The developers of computer software have considerable powers to hold us all to ransom.  If they decide that they are not going to continue to support a particular product, then we all have to consider the future sustainability of the use of that - and our general decision is to move to something that has longer term functionaity and support.  At the moment the university is having to upgrade its two biggest software systems for the same reason - that the manufacturer / developer has brought out a new version and will no longer support the old.  It is only 3 years since we installed SAP as our overall business system, yet we are already installing a major upgrade.

Today I chaired the project board for the upgrade of another system - the shift from MOLE as our virtual learning environment to what we are calling MOLE2.  MOLE was a product of WebCT, but that company was bought by Blackboard and support for WebCT will be finishing in less than two years.  So we are having to move to what is in many ways not just an upgrade but a new product - a version of Blackboard 9 which we will call (to show some continuity) MOLE2. 

These upgrades certainly tend to bring additional functionality, although often with a need for time-consuming re-training by users.  We have taken on temporary staff to help with the migration of course materials from MOLE to MOLE2 - and over the summer we will be recruiting students to help with that work (which will certainly have spin-off benefits for them in terms of work experience and internships, but which will cost money).

But one aspect of our dependence on such technologies that I regret is that we run the risk of losing access to masses of material that was developed some time ago for systems that we no longer have.  I have various teaching materials locked away on discs for the Amstrad word processor, and I also have a collection of floppy discs for early versions of Windows.  But there are very few computers around the university now that can accept those floppies (and I doubt if we even have one machine that can read the Amstrad discs from the early 1980s).  I suppose the best-known case of technological change leading to a complete loss of access to materials lies in the BBC's Domesday Project to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book in 1986 - using a video disc to store masses of locally-generated materials, and hence a technology that we no longer use such that all the effort that went into the project has now been effectively wasted.

I don't think of myself as a Luddite - but there are still advantages in sheets of paper and books as means of record.

One of the great fringe benefits of working in a university is the opportunity to hear visiting lectures by a wide range of distinguished speakers - free.  Over the years I have attended, and enjoyed, lectures by (amongst many others) Ralf Dahrendorf, Kenneth Galbraith, Sir Paul Nurse, Stuart Hall, Sir Liam Donaldson, Archbishop John Sentamu, Roy Hattersley, General Sir Mike Jackson and many more.  We have the opportunity to try topics that lie outside our normal field of interest, and often to pose questions to these speakers.

Tonight I attended an illustrated lecture by Christopher Hogwood, founder and conductor of the Academy of Ancient Music, the lecture being given as part of a series organised by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.  I don't think I've ever drawn attention to the next fact in my blog - but my main leisure activities revolve around music, either listening to it or playing the piano.  So tonight's talk was always likely to be a special one for me. And so it proved, with Hogwood being an engaging and interesting speaker and drawing on examples of recordings from 1888 to the present day.

But the nature of the audience was also of interest. This was a lecture that attracted a lot of people from outside the university. But music is also something that transcends the Freddy Leavis / C P Snow 'two cultures' debate.  I noticed a number of people from faculties other than Arts and Humanities - Physics and Biomedical Science were represented, as also were Medicine and social scientists.  I didn't notice any engineers, but there may well have been some.

There is discussion at various levels within the university about extending the intellectual range of our students by encouraging (or even requiring) them to study material and concepts from disciplines outside their own. Our employers have asked for more evidence of intellectual breadth from our graduates.  There is, however, a question about the extent to which the staff of the university are prepared to avail themselves of the breadth of opportunity that lies within our own institution.  Inaugural lectures these days rarely attract more than a handful of poeple from disciplines other than that of the speaker.  Perhpas we should all make a resultion to attend one guest lecture a month from a discipline removed from our own. That might broaden our minds, make us more united as a university community, and provide a platform for asking our students to undertake something similar during their time with us.

Architects and designers have a great deal to say about the image that rooms can create.  Fitting the image to the message that a room conveys is understandably difficult when that room is to be used for multiple purposes.  What works for one purpose may not work for another.

The Tapestry Room in Firth Court is a case in point.  Over the last few weeks I have - shown it to the cultural attaché from a foreign embassy; hosted a meeting there of careers advisers from local schools; chaired a committee meeting in it; shown it to an alumnus of around 25 years ago; hosted a celebration of NSS success in it; and seen it used as break-out space for an outreach event with local school children.  The alumnus was (I think) impressed; the cultural attaché found it interesting but unimpressive; the careers advisers seemed a little overawed by it (or perhaps that was me); the committee took it for granted (they meet there regularly); and the school children didn't quite know how to behave in it since it is so different from the teaching environments they are used to in school (or that they will experience here).

(For those who have never been in the room, it contains a large historical tapestry on a mythical theme, a modern tapestry depicting the subjects taught at the university, a series of portrait drawings of the early professors of the university - all male, one or two other objets d'art and a portrait bust of David Blunkett - as well as ranged chairs and tables.)

Today I took some visitors from a new university to a meeting in the John Carr Library in the Mappin Building at St Georges.  They immediately expressed their view of how impressive the room is.  It conveys a spirit of the solidity of learning and of the confidence of those who built it.  We quickly moved on to the fact, however, that it now houses largely redundant old journals stock and is scarcely in active use as a library - instead serving as a meetings room (but one with rather poor acoustics for that purpose).  We do, of course, use the room when we want to impress: I recall some years ago the university hosting a meeting of the committee of the Headmasters Conference (the gathering of inpdendent schools) and choosing to do so in the John Carr Library. I suppose we were trying to match the ambience of Charterhouse, Haileybury or, more locally, Worksop College.

One building to which everyone, in my experience, has the same reaction is the Information Commons.  Having chaired the Project Executive Group that oversaw its construction, I have taken innumerable visitors around that - groups from foreign universities, Vice-Chancellors from UK institutions, student representatives from other universities, Lord Mayors (or perhaps that should be Lords Mayor), parents of students, candidates for admission.  The reaction when they all get up to the first floor is a universal 'wow'.  And clearly the Information Commons plays a major role in putting us at number 2 place in the national survey of student experience published in this week's Times Higher.

We who work in the university probably take the image of most of our buildings and rooms for granted.  Perhaps we should pay greater attention to the messages that they convey to those coming into use of them for the first time.

Universities are not the only element of the education system that is currently about to undergo huge change.  This week I have hosted five meetings with head teachers, college principals, education officials from the local authority, school governors, and careers advisors - in addition to a broad swathe of employees of the unviersity who are also themselves parents of school age children.  Let's just consider a list of changes in the education system as a whole:

Threats to the continuation of Sure Start (to support the youngest children in deprived neighbourhoods)
Threatened closures of local authority nursery provision as a result of financial cutbacks
The initial cancellation of large parts of the school rebuilding programme (although I note that today a court has found that aspects of that cancellation are not legally tenable)
The push for the creation of new academies
The drive to support the introduction of 'free schools'
The dismantling of the powers of local education authorities and the consequent reduction in the possibility of coherent area-based school improvement strategies
The granting of commissioning powers to schools - with the possible consequence that schools that get it wrong will in future fail as businesses and not just in educational standards
The rapid introduction of expectations around a newly-defined 'English baccalaureate' exam system at 16+
The likely reduction in modularity in A levels and the re-introduction of end-of-course examinations, with a reduction in assessed coursework
The elimination of the Education Maintenance Allowance that encourages young people from needy families to stay in education beyond the age of 16
The winding up of AimHigher funding from this summer, under which university and school partnerships have worked to raise young people's aspirations to enter higher education
The likely removal of funding for adult access courses from 2013 such that mature students studying via access routes to enter high education will have to pay full fees to do so
The likely transfer of teacher training from universities to 'teaching schools' which must have had a recent 'excellent' OFSTED inspection outcome and no recent change of head teacher
The new funding regime for higher education from 2012 onwards

It is the social scientist in me that wants to hold back to a series of controlled implementations whereby we will be able to evaluate the success of individual initiatives by benchmarking change against parts of the system that have not been transformed.  Clearly that will not be possible in England over the next few years.

