Brains working towards machine consciousness

Upgrade plans and implementation

As part of the MUVEnation project I have taken responsibility for overseeing a junior colleague upgrading Moodle versions, making sure that the upgrade plan was defined and disseminated amongst our team via our community in the RedGloo site which I established to enable peer learning amongst ourselves. This plan emphasised the need for continuation of service for an active course, and involved a rigorous evaluation of the stability of the upgrade using a dummy server with data copied over from the existing system. Some of the posts are kept to team members, but an evaluation login can be arranged to enable review of the material shared on this community forum.

Funding and implementation

I am involved in writing proposals for most of our projects, including requirements analysis and making the case for sufficient redundancy in our systems to be able to provide a consistent level of service. As part of this I have advocated and supported a move towards virtualisation, making use of project funds to ensure that we have adequate hardware to support several virtual machines for our European and Eduserv projects (MUVEnation, Mobi-blog, LLL3D, ThisIsMe).

Training and development

In addition to providing in-house training to my IT training team colleagues when I worked for Thames Water, I now provide mentoring for some of my colleagues who are new to their roles at OdinLab. In particular, I work closely with one new colleague, providing mostly moral support but with some suggestions of ways to minimise the impact of system level changes and to make upgrades as secure as possible. I see this as a two way process, however, and am always willing to learn from, and reinforce, his methodical approach.

Classroom initiatives

During the last term, I introduced our programming students to CMapTools to help them visualise the ideas within and around the topic they were learning about. They were nearly all deeply engaged for the full 3 hour session, and feedback from one student who has continued to follow up on the tool is available on my Facebook Wall (access to Facebook is required to view this, however). This exercise involved the students installing the tool on machines on which they had no administrative privileges, and provided a great opportunity for them to learn ways of using third party software on systems, in addition to the primary learning outcome.

In collaboration with Shirley Williams I devised and delivered an exercise in using Google search and other online tools to help students learn about their Digital Identities, as part of their programming module, and in conjunction with the Eduserv funded This Is Me project.