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University of Salford
Last week, I was delighted to give a talk at Diversity UK’s Tech Showcase, focusing on the collaborative work we do at Salford University, bringing together art, science, technology, and digital media. It was great to hear the pitches of various companies in the region, so much creative innovation going on.
On Tuesday (18th July) Vice-Chancellor Professor Helen Marshall visited Buckingham Palace for a royal audience with Prince Philip in celebration of our 50th anniversary. Helen, along with University Registrar Alison Blackburn, Chair in Science Communication and Future Media Professor Andy Miah and Lecturer from the School of Computing, Science and Engineering Neil Currie, had the rare opportunity of meeting with the Duke of Edinburgh to discuss our recent successes and plans for the future.
As you may be aware, the Prince has had a long-standing affiliation with the University and was our first ever Chancellor who remained in post until 1991. He spoke fondly of the times he has visited Salford over the years and how impressed he has always been with our strong industry links. The Prince was interested to hear about our growing collaborations in the region, along with our drive for public engagement programmes like the Manchester Science Festival.
Vice-Chancellor Professor Helen Marshall said: “Prince Philip being our first ever Chancellor made this special engagement at the Palace especially poignant. He has always had a very close relationship with the University so I welcomed the opportunity to meet with him just before his retirement. I was delighted to tell him about our strong employment figures and update him on our vision of the future in this, our 50th anniversary year.”
Professor Andy Miah added: “What came across to me was that, while figures like the Duke of Edinburgh have countless patronages and public roles, it felt like he truly cared about his contribution to our University. Salford was a place he could talk about with strong recollections and a sense of purpose about what the university could do.”
We'll leave you with this great image Andy took of the team outside the Palace gates which get top marks for aesthetics..
Today at Media City, we have our first eSport conference, with some really amazing speakers, who are thought leaders and doers in the industry. It's such a privilege to have to have such excellent folk to our place to plan the future!
The University of Salford Centre for Sports Business, in collaboration with The Digital Cluster (part of CARe), and World Gaming Executives is hosting a one-day symposium on the 2nd November 2016 at the University of Salford at MediaCityUK on eSports and the Future of Sport.
This event will include talks by leading academics in the field, and those working in the management and provision of eSports. This will explore the rapidly developing business of eSports, and consider its relationship and synergies with the changing nature of more traditional sports.
The event is free and open to anyone interested eSports, the business of digital gaming, digital media, or the changing nature of professional sports.
Garry Crawford (University of Salford)
Andy Miah (University of Salford)
Trevor Keane (Celtic eSports League)
Chester King (CEO International eGames Group)
Christopher Paget (Sheridans, Media Law)
Dr Mark Johnson (York Digital Hub) & Dr Jamie Woodcock (LSE)
Dominic Sacco (British eSports Association), Carleigh Morgan (King’s College London), Malph Minns (Strive Sponsorship), Josh Williams (NUEL)
This week, I produced a day long research event for the University of Salford, bringing together interested academics and professional services to talk about how we might use drones within our work. It drew interest from a range of schools across the university and was a really great deep dive into the subject, bringing external expertise - such as world-leading drone conservationist Prof Serge Wich. It was a fantastic day with some excellent presentations.
This week, i gave a talk with colleagues at Salford University, focusing on how we want to build collaboration with industry partners and work towards more co-creation of research. Here's the presentation.
This week, we had a 2 day event for PhD students, to give advice and guidance on how to use social media to build profile, develop research collaborations, and to discover new ideas. My contribution focused around key platforms and how best to use them, covering, Twitter, ResearchGate, Whatsapp, YouTube, Slideshare, Prezi, and we covered ResearcherID and ORCID too.... that said, the main thing was about how social media is a crucial way for academics to get behind the digital revolution, which is transforming what universities do, how they do it, how they relate to the media, publishers, government, and everything. I wanted to show this classic, but I didn't have time...
This week, I took part in a panel discussion about the future of hospitals, following this brief:
The Government is committed to a vision for hospital services structured around the needs of patients, both now and in the future. Delegates will explore the need for changes to how we organise and deliver hospital care and treatment that is safe, effective and meets the needs of patients, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
As the constraints on NHS spending continue, coupled with patient’s expectations of safer and higher-quality health care, the need to provide health services differently has never been more crucial.
Under intensifying pressure to change, hospitals are adapting their organisation and services to cope with cuts to financial resources. Simon Stevens, NHS England Chief Executive, has made facing financial challenges a priority. He has also emphasised how frontline staff will be vital to create change and generate innovation to deliver services differently.
A core part of the vision laid out by Simon Stevens in the NHS five year forward view involves hospitals becoming more closely integrated with other forms of care. If the health and social care system is to respond to the changing needs of the population, and also address the financial challenges it faces, all hospitals will need to play a fundamentally different role within local health economies.
