If It’s Not “All About The Technology” Then What Else Is It Not About?

The announcement of the availability of a video summary of the event reminded me of the opening F-ALT session, held on 8 September in the Lass O’Gowrie pub  (a pub I always try to get to when I’m at a conference at Manchester University).  This was my first time at F-ALT, the ALT’s Fringe event, and I was looking forward to meeting up with the F-ALT organisers and participants, many of whom I’ve met previously or may not have met but read their blogs or follow on Twitter.

From what I’d heard of last year’s F-ALT, the Fringe event would provide an opportunity to discuss topics related to elearning in a informal and friendly setting. I’d heard anecdotes of last year’s debate on the “Edupunk” meme and was looking forward to a similar light-hearted evening of geeky fun.  However the topic of the opening F-ALT session was “Postdigital” and the description on the F-ALT wiki  read:

“What does this mean? Why is it not two words? Is it just Dave making-up another term in an attempt to get keynote gigs? No, it actually has some substance to it and could be a very helpful way of framing the learning-tech discussion over the next few years. If you are sceptical about all this then you should definitely turn-up. The chances of an argument breaking out are very high.“

Perhaps this year’s F-ALT wouldn’t turn out to be  the informal evening and drink and chat that I had expected! The participants at the event were asked to give a two-minute response to a number of ideas we were presented with. Mine was, if I recall correctly:

The speed of the change, however, has left us with the mistaken belief that social change was somehow ‘created’ by the digital rather than simply played out on a the canvas of the digital; that the digital itself is the main driver of change.

Being presented with this serious topic in the pub on the opening evening of the conference I tried to response in a light-hearted fashion. I suggested that it was appropriate that this topic was raised in a traditional Manchester boozer, possibly a pub which Fredrick Engles drank in when he spent time in the city. And just as we call for ownership of our scholarly works in ours IRs (institutional repositories) so Engels called for ownership of the means of production in the better known IR – the industrial revolution.  So the arguments we are having now aren’t about primarily about the technologies, but reflect arguments which date back hundreds of years (indeed Martin Weller has suggested that the debates go back many centuries).

The publication of the video summary of the evening (which is embedded below) provides an opportunity to revisit ‘postdigital’ debate …

If, as Dave White suggests in a post on “Postdigital: Escaping the Kingdom of the New?“, we tend to overhype the new and exciting, and fail to appreciate the aspects which are actually useful, what are the implications? Perhaps this is a topic which is worthy of more considered thinking. 

Now maybe it is correct to suggest that we in the development community, who consider ourselves to be agents of a transformational change to a better environment, fail to appreciate that our users often ignore our developments and our vision. After all, if the initial evidence reflects a more general trend, we seem to be living in a world in which most users use an MS Windows platform to access institutional resources – they’re not interested in Linux, for example, despite many years of evangelism from the open source community. A computer’s a computer, just like a fax machine is a fax machine – only nerds care about what goes on underneath the bonnet.

But if this is true, what are the implications for accepting that we are in a postdigital age?  Don’t we then accept that our IT environment will be owned by the mega-corporations – Google and Microsoft. And let’s forget debates about device independence and interoperability – unless the mega-corporations feel such issues may provide a competitive edge.

It strikes me that the postdigital agenda is a conservative one, in which we are asked to accept that we (in our institutions and in our working environment) cannot shape our digital environment. And for me that is a worrying point of view which I don’t accept.

200,000 Views

On 6 September 2008 I published a post entitled 100,000 Views which documented the date of this blog having received 100,000 views according to the usage statistics provided on the WordPress.com site.  I described how:

“I’ve found it useful in the past to write about significant landmarks on this blog in order to provide some data which other bloggers may find useful in drawing parallels. And such factual data may also be useful in the various blog workshops which myself and colleagues have been running“.

Just over a year later, with the blog having yesterday received 200,000 views, this milestone provides another opportunity for some reflection. As can be seen from the graph, there has been a significant increase in the number of average monthly page views which began (coincidentally?) after the blog reached 100,00 views in  September 2008.

There was a peak (of 9,108 views) the following month (October 2008) followed by a plateau of over 7,000 views until June 2009, which saw a new peak of 9,300 views.  This peak coincided with work I had been involved in for a workshop on “Using the Social Web to Maximise Access to your Resources” – it would seem that the experiments (including gathering evidence of the influence of Twitter in generating traffic) were successful.  However there has been a significant decrease in traffic since that peak, although the figures are still higher than a year ago (the dip could be accounted for by the summer holidays and a decrease in the numbers of posts while I was away at conferences recently – but could also reflect a more general decrease in blogging activities which some commentators have speculated about recently).

Although I recognise that it is not possible to gain a picture of the state of the blogosphere based on usage figures for a single blog (to say nothing of the view that there may be Lies, Dammed Lies, Blog Statistics and Unexpected Spikes) I hope this snapshot is of interest to others. It would be particularly interesting to hear if others are experiencing a downwards trend in light of the supposed move away from blogs to use of Twitter.

We Need Evidence – But What If We Don’t Like The Findings?

The Need For Evidence

We know that technologies have the potential to provide many benefits, but this potential is not necessarily also realised. We therefore need to gather evidence in order to inform our policies – perhaps to help us recognise that what seemed to be a great idea has actually not been delivered in practice, perhaps to make us aware of a need for greater advocacy and user engagement or perhaps for refining the approaches we initially took.

Usage Statistics For Mobile Devices

Such issues came to mind following a recent discussion on the website-info-mgt JISCMail list. The discussion began by addressing the question of whether institutions should be developing iPhone applications providing, for example, resources of interest to new students.

