Module 1: Analysing the Professional Context
This is a piece of assessed coursework for my Masters Degree in case you were wondering why there is a 4000 word blog post suddenly appeared. Please bear with my while I fix all the formatting and cross a few 'i's and dot a few 't's... Also please note that views expressed here are my own and do not represent those of my employers, department or those that fund them.
I work in a rather complicated set up.… 5 years ago I got my current job at the University of Bolton as part of the entity known as the Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards (CETIS). CETIS exists to support the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and various of the projects it funds at other institutions across the country. The projects are termed “e-Learning” projects however they cover a range of areas from applications directly related to learning and teaching (virtual learning environments, content repositories, assessment, collaborative tools, ePortfolios) as well as more “administrative” or enterprise-level applications for handling such things as timetabling and student records. CETIS exists to give both JISC and the projects guidance and support with the more technical side of their work, often the development of software or studies into its use and application. It’s about standards and interoperability - encouraging the projects to use appropriate standards and specifications to exchange data with other systems, enabling the complex arrays of systems in universities to be more joined-up and thus hopefully more effective.
CETIS as an organisation seems relatively unusual in structure. It’s distributed around the UK with people in Bolton, other parts of Greater Manchester, Bangor, Glasgow, Edinburgh. Some are employed by Bolton, some by other institutions. Within Bolton, CETIS is hosted by and is one of the various activities of the department called the Institute of Educational Cybernetics (IEC). Other activities at IEC include work on a European project called TENCompetence and of course the IDIBL masters course for which I am writing this piece.
The exact configuration has changed slightly over the years, particularly in relation to the identity and structure of the Bolton department. It has gone from being called CRAL to e-Lab and at one point the department itself was called CETIS which was particularly confusing. Staff have come and gone and more of them are now directly employed by Bolton, however the same fragmented working environment has persisted.
The distributed structure of CETIS is mirrored both in JISC and in the IEC. In all three the people are spread-out geographically, many working from home for a good part of the working week. Physical meetings, conferences and such take place regularly but in almost all cases someone will have had to travel several hundred miles to attend.
Fragmentation is also evident in how we are managed. There is a great deal of individual freedom both in terms of working practices such as home-working, self-regulation of working hours and in terms of the task setting and overall direction of the activities CETIS engage in. Staff members frequently focus their activities on areas that they individually consider to be important or “cool”. For example Scott Wilson is currently quite heavily focussed on “widget” technologies and Simon Grant on modelling personal development and competencies. While this freedom allows individuals to play to their strengths and for the organisation to be relatively agile in following the latest trends in software or standards and hopefully pre-empt the needs of the wider community it can also be very double-edged....
So what do I actually do? My job title is “Standards Implementation Support Officer” meaning that my task is to directly contribute to this support effort. When I first started there was a specific clutch of projects to work with, meetings to arrange to enable them to share knowledge and experience, reports to write on their progress and JISC programme managers to advise on the strategic trajectory of the work. Over time however my day-to-day work has shifted into the realms of actually being directly responsible for the provision of technology to enable CETIS to operate.
All three organisations are highly reliant on collaborative technologies to enable them to function in their distributed settings. Examples being email, conferencing (using both phone-based services and skype), sharing of personal calendars, as well as web-based tools for publishing, disseminating our work and collecting information. Within CETIS we operate a blog-farm using Wordpress coupled to custom software for editorial purposes and a wiki.
Looking back I realise that I became tasked with putting much of this in place - from building various custom web tools right down to the level of setting up and managing the servers it all runs on. While it may not exactly be what I was employed to do it’s something that I frankly do have quite a passion for. I’m the guy who knows how to do cook things up. Prior to CETIS, I worked as a software developer in Sheffield, before that as a database administrator. I understand the nuts and bolts of this stuff and have been tinkering with and programming computers since I was four years old. I don’t pretend to be an incredibly talented software developer, but I hack and I make things work and I consider the usability of systems from a human point of view to be of great importance.
