I came late to the iPhone, and to Apple more generally.  For 20 years I have had a succession of trouble-free mobile phones from Motorola, Samsung and other  providers.  I have always been very happy using Microsoft products (I realise that some readers may be splitting blood by now).  But increasingly people looked at me askance for not having a smart phone, and thus not being able to download e-mails, or to enter the world of 'apps.'  In December 2010 I finally joined in and exchanged my Samsung for an iPhone.

I last made a call on the evening of Wednesday 23 March.  The following morning my phone showed 'no service' although intermittently I could get wi-fi connection to the internet.  It is now five days later and I have visited two Orange shops and one Apple Store. I have spoken in person to three assistants, and on the telephone to 8.  I have handed in my old (actually only 4 months old) phone at the Apple Store and been given a new one - which still doesn't work.  I have spent much of a Sunday updating the version of iTunes on my home desktop and installing the same version on my laptop (because I am now told that I am running such an old version of Windows - Windows 2000 - on my home desktop that my phone won't connect to it). I have updated the software in my new phone - because it was older than the software in the phone that I handed in when I was told by both Orange and Apple that it had a fault. 

All the people I have spoken to have been very polite and very concerned - but they all have different views on what is wrong. Tomorrow I am supposed to receive a new SIM, couriered to me. I have little faith that this will make any difference.

Even if it does it now appears that I cannot connect my new phone to my old desktop such that I cannot download the backup contacts list (around 200 contacts) that are left there: I had the presence of mind to type most of these into a spreadsheet on Saturday evening, 'just in case', but I will now have to input them manually to the new phone - if it ever works.  And I understand that I can't download to my laptop a duplicate version of any apps I've already downloaded to my desktop - which are now inaccessible because the new phone won't connect to iTunes on it.

A month or so ago I wrote about the way in which technology has become dominant over the way we do things.  I realise now how much I had already changed my work practices after getting an iPhone - reading e-mails when I should have been doing something else, paying attention to the wrong things.   As the days go by I may find that it is very liberating not having a mobile phone for the first time in 20 years; that I will be able to tell people to send me less e-mail because I only look at it when I'm at my desk.  I've already lost a weekend to this whole escapade - and inevitably my strong advice to anyone thinking of getting an iPhone would be 'DON'T'. 

So, call me on my landline if you need to speak to me.  Or contribute to my pile of e-mails which I shall tackle once a day.  Or even drop the pace further and send me a note through the post.

I've selected my blogging days for April, using a random date generator. I'm having a week's leave early on so there will only be 4 blogs next month - all towards the end: Monday 18th, Tuesday 19th, Tuesday 26th, and Thursday 28th.

A PS to this: On Sunday 17th April I finally finished manually inputting all my contacts (over 250) into the new phone - with its new SIM - that I eventually got out of all this.  The new SIM worked, and showed that that was what was needed all along - not a new phone.  But the connection problem with my desktop hasn't gone away. I now synch the phone with my laptop - and moving apps across to that via 'home sharing' has not been simple: several have taken several attempts to move over.  Anyway, thanks for the sympathy that a number of you have expressed!

(Apologies for this being posted a couple of days late)

This afternoon I took part in a 'signing ceremony' for an agreement on a new joint Masters programme to be delivered by Law and Politics here with Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.  It will be a Masters and will involve stduents studying in both institutions, It has taken a lot of work to put together, involving colleagues in LeTS as well as the small group of senior colleagues who oversee the governance relationships for all forms of collaboration.  Later a mixed group of Japanese and UK colleagues had a meal together in town to celebrate the achievement.  The first students will enrol next session.

When I first became PVC one of the early actions I supported was to create the possibility of Sheffield awarding joint degrees with other institutions - degrees where there would be one degree award made jointly by two universities (symbolically with two crests on the degree certificate).  Such degrees could be awarded where programmes had been jointly developed, jointly taught, jointly examined, and subject to a quality assurance process thatw as operated jointly.  Our new degree with Doshisha is not going to be a joint degree.  Sheffield has actually run ahead of the rest of the field in creating the opportunity to award these.  Many other unviersiteis around the world do not have such powers, often because their national funding bodies and governments insist that any final qualification has to be solely owned by one institution ('their' institution).  Even with the UK, a number of other universities can not yet award joint degrees.  They look to our example (as also has the Japanese government) to see what can be done.

