It’s been a lot of fun to help establish a new blogging community of practice with Jim Groom and the team at Reclaim since that start of the year, and you’ll no doubt hear more about blogging from me as the year goes on 🙂
Alongside that project however I have also had the opportunity to write some case studies based on interview conversations Jim leads, and the first of these has recently been published on the Reclaim blog: Princeton University: Domain of One’s Own . As a Higher Ed case study this piece focuses on a six month’s project of a large scale server migration.
This case study shows how the collaborative effort between the Office of Information Technology, their campus partners and Reclaim Hosting, ensured the desired outcome for stakeholders across campus, resulting in the successful and timely completion of the project [and includes] take aways which will help replicate the success of this project for future initiatives.
It’s a unique opportunity for me to hear how amazing teams at world-leading institutions make educational technology work in the long term, and find out how they find a path through the sometimes messy reality of serving the diverse needs of an academic community in a fast moving technology landscape.
Listening to the interviews it also strikes me how much the technology itself recedes into the background. Although the technology is what we’re talking about, it is the people that draw the focus: the large spectrum of users who bring their individual needs, deadlines and digital literacy to the work at hand, liaising with the teams on campus who navigate their projects within a complex framework of institutional policies and practices alongside a myriad of teams and directorates, and at the other end the expert team at Reclaim who are supporting the work with technical expertise, troubleshooting and their years of experience.
Work on the next case study is already underway, and I am really looking forward to seeing this one published and to add to this body of work that tells a story of open, independent EdTech in Higher Ed right now (and that’s a story I don’t hear all that much about elsewhere just now).