Monthly Archives: December 2011

From the archives: Internet Gallery Advisory Board, National Media Museum

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I also found this in the drafts for this, from2010. And rather than waste all that effort I put into writing it…

Of course, the Internet Gallery is now the soon-to-be-launched ‘Life Online’, and there’s been another advisory board since, so this is mainly of historic interest now! I think given some of the challenges outlined here, they’ve done a fantastic job of representing the story of the internet in a physical space. Of course you’ll have to wait until next year to find out for yourselves.

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It was an interesting meeting yesterday [well, over a year ago actually now, ed], both to hear the plans that are currently in place to develop the ‘Internet Gallery‘ at the NMeM and also to hear people’s take on the idea. Whilst we did seem to get side-tracked by the debate around sponsorship and its potential influence on the content, there were some interesting ideas about what a ‘gallery’ of the internet should strive to achieve and how it should be presented.

I’m sure that in future there’ll be the opportunity to put some more meat on these ideas (not in a Lady Ga Ga way you understand), but at least we’ve made a start. Exploring the ideas that float somewhere between the concept of the internet and a physical gallery space is one that could take many different twists and turns, and it may well be that the gallery ends up being as fluid and evolutionary as the internet itself.

I was good to see the demo of the concept linkage work from Peter Cowling and Stephen Remde.  This is a very slick demo now, and whether or not this ends up as an exhibit in the gallery remains to be seen but it’s an interesting piece of work in its own right.

It was also good to catch up with people who I only get to see in person on rare occasions, but follow their digital lives regularly (yes, that means you Rob, Steve and Imran!).

It looks like you’re trying to create a new academic calendar…

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It’s been so long since I put anything on here, I don’t expect many people will still be reading. However, one of the proposals at the last ‘BOG’ (that’s the Bradford Offer Group in case you don’t know, I still get strange looks when I say “I’m off to the BOG”) was that we should improve communications by keeping a blog of what we’re doing. So until something else gets written I thought I bring this out from its state of suspended animation.

As the title suggests, I’ve been tasked with looking at the structure of the academic year, something Nigel Lindsey did a huge amount of work on previously. As Nigel found out, this is quiet a challenge to say the least (hence the title, I’m hoping a friendly paperclip will pop up with some suggestions). The Bradford Offer made a number of proposals about all sorts of things, but one was about a change in the structure of the year. To cut a long story short, the main points were around seeing if we could start the year later (to give more time for preparation and for students to get here) and to fit in supplementary assessments in before the end of July (mainly to allow students to plan better for September). Clearly, starting later and ending sooner are not necessarily compatible aims!

The biggest issue with this is the ‘crunch’ time between the end of the first assessments and the start of the supplementaries. Work needs to be marked, checked, the marks entered on the system, formally ‘approved’, then taken to exam boards to make decisions on the individual students.  This, together with the sheer volume of examinations that we have, makes it quite a challenge.

Of course, other institutions mange to do this, and claim that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, and although there’s some ‘pain’ in moving from one model to another, they are very adamant that they are in a better place now than before.

So work goes on. There’s a target of having a revised proposal to got to ASPC/Senate in the new year. How exact we can be about the impact and resources needed to do this remains to be seen as there’s the small issue of the Christmas break between now and then, but we’ll do our best.