Does the wifi disappear on your laptop? It might be just me, but I’ve had this recurring, intermittent and extremely annoying problem for a while. By wifi disappearing I don’t mean the wifi network, I mean the wifi adaptor itself. The laptop just doesn’t seem to realise it is wifi enabled. I finally found a fix, or at least a workaround.
ITM – The First Week
Well, the 2016-17 season has started well. Again, the Innovation and Technology Management MSc cohort is both international (15 nationalities) and diverse (automotive engineering, economics and marketing to name a few). The first intensive week of teaching is now complete; after a day of looking at innovation case studies, by day 2 students had researched and were presenting their own examples of Architectural Innovation.
Yesterday we visited the Innovation Centre in Bath to meet local entrepreneurs, all of them recent alumni of the University. I have a feeling that some of this year’s cohort will be following in their footsteps….
Posted in innovation, teaching
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The Global Classroom
Last week, I travelled to London with my colleagues @TraceyMadden and @FabioNemetz to attend the #ESLTIS16 conference. The conference was fascinating (some thoughts below). Tracey and I presented some work that we have done with @DanishMishra on using Social Network Analysis to look at learning in MOOC. Looking at 2 different FutureLearn MOOCs, we show that the one designed to be more connectivist has a more participant-led pattern of interaction. Interestingly, over repeated presentations of the MOOCs, the interaction patterns converge to some extent, as tutors take more of a back seat role.
Christmas Puzzle
This is a logic puzzle I picked up some time back. I think a version appears in a great book called Modern Heuristics.
Warning – it’s a bit of a time waster. But there is a solution, I promise.
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No email in the morning
For the time pressured, the title of this post is the conclusion. Read on to find out why.
Posted in timemanagement
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Agile in Government
Despite my last blog on some well publicised troubles, agile is still firmly central to the UK government’s digital strategy (incidentally this appears to be true over the pond in the USA). This topic was explored on Friday morning at agile on the beach.
Does Agile work?
Ouch! The UK national audit office has just released a report criticising the DWP project on Universal Credit, released on the last day of agile on the beach. It has been billed as a ‘rude awakening for the agile dream’, ‘agile chaos’ and even ‘failure of agile’
Is this fair? The essential line from the agile community is that the project failed because it wasn’t agile enough. Although you might counter by saying that agile was simply the wrong tool for the job.
If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail (picture used with permission)
In this blog post I argue that although most of the failures were nothing to do with agile, the case nevertheless has some warnings and lessons about the application of agile that we would do well to heed.
- Watch the interfaces
- Manage the big picture
- Get the contract right
- Have clear objectives
- Embrace and learn from our mistakes
Agile on the Beach?
Agile on the Beach. Is this a real conference? I was sceptical, until I checked the 2012 lineup and discovered that this conference – probably more than other agile conferences – tackled business as well as technical challenges. It’s also pretty good value. So I packed my bags and went to Falmouth. (By the way – it’s further than you think: over 4 hours by train from Bristol: BRI to PYN).
I was hoping to get some insights into a number of agile challenges. Particularly: the customer transition to agile; contracts; and agile in government. I was very happy to find that the conference exceeded expectations on all three counts.
What follows is a series of blog posts about the sessions I went to. Some of them need a bit of background reading so I will be posting them in a piecemeal fashion. There was plenty more, incidentally: on craftsmanship (including a fun sounding coding ‘dojo’); agile teams; and agile in business. I attended mostly, but not exclusively, the latter.
Papers and referencing
I’ve been using the Mac version of a program called Papers2 (also available on Windows). I am slowly getting converted to the program, if you are looking for a better way to organise your academic reading I recommend you give it a try (you can download a trial version for 30 days). Here are some initial notes and tips:
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Future of the UK automobile industry?
I am rarely this timely with my blog posts but was alerted to this announcement by my colleague Andrew Graves:
The government and automotive industry are investing £500 million each over the next ten years in an Advanced Propulsion Centre (APC) to research, develop and commercialise the technologies for the vehicles of the future.
Steve Cayzer 