Podcasting with @Rosie

Discussion with @Zac

Facilitation with @Lis

Chairing with @Chris

It’s all happening in the community hub at #Digifest26 @jisc.bsky.social #Jisc #EdTech

The choices universities and colleges make about AI are political Ahead of this week's Digifest, Michael Webb and Rebecca Flook confront the complex values systems behind general purpose AI technology

Rebecca Flook and me on the power behind gen AI tools.

"The systems now being woven into education are shaped by a remarkably small group of people."

wonkhe.com/blogs/the-ch...

#jisc

Digifest is almost here.

I’ll be in conversation with Rebecca Flook and Lawrie Phipps on “The Power and the Principles: Who’s really shaping AI?”

A timely discussion given everything happening in the world right now.

Tuesday, 12:30 (Hall 8B)

#jisc

A human approach to digital transformation: Action Learning Sets in higher education libraries - Inspiring learning Scott unpacks how Action Learning Sets can help libraries in Higher Education work through digital transformation projects.

'A human approach to digital transformation: Action Learning Sets in higher education libraries' [BLOG]: inspiringlearning.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2026/02/a... #DX #Libraries #HE #ALS #ActionLearningSets #Coaching #DigitalTransformation #Jisc

Elsevier and Jisc Establish a New Agreement to Enhance Publishing Access for UK Institutions Elsevier has partnered with Jisc to launch a three-year agreement that ensures UK institutions continue to access journals while enhancing open access opportunities for researchers.

Elsevier and Jisc Establish a New Agreement to Enhance Publishing Access for UK Institutions #London #United_Kingdom #Elsevier #open_access #Jisc

Quick shout out for UK #HE and #FE folk attending #digifest26 - @littlebootevans.bsky.social and I will be facilitating a community #Wellbeing session. All welcome :) #Jisc

The UK university spin-out register, a comprehensive view of every active spin-out company across the country. It will help understanding the health of the spin-out ecosystem and support decision-making across government, academia and industry.
www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-ana...

#UKRI #HESA #JISC

In case you missed it, here's what digital leaders have been talking about in our forums last year #digital #HE #FE #Leadership #DigitalLeadership #Jisc

Why better communication with users matters - Infrastructure Last month marked the first time a dedicated community-focused session had been run at the Jisc security conference, introduced following the success at other Jisc events. Although I had not been invo...

'Why better communication matters' [BLOG]: infrastructure.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/12/1... >> Excellent post by my colleague Chris Griffiths on why communication is so important to getting people on board with digital #EdTech #Communication #Jisc

The latest #AmplifyFE newsletter is out now! Packed with CPD opportunities for the new year including 3 new free AmplifyFE webinars, new blog posts from Zoe Tierney & Metaverse Learning as well as events from across the sector

#BettUK2026 #Jisc #ALTc #GetAdultsLearning #EdTech buff.ly/1m5B3Kl

AmplifyFE community space blog post graphic with a listening dog and an AmplifyFE branded megaphone

Check out the latest #AmplifyFE blog post from Zoe Tierney about her recently shortlisted work 'Regenerate: A National Forest Immersive Collaboration Transforming creative collaboration in FE through immersive technology' #ImmersiveEducation #Jisc #ALTAwards buff.ly/zoe8hYR

On day 20 explore the latest #AmplifyFE blog post from Zoe Tierney about her recently shortlisted work 'Regenerate: A National Forest Immersive Collaboration Transforming creative collaboration in FE through immersive technology' #ImmersiveEducation #Jisc #ALTAwards buff.ly/zoe8hYR

AmplifyFE Festive countdown day 9 Jisc Community Champions 2026 submit your nominations

On day 9 we encourage you to submit your nominations for the Jisc Community Champions 2026, entries close on Sunday 14 December at midnight #Jisc #AmplifyFE #VocTech buff.ly/xjCyYcq

On day 9 we encourage you to submit your nominations for the Jisc Community Champions 2026, entries close on Sunday 14 December at midnight #Jisc #AmplifyFE

robert downey jr. is wearing a purple sweater and looking at something . ALT: robert downey jr. is wearing a purple sweater and looking at something .

