Towards a New Enlightenment - Openess and the Future of Technology in Science and Education

Towards a New Enlightenment:Openness and the Future of Technology in Science and EducationOpen Science and Research Forum, Helsinki, November 2014

Photo credit: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Flickr user quinn

Martin Hamilton [email protected]

Futurist @martin_hamilton

1. About Jisc2. Technology Foresight3. A Digital Dark Age4. … or a New Enlightenment?5. Closure

Towards a New Enlightenment:Openness and the Future of Technology in Science and Education



Photo credit: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Flickr user thalamus






:: About Jisc :: What we do

» Registered charity championing the use of digital technologies in

research and education

» Range of shared services for UK Universities and Colleges, e.g.

- Janet, world leading research network

- eduroam global wireless roaming

- Groundbreaking content deals with publishers

- Cloud brokerage with Amazon, Google, Microsoft

» Complementing UK research councils and Innovate UK/Catapults

- Open Educational Resources, Open Access and Open Data

- Just launched asset sharing initiative

:: About Jisc :: UK Further/Higher education

:: About Jisc :: The Janet network

:: About Jisc :: Efficiency gains

Generating £260m savings per annum

e.g. KnowledgeBase+ - £4.5m

:: About Jisc :: Efficiency gains

Generating £260m savings per annum

e.g. DigiMap - £40m






:: Technology Foresight ::

» Technology Foresight

– Our Horizon scanning and sense making activity

– Identifying future strategic themes and asking

“how do we get there from here?”

› Website just launched

– http://foresight.jiscinvolve.org

› Coming soon:

– Horizon Scan synthesis

– Think Tank for “wicked problems”

– Targetted pilots, testbeds and prototypes

“He sees you when you’re sleeping.

He knows when you’re awake.

He knows if you’ve been bad or good.

So be good for goodness sake”

– from Santa Claus is Coming to Town,

by Haven Gillespie / J. Fred Coots

:: Technology Foresight ::Google Knows What Makes Your Heart Beat Faster

See http://foresight.jiscinvolve.org

» What is the IT function “for” now?

– Collaboration and storage are free

– Commoditization of compute (AWS,

Azure, Google Compute Engine etc)

– Amazon AppStream, Azure

RemoteApp “app as a service”

› Innovation in Technology?

:: Technology Foresight :: The Day of Forever,

Infinite Storage & the Future of Corporate IT


‘Never memorize something that you can look up’ – Albert Einstein.

» Impact on teaching and learning

– But do we control the technology, or

are we controlled by it?

– Who needs what digital skills?

› “Web we want”, Unhosted, ind.ie

:: Technology Foresight ::

Amazon Echo, and the End of Remembering







:: A Digital Dark Age :: The End of History?










:: A New Enlightenment :: Open by Default


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:: A New Enlightenment :: Goodbye to Berlin

:: A New Enlightenment :: Goodbye to Berlin

:: A New Enlightenment :: Get the Data

» Schema.org – Datasets, Learning Resources (LRMI) etc





:: A New Enlightenment :: Asset sharing

:: A New Enlightenment :: Asset sharing

» Leveraging public investment in the Janet network

– Connecting industry: http://www.ja.net/janet-reach

– Where next - e.g. 10Gbit/s links to Science Parks?

– Testbeds for new technologies, e.g. UHD streaming from Tokyo

Olympics, Surrey 5G testbed, Catapult centres

» Where else can we add value?

– Exploit our cost sharing group (256 institutions, 93% of Universities)

– Research clusters, e.g. Jisc shared data centre with Sanger, Crick, UCL,

King’s College, QMUL, LSE etc: http://www.ja.net/data-centre

– Anticipating Austerity 2.0 efficiency savings

See http://www.jisc.ac.uk/research/projects/equipment-sharing

:: A New Enlightenment ::Frictionless supercomputing

Image credit: CC BY-NC-ND HPC Midlands

» Brokering access to £60m public investment in HPC






:: Closure :: School of the future




Towards a New Enlightenment:Openness and the Future of Technology in Science and EducationOpen Science and Research Forum, Helsinki, November 2014

Photo credit: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Flickr user quinn