Working on the tools moved me bit-by-bit away from my original job and from my direct engagement with projects or JISC staff. I became much more isolated and tucked in my own bubble of being busy working on the tools.
From the very beginning of career at CETIS it became apparent to me that in order to support the JISC projects (particularly as their numbers were increasing) it was going to be essential to know what the projects actually are. In my very first week I remember sitting in a pub in Edinburgh with one of the JISC programme managers discussing precisely this matter and discovering that JISC did not have any form of centralised project information database. They have a website which lists the projects but much important information as to their running and status was (and for that matter still is) held in various Excel spreadsheets on programme managers’ individual laptops.
At the CETIS end we also had this need - we needed also to be able to identify specific standards and specifications that projects were using, chart relationships between projects and have somewhere to keep track of our interventions, recommendations and general thoughts as to their progress. A website had been built before I got there; the e-Learning Framework (ELF) which did some of this, however the structure of it was never quite right. It was somewhat structurally inflexible in that the relationships between projects and standards were initially one-to-one. The collaborative aspects of the tool, discussion forums and such were mostly ill-used and failed to gain widespread use among the projects. Finally it was not built on technologies that I was particularly comfortable with in terms of doing my own hacking and re-structuring.
SO what do I do about it? I come up with something else. Another database-driven web-application which eventually became known as PROD. Developing this became my main activity at work continuing the trend of my working on building software rather than direct engagement with the JISC projects and programmes.
PROD has a looser structure than ELF and importantly (as time and technologies have progressed somewhat) the ability to aggregate news feeds from the projects own websites. Instead of requiring projects to input information into the site directly it becomes self-updating based on these feeds. It gives us the ability to get an at-a-glance view of activity from either a single project, all the projects at once, or a given subset of them based on any of the project’s attributes, such as use of a given standard or the specific programme that they belong to.
PROD still suffers from the lack of a central source of information though. As a quick fix I implemented “scraping” techniques to gather the basic information about projects directly from the JISC site, a slightly fragile solution but one that does work. It’s around this point that not only does JISC finally get their own Project Information Management System (PIMS) up-and-running but another very similar project directory tool is developed by Ross Gardler of OSSwatch called SIMAL. We now have at least four databases covering much of the same project information (not to mention all the spreadsheets).
The technical answer to this glorious duplication of information as far as Ross and I were concerned was to enable exchange of information between the systems (with PIMS acting as the master-soul-controller) using a dialect of RDF known as Description Of A Project or DOAP. This way the core information is more reliable and the other directories freed up to add their own value, such as feed aggregation and standards-mapping in the case of PROD. This final piece of the jigsaw, trying to get some form of interoperability and data export from PIMS is where we are currently stuck. [Update: 2 weeks later and suddenly we are NOT stuck - there has been lots of movement in this area - hooray!]
In the IT industry it’s often said that the biggest problem is clients. One only has to look at the recently exposed issues with software procurement in the NHS to see an example of a developer, in that case Fujitsu being so overwhelmed by the shifting requirements of the client that the software became impossible for them to deliver:
But public sector work holds pitfalls for suppliers, who often find government departments difficult customers.
Fujitsu pulled out of the NHS programme for IT in May after receiving 650 requests to change its product. Peter Hutchinson, the group director of Fujitsu, told the Public Accounts Committee this summer: “There were a lot of delays in getting paid for things, which was quite frustrating, and there is no question that local trusts withheld agreement to payment in order to force us to make further changes to the system and keep us under pressure.”
Alexi Mostrous
The Times Online, February 2nd 2009
True to form, most of the work I’ve undertaken in the past years on software at CETIS has been subject to similar pressures, requests for changes, shifting requirements. The work of building software ultimately takes much longer than it would have if it were a matter of simply planning-and-doing (wash, rinse, repeat) and diverges from the initial visions and intentions.
The other big factor is that simply throwing technology at an issue is rarely a solution in itself. For an intervention to be truly effective it requires engagement from those participating in the task that the technology is designed to facilitate.
My personal circumstances have been on a rollercoaster. I’ve had two children, split up with my partner, been homeless, had two close friends die in rapid succession and had another one go missing. It has been highly distressing.
Such life circumstances haven’t helped my motivation for work and being in the self-directed, fragmented world of CETIS it has been all-too-easy to retreat into my own bubble, avoid communication with colleagues, fudge my way round work that should have been done yesterday but I’ve simply been ignoring in favour of being occupied by either dealing with my personal problems or indulging in other more-exciting things.
And ironically “more exciting things” really are incredibly exciting right now. I feel I’ve been undergoing somewhat of a creative renaissance, re-discovering passions for music and photography that had been all but quashed from my life. Putting my soul into my personal blogging and writing for the first time ever. I’ve started to put my head above the parapet and consider the future and how I really want to live my life.
I’ve said a few times that Facebook saved my life - it was through re-connecting with old friends that gave me a good deal of the support I needed to make such major life-changes. Where last year Facebook connected me with old friends, this year Twitter has shifted the goalposts again, enabling me to make lots and lots of new connections, strengthen relationships with colleagues and the wider educational technology community. From being the virtual water-cooler in the corner of my screen when I was following a few colleagues and exchanging odd titbits twitter as my network has expanded has also become a veritable factory for generating ideas as I have come into contact with a much wider group of people. Much of this is in turn thanks to events such as Manchester’s Social Media Cafe, which brings together creative people from across the city, focussing on social technologies and their potential in arts, education, media, marketing and many other walks of life.
That’s quite a lot of context. To summarise, the principal issues identified are:
My aim for the rest of this piece is to look at the key issues identified earlier, in my organisation and my own life and analyse them using Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM).
While I’ve not yet read Beer’s classic book “Brain of the Firm” the model and the cybernetic principles behind it are the cornerstone of the IEC’s philosophy and how we as a department seek to understand and make interventions in our world.
Wikipedia defines the VSM as follows:
The Viable Systems Model, or VSM is a model of the organisational structure of any viable or autonomous system. A viable system is any system organised in such a way as to meet the demands of surviving in the changing environment. One of the prime features of systems that survive is that they are adaptable. The VSM expresses a model for a viable system, which is an abstracted cybernetic description that is applicable to any organisation that is a viable system and capable of autonomy. It embodies the risk constraints on Development.
The Viable System Model
Wikipedia at 3:07 UTC February 6th 2009
This afternoon Mark Johnson walked me through the key points of the model and we discussed how it applies in the context of a typical university.
The VSM takes a view of an organisation (though it could also be applied to a human being’s behaviour or a bit of software or whatever) and breaks it into “systems” characterised by five types of activity;
The communication-points between said systems are of paramount importance. In the video discussion Mark talks about how in a typical business environment there is a close linkage between systems three and four, strategic planning and operational management. The chains of command from there down to actual work are equally well established and there are regulatory procedures in place to manage problems between work and management where they arise.
However Mark argues that in our university environments there is a disconnect between systems five and four and the remaining three systems. The organisation has clearly defined identity and strategy at the top level however individuals are effectively being expected to “just get on with stuff” managing their own operational strategies and regulatory procedures. Staff operate in a bubble, isolated, thrashing around according to their own habits and personal demeanour. The fact that we have self-regulation means that those who lack the appropriate self-discipline or resources to deal with an issue can be left to struggle until a counter-productive situation gets utterly out of hand.
Looking at CETIS in terms of the VSM this concept of bubbles is again reflected though I think the boundaries of the bubbles are perhaps slightly different.
System 5: As an organisation we have a reasonably clear identity and remit to support the work of JISC and it’s projects. These are the terms of CETIS’ existence as a service.
System 4: Strategic planning is often concentrated in a few influential individuals though with reference to overall identity as well as the trends and topics bubbling up from System 1 and those individuals’ work.
Systems 3, 2 and 1: Day-to-day work, operational management and regulation are principally down to individuals and their personal bubbles as above.
Several weeks ago I started a discussion on the IDIBL masters course’s (private) forum regarding how we as individuals feel about public exposure of ourselves online. I asked:
Young people today, always having parties on MSN and exposing their telephone numbers to the entire world and posting pictures of each other on Facebook with no trousers and drawn-on moustaches... What do people think about the barriers between personal privacy, exposure and transparency? Which side of the fence do you sit on and why?
_Myself_ on the IDIBL discussion forum
http://moodle.bolton.ac.uk/moodle/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=299
The responses from colleagues and other participants on the course showed a wide range both of personal attitudes and of anecdotal experience from others (learners, colleagues) in their various work settings.
I have to admit that I am one of those people that posts my drunken pictures on facebook and also I am quite personal on the information I state about myself on the web, and my reasons for that is that is who I am. I am the same in work as I am out of work my second life avatar looks like me and I have no need to be wacky online or change my persona online.
My view is if people don’t like what they see then Don't look.
_Stefano Ghazzali_ on the IDIBL discussion forum
A contrasting view came from another participant:
I think this is a very important issue not just for academics but for students as well. The blurring between the private thoughts of an academic and the incendiary, debate initiating firecracker comment that is used to start discussions between students is quite a difficult one. While it can be necessary to be controversial or present an outlandish or, at least, an unpopular statement to get a discussion going it is one thing doing this in a lecture/tutorial room and quite another doing it online! There (here?) it can be copied, edited and re-circulated without any chance of redress or balancing statement being attached to it. This is a danger that, in many cases for me, has prevented me from publishing all but the most sanitised content online.
I've worked in/on the web since 95 and in all that time I have seen inconsiderate use of technology come back and bite people at a later date. Maybe we rush to print (or blog or twitter) now and will repent at leisure.
_Damien Markey_ on the IDIBL discussion forum
What is the impact of these contrasting ways of thinking on communication? How does this affect our self-regulation in terms of the VSM?
There is a lot to be said for transparency, it demonstrates a level of self-confidence and willingness to communicate without fear or prejudice. Stefano as the free-poster in the discussion states that he is more than prepared to expose his opinions even if they are critical of his organisation and that he values his own consistency as an individual across the domains of work and social life. If his self-regulation in terms of the VSM also operates in this way anyone who cares to know where he is at professionally and what his issues are only has to listen. The question then is, “are they listening?”
Damien’s comment shows much more caution and concern over the impact of ones statements being taken out-of-context. As opposed to Stefano’s “If you don’t like it don’t look” approach Damien seems to be saying, “Watch your back and don’t do anything rash.” Putting this in VSM terms it’s not necessarily preventing feedback between the systems within his organisational environment but if one is too careful could it exsasabate tendencies toward the bubble mentality?
As a further inquiry I will be asking the forum what they think of my suppositions in this regard. Ultimately my feeling is that there is a balance to be struck for one as an individual but that organisations will have to come to terms with the likelihood of their laundry being aired in public, and pay closer attention to their employees needs and opinions.
Also, mostly thanks again to Twitter the speed at which information spreads or “goes viral” has become incredibly fast. An recent article in Computerworld discusses many examples of such activity:
There are countless situations in which everyone in the room assumes privacy or even "Vegas Rules" (what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas). But when someone is twittering about those situations, the event suddenly becomes public, sometimes very public.
Mike Elgan
writing in Computerworld, January 31st 2009
Prior to writing this I created a diagram showing a range of my activities, both within and outside of work. The green lightning-bolts represent areas of excitement and creative success - red ones of fears and failure, representing how I feel about these activities.
Again trying to frame this within the VSM, the majority of the points of failure exist at the point of self-regulation in System 2. Of communication breakdown in terms of articulating the issues with my work. Many of my more “successful” are in the space of Systems 4 and 5 where the activities and interventions are making an impact on my personal identity and strategic ideas as to how to develop myself. In these spaces for me it really has become about extreme transparency and sharing of both the creative work I’m producing and how I’m feeling about it. Of becoming very public indeed and of seeing tangible benefits in terms of feedback, reputation and my own self-esteem.
Concrete examples include being approached by a national music magazine for use of my photographs (http://icanhaz.com/mushaboom) or generating ideas in concert with twitter-folk to revolutionise Freecycle (http://samscam.co.uk/blog/404) and then discovering that it had already been more-or-less done already but finding myself instantly in touch with those who had done so and potentially contributing to their work and thinking.
In this creative space I’ve made a new and viable bubble for myself. The trouble is it’s one that is in many ways separated from my primary work tasks.
In a corner of the world-map near all the good stuff there is a cloud labelled “work imperatives”. I see it as being about taking the practices and most importantly the level of unburdened communication which is characterising my “creative” life and putting that into my “work” and “home” lives, creating a more naturally self-regulating self, ending the separation between these aspects of myself. Popping the bubbles in which those systems exist.
What I believe I have been learning through this process is what people have (I now realise) been telling me for years, simply that closed lines of communication prevent one from achieving ones goals or realising ones dreams.
While writing this essay I have of course been twittering - it has helped get me through the night. Here is the log of conversations:
samscam Christ almighty... I've got writing to sort out.... I CAN do 3000 words by morning, brain dump time! Pizza, coffee, ice cream and NO TWITTER about 12 hours ago
kylemcfarlane @samscam or, Pizza, coffee, ice cream and 150 tweets (at 7 characters a word, that should get you to 3k). It's all about perspective. about 12 hours ago
mundusvivendi @samscam Thanks Sam, that reminded me of my student years ;-) about 11 hours ago
mundusvivendi @samscam I hope it goes well for you about 11 hours ago
samscam @kylemcfarlane @mundusvivendi thanks for the support :-) eta currently 3am. 660 wds and accelerating. about 11 hours ago
francesbell @samscam - write, write then cut, cut - good luck Sam about 10 hours ago
samscam 1081 - is it ice-cream time yet? about 9 hours ago
samscam Mmmmm phish food. about 9 hours ago
samscam Listening to Ella Fitzgerald "All through the night" :-) about 9 hours ago
samscam Switched from Jazz to Funk - and included the words "master soul controller" in the essay! YEAH! 1606 #edufunk about 8 hours ago
samscam TWO THOUSAND WORDS about 7 hours ago
samscam Now writing the bit about twitter "Last year Facebook saved my life, this year Twitter has revolutionised it" about 6 hours ago
samscam Sankeys is kicking out... lots of girls and boys getting on the disco bus back to studentland. I'm on the viable system model. 2247/3000 wds about 5 hours ago
samscam Booooooopppp. Still going. 3rd pot of coffee. 2653 about 4 hours ago
heloukee @samscam is the end in sight??? about 4 hours ago
samscam Well it needs to be between 3k and 4k - But I've gone and top-loaded it... need more down the bottom and less up the top... Classic error! about 4 hours ago
samscam @heloukee Possibly more phish food will help :-) about 4 hours ago
heloukee @samscam i deleted it because i didn't want to distract you!!! hehe.. are you aching yet? about 4 hours ago
samscam @heloukee reckon I have gone over initial hump of exhaustion and barmyness... closing twitter for a bit to type type type. bfn about 4 hours ago from twitterrific
samscam WHOOO! 3024 loads still to write about though! about 3 hours ago
jont @samscam I seem to remember a brave "no twitter" comment :-) Wish I'd got up this morning with +3000 words about 2 hours ago
kathtrinder @samscam You been up writing all night?!?!? Impressive, sir. Zzzzzzz..... about 1 hour ago
samscam @jont @kathtrinder 3584 - really bonkers now. Twitter has helped keep me going in all honesty! about 1 hour ago
kathtrinder @samscam Completely! :-D What a great use for Twitter, though. I'll go put the kettle on for more coffee. about 1 hour ago
Hi Sam, great work you're doing here. I'm now even more interested in doing what I indicated we could do at the last #smc_mcr @ The Northern. I'll need to read the full blog you've got tho. %-) How about the end of March? 28/29th? Drop me an email... or indeed, find me on Facebook! :-)
Have a good day!
This is kind of inspirational.
I think you're right.