slides are available on the DigiFest programme and well worth a look.

As someone who reads the Standard Occupational Classificationfor fun, the Nesta page on Skills Taxonomy sounded really interesting (no, really).

After the keynote I went to a JISC session on Digital Capabilities, which showcased a Digital Capability DIscovery Tool which even thoough the wifi and numbers of people logging on made it a bit slow I could see enough to know it looks a promising development and good to see that the skills of professional staff are being addressed by a pilot this year.

A bit of networking during the day led to me catching up with Marieke Guy from the Royal Agricultural University who has writtten an excellent and comprehensive summary of her two days at the event, though I remain healthily skeptical about whatever ‘Education 4.0’ is.

The best session the day was saved til last.

Andrew Proctor from Staffordshire University talking about their Digital Transformation work. Slides are available. I particularly liked the emphasis on practical things they’d built and the way that they seemed to build things and learn the lessons quickly and then go and build some more. The bot that they built to automate some queries was built using a standard Bot framework in partnership with an agency, but the main point that I noted was the speed that things were released, assessed and fed back into future development. What he didn’t go into, which I guess was out of scope of the talk was the journey of getting to that state. A talk for another day perhaps