The other day I got a message from my friend Albert Hankel at SURF in the Netherlands. SURF is the Dutch equivalent of Jisc. Albert told me that SURF and colleagues in Dutch higher education had been working on a “Green ICT Maturity Model” as part of SURF’s programme of work on Green ICT. The … Read more
“Printing is out of control” it has been said, and certainly in many universities and colleges, this is true of staff printing. In many institutions there is to be found a plethora of individual use, low-capacity printers attached to individual computers about which the users exhibit strong proprietorial and territorial behaviour. Typically these printers do … Read more
Or UCCCfS – not the most cuddly acronym, but apparently better than some of the options discarded on the way. I’m just back from the north, and was in Edinburgh yesterday evening to be present at the official launch of this scheme. So far 50 universities and colleges have signed up to the challenge of … Read more
In Birmingham today for the Cloud computing workshop run by the JISC funded project that is looking at the environmental and organisational implications of the Cloud for higher and further education.After a quick review of the evidence collected from the interviews have conducted, its down to discussing some of the issues being raised. Trust seems to be … Read more
The JISC funded Suste-IT project has released a briefing paper on Sustainable Procurement in Higher Education. Procurement was identified as one of the key areas for activity in the main report from the project published at the start of this year. Buying the right servers and PCs can make areal difference to an institution’s environmental … Read more
JISC has produced and released an eight minute video to provide some inspiration around the use of thin client approaches to reducing the carbon footprint of desktop computing. The video features the thin client installation at Queen Margaret University (QMU), Edinburgh, and follows on from the success that QMU had in winning the Green ICT … Read more
Back from my holidays and able to flag up the launch of the first part of the JISC Greening ICT Programme. The main Grant Funding Call went out on the 2nd September and has the following parts: Call for proposals to look at the relationship between ICT related energy usage and responsibility for paying for … Read more
Carbon footprint tool from JISC helps universities and colleges tread more carefully How green is IT? A new tool from JISC is helping universities and colleges calculate just how eco-friendly they are, by estimating the carbon footprint left by their computers. Institutions can calculate their carbon emissions by inputting information about the numbers of computing … Read more
In March 2008, the University of Oxford hosted the ‘Towards Low Carbon ICT’ conference to stimulate discussion on the practical measures that can be taken to build ICT services that both reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and mitigate the effects that higher energy prices will have on our institutions. Much happened over the months that followed: … Read more
The JISC Regional Support Centres are organising a series of Smarter, Greener Learning Conferences which will launch at London’s City Hall on 26 February 2009 before moving on to Birmingham on 18 March and Edinburgh on 22 April. The conferences will bring the latest thinking and practical advice to managers in further education and skills … Read more