A-head in the cloud

I often used to envy the governance, funding and resources available to the UK higher education sector - less so in the past year or so admittedly - but today's announcement of 12.5M funding to develop cloud services for education and research brought the green eyed monster roaring back into my life. This initiative is not only exciting pointer to the technology of the future. It could go a long way to solving some of the sector's financial challenges by gaining efficiencies at a national level, without squeezing more life - or quality - out of a public sector that is already careening rapidly towards the lean end of the spectrum.

When I first came to NZ in 1995, I - foolishly as it turned out - thought the collaborative model pursued by the UK higher education sector could work even better in a country with just 7 (at the time) universities. There is potential here, and some great initiatives, but we fall far short of the scale of leadership and cooperation happening in the UK. Maybe our crisis needs to get worse so it becomes the only way forward :-(

The monster that thought conjures up is anything but green!