Friday 1 July 2011

CABs, Admissions and White Paper

A few things to catch up on. Last Wednesday I was in London at a meeting of the UCAS Admissions Process Review Group. Lots of extremely good research has been carried out using prospective students, students who've been through the system, schools, colleges, universities and both good and bad points about the system identified. Lots of very exciting proposals for change, and we're in the middle of considering them now, and of course wider stakeholder groups are also being consulted. Expect to see a report for consultation around September.

Also this week I've been involved in discussions about how we might offer Google accounts to students when they leave and become alumni, and bout how our data migration in preparation for our move to Google calendar for staff is going.

This morning was our weekly  Change Advisory Board, and a discussion about when is the best time to do some upgrades to our core routers, which might, if it all goes horribly wrong,  cause a network outage, and some server outages. Of course the answer to that is never, so we have to look for the least worst time. It is definitely an issue with the current 24/7 expectation, that finding maintenance windows gets harder.

Oh, and of course, the other interesting event this week was the White Paper. Watched the debate on a live BBC stream, and followed the breaking news through the day on twitter.  Supposed to be released at 3.30 but late in the day a delay was announced, leading to much speculation on twitter for the reasons. My two favorites were:

delay: BIS officials struggle with numbered paragraph issues in Word 2007"

and

"I presume the delay is down to the possible plagiarism found in it by Turnitin"

Implications for IT to follow when I've managed to read though and digest it all.

No comments: