Virtually Friends

I’m doing Race for life this Sunday and am collecting sponsorship through my online sponsorship page (feel free to sponsor me!) Race for life takes place all over the country and is Cancer Research UK’s biggest event bringing together thousands of women each year to walk, jog or run 5k and raise money to beat cancer.  To date, four million women have raised over £240 million for Cancer Research UK’s life-saving work.

Anyway this isn’t just a shameless plug, there’s slightly more to it than that …

I’ve done Race for life before and have previously used printed out sponsorship forms as well as the online one. This year I decided to ditch the paper copy and go just for the online version. My personal promotion has taken the form of emailing a big chunk of my contacts list, sticking a link on Facebook and Tweeting about it.

Some of my friends and colleagues have sponsored me, others haven’t (quite a lot of apologies from people who have sponsored lots of other Race for life participants already – totally understand – there’s a lot of us doing it) and some probably don’t know yet (and won’t find out) because they don’t go online very often. OK no big surprises there.

What I was surprised about was that I received sponsorship from a few people who I haven’t actually met before and don’t really know. At least I don’t really know them in real life but they are part of my Twitter circle. They are virtual friends, or should I say virtually friends!

I’ve been a member of virtual communities in the past but have never got to know so many people so well in such a quick amount of time – people who I haven’t actually met in the flesh, and am probably unlikely to.

Anyway thanks to all virtual (virtually) friends.

Anyone else want to sponsor me?

UCISA Symposium: It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it

Yesterday I made a flying visit to Birmingham (and back) for the second day of the UCISA Advisory and Support Staff Symposium 2009 held at the Aston Business School Conference Centre, Birmingham.

This year was the first time that USICA has pulled together two of its groups into one event event: the UCISA Service Desk Group (formally known as the Advisory Services Working Group) and the Distributed IT Support Staff (DITSS) Subgroup. So the delegates comprised of the people in HE/FE Institutions who help you with all your IT requirements. Not a community known for being an easy crowd – and they admit this themselves, as one speaker said “we have in the past had a reputation for being the people who say no“. The infamous “computer says no” sketch from Little Britain hasn’t helped things either.

Presentations

The theme for the event was It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it so remote working could prove to be one of the cornerstones of this assertion.

The morning kicked off with a presentation by David Morris of Coventry University on the Location Independent working (LIW) project. I’ve blogged about this project before and it seems to have gone from strength to strength. The project is now in it’s 12th round and when complete will result in 125 members of staff working off-site. Coventry University have also found that the opportunity to work remotely is proving to be an attractive incentive to future employees and is a significant instrument.

The next set of presentations looked at Cloud computing from a couple of different angles. Nick Short and Sarah Sherman from the Appropriate & Practical Technology for Students, Teachers, Administrators and Researchers (APT STAIRS) project have been using Google docs as a tool to solve a number of L&T problems. In the second phase of the project they have with been working with vets out in Tanzania and begun to use the Google Android mobile platform. As Nick pointed out in Tanzania there are surprisingly good networks that can be taken advantage of (in fact he’d found the wireless in Tanzania to be better than the wireless in the Aston Business School – which was lousy!). Phil Range from Manchester Metropolitan University talked about the move from their Novel Student email system to Microsoft Live@Edu. Some interesting discussion followed on the problems this might cause with regard to support and loss of data. Manchester Met have taken the “it’s now Microsoft’s problem” approach to dealing with this.

Connecting Remote Workers

After refreshments I led a workshop on Connecting Remote Workers. The session was met with mixed response. Some delegates felt that they had the technology sorted (and have had for many years) and the people problems and other support factors were not really relevant. Others recognised that having a general plan in action was becoming a necessity with the rise of crisis situations (like Swine Flu). Many recognised that there was a need to test their systems for such situations. Other issues we discussed were licensing problems, broadband problems and roam working. I think these guys were primarily interested in the tools available and saving themselves a headache.

My slides are available from Slideshare:

I next attended a really interesting session on Business and Community engagement led by Dave Hartland of Netskills. BCE is strategic management of partnerships, interactions and transactions with partners, clients and intermediaries external to the institution. Doing this more makes total sense given our current economic situation and JISC have recently begun a programme in this area.

The day ended with a great presentation by Rhion Jones from The Consultation Institute on Serving the stakeholder customer. Rhion did a fantastic job of illustrating how important the symbiotic relationship between a support team and their stakeholders is. This mutually dependent relationship is built on knowing your client, understanding the client and trust. Unfortunately Rhion’s uplifting presentation ended on a bit of a downer – the stark reality that confidence building is particularly tricky in these tough times and that we (the public sector) are heading closer and closer to economic meltdown. As Steve Gough, co-chair of the event put it in his closing thoughts: “we are all screwed!“

This might have got me down luckily I’d just read the reboot Britain essays (more on those in another post) on my train journey so was feeling optimistic and empowered! New situations just require new approaches. I allowed this idea to be the one to fill my thoughts on the walk back to New Street…

The Psychology of a Remote Worker

Chatty workers are the best telecommuters claims a recent MSNBC article and on first reading I felt I had to agree. The basic premise of the article is that some of us have the right mindset for remote working and others don’t: “Some of us are simply not — by temperament, psychology, or personality type — wired for the life of the digital nomad.“

Extrovert vs Introvert

The assertion is based on some research carried out by Pearn Kandola for Cisco. Prior to the research they assumed that it would be “the quants, the introverts and the shy types who would thrive in a virtual work situation” but they found that in reality “it’s the employees who chase socialization who thrive in the land of virtual work“. Those who were better at communicating in the office were also better at communicating out of the office. These were people who “stay connected no matter where they are. It comes naturally to them.“

My Twitter Class by Mallix (Flickr)

Now I’m really into communication and most people who know me will say that I’m quite a chatterbox so this research suits me. I know that as a remote worker I’ll do my best to keep in touch with people (using Twitter, Skype, email, anything that’s going) because I like to chat. However I’m not entirely sure that it means I’m being more productive than someone who doesn’t chat as much and I’m also not sure how this can be measured. Maybe I’m just dealing with remote working in my own way. The person who doesn’t chat may be getting along just fine working from home, but just isn’t as vocal about it. I suppose what I’m saying is that supporting a remote worker is about making sure that they are getting what they require communication wise. If they feel isolated because they are home alone then an organisation needs to make sure that they have access to social networking tools and the like. However if they prefer to be left alone then as long as that suits their team and is the right approach for the work they are carrying out then that’s OK.

I guess one could argue that those who chat more make their manager’s lives easier because they lend themselves better to being measured by output rather than attendance. Personally I feel there needs to be some serious retraining of managers to deal with more flexible ways of working; discounting a personality type to make their lives easier isn’t acceptable.

Organised vs Disorganised

The Pearn Kandola research also found that remote and mobile workers “are far more organized, personally, than their office-bound counterparts“. This does make sense. To make it work working from home or out and about you do need to be organised. However some organisation skills can be taught.

The post concludes with some comments from Stuart Duff, Pearn Kandola’s chief researcher:

In offices across the world, Duff saw managers struggling with managing their remote workers. “It’s not as easy as simply pushing workers out the door,” says Duff. The wrong personality types will flounder. Extroverted curiosity seekers who are quick decision makers and super Type A personalities tend to thrive. “It almost requires a super person,” says Duff.

Does that make me and my remote working colleagues super people?

I think not. I just want to make it work, mainly because I have to!

Assessment

I do agree that there needs to be some assessment of personality when considering if someone can work out of the office. This selection criteria should all be well documented in a remote working policy. However I don’t think that those who are less extrovert should be discounted.

On reading the article I did start thinking about my recent attendance of a one-day conference on Improving Services and Reducing Costs Through Flexible Working for the Public sector. It became apparent during the day that Local Authorities are moving lots of people off-site through necessity (space and cost restrictions). Many of these people might not have chosen, given the option, to work in this way and many may not have the right personality for this different way of working. Lets hope that LAs bear this in mind when they make their decisions or it could be an accident waiting to happen.

So what psychology do you think it takes to be a successful remote worker?

Establishing Our Online Identity

A Friday treat for you all! Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University has written a great guest blog post on the significance of online identity for remote workers. (I touched on this a few weeks back when discussing the distribution of vanity URLs for Facebook).

Those who read Martin’s very popular blog (The Ed Techie) and/or follow him on Twitter (mweller) will know that digital identity and the issues surrounding it are an area of much discussion among Martin and his colleagues.

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I recently gave a talk about online academic identity. I argued that for academics our online identity will become our academic identity. What I meant by this was that, just as with academic papers, if they can’t be found and accessed online (usually via Google) then they don’t really exist. Most people now, whether consciously or not, make the access trade-off: even if a different resource may be better if they can’t access it directly (and freely), then they will choose a lesser one. The same will happen for people – if your academic identity isn’t represented in some means online then you will be left out of discussions, projects, collaboration, references.

For those of us who often work at home, establishing this identity has dual significance, because it is both how we are represented to the world, but also to our work colleagues. The good news is that creating such an identity is not only easy with the number of tools we have available, but it may actually be more effective than the traditional, face to face methods.

In the 1980s in the heyday of the Yuppie, there was talk of the ‘power breakfast’ when Masters of the Universe would meet at breakfast to do business to show how tough they were. This is nothing – nowadays I get up and reply to some tweets, put a comment on someone’s blog, respond to comments on my own blog that have come in overnight and maybe even produce a quick publication in the form of a blog post. I have done global networking before I’ve changed out of my pyjamas. And I’m pretty normal in this.

So it is not just that our identity is distributed over space (ie through multiple sites which highlight different facets of our personality), but it is also distributed over time. And this allows for a greater network of contacts than when we are limited by the physical environment. If I tweet a joke or observation, it is the type of comment only a few people in a face to face setting would hear, but on twitter it is potentially ‘heard’ by all 1700 followers (and more if it is retweeted, although in reality it will only be a fraction of these that actually read the tweet). And these are the type of ’social glue’ comments that connect people.

I used to work on campus 5 days a week, but working at home more has coincided with the advent of blogs and twitter. My professional and personal profile on campus is now much higher than it was when I attended every day, but largely sat in my office, and occasionally ventured out for coffee. I have contact across many different units which are both professionally useful, but also more social and personal than they were previously. I am sure being a homeworker has meant that I have worked harder at establishing this online identity.

The talk I mentioned at the start was given to a small audience of about 20-30 OU academics. Afterwards I recorded an accompanying audio soundtrack and sequenced this to make a slidecast over at slideshare. In a week the recording has had 719 views. If I look back at my other slideshare presentations the number of views of most of them number in the 1000s, with the highest being 6331. This is possible because they are distributed across place and time.

I know that some people now don’t bother attending my ‘live’ presentations (or are unconcerned if they miss them) because they know I will put them up later. And more than that, I feel that I have time to correct the presentations (although they still remain a fine example of amateur hour) so that the recorded version may well be superior to the live one. I think this may pervade across all of my online identity: my blog has more interesting things to say than I do, and my twitter stream is wittier than I am. I have become like one of those bands of whom people bemoan ‘they’re not as good live’. And as we perfect our online skills, maybe this is the fate that will befall us all. In which case, don’t ask me to give a keynote, I’ll just record you one instead.

Weighing up Webinars

Last week was a busy week and I didn’t get a chance to post about my webinar for the Regional Support Centre South West.

I gave a number of webinars earlier this year for the Regional Support Centre Eastern using Elluminate and shared my experiences (Squirmy Creatures: My first Online Presentation). The title sort of gives the game away but online presenting was quite a new, nerve-wracking experience for me. The good news is that the webinar I gave last week went really well and I felt a lot more relaxed. It definitely gets easier to present in this way the more you do it.

The biggest difference between this seminar and my previous ones was that this time I used GotoWebinar rather than Elluminate. The two software products are pretty similar, the main difference being that Elluminate requires you to upload your slides for participants to see while GotoWebinar allows participants to see your desktop.

Having now used the two products I’d have to say that I prefer uploading my slides because it means that my desktop (and all its mess) remains my own and if I need to do a quick look up on the Web to check something out then I can without anyone realising. It also means that you can use your first slide as a basis for discussion while waiting for the webinar to begin (I previously had a list of Web 2.0 tools and got people to tick them if they’d used them before.) The other main differences I noticed were that there was no participants list and no general chat box (though messages could be sent to the administrator). (Note that some of the GotoWebinar features were locked for our webinar so there may be other ways of working). I’ve just found a good critique by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner entitled Feeling lonely in a webinar in which she, normally an Elluminate or Adobe Connect user, talks about her GotoWebinar experience without chat and a participants list: “It was a rather lonely affair.”

Last week I was too busy concentrating on presenting to feel lonely. However one thing I did really enjoy at the end of the session was when Mel, the organiser, allowed people to ask me questions using their microphones rather than through the chat. This allowed us to have quite a lively discussion about the appropriate etiquette for Creative Commons use. It was also great to hear the participants – proof that they really do exist!

If you are interested in using webinar software then there is a good discussion of the main issues/features on the elearning technology blog.

The actual webinar was on creative Commons and for those interested the presentation is available from Slideshare.

A video of the webinar is also available from the RSC-SW site.

While I’m on the subject of webinars I came across Graham Attwell’s Ten tips for online moderators on the Pontydysgu blog. All the organisers and moderators I’ve worked with so far have been totally professional but these tips are great starter for anyone who hasn’t moderated before.

I’d definitely be keen to try other webinar software (like Webex and Livemeeting) in the future to get a better idea of what is available. So if anyone is after a presenter on something Web 2.0 related then just drop me a line.

Animoto: Sharing Video

Animoto is a great tool for creating short videos from images. I started out using the free version to create a short video about last years Institutional Web Management Workshop (a 3 day event I chair for HE/FE Web managers) but ended up paying $3 for a longer video because it was so easy to use.

Institutional Web Management Workshop 2008, Aberdeen, 22-24th July

Have a watch, I think it gives a good idea of the atmosphere of the the event!

Embedding in WordPress

Figuring out how to embed it in WordPress.com took a little time. After you’ve created your video there is a button on the right hand side called Video toolbox which opens up a set of options. Although there is an option to Embed the code given doesn’t seem to work on WordPress.

Instead you chose the Share option and then click on More options where it will ask for your WordPress login and then will directly send the code as a draft post. Be careful, some other ways of doing this (such as this Vodpod work around) actually publish your video by default, so you might find that you have a live post before you are ready!

I’ve also upload the video to YouTube, though this version isn’t as high quality.

If you want to see the video in its full glory take a look at the Animoto original.

Credit Due

Thanks to all the people who took the photos used in the video (especially Sharon Steeples). They are all available from Flickr using the iwmw2008 tag and all have a Creative Commons licence on them.

Also thanks to everyone who appears on the photos!

Remote Worker Awards

I’ve entered the Remote Worker Awards organised by Remote Employment.

The awards are open to anyone who works remotely or from home and any employer who employs remote workers. Prizes include a £15k home based franchise and a Garden Home Office worth £10k. Why not have a go!

There are several categories:

• The Home Worker Award – Employees currently working predominantly from home.
• The Remote Worker Award – Employees currently working remotely, out of office, field or mobile based.
• Work From Home Award – Anybody who wants to work from home but is currently not doing so.
• Freelance Consultant Award – Anyone working as a freelance consultant.
• Helen O’ Grady Special Award – Anyone looking for a life changing career.
• The Open University Skills Award – Anyone looking to re-train or re-skill possibly following redundancy.
• The BT Home Business Award – Anyone running a Home Business, large or small.
• The Vivid Green Award – All entrants are automatically entered.
• The Remote Employer Award – Companies who have remote or home based workers included in their workforce.

Now I’m not one to enter myself in competitions but this one had my name written all over it!

It’s also a really great opportunity for me to talk more about the support I’ve received from my employers (UKOLN), the support framework we want to share with other remote workers and to enthuse on the positive side of remote working (such as environmental factors and achieving that work-life balance).

Remote Employment recently sent out a press release to my local paper (Melksham Independant News) which led to many people I know (and don’t know) asking me more about my situation. A pretty common reaction was “Aren’t you lucky, I’d love to work from home“. It isn’t all plain sailing but I’m the first to admit that in my situation (a working mum) it really means I can give as much as possible to my two (very different) worlds, which makes me pretty lucky. It also means my children and my work get the best out of me – so they are lucky too!!

You can’t vote for the awards, there is a team of judges who’ll make the decision in late September. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed! That home office would look great in my garden! Not only that it would be an ideal place to hide from my family when the going gets tough!

Local Authorities Working Smarter

Yesterday I attended a one-day conference on Improving Services and Reducing Costs Through Flexible Working organised by Public Sector Forums. The event was held at Edgbaston Cricket ground, which seemed to cause a lot of excitement among the a few of the delegates…it just looked like a big lawn to me!

The delegates were primarily (IT/change/communications etc.) managers working within Local Authority Councils. I have to admit that the local authority public sector community are not one I’ve had a huge amount to do within the past so I did occasionally feel like a fish out of water. That said the day was really useful and I now feel I have a much clearer idea of what is happening within local authorities with regard to remote working. The key driver to all flexible and remote working activity is ‘rationalisation of office space’ in an attempt to cut costs – many councils are closing down their many smaller, unfit-for-purpose offices and replacing them with a small number of purpose built offices. This means centralisation of resources, server virtualisation and relocation of staff. In most cases there are now (or will be) less desk spaces than there are staff – hence the encouragement of remote working.

It’s interesting that remote working is here being led by organisational need rather than employee need, but then such is business. This of course means that there is not so much a requirement to win support among the higher management (hopefully the business case will have already displayed this) but middle management and the employees who will be becoming remote workers may not have been convinced yet.

Jon Watkinson from The Project Network Ltd started off the day with an excellent introduction to the benefits and challenges of remote working. He used some key statistics (such as remote working bringing a consistent 20% improvement in output) and looked at some common hurdles to implementation. Jon chaired the day.

The majority of presentations were case studies looking at how councils had made the move. Kelly MacMillan, Market Specialist, Mitel gave a case study on Malvern Hills District Council’s uptake of Mitel’s intelligent migration VOIP phone system. A technical person from Mittel also introduced SunRay, a stateless thin-client solution (virtual desktop) aimed at corporate environments which has been available for 12 years now. The technology demonstrations showed that there is a need for corporate lock down on many remote working set ups, something that probably wouldn’t work among many HE/FE remote workers.

Terri Fleming, Performance and Information Manager, Denbighshire County Council gave a more down to earth presentation on their Worksmart initiatives. Some great ideas here including running a training programme for middle management to help them move from assessing by attendance to assessing by outputs. It was a relief to see Jill Scott, Equality and Diversity Adviser, Birmingham City University explore some of the differences and similarities between the issues local authorities and Higher Education face. She recently worked on a project implementing flexible working funded by HEFCE. She explained that HE is not leading the field in this area but there has been a move towards formal policies. Jill said that HE is not suffering building closures so didn’t have to get people off site but I’d have to disagree and say that in HE the increase in student population has meant that their are increasingly space restrictions which has led to more remote working. It may not be long till we are following the Local Authority example.

After Jill I gave probably the only presentation of the day that considered things from the employee’s angle. I tried to explain that although there may be an enthusiasm and appetite for remote working that it would only be a success for all if it was well supported. Retention of staff may be an argument in favour of remote and flexible working but staff could be left isolated and unhappy if not managed effectively. I think my presentation was met with some interest and afterwards a number of people remarked that it covered a lot of things that they’d “not thought about before“. Lets hope that winning hearts and minds of staff continues to be as important as saving pennies for our LAs.

My presentation How to be a Connected Remote Worker in 10 Easy Steps is available from Slideshare.

I also took a video of my talk. Unfortunately the battery on my Flip camera ran out half way through.

If you are interested in viewing it (the first 15 minutes) please do let me know.

My talk was followed by two more case studies. The first by Andrew Hughes, Project Manager on the Worksmart programme at Wakefield Council and the second was by Emel Morris, Head of Communications on The Way We Work programme at Hertfordshire County Council. Both were exemplars case studies:  hot desking, team areas, check in spots around the county, mobile devices, digital pens and great support. The audience seemed very enthusiastic about what could be done.

During the day there were opportunities for round table discussions and it was interesting to hear people’s issues and how they were dealing with them. There was also an exhibition of appropriate remote working systems.