[Veille] 2025 Tient, l' #Amue sort 1 point "Mutualisation numérique dans l’ #ESR : premiers enseignements d’un panorama européen". Avec du #JISC dedans
Genre
Bon, comment dire...
2013 : x.com/amarois/stat...
2013 : x.com/amarois/stat...
2016 : x.com/A_Moatti/sta...
2018 : x.com/amarois/stat...
etc.

Opinion: how generative AI can help us address linguistic inequalities - Artificial intelligence Within the theme of AI and social inclusion, Tom Moule discusses how generative AI can address linguistic inequality.

In a perfect world, maybe we’d all be able to accept everyone’s authentic self and not judge people by how they communicate, including how they write and express themselves. But we don’t live in a perfect world, do we?

#jisc #aied

nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/07/0...

The US have released their AI action plan. We need to take notice as it has profound implications for academia. More here:

#jisc #aied

nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/07/2...

What is the hidden cost of using images? - Inspiring learning Images are widely used in education, but their hidden environmental cost is often overlooked. This post, based on a Jisc project, explores how mindful image use can support sustainable digital practic...

'What is the hidden cost of using images?' [BLOG]: inspiringlearning.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/07/w... #Images #Sustainability #SustainablePractice #DigitalPractice #DigitalSustainability #ImageOptimisation #Jisc #EdTech #AmplifyFE

Turning skills into stories: how longitudinal skills portfolios enhance student employability Universities are adopting reflective digital tools to help students connect their learning to graduate skills. Here’s what they’re doing and why it matters now

How can turning skills into stories through longitudinal skills portfolios enhance student employability? @catbeelearny.bsky.social investigates! www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/turni... #Employability #LifelongLearning #Jisc

UK universities and colleges convene to secure Oracle Java agreement through Jisc  New collective agreement delivers transparent, simplified licensing, and significant cost savings   Jisc, a provider of digital solutions for UK education and research, has negotiated a… UK universities and colleges convene to secure Oracle Java agreement through Jisc  was published on FE News by Jisc

