Plate Spinning: a reflection on the past 13 months

It’s been a hard year and to be honest and personal it’s been a mixed year of anxiety and pride. I think my early pandemic optimism (or naivety) has been eroded over time via 5pm briefings, attention grabbing headline, confusion, politicisation of everything and anything. On sunday 8th March 2020 I sat in a packed […]

Online Proctoring: what came first, the chicken or the egg?

Myself and Karen Howie have been working on a paper regarding online proctoring and whether the technical solutions currently in the market are fit for purpose. When I say fit I mean do they meet the huge amount of variation in exam practise used at the institution, can they cater for varying numbers of students, […]

We are the campus

Recently I find myself wondering with colleagues about when we will be back to the office. Reminiscing on the smell of shared toilets that have balsa wood walls and a unique fragrance that reminds me of a music festivals loo. Or when we will be able to visit hipster coffee shops and try not to […]

This is getting harder

Day (I have lost count) in the big brother house and I am starting to struggle. It’s been a slightly odd 33 days! I started working from home on the 16th March and my daily routine is in the bin. Before I would be getting home at 1700 and running after children, getting ready to […]

The Pandemic Pivot

These are unique days in which we are trying to evolve and adapt to a situation that is unpredictable and unrelenting to everyone. The current pandemic is generating stresses in both professessional and domestic lives with the only certainty being that in the short term are lives will be flipped and we all be affected […]

All work at home and no play makes Myles …..

Working at home, the last frontier….. for some! I have been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to work at home (WAH for those that love an acronym) for 12 years thanks to the flexibility of my employers and the ability to do IT stuff remotely. Whether it was building Citrix servers, packaging applications, […]

OnTask: Learning Analytics to help you stay on target\ontask

Usually when I blog I try to think of a funky title to depict me brian dump however today I am feeling less imaginative so the title reflects the blog. It’s about the OnTask pilot 2020 @ the University of Edinburgh. If you want to hear someone rant about big data and prediction please flick […]

I Predict a Riot

Prediction is a word that I am starting to see and hear a lot more recently. It not new, my fitness tracker predicts my steps each day and my expected sleep patterns, my smart lights predict when I will be home and my smart thermostat also likes to know when I am home ensuring I […]

Suspicious Minds or similarity

If you work in edtech and someone has asked about online assignments you will have probably had the plagiarism chat. It usually ends in the same workflow being adopted which uses a tool that the majority of the UK institutions utilise. I am not name dropping however we as a sector may need to reflect […]

The M&M Podcast Edpiside 2: Bots in education

The second episode of the Michael and Myles (M&M) podcast explores the expansion of the teacher function via bots. The podcast speculates on the role of bots, current bot deployments, bot myths and the research currently being undertaken at the university to identify possible use cases for bots. Now thats the official bit of the […]

Author: mblaney