BBC
Monday October 21st, we visited the BBC for the whole day. In the morning we meet with our contact Rebecca who worked at ASAP with Mike. Then two managers, Peter and Niko, presented the background of BBC to us and what they are currently doing at the company. A big thing has been making the website and apps more consistent and responsive. We split into groups and went on a tour of BBC. We got to see the newsroom and different recording studios.
In the afternoon our class broke into three groups and meet with different people working within the BBC. The first person the group I was in met with Dipesh Patel, a software designer. He works with a team of four and they have a two-week sprint where they set tasks to complete. They work to solve problems within certain applications and all the work they do is behind the scenes in BBC.
Next we met a user experience designer and there are about a hundred people in that department that she oversees. There are different teams within, one of them is called the companion experience team and they are testing how to sync content without interrupting people on mobile devices. She also mentioned how a big part of the design process is getting people to work together. Lastly, we met Michael, a business analyst and he works on the syndication team. He deals with most of the data coming in and out of the BBC. As a business analyst he and his team are part of the go between stakeholders and developers. I found the BBC to be a very interesting visit to learn about what goes on within the company.
JANET
Tuesday October 22nd, we met with Emma Smith who works with Janet (Joint Academic Network). Janet is the UK’s research and education network and the government funds it. Emma told us about a recent Art and Humanities workshop. She told us about music software presented at the workshop called LOLA. This software is for teaching/learning music and musicians have developed it. They have a community website with different groups to get people to talk to each other and ask questions. The advantages of Janet are that it is a private network so the bandwidth is higher and it is always being updated. The LOLA software can be found on the website. Overall, it was interesting to learn about the music software and learn about Janet as a private network for education.