Graduate Business Analyst / Marketing Analyst
Havant, Portsmouth

£20k 1 year fixed term contract for a graduate in Business Studies, Marketing, or similar, to take on a newly created role as Business / Marketing Analyst for a hi-tech manufacturer in Havant, Hampshire.

The role will involve a week a month travelling, primarily to US, China or Germany.

Analysing commercial data on customers, competitors, markets, products and territories, you’ll help the MD to make informed decisions on business development strategies. You’ll be supporting global business projects by investigating, analysing and presenting commercial data on high technology products.You’ll ideally be able to demonstrate experience with a variety of research methods (possibly through your degree / dissertation), including interviewing techniques as well as the analysis of subsequent data.

The role is based in Havant, Hampshire, commutable from locations such as Portsmouth, Waterlooville, Fareham, Chichester, Petersfield and it is an initial 1 year fixed term contract. Please forward your CV to darren@astutejobs.co.uk

Key takeaways for me from a great day at Future of Technology in Education (#FOTE11) at the University of London yesterday:

There was angst from the IT department as the ever increasing consumerisation of technology challenges creaking university systems and a too prevalent culture of ‘computer says no’. It is more productive for staff and students to collaborate and operate outside the system using free online tools (Google docs, Dropbox and Skype do the job perfectly well for me).

Vendors who try too hard to plug their stuff to an ed tech audience risk the ire of the backchannel (you know who you are!)

While a sense of place is still important, (we had a great tourist’s guide to Bristol from @nick_skelton ) mobile phones have allowed people to make their meeting plans on the fly (for example, student bars are struggling) and economics keep many students away from campus (eg living with parents). And this is before the increase in fees…

Time and time again we heard examples of poor communication (between university and students, teaching staff and students, IT and staff/students…etc)

We don’t know enough about what students want and how students live – it was agreed we should try *asking them*more often.

The importance of digital literacy – plenty of staff and students just don’t have it. Thankfully, there seemed to be general agreement that the ‘digital native’ is simply a myth. @suebecks gave a great presentation with many fascinating examples of the importance of digital skills to employability.

There was more emphasis on challenges than solutions. How do we take change forward…we have identified the need for it, but how to make change actually happen? Andrew Bollington provided a reality check, suggesting that appreciating and incorporating the contrasting perspectives of finance, strategy and marketing would be a good start.

@andypowe11 provided a great summary of who and what was shared on Twitter – as you can see, quite a lot!

It was good to catch up with mobile supremo Jane Vincent from the University of Surrey at Digital Surrey last night. The topic was recent developments in mobile, presented by Jon Bishop, Head of Social Media at PayPal UK (@jonin60seconds). Jon’s slides are available on Slideshare and a detailed review of his talk was very quickly posted by Mark Wilson (@markwilsonit)

The purpose of this post is to flag up some points arising from listening to Jon, that could be pursued in a research project by Jane and myself as a sequel to our investigation from a few years back of the role of mobile communication in e-government. We suggested in this paper that mobile phones may offer the most viable electronic channel through which to encourage large-scale take-up of online public services, but ‘m-government’ would take a significant amount of time to become a reality unless there was a substantial change in social practices.

It was clear from Jon’s fascinating discussion of mobile payments in Africa that the developed world has a lot to learn from successful services developed in Kenya.

In the UK, mobiles have become even more central to people’s lives and business is clearly waking up to the marketing potential of location based services. But effective interaction with government services via mobile looks no closer than it did back in 2007.

The Digital Surrey community are by definition enthusiastic adopters of new developments in technology, but I’m not sure that the general population is quite ready for NFC and QR codes…and as Jon noted, 76% of websites are still not optimised for mobile devices.

Infrastructure issues still remain…just try staying connected while travelling by train.

And are smartphones really that smart? My BlackBerry (a recent model) takes forever to simply load a website, and if password access is required, forget it. I certainly won’t be using it to buy anything with. Perhaps a ‘hype v reality’ project might be a useful exercise…

Many thanks to Jon, Abigail and the rest of the Digital Surrey team for laying on great weather and free beer, as well as an informative and entertaining evening! For information about upcoming events, check out the website

I’m sure that regular readers and contributors to Martin’s blog will be delighted with this book. Although he takes care to be objective throughout the text, its subtitle should read something like ‘wake up and smell the coffee’. The real challenge will be getting the book onto the radar (and from there into the practice) of university staff who are still operating along more traditional lines despite massive environmental change.

