As 2025 comes to an end (and yes, I can barely believe it’s nearly 2026) it’s worthwhile to reflect on the past year. It’s been a quite a whirlwind. Not only has news and politics been pretty shocking and horrible this year (again!!!) but news about finances in UK HE …

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.  …

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 …

I don’t really understand how we got to the end of August (well, nearly) already. It feels like minutes ago we were welcoming the summer in with our new intern cohort and today is the day that most of our summer internships finish. I can’t tell you how much I …

The numbers have been crunched, the results are in.  We’ve had record usage of our lecture recording service by our staff and students this year! We’ve had a whopping 40,160 recordings created since June 2024 and a massive 28,945,731 minutes of lectures watched in the same time frame. Of course, …

I’ve had an exciting week so far (and it’s only Thursday), in a good way rather than a bad exciting week (which sometimes happens but is less fun….!).   We had 3 new interns join us in DLAM (David, Hera and Otis) more about that in a future blog post) to …

I’ve long been interested in the value of AI and where and when it is particularly useful or gimmicky.  Given the impact of AI on the environment (and costs), I often reflect on whether the AI input is worth-the-impact. I have been using ELM to help tidy up and reword …