#EdTechNewsonEducationTechnology #jisc

Will quantum computing topple SAML? The Majorana 1. Photo by John Brecher for Microsoft The UK federation is arguably one of the largest SAML federations in the Research and Education sector, with over 1200 member organisations spanning Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE), and with significant representation from the research and commercial sectors. We are a trust broker. A level playing field. We help people securely access services, and enable services to make informed decisions about access and authorization. We have operated in the international community for 20 years. We work for the benefit of our customers by integrating with over 70 other national federations to increase our worldwide reach to 6,000 identity providers and over 3,500 services. There is a lot of evidence that multi-lateral SAML federations are in good health: * The UK federation continues to register new SAML services * Our helpdesk receives excellent customer service feedback for its support to Jisc members and customers * Data from federations which produce statistics on number of authentications (such as the Dutch federation SURFnet) show an increase year-on-year * In April 2025 five new national federations joined the eduGAIN (SAML) inter-federation service. How, then, should we respond to the increasingly insistent claims that “SAML is dead”? These claims are often given with little evidence, and certainly have no timescale attached. However, we know that there is significant development effort happening with other federated identity protocols such as OpenID Connect, OpenID Federation and the Federated Credential Management browser API. More importantly, recent guidance from the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre gives a clear timescale for migrating systems to use quantum-resistant cryptography. They’re not the experts on SAML federation, of course, so they don’t provide a pathway for us to follow, and we have to define our own. Will quantum computing topple SAML? ### **Some evidence for SAML decline** * Web developers are typically not familiar with federated authentication, nor the design patterns and architecture associated with multi-lateral SAML federations. We already see a slowdown of new registrations to the UK federation, but is that trend going to continue, or would information and advice about the benefits of SAML federations reverse that? * Scalable mechanisms to release personal data do not exist and IdP operators are risk averse to ad hoc solutions. This frustrates the promise of the rich authorization framework that SAML federations can support. * There are many infrastructure and community proxies which provide functionality that cannot be provided by the national multilateral SAML federations, such as protocol translation services and group membership. The AARC Blueprint architecture shows the maturity of the proxy space and indicates the features that cannot be easily deployed in a pure SAML federation. * The SAML technical committee was closed in 2023 so new developments to the protocol are very unlikely. Even before the committee was formally closed, the pace of standardisation was slowing, with the last specification dating to 2019, and low uptake of the newer specifications. * SAML does not easily support use cases like single page application frameworks or mobile applications, and doesn’t have REST APIs for authentication flows * New technologies like Verifiable Credentials are being built on top of OIDC not SAML. * If a vulnerability in the SAML protocol were discovered, there would be no standards-based response. However, we could develop ad hoc or community solutions which are really the basis for any formal standards-based response, so this is really a lack of formality than an existential issue. And also note that recent vulnerabilities have been in SAML implementations or deployments; it’s not the protocol which has been critically vulnerable. * Making or maintaining secure SAML implementations is likely to get harder as people with relevant skill sets (for example, XML, XSLT and XML Digital Signatures) leave the sector and new developers just want to use and work with JSON and JOSE. None of these factors suggests a specific end date for SAML although taken together they indicate a gradual decline in relevance and low capacity to change. We could take the position that the UK federation has found a niche and should continue to occupy it. ### **NCSC timeline for migration to post-quantum cryptography** The game-changer is guidance published in March 2025 by the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, which provides a timeline to migrate safely to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). Should we be concerned with PQC? A recent research paper states that “the security and privacy of XML-based frameworks such as SAML is threatened by the development of increasingly powerful quantum computers. In fact, future attackers with access to scalable quantum computers will be able to break the currently used cryptographic building blocks and thus undermine the security of the SAML SSO to illegally access sensitive private information”. For our purposes, the NCSC timeline is: * By 2028, we must define migration goals and build an initial migration plan * By 2031, we must carry out the earliest, highest-priority PQC migration activities * By 2035, we must complete migration to PQC of all systems One of the main goals for us as a national infrastructure provider is to stay on top of the game and to minimize the disruption to our members. From an infrastructure point of view, the goals for making the UK federation technical infrastructure quantum-resistant lie on a spectrum between: * Ensuring SAML in use in the UK federation is quantum-resistant, and * Migrating away from SAML to something that is quantum-resistant. Since internet identity is an ecosystem, it’s likely that a hybrid solution will emerge, and that the UK federation will have to investigate a number of scenarios to define our goals. Once we have defined the goals, their delivery and implementation will be a colossal piece of work for the UK federation as an infrastructure provider. To illustrate the scale of what a migration goal should encompass, consider that on 22 April 2025 there were 2192 software deployments registered in the UK federation. Of these, 1442 run Shibboleth, 319 use OpenAthens, 82 run SimpleSAMLphp, and the remaining 349 are a long tail of other software stacks. Ensuring these software deployments migrate and remain interoperable is a considerable behind-the-scenes piece of work, which would need to be scaled out worldwide to the 8,000 other deployments across eduGAIN. It will need significant technical expertise, good communication with stakeholders and adroit management. #### **How do we ensure SAML in the UK federation is quantum-resistant?** In August 2024, NIST standardised the first PQC algorithms after several years of scrutiny, but that is not the end of the story. These algorithms have to be incorporated into protocols. The algorithms must also be implemented in hardware and software, and then into the applications stacks. This work is happening right now, although as William Gibson’s saying goes: the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. For example, Java is the primary implementation language in the UK federation, and Java 24 now implements the ML-DSA digital signature algorithm, but the long tail of implementations in the UK federation are not all Java code. Research and Education SAML federations rely on cryptography in these 3 ways: * All network traffic happens over https, so there is TLS protection of endpoints. * We sign XML metadata with our federation’s key to ensure integrity and authenticity. We verify other federations’ metadata with their keys. These keys are typically 4096-bit RSA keys. * Federation members sign and encrypt XML messages to other federation members, which verify and decrypt the messages. These keys are typically 2048-bit RSA keys. Preparation for migration to PQC in TLS has been underway for some time, for example the IETF’s TLS working group is standardising hybrid key exchange in TLS 1.3. Federations do not need to lead the way here, although we must understand good practice and roll it out to our community. The primary job for federations will be to understand how to protect the integrity and authenticity of XML metadata. We also need to work with SAML software implementers to determine whether it’s possible to sign and encrypt XML messages. This is going to be a challenge. The cryptographic identifiers we use today were standardised in the W3C namespace over 15 years ago. It is unclear to the UK federation team whether the W3C is updating its specifications in light of PQC, so one of the first steps will be to engage with the W3C. And as we’ve seen before, standardisation of algorithms is just one step on the migration path. There are a lot of pieces of the puzzle to fit together. ### **Conclusion** Making SAML quantum resistant has many interdependent elements which make hardening SAML a complex and risky endeavour. However, as we’ve seen in previous Trust and Identity blog post, if we wanted to migrate away from SAML then there’s no clear technology choice for what to migrate to. Even if there were, we would find similar migration challenges. The practical aspects of migration are formidable whether we choose to migrate away from SAML or we choose to harden SAML. Over the next year, the UK federation team will continue to investigate this area and define our migration goals. We will endeavour to communicate our progress to UK federation members, and we anticipate more blog posts over the coming months.

