Niall Barr

A6: Recognise that expertise is needed as well as enthusiasm, treat appointments to these roles at least as seriously as a senior lecturer post, and eliminate any hint of cronyism. Look for people who challenge the status-quo rather than maintaining obsolescence. #LTHEchat

A5: A culture of investigation and experimentation is important, but it is also important to keep security and sustainability in mind when doing that. The balance between these often goes wrong. Also, beware of people who never challenge leaders, otherwise they end up surrounded by yesmen #LTHEchat

Q4: Connections with many people I met through 1EdTech/IMSGlobal and JISC CETIS mainly. Also being really interested in the technology - having work as a hobby is a great help in the digital world. #LTHEchat

A3: Digital accessibility is a key part of it - the leaders need to promote it, and ensure the accessibility champions have the influence, power and tools to ensure best practices are followed. #LTHEchat

A2: I think I annoyed too many people by being the person who had the expertise they really needed.... I was only ever a leader in national and international contexts, never locally. #LTHEchat

A1: Digital leadership needs to connect many strands - they need to manage and negotiate the differing requirements of teachers, students, server and security teams. The also need to have the specialist expertise in educational software and standards that is lacking is these other teams. #LTHEchat

This is yet another example of how you beat the far right. By beating them, not trying to be them. By having your own agenda, not aping theirs. With courage and conviction - and humour - not fear and timidity.

A1: I'd really not like to do that - I always treated (and considered) my masters students members of the team, and that seemed to work well. #LTHEchat

A6: Sometimes a framework can help originality - e.g. the game frameworks mentioned in the blog, without something like Unreal, Unity, PlayCanvas, or even MonoGame, the user would be bogged down in basics, and have no chance of doing something great on their own. #LTHEchat

A3: In a way my PhD is a framework for writing parsers - I'm working on generative programming, and one of the challenges is to make the creation of parsers easier for non-specialists. #LTHEchat

That course was part of the BTechEd, so the students had very varied backgrounds, some straight from school, with good highers in maths, and others looking for a second career, with a distant memory of an O grade maths.

A2: Teaching programming I tried to make activities that the more capable students could add extras to. The best mixed ability technique I've seen hough was when I covered for a L1 maths class, with very varied levels, where the better students basically became tutors. #LTHEchat

A1: In the distant past I used Authorware - a sort framework for e-learning content, and more recently I've encouraged teachers to use H5P, which is similar in concept, but much better, and easier for teachers. I've not come across anything similar for students though #LTHEchat

It makes many of the benefits of a personal tutor available to people who would not otherwise be able to afford it. I think in the long run this is going to be one of the most positive uses of AI. #LTHEchat

YouTube video by Niall B Unboxing the Behringer PRO VS MINI and the Behringer JT-4000M MICRO

A rather amateur looking video in the unboxing genre - "Unboxing the Behringer PRO VS MINI and the Behringer JT-4000M MICRO" youtu.be/8yR54ol5kJs?... via @YouTube - hopefully I'll get round to making another video with nice sound from these soon!

A6: A complete removal of artificial barriers to career progression, so ability counts, irrespective of whatever box an HR job-worth has put you in. #LTHEchat

A3: A tendency to prefer status, and luck with funding to ability... #LTHEchat

I sometimes suspect it was an aspect of the Peter Principle - people who'd been promoted just beyond their competence by being overconfident and pushy, hitting downwards..

At times from people who felt I was getting preferential treatment from our boss, with other bosses who were a problem though, I don't know - maybe they just didn't like people who didn't fit in nice boxes....

A1 pt 2 Previously, I got a lot of resentment from other staff on non research contracts, even though my 'research' was really development and process improvement. That was part a sort of gate keeping research culture, but not from researchers. #LTHEchat

A1: Even though I'm now doing research full time, I don't really feel part of a culture. #LTHEchat

I've found that asking for a 'diverse group of students' reduces the white bias quite a lot. #lthechat

A1: I've played with stable diffusion a bit, and used it to create placeholder images, and a header image for a recent PhD related blog post - blog.niallbarr.me.uk/2025/05/test... (text was "An abstract painting representing complex source code with many stages where bugs can be found." #LTHEchat

A4: The technology is improving all the time, and it's probably up to learning technologists to keep up with that, learn to develop, and show teachers the possibilities with small demos. One challenge is the equipment though - the best dev tools take a lot better hardware than delivery. #LTHEchat

A blog post about little parsers - blog.niallbarr.me.uk/2025/03/pars...

A6: Assuming that this is a box of the great things to be preserved for ever: PHP 7.4 - the last version before the developers forgot that it's a scripting language. QTI 2.1 specification, and QTIWorks. (Again focus on the essentials was lost after that.) #LTHEchat

GitHub - niallb/YACRS: Web based classroom response software Web based classroom response software. Contribute to niallb/YACRS development by creating an account on GitHub.

A lot of our lecturers really liked YACRS (github.com/niallb/YACRS) It needs a bit of tlc at the moment, (and a few recent updates committed to github,) but it worked better with the way most lecturers teach than menti. I'm open to setting up a demo.

A5: Replacement of all commercial teaching tools with opensource, properly supported by Universities sharing the development and support costs. (A bit like Moodle almost is...) #LTHEchat

Opensource tools don't invite decision makers to the annual "user conference" in Hawaii! (I can't remember which tool that was, but it was quite blatant bribery.)

Another important thing that is often forgotten, but is a bit of a fixation of mine, is that it should use interoperability standards where appropriate, and certainly not lock teachers in by making their material impossible to move to a different tool.