Martin begins by reflecting on how his research process has changed since writing his last book just 6 years ago, which very much concurs with my own experience:

· Increased quantity of digital content available

· Advice and input from members of his social network

· Wider range of information sources drawn upon (blogs, video, tweets etc)

· Digital files of whatever type are easily sharable and accessible to any interested party, opening up research to new audiences and contributors.

Some key points for me from the book are:

The growth of ‘good enough’ technology such as skype or netbooks (as examples of the classic Christensen model of disruptive innovation) which despite lacking in refinement meet a mass market need for next to no cost – and consequently can displace more ‘professional’ products and services almost by stealth.

How to navigate the ongoing tensions between the established order and the new possibilities offered by developments in technology? For example, while learning from online resources and a global network of peers and experts offers a compelling alternative to a traditional lecture, the role of universities in providing well recognised social and accreditation functions is more difficult to replicate.

Interesting lessons from the experiences of other industries such as music and newspapers which have struggled to deal with developments in technology. Martin considers how traditional notions of scholarship (Boyer’s categories of discovery, integration, application and teaching) are challenged by the digital age and these aspects provide a framework for the chapter structure.

Worryingly, new researchers are not maximising the potential of new technologies in research. This can be explained by university reward systems which are driven by a conservative and narrow viewpoint of what constitutes ‘quality’. The consequence is that “new entrants are encouraged to be conservative while the reinterpretation of practice and exploration is left to established practitioners” – 180 degrees away from most industries where ‘fresh sets of eyes’ are encouraged to re-energise an organisation by challenging established practices.

In today’s world where information is abundant and shareable and global networks of expertise and support are accessible, the limiting factors for the individual learner are time and attention. Developing effective strategies for dealing with managing this are critical. (For example, I have switched off Tweetdeck in order to finish writing this post!)

Trying to protect traditional models of academic practice are unlikely to succeed (see newspapers and music) – Martin notes how students or conference participants will circumvent attempts at control, for example by googling for free alternatives to a set textbook, or watching more dynamic video presentations of a particular lecture topic online, or criticising a module on Facebook in a far more direct way than they would do on an official course feedback form.

I very much enjoyed the book, and as a ‘call to action’ I hope its messages get the attention that they deserve J

…is a question I was recently asked. E-business was very broadly defined beyond the commercial world to include related fields such as e-learning, e-government etc. It got me thinking beyond the latest crop of rock star offerings (great though many of them are) to try and come up with classics that have not only shaped the digital agenda, but also have truly stood the test of time. Not so easy is it? Anyway, after some pondering while walking the dog I came up with these:

Anything by Clayton Christensen on Disruptive Innovation (I’m looking forward to his new book on the Innovative University which is out soon, and apparently not an oxymoron)
Information Rules: a strategic guide to the network economy by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian
Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
The Cluetrain Manifesto by Levine, Locke, Searls and Weinberger
Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff

I’m sure there are many others…I’d be interested to get some feedback on these choices, or any alternative suggestions…?

Last week Hugh Davis, Su White and I hosted the 2nd International PLE Conference in the brand new Life Sciences Building at the University of Southampton.

The event provided a space for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas and experiences around the development and implementation of PLEs, including the design of such environments and the sociological and educational issues that they raise. There were around 90 visitors from all over Europe and as far away as New Zealand and Pakistan.

The event included a number of innovative features:

Un-Keynote sessions in “Fishbowl” formats: a small group of participants move in and out of chairs in the centre of the room when they wish to contribute directly to the debate. This enables the whole audience to experience a lively and intense discussion that is facilitated by the presenter.

Bring Your Own Laptop: for practical real time participation in a specific topic.

Speakers Corner: a time and place is announced for informal discussions on a particular theme.

