My presentation for HeLF 26, 13 June 2012. It might beread alongside this article on emergent tech, which has some detail on the Cloud: http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/378

1. The University and the Cloud: a
health warning
HeLF 26: Effectively navigating the cloud: The impact of
externally hosted learning spaces
Dr Richard Hall [@hallymk1/rhall1@dmu.ac.uk]

2. What was I asked to do?
Identify benefits, constraints and impact of these new practices.
3. How has the move to the cloud changed you role (i.e. gives you more
time to focus on pedagogy?) and the role of your team (i.e. less/more
focused on support?)?
4. What impact is this having on resources/funding? How has this
changed the way in which funding is allocated to e-learning
developments? Where does the funding come from? Do you have to
bid for funds from different sources within your institution or externally?
Are you expected to tender?
We would very much appreciate it if you could highlight which of these
practices are transferable to other HEIs

3. context: organisation and risk

4. Cloud(s) or hosted or in-house?
The debate has amplified issues around the following [risks].
• Curriculum control/change-management: ad hoc vs strategic control vs
staff digital/technical literacy.
• Support and skills in-house: quality/distinctive or interesting vs boring.
• Elasticity of demand and service-provision: developing technologies
that will enable emerging and future web applications.
• Maturing: Library and Learning Services: LibGuides (patron portals);
SFX (OpenURL); Verde (electronic resource management); Prism
(library catalogue); Discovery solutions (reading lists); netstorage.
• Limited: student resources: Google Apps; Turnitin; Campus Pack.
• Limited: staff resources: Google Sites (intranet).
c.f. DMU Commons [WPMU/drupal]; Blackboard; internal restructuring.

5. ELT @ DMU

7. Money: technology as a crack for
marketisation
Q2. What impact is this having on resources/funding?

8. Education markets are one facet of the neoliberal
strategy to manage the structural crisis of
capitalism by opening the public sector to capital
accumulation. The roughly $2.5 trillion global
market in education is a rich new arena for
capital investment.
(Lipman, P. 2009: http://bit.ly/qDl6sV)

9. The Treasury position, on shared services:
2.191 VAT: cost sharing – Following the
announcement at Autumn Statement 2011 the
Government will introduce a VAT exemption for
services shared between VAT exempt bodies
including charities and universities.
HM Treasury (2012) http://bit.ly/GCRYCy

10. http://bit.ly/GI2nP4

11. This is further evidence of a piecemeal approach to
higher education change but the speed of
implementation is likely designed to ‘do right by’
Malcolm Gillies at London Met and allow him to rush
through cost-cutting measures prior to 2012/13
entry. It makes his low fee, no frill strategy more
viable and threatens more jobs there.
Andrew McGettigan (2012). VAT exemption on shared services: http://
bit.ly/OrxKQf

12. Technology deployed inside hegemonic, fiscal “realities”.
Driven by IT not “values”.
• Public-private partnerships: services; re-engineering;
applications; outsourcing; consultancy.
• Discourses of efficiency/productivity to be rooted: analytics;
big data; reduced circulation time; changes in production;
workload monitoring.
• Legitimation of R&D: value-for-money; commercial
efficiency; business process re-engineering (c.f. European
Vision 2020; HEFCE 2012).
• Moral depreciation and constant innovation/value-creation.

13. http://bit.ly/MNPOpn

14. Governance: does it matter?
Q1. How has the move to the cloud changed your role ?

17. • Twitter: EFF/American Civil Liberties Union; Birgitta Jonsdottir; U.S.
Department of Justice; Wikileaks.
• LinkedIn: cracking a service; aggregating data for future cracking;
confirming guesses about passwords; comparing hacked data against pre-
computed versions; broadening "guessable” data.
• Facebook, Google and Twitter: new obligation to identify “trolls” ; internet
companies will have to surrender the details of those posting libellous
messages.
• Leveson: Hunt’s private Gmail account; role of the information
commissioner; use of private (email) accounts to conduct official business is
subject to FoI.
Service resilience; confidentiality/privacy; copyright/copyleft/content
distribution; data security/back-ups; control/deletion

18. the legal standard for production of information by a third party, including cloud
computing services under US civil (http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_45)
and criminal (http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcrmp/rule_16) law is whether the
information is under the "possession, custody or control" of a party that is subject
to US jurisdiction.
It doesn’t matter where the information is physically stored, where the company is
headquartered or, importantly, where the person whose information is sought is
located.
The issue for users is whether the US has jurisdiction over the cloud computing
service they use, and whether the cloud computing service has “possession,
custody or control” of their data, wherever it rests physically.
EFF (2012): http://bit.ly/yqsrps

21. • We have a Governance Unit, a set of IT regulations and
an IT Governance Group: http://infogov.our.dmu.ac.uk/
“The cloud has its own challenges, not least of which is
the fact that the name can lead non-tech savvy folks to
imagine that their data is bits of magic floating about in
the ether rather than sitting on a server subject to the
laws of the land in which it is located. There are concerns
about ensuring safety of information.”
“Additionally, potentially big problems with 'offshoring'
corporate assets outside of corporate governance.”

22. • Risk-management at a range of scales: does it matter if
someone accesses your stuff? [Dropbox; subject to FoI]
• What about corporate governance, including access to
services that are marketised? [Google-Verizon and a two-
speed internet; costs of accessing data in marketised HE?]
• Does it matter if the responsible academic gets hit by a
bus? [assessment; what should be managed in-house or
hosted via a contract?]
• Do we understand that data is being transferred into a
service and that we have responsibilities? [T&Cs; IP;
protected characteristics; indemnities for libel]
• How do we work-up the digital literacies of our
staff/students in this space? [staff guidelines
http://bit.ly/LnazH5 ]

23. The University and the Cloud: a health warning is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
.