And those 'few years' will actually be two decades long.  Formal education is an extended process lasting up to 20 years or so if a young person goes through from nursery school to the completion of a postgraduate qualification.  And we must not forget adult learners who wish to return to study later in life. So, to take my first example above, the effects of a change to Sure Start will not be fully seen until the affected cohort has gone right through the system - but in the meantime there are so many other changes taking place that there can be no rigorous analysis of cause and effect, or of what 'works' and what doesn't.

I am not arguing for the limitation of changes to one element every few years.  But it does seem that the rapidity and depth of change is such that the scope for unitneded consequences, and for failing to recognise inter-dependencies within the system, is very considerable.

Listening to college principals earlier in the week I realised the plight of those from derpived backgrounds in the Lower Sixth (Y12) from within our own city region.  Since they made their A level choices and started their courses in September 2010, they have seen the announcement of the withdrawl of their Educational Maintenance Allowances from this summer; the elimination of AimHigher activity supporting their aspirations; and they now know that if they go on to higher education in 2012 they will face a very different funding regime.

All of us, in all areas of education, have a responsibility to the young people out there to work in a co-ordinated fashion to try to produce as coherent a route as possible through all the changes.

I indicated last month that in future I would identify five blogging days each month this year. To do that I have resorted to 'random numbers tables' to decide on dates - but have given myself Saturdays and Sundays off by excluding them.  The dates for February are today, Friday 11, Friday 18, Wednesday 23 and Monday 28.

We are now over halfway through what we are calling 'Project 2012' to position the university for the introduction of the new fees regime in 2012. Much of today has been taken up with that Project.  At 0915 I met three senior colleagues to consider aspects of how we may further strengthen our widening participation activities. I went straight from that to a meeting of the project workstream that is considering ways of enhancing the student experience.  Like several of our other workstreams, this has student union officer membership as well as representation from several faculties and from a variety of professional services. This particular group is now moving quite quickly towards a series of suggested actions, many of them effectively being the spreading of existing good practice around the university.  We deliver every aspect of high quality in some part of the institution, but the challenge is to deliver such aspects consistently across the whole institution.

At 1200 I then chaired the University Executive Board meeting as a Project 2012 Board.  Much of our two hour meeting was spent going through a detailed piece of work that has been done looking at individual departments' competitive position in terms of student satisfaction, employment prospects, applications, and a variety of other metrics. These data will shortly be released to departments for their consideration - particularly in relation to what needs to be done to improve our position.  Another Ruseell Group VC recently told me that he intended to ask every department to justify a possible fee level and then to put in place an action plan to put them in the position whereby in future they could justify the highest fee currently being suggested by a department.  We are not putting our VC in such a 'star chamber' role in front of departmental supplicants, but the opportunity to drive up quality is something we certainly want to grasp.

After the end of our UEB meeting I had one-to-one discussions with two Faculty PVCs on a variety of matters, but many of them revolving around Project 2012.  There followed a catch-up with the staff of the Vice-Chancellor's office over diary commitments for the rest of the week (the VC is currently unwell and I am taking over as many of his engagements as possible). And then at 1715 I chaired a meeting with Principals from South Yorkshire FE colleges to get their take on the higher education landscape beyond 2012, on our role in it, and on our connectivity with their activities.

Thus it was only at 1845 that I started on the e-mail traffic of the day.  I will not be unhappy when we come to the formal ending of Project 2012 and decide on our proposition in the new marketplace, our commitments over widening access, and our fee structures.  But I have a feeling that this calendar year is going to be very busy well beyond that April deadline.  The current shake-up of higher education funding is the most significant for nearly 50 years, and its ramifications are very considerable.