New blog post by a colleague: Will quantum computing topple SAML?

trustandidentity.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/05/16/will-quant...

#saml #sso #pqc #quantumcomputing #oidc #jisc #infosec #iam #aim

Discover the University of Reading's journey in promoting ORCID adoption! Their persistent efforts have led to over 1,000 linked ORCID IDs. 👏👏👏👏

#ORCID #JISC

➡️ https://shorturl.at/xhMb3

How do we prepare students for Green Jobs of the future? - Inspiring learning Scott reflects on the interviews with members for the ‘Embedding digital sustainability into teaching and learning' project. The post explores the digital attributes we need to develop in students to ...

'How do we prepare students for Green Jobs of the future?' [BLOG]: inspiringlearning.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/05/h... #DigitalSustainability #GreenSkills #DigitalSkills #Jisc (f.i. @cal-innes.bsky.social @littlebootevans.bsky.social).

Cartoon image of a dog sat next to an AmplifyFE branded megaphone. Text reads 'Building Digital Confidence in Teacher Training: A Practical Mapping to the Diploma in Teaching By Louisa Stamatelopoulos'.

Check out our latest #AmplifyFE blog post ’Building Digital Confidence in Teacher Training: A Practical Mapping to the Diploma in Teaching’ by Louisa Stamatelopoulos from @jisc.bsky.social buff.ly/uOtlpTd #ALTc #EdTech #FEUK #Jisc #LoveFE #DiplomaInTeaching #Teaching #EduSky

Selfie of the digital capabilities team with the student postcard advertising the new study we are recruiting students to. In the background is the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford University.

Been busy delivering postcards about our new student digital skills study at Oxford. If you know anyone who’s a current student at Oxford University, please share this form with them forms.office.com/e/Y5P5nTQW1k
#DigitalSkills #OxfordUniversity #ALTc #Jisc #EdTech #OxfordStudent #StudentResearch

How Can Analytics and Software Selection Enhance Teaching and Learning Practices? - Inspiring learning Jisc is investigating how Wales' FE and Skills Sector uses core platforms to share innovative practices, funded by Medr. This research will focus on widening participation by ensuring equal access to ...

"How Can Analytics and Software Selection Enhance Teaching and Learning Practices?" [BLOG]: inspiringlearning.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/04/h... @catbeelearny.bsky.social Early findings from our interviews with members for a Medr funded #Jisc project 'Maximising use of existing tools'

Anyone else using #zen internet, specifically via #OpenReach FTTP, having problems accessing hosts on #janet / #jisc networks this morning?

Traceroutes are failing for me around lag-0.bng1.ixn-lon.zen.net.uk and lag-4.p2.ixn-lon.zen.net.uk

NB. my "internet" seems fine, it's just stuff on […]

Early findings from the digital sustainability interviews - Inspiring learning Scott shares the early findings from the interviews with members for the Jisc project 'Embedding digital sustainability into teaching and learning.' The key themes so far are discussed, including the ...

How are FE & HE tackling digital sustainability in curriculum? Key takeaways from @scotthibberson.bsky.social's latest blog: collaboration, staff confidence & linking to digital skills all key themes👇 #DigitalSustainability #Jisc #FE #HE

At the end… Strategic foresight: how we might prepare for the unknown? #jisc #digifest25

Digifest 2025 Day 2
Robin Ghurbhurun: Festival of Learning, Where today meets tomorrow
#jisc #digifest2025