Our new Doshisha degree is a double degree - students will receive two awards, one from each institution.  In principle such awards make me a little uneasy - one programme of work should lead to one qualification (although I know that there are long-standing exceptions even within our own unviersity in the form of, for example, the MBChB).   But the Doshisha degere is going to be a two year degree, and the double award in this case is more acceptable to UK eyes - given the normal one-year length of our Masters programmes.

The Doshisha degree is among a group of new programmes we are now delivering with institutions around the world - on an integrated basis.  UK universities for many years saw the rest of the world almost exclusively in terms of recruitment opportunities - often with a rather colonialist mentality that took it for granted that 'we' could deliver a higher standard of education than could be provided in 'their' countries.  Thatw as a point made strongly to me when I was part of a UUK delegation to Hong Kong a few years ago and the Education Minister there deconstructed traditional UK attitudes for us.  Rebecca Hughes, our new PVC International, has a magnetic wall map in her office with ball-bearings marking all the places where students are studying for Sheffield degrees.  She can now add a ballbearing for Kyoto (Doshisha) to that.  And I look forward to many mroe arrangements that take advantage of the strengths of Sheffield as well as another institution to create innovative programmes that will give students experience of a much wider world.

When I first became PVC in 2004 we generally held Senate in the Richard Roberts lecture theatre with a configuration that had the whole of the executive team (the Senior Management Group as it was then called) sitting facing the rest of Senate, with everyone else in the lecture theatre seats facing the 'top table'.  There was an attitude amongst one or two of my colleagues on the top table that a successful Senate was one where there were no questions asked, no points of discussions, and all the talking was done by those presenting various reports for information or approval.  If anyone asked a question they did so without the benefit of a microphone, so no one sitting behind them could hear what they were saying.

One of my achievements since then has been the creation of a new format for Senate.  I suggested some time ago that we should move to a different seating arrangement - others took that forward and added the use of microphones. That is partly inevitable since we now generally use Firth Hall, where the size of the venue necessitates amplification.    The 'top table' of those actually presenting business is still identifiable, but that is partly prgamatic to enable the main speakers to have access to the microphone and lectern.  But plenty of business is also presented from other locations.  We sit at round tables, encouraging interaction between senators. And we have roving microphones so that questions can be heard by everyone.

But it is a little disappointing that we haven't actually engendered a great deal of extra discussion. At today's Senate the Registrar and I took senators through the whole of 'Project 2012' and the process by which we have consulted on how to respond to the new fee regime.  Perhaps we talked too long; perhaps we provided too many details. Perhaps (and it would be nice to think that this was the case) we answered all the possible questions people had in their minds so that they didn't need to pose them.  The 10-15 minutes discussion afterwards was a little less than I, for one, had been expecting.

But I still think that adopting a format for Senate that should enable more discussion is a good thing.

The M1 from Leeds to Sheffield is remarkably quiet at 2030 in the evening - much more so than at 1545 when I was heading north for a couple of meetings back to back at the University of Leeds.  Leeds, Sheffield and York make up the White Rose Consortium - a grouping that most people have probably heard of yet few have really experienced.  Today I was at a consortium meeting - and at another that followed it which involved one of a series of 'consortium plus' groupings for specific purposes: in this case the 'plus' was Hull.

In my view we under-exploit the possibilities of these collaborations with other universities.  It is rather as if we see our own institutions as 'lone scholars' and haven't yet realised what teamwork could do for us. Yet Leeds, Sheffield and York togther make up a very powerful set of top-rated research-led universities within 75 minutes drive of each other.  Active collaborations I have been involved with include the White Rose Centre for Enterprise which then formed the nucleus of the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning that has given us our Enterprise Zone in Portobello as a legacy; the White Rose East Asian programme of major research council funding for a 5 year programme in Leeds and Sheffield; and more recently the winning of a joint Doctoral Training Centre from the Economic and Social Research Council which makes the three collaborating universities the second most powerful social science training force in the country.  There are further active collaborations in Engineering, the Sciences, and in Health Innovations.