Pecha Kucha: a simple presentation format where you show 20 images each for 20 seconds. The images forward automatically so the presenter has to be concise and stay on track 

During the event, a number of additional useful tools also emerged. Standouts for me were:

Scoop.it (via @pgsimoes) which is a curation service that allows you to find things that interest you and gather them all into one place or showcase on your blog

Packrati.us (via @torresk) = Twitter + Delicious. It automatically saves tweets or retweets with a url to your Delicious account

Debategraph (via @thanassis_t) enables communities to visualise, synthesise and evaluate contributions from its members and facilitate constructive dialogue around the issues raised.

We had an active backchannel including Tony (@aeratcliffe) who stayed up all night in Canada two nights running to watch the livestream and contribute via Twitter. There were some interesting combinations of online and offline communication. During the first unkeynote, two backchannel participants from different countries were introduced to each other via Twitter by a delegate in the room. On another occasion, delegates moved from the café area into the conference room part way through a session, intrigued by the content of tweets coming from inside the room.

A big THANK YOU is due to all the tech support guys from iSolutions who enabled high speed *reliable* wifi connections (how rare is that?!), live streaming and video capture of sessions (including contributions via Second Life and Skype).

You can watch opinions and insights from presenters and participants , read presentation slides on Slideshare (thanks to David Delgado), see photos on Flickr and read full papers.

Twitter provided some great feedback (and speculation about the location of PLE2012!) 

Next week I’m discussing a paper written by Paul Harrigan and myself in the 2nd International Personal Learning Environment (PLE) Conference which takes place in Southampton.

The PLE Conference is intended to produce a space for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas, experience and research around the development and implementation of PLEs – including the design of environments and the sociological, educational and technological issues that they raise.

Thankfully the event “practices what it preaches” with a series of interactive discussions, Pecha Kucha, Un-Keynotes, a lively Twitter backchannel etc rather than the usual standard presentations – though for reference the slides that I will be basing my part of the discussions on are here:

The full paper can be accessed here: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/190415/

Just back from a great Web Science event in Koblenz. Social network analysis was by far the most dominant theme, and the full selection of papers can be accessed here.

Where were the business peeps though? A commercial perspective on some of these great ideas would have been very useful. For example, Karolin Kapler’s excellent presentation titled ‘social media as a new social fetish’ has significant relevance to marketers tempted to evaluate the impact of Facebook communities on the basis of ‘likes’. Karolin discussed the trend of ‘interpassivity’ where users substitute an online action for a ‘real’ one – for example, setting up an impressive selection of RSS feeds does not mean that any of them are actually read, or ‘liking’ a particular cause may not necessarily lead to a charitable donation. Businesses who are currently paying out cash or other benefits for ‘likes’ on their page ought to bear this phenomenon in mind…

For a tweet-sized flavour of the conference, check out the Alchemist analysis

And the Rhine boat trip was fabulous J

Moloney Search is a graduate headhunting company based in London – currently they are working with an extremely well-known retailer to recruit high-flying Business students to join their fast-track management program to start in September 2011.  

They are specifically seeking ambitious and high-performing students with good extracurricular involvement who are interested in strategic management, trading and marketing rotations.   It will be an excellent opportunity for a graduate with a strong commercial interest, great leadership qualities and the drive to succeed to be a very visible part of a FTSE 100 company. 

If you are interested in hearing more about this opportunity to build your career in retail, please get in touch with Philippa at Moloney Search on 0207 368 5103 or send your CV by email on pn@moloneysearch.com

…with an obvious answer in 21st century educational settings, conveniently confirmed by Cristina Costa in her informative post earlier today about the challenges for learners that are inherent in today’s digital world. Cristina notes:

“It is important to bring people together for true collaboration, not just for representation in committees. It is by working closely together that we will be able to understand people’s approach and transform ours.”

What prompted me to write this was an email exchange that I observed the other day, and which has been winding me up every time I recall it. Someone was complaining that the new departmental shared printing facilities meant that other people might “steal his ideas”. Are there really any ideas that would not be enhanced from sharing, feedback and discussion? Surely you “get back” far more than you “give away”? And just think how easy it is now to achieve this position with modern communication tools. So why are some people still so resistant to sharing? Answers on a blog post please…