The final conclusions were presented by Jon Watkinson. He also offered two slides – one for managers, one for everyone else – for us to take a final thought from…

All slides will be available from the Public Sector Forums Web site.

Reviving Video Conferencing

Last week I had a look at the University of Bath’s video conferencing suite situated in the BUCS (Bath University Computing Services) building.

The facilities comprise:

• A Tandberg 6000 MXP Codec video conferencing system including P/T/Z/F controllable colour WAVE camera, dual 33″ monitors with Tandberg Natural Presenter Package (NPP) and MultiSite (MS) Packages. This runs over IP only.
• Laptop, DVD player, VCR, overhead projector, interactive whiteboard, projector etc.
• Screen
• Seating for up 25 people

Despite considerable money and effort having been spent acquiring it, the kit is currently under-used. There were originally two dedicated rooms for video conferencing but university requirements for more space has meant that one of these has now been returned to staff use.

Martin Stone, who gave me a tour of the facilities, explained that the room was well used for a brief period while the University had been investigating having Oakfield campus as an extra university site in Swindon.  Short meetings between colleagues on the two sites had been the perfect material for the video conferencing suite. Now the room is primarily used by Human Resources as a way to interview overseas students for university places and by schools for e-learning activities.

Martin and I speculated on reason’s for the suite’s lack of use. We came up with:

• Low level of promotion of the resources by BUCs and the university.
• Expense – at £25 for half an hour the cost does seem high. A day’s use of the room would work out at quite an expense. However the cost is relative and fairly low if you compare it with the cost of flying a staff member out to a meeting.
• Reluctance by staff to forgo travel opportunities.
• Technical issues – To use the system, both ends need have appropriate facilities in place.
• The increased use of free and low-cost software applications that allow peer-to-peer video contact e.g Skype.
• Better options – despite being bespoke, costly and purchased only a few years ago the system is already out of date. Many newer teleconference systems offer visual options like life-size images of attendees. The experience could be a much better one than that offered by Bath.

It seems a real shame that room isn’t being used more and I have to admit to feeling a little sad about the situation. The University is currently taking part in Our Big Energy Challenge and could quite easily do more to promote the suite’s use  from an environmental perspective.

Are other Universities finding that their video conferencing suites are sitting empty? How can we get people to embrace the technology?

Further information on video conferencing in Higher Education is available in the form of a briefing paper by JISC’s Tech Learn.

Are We Ready for Opera Unite?

This weeks exciting new technology is Opera Unite, which is basically a Web server on the Web browser.

“ Opera Unite allows you to easily share your data: photos, music, notes and other files. You can even run chat rooms and host entire Web sites with Opera Unite. It puts the power of a Web server in your browser, giving you greater privacy and flexibility than other online services.

What if you use Opera at home, and a different Web browser at work? Opera Unite services can be accessed from any modern browser, including mobile browsers! At home, just select what you want to share, and you can view it later using your work Web browser without any problems.“

Potentially this could mark a significant change in the way we use Web services. Brian Kelly, in his post Who Needs Social Networks? I’ve Got Opera Unite, suggests that despite many IT service teams having reservations Opera Unite may be a move away from reliance on commercial companies such as Google and Facebook. Most of the comments on his post seem fairly positive, apart from those who have observed the need to keep your PC on all day!

The big question is how well will it work for those of us working from home? In the past home broadband and the use of Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), which have meant a possible lack of bandwidth, have stopped people from locally hosting Web sites.

As Mashable explains when talking about challenges to of locally hosting a web site “a popular web site can suck a lot of bandwidth, and most home connections simply couldn’t deal with it.” Also upload speed is fairly limited – basically it’s a lot slower going up than it is going down! Mashable goes on to say “this web server also needs to be secure from intrusions and hacker attacks, it should have backup; in short, it should be a lot of things that the average user’s computer is not. “

Mashable concludes that “Opera doesn’t really try to change all that, but they do count on the fact that internet connections offer way more bandwidth than they used to“.

Is this really the case? Despite the promise of super fast broadband roll out made in the Digital Britain report recent observations on the low quality of broadband may mean that for many of us running a Opera Unite effectively is still a pipe dream.

I have yet to try it out but would be interested in hearing about people’s experiences.