Hospitals across the UK and around the world face significant challenges as a result of demographic change, rising demand and a staffing challenges. The changing needs of the population make it increasingly important that hospitals are able to provide high-quality care for people with multiple chronic conditions and complex needs, including but not limited to the growing numbers of frail older people. To respond effectively to these changing needs, health and social care services must be capable of providing ongoing support over time, anticipating and preventing deterioration and exacerbations of existing conditions, and supporting a person’s multiple needs in a well-co-ordinated way.
With all this in mind, hospitals will need to develop new ways of working that span traditional service and organisational boundaries – including working more closely with other hospitals (for example, through alliances and partnerships), and strengthening connections with community-based services such as primary care, social care, community services and mental health. This points towards hospitals playing a more outward-facing role in their local health system, in which they shift
from an organisational focus to a system leadership role, and play a more active part in preventing illness and promoting health in local communities.
What the future hospital will look like and what its central role will be will emerge out of the remnants of a system currently not fit for purpose. The Future of Hospitals Conference will address all the key issues and ask the main question, namely, what will the future hospital look like and how will it operate on a day to day basis
Salford University's Creative Entrepreneur event has become a huge success, with over 400 delegates registered over 1 day. I took part in a panel this year focused on Sport Business 2.0, at which I spoke about the game development community around sports and the growing mobile health market.
This week, I was privileged to speak at the University of Salford's London meet up. It was a unique event for me and incredibly humbling to see and speak to so many remarkable people who have come through the university, including a Lord who was involved with writing the House of Lords report on drones - the subject of my talk! It was a great way to conclude an extraordinary first academic year at the university.
University of Salford 087e1
Yesterday, I spent the day at Chester Zoo, filming with our Brazilian PhD researcher Luiza Passos, who is working with the Golden Mantella frog, a species under threat in Madagascar, under the supervision of Professor Robert Young. In the afternoon, I gave a talk for Heads of Depts at the Zoo, talking about science communication opportunities. It was such a refreshing and engaging discussion and we've got so much to do, not least of which is working to build a really exciting and creative documentary programme around the amazing science that is happening at the zoo!
As each month passes @SalfordUni, there is another amazing thing happening. The other week it was #SonicFusion, directed by Prof Stephen Davismoon who just happens to be best mates with Prof Eduardo Miranda, a remarkable composer and AI researcher at Plymouth, whom I have worked with and known for a few years now. There is a staggering amount of experimental innovation at Salford University and this weekend of really provocative and beautiful audio visual experiences was no exception. Here's what I grabbed during the weekend:
This week saw some of the UK's best media pros come to Salford - many of them are already here of course! The phenomenal venue of Media City was a fantastic back drop to debates about media change, not least because it stands as an example of how much change has happened already in the UK, since Media City was open. The industry conference was preceded by an academic conference and, while one might wish for more integration than separation, these are still early days in the programme's life and it was a fantastic achievement to bring these two alongside each other.
I chaired a panel looking at alternative media and social media and their role within journalism. Two things struck me about this panel. The first is that the media industries are still trying to figure out how to do social media and have yet to come to terms with just how much it is changing their profession.
Forget whether or not citizens are journalist, what struck me most was provoked by Salford' Caroline Cheetham revealing that the user-generated content (UGC) department in the BBC is the fastest growing of all departments. In a world where the amount of news is expanding and the number of journalists is diminshing, it seems apparent to me that a completely new model is required. While one presentation talked about journalists as 'curators' of content rather than 'originators' of content, this seems still a stop-gap position, at the top end of a slippery slope, the end of which is a complete failure of journalism to do anything that the people cannot do themselves.
This is not a realisation that those in the industry willingly accept, but it is an impending reality that is steadily eroding professional journalism. Until the media realise this and figure that, even 'trust' is not something that they can rely on as a USP, then it will steadily ebb away into oblivion.
Despite this gloomy prognosis, I am optimistic about the future of journalism, but it is a future that is not predicated on the current economic model, not even the current ethos of journalism. It has to evolve and figure out what kind of future it has in a world where enhanced democracies can produce capable citizen journalists who work out of networks that can take on the biggest and smallest stories in our world.
The opening day closed with a lecture from Harriet Harman MP, who emphasised the importance of the creative industries - focusing more on this than on the journalism side of things. Yet, this separation was my biggest problem with her speech. Within government, there is no sense of the ways in which content overlap across industries and how difficult it is to separate them out.
A debate about the BBC license fee on the second day left me with one conclusion. In a world where citizens take on the role of journalists, the rise of user generated content may one day see the BBC change its acronym to UGC. Journalists may still have a job, but it will look nothing like the one they enjoy today.
