What's the role of culture in innovation? As I hinted in my previous posting on the TEDxGalway event, I firmly believe that we often underplay the importance on place within higher education. Whilst universities understandably struggle to position themselves according to league tables or to government priorities and funding regimes are they in danger of becoming more and more like each other and consequently less and less distinctively representative of their geographical, national and culture contexts? As a student or staff member wandering from lecture theatre to tutorial class how can you tell in which country you are based? Are we in danger of suffering from airport syndrome where all the world looks the same except for the bits beyond the runway and outside the terminal? In our practices and in our courses what distinguishes one from another? Is a Bologna-fied degree in Ulan Bator identical to one in Vienna? Finbarr Bradley, one of the keynotes at the Symposium touched on similar issues in his lively closing presentation. For international readers the introductory few sentences are in Irish.

I've always believed that one of the areas in which many universities could improve is in greater recognition of the fact that they are essentially cities of ideas. What I mean is that the phrase 'scholarly community' is rarely realised in practice other than within individual academic disciplines. How many staff and students are aware of the interests and work of their colleagues in different disciplines? How many attend seminars and colloquia in different colleges or faculties? That's why I was pleased to attempt a small contribution towards this using the TEDx format recently. Sure, the audience at the event was limited and there were perhaps more people external to the university (also a good thing) than from around the schools and colleges, but the talks have been recorded and are gradually appearing on the TEDx youtube site. As each is viewed and links are passed on the idea is spreading and more and more people are talking to me about events of this nature, the focus on sharing and accessibility of ideas (rather than the traditional long lecture format) and (and this is what I think is important) the sense of celebration of passion and of enjoyment. See what I mean, perhaps, in these first three to go online: Louis de Paor, Director of the Centre for Irish Studies, in partnership with Ronan Browne and Naisrin Elsafty. Lionel Pilkington, Head of the School of Humanities, on 'Performance, Performing and Ireland' Abhay Pandit, biomedical engineer/scientist on 'Biomimicry' and biomaterials.

Day 1 at the de Havilland campus of the University of Hertfordshire. The opening keynote was delivered by the VC of Hull, Calie Pretorius, and in keeping with the standard set of talks new VCs seem to be provided with in their leadership training his theme was 'innovate or die'. He did deliver smoothly with anecdotes, analogies and occasional jokes but with little real content of any substance, despite the promising abstract. His slides were well done from a PowerPoint-of-view but curiously had a string of book covers to make his point - all of which were the sort of management trash you pick up at airports, you know the kind of thing 'Think Big not Small - how to outsmart your competitors before they outsmart you'. Clearly he does a lot of travelling. They weren't being used in any sort of ironic sense, sadly. Main message is that universities need to innovate, innovation means not just having ideas but delivering them (in fact in his presentation he extolled the virtue of stealing ideas from others and exploiting them - something that the concurrent conference on Plagiarism shouldn't hear about!), and we need to continually change, continually adapt, faster and faster (analogy of zebra on motorbike keeping ahead of a lion got a laugh from some of the audience and an inner scream from others). Anyway, his slides were quickly popped online by the Academy, but you had to be there... The conference then broke into parallel sessions and when you see it fork into up to 13 simultaneous presentations, then you realise there has to be a better way. Many of the talks were related to one another but in direct competition for an audience. I know the numbers of participants are large, but it would be nice if perhaps talks could be shorter, clustered under a theme and then given scope for discussion. It might mean stricter selection or perhaps a more innovative (see I did learn) approach might be to showcase lots of the interesting practical work people are doing in something like a Pecha Kucha (20x20) session followed by panel discussion? Anyway, the speaker for the session I (and a relatively big crowd of others) picked didn't turn up, despite being from Hertfordshire itself. No show, no explanation, so we all slowly filtered away. The afternoon sessions I attended were very good. One by Elisabeth Dunne of Exeter University talking about some great work she has done with students as change agents in teaching and learning (really impressive scale of activity). After that Paul Kleiman spoke about some intensive discussion/focus group type analysis of HE from student perspectives centred around an awayday session. It was good, in both cases, to hear of student active engagement and indeed a real desire for such. We also heard that students really resent being treated as (and in some cases labelled as) 'customers'. (So if you want to cheese off not just your academic staff, but also your students, keep mentioning 'customer.') The dinner was preceded by awards to students from the various subject centres and the dinner itself was the setting for national volunteering awards. That's it. I could say more, but probably shouldn't. Hopefully an update tomorrow provided internet access available wherever I'll be en route to the Journal of Education Policy 25th anniversary meeting.

I'm delighted to say that the videos from the Galway Symposium 2010 and TEDxGalway are beginning to appear off the production line and as they do so, we'll link to them here as per our annual tradition. The first recording is the keynote given on Friday morning by Anna Newell who has worked in Queen's Belfast in the Centre for Excellence in the Creative and Performing Arts (NI). Anna collaborated with Melissa McCullough in Medical Education on a fascinating project that brought together medical and drama students and explored issues in medical ethics, in this first case that of body donation. The performance they developed was called 'Dead Man Talking.'

The RSA recently asked a bunch of famous folk and others hanging around in their building in London what they think 'everyone should know' and should be included in a common curriculum. What do you think?