White Rose plus groupings include one with Sheffield Hallam that manages the National Science Learning Centre in York and all the other Regional Science Learning Centres.  The potential of that seems to me to be under-exploited. We are managing one of the biggest experiments in science education, yet it is an experiment that is not yet being fully evaluated.

Today's second meeting in Leeds (with Hull also there) was about the 'Excellence Hub' that we have jointly been running for the last three years, targeting gifted-and-talented young people from widening participation backgrounds with co-ordinated aspiration-raising activities across our four universities.  I suspect that few people reading this blog will know anything about this ongoing action - which has proved to be the most successful of the 9 Excellence Hubs set up with Department for Education funding.  The other 8 have all already ceased operation.

So I think we don't fully recognise the potential for inter-university collaboration, but I don't really know how to raise the profile and the possibilities of existing and future collaborations.  Probably the last thing people want is yet another newsletter or e-mail. Suggestions would be welcomed.

The random numbers tables have thrown up 1st, 8th, 9th, 14th and 28th of this month as blogging dates.

I first met Bob Woods when he walked into the workroom that half the DPhil students in the School of Geography in Oxford shared.  I was just about to start as a postgraduate student and so was he - but whilst I was staying on at the university where I had completed my undergraduate degree, he was an exotic - he had done his bachelors degree at Cambridge and was now switching to Oxford to work with Ceri Peach - a rising star of social geography.  Ceri was rapidly building a research group working on ethnic minority communities in British cities, and Bob had come to join that, to do his DPhil on the changing distribution of immigrants in Birmingham.  Bob had a clearer idea of what he wanted to do than many of the rest of us, and we were impressed by him.

Not that we were in awe of him.  He had a great guffaw and chuckle, and he joined us every day for coffee in a local pub (research students were banned from the senior common room of the department in the morning - and on Friday afternoons when the librarian provided a cake which she did not feel research students were worthy to partake of.)

Bob was one of the key figures in that research room - advising everyone else on their statistical analysis (he mastered the 10cm high stack of cards needed to run principal components analysis on the single university mainframe computer much more quickly than the rest of us did).  Others drifted off at the end of each year - to lectureships at Keele, Queen Mary, and other universities. Bob got his first appointment, teaching statistical demography, at Kent while I was appointed to Sheffield (those were the days when 24 year olds, prior to completing their PhD, could secure university lectureships).  A year later Bob came to join my department at Sheffield and we extended our friendship into something more lasting.  He met and married a colleague in the department (although the students never caught on to the fact that they were being taught by a husband-and-wife duo).  Bob and I secured a contract together, and produced our first book - The Geographical Impact of Migration - which we originally dedicated to our wives but then added the names of our first-born daughters to because they came along between the manuscript being submitted and the book actually being published.  We wrote various other things together, and taught jointly on a number of courses.  We jointly superviseid a number of research students, winning studentships from Economic and Social Research Council to do so.

Ten years later, still in his thirties, Bob was appointed to an endowed chair at Liverpool. On the day he was offered the job he delayed telling even our head of department until he'd had the chance to tell me.  I went over to hear his inaugural lecture, as he later came back to Sheffield to hear mine.  His research field shifted a little into historical demography and he built a reputation as one of the UK's leading experts in that field - and went on to win honours and success from every quarter.  We occasionally met at conferences, and we kept in touch with news of our families.

Tomorrow I will be going to his funeral in Chester - cut down by pancreatic cancer while still working on mortality in Victorian England. Ceri Peach, the tutor at Oxford who he came to work with will be there.  Ceri eventually trained dozens of the leading social geographers in the UK and it was an immense honour for me a few years ago when I was asked to give a talk at his retirement conference in Oxford. And people all round the world who shared that research room with us all those years ago will be there in spirit - the ex-Pro-Vice-Chancellor from the University of South Australia, the head of department from Christchurch, New Zealand who has just survived the earthquake there unscathed, the Vice-Principal of Queen Mary at the University of London.

There's more to working in a university than simply having a job.  For many of us academia has provided us with a solid and caring community.  For me, that is something to be celebrated tomorrow, as well as Bob's life and contribution..