A lot of the time IT services are supporting users – that is, students and teaching staff – or work quietly in the background to assure systems and infrastructure are in good shape and fit for purpose. In my own role I rarely have an opportunity to see what happens “on the ground”, in the […]

In 2023, I started work on migrating three Drupal 7 websites over to Drupal 10. All three sites used a custom sub-theme based on Bootstrap 3. Each site had its own purpose, but they needed to look and feel similar. The main reason for the migration was that Drupal 7 was reaching its end-of-life.

This is a blog post containing an appeal for pretty much every supplier who provides HE with IT services of some sort, teaching & learning, finance, email, communication tools, etc etc. That big long list of features we’ve requested and the bug fixes we are desperate for…..  we’d very much …

I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about AI agents/agentic AI.  If you don’t know already, AI agents are AI systems which can collect data, make decisions and take autonomous actions to achieve goals (see this helpful description by Amazon).  They can do this on your behalf without your intervention.  …

Switching jobs from one university to another might seem like it wouldn’t be a big deal, and in some ways, it isn’t. But in the world of higher education, particularly in the realm of Learning Technology, changing institutions can actually be quite significant. Institution and LMS ‘Switcharoo’ Although my expertise in supporting Moodle was helpful […]

Nelly and I were invited to speak at Kaltura Connect in London today (at the fantastic Science Gallery @KCL).  Kaltura is the service we use to provide our own Media Hopper Create service for media storage and streaming.  It was a fun day, we got a chance to catch up …

I attended the Friday of ALT-C today and I’m glad I did, it was a very interesting and fun day. Some brief highlights from me…. I learned a new term today which I thought was really poignant – ‘lifeload’ – sum of all pressures a student has in their life …

Ada Lovelace Day was on the 14th of October this year.  We’ve been celebrating her day here in IS for a decade now (long before I joined IS) and this year, like the last 2 years, I was on the organising team for our celebration.  This year we had an …

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes. For Ada Lovelace Day 2025, Jackie, Magda and Stewart created the ‘Interactive Women in STEM tour’ game for everyone to play.

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes. For Ada Lovelace Day 2025 I created a colouring-in illustration of Moira Dunbar (1918-1999), the pioneering Scottish-Canadian glaciologist and Arctic sea-ice researcher.