Following a discussion as to whether we should be developing generic applications for mobile devices and whether this could fail to exploit device specific features, especially features which might be particularly valuable for students with disabilities, David Bailey (Bath Spa University) put the discussion into context by providing statistics on access to his institutional Web site from various platforms.

His statistics revealed that 80.55% of visits to the Web site in the past month came from an MS Windows platform, 17.84% from the Apple Macintosh and 0.66% from a Linux platform, The figures for mobile devices were iPhone (0.44%), iPod (0.11%) and Symbian (0.10%) with the figures for mobile devices such as the Palm, Blackberry and Android and gaming devices such as the Wii and Playstation being less than 0.1%.

In response to this sharing of evidence a number of follow-up posts provided additional statistics:

Heriot-Watt: MS Windows (93.51%), Apple Macintosh (5.05%), Linux (0.67%), iPhone (0.34%), Symbian (012%) and iPod (0.11%) (see email).

Sunderland: MS Windows (92.4%), Apple Macintosh (5.7%) and Linux (0.7%). The figures for other devices were all less than 0.1% (see email).

Imperial College: MS Windows (91.69%), Apple Macintosh (6.9%), Linux (0.87%), iPhone (0.3%), Symbian (012%). The figures for other devices were all less than 0.1% (see email).

University of Warwick: MS Windows (89.19%), Apple Macintosh (8.4%), Linux (1.85%) and iPhone (0.25%). The figures for other devices were all less than 0.1% (see email).

Before reflecting on the implications of this evidence we need to be aware of the limitations of these figures: it reflects the experiences of only four institutions; the data is not necessarily based on institutional data and may reflect usage for departmental Web servers and the data reflects usage in the summer vacation. But having acknowledged these caveats, what might the implications be if this evidence does prove to be indicative of the wider higher educational community?

Discussion

Ironically although the discussion on the website-info-mgt list began over access to institutional Web sites from mobile devices the data provides little evidence of significant usage by mobile devices. But the data does reveal patterns of desktop usage which are worthy of further consideration.

I suspect many of the Web and IT developers and support staff who have been critical of Microsoft over the years will be disappointed at the overwhelming popularity of the MS Windows platform for accessing the institutional Web sites described above. Should we now accept that MS Windows has won the battle for the desktop operating system environment? And at a time when, if the predictions are correct, we may see a reduction in staffing levels, do these figures suggest that the time and effort in testing Web sites on the Linux platform may not be justified? This isn’t to suggest that Web sites should be designed for the MS Windows platform, rather that the effort in testing and tweaking for little-used platforms may not be justified.

Of course an argument could be made that the figures suggest that there is no point in developing services for the mobile Web as the current levels of usage are very low. But the difference is that the desktop and laptop computer environment is now mature, whereas the mobile environment is new.

I think there is a debate to be had – and there is also, perhaps, the need to ask “Where did it go wrong? What happened to the diversity of operating systems? Where have the Mac users and Linux users gone?” Or perhaps they are still around, and simply aren’t visiting institutional Web sites. What do you think?

Tweetboard: Adding Twitter To Web Pages

I was recently alerted to a blog post on TechCrunch entitled “Tweetboard Launches Twitter Client And URL Shortener“. The article described how this service “lets you create a Twitter-powered forum on any site“. In addition Tweetboard provides  “the ability to view discussions as a thread, similar to what you’d find on FriendFeed or Facebook“.

This sounded interesting so I signed up for a (free) Tweetboard account and created a page in which I added the HTML code to create the embedded interface.

An screenshot of my experiment is illustrated.

As can be seen the tool provides a threaded view of replies to tweets – something I’ve not seen before but a feature which does seem popular in FriendFeed.

However as has been pointed out, the service does seem slow (although I wonder if this might be due to the increased usage of the service which the TechCrunch article may have generated) and the tweet display  cannot be moved.

Now although many experienced Twitter users may be interested in the threaded replies feature I suspect that a typical response is likely to be “So what? There are lots of good twitter clients available – why should I be interested in this one?“. This may be true, but will this approach be a useful way of introducing new Twitter users to the service, in a specific context of use.  At an amplified event, might an event page with this embedded interface prove useful, I wonder? And if the HTML <script> fragment can be embedded in more mainstream applications environments – such as a VLE, for example – might this be a way of embedding Twitter functionality in the context of existing widely used services? Hmm, might there be life in the VLE yet?

Reflections on Web Adaptability and Techshare 2009

Last week I gave a talk entitled “From Web Accessibility To Web Adaptability” at the RNIB’s Techshare 2009 conference. I have already posted about this talk and described how I had created a slidecast of a rehearsal of the talk (containing an audio track synched with the slides) in order to (a) check the timings for the talk and (b) allow the co-authors of the paper on which the talk is based to see how I intend to present our work. An additional benefit is that the talk is more accessible to people who attended one of the parallel sessions at the conference or who couldn’t attend the conference. In addition people who could attend the talk will be able to revisit the ideas and share them with colleagues.

In addition to the slidecast of the rehearsal I also brought a Flip video recorder with me, together with a tripod and recorded my live talk. This 30 minute talk is now available on Vimeo.com (and a master copy is also held on the UKOLN Web site).

It should be noted that there are some differences between the rehearsal and the live talk. In part this is due to the delayed start of the talk (due to technical difficulties) which meant I had to skip a couple of my slides. But in addition on the evening before the conference I met up with a number of conference participants, including Lisa Herrod (one of the co-authors of the paper) and Joshue O Connor, who is a member of the W3C WAI Protocol and Formats WCAG 2.0 and WAI-ARIA Working Group.

The chat I had with Joshue provided me with a fresh insight of my criticisms of the WAI model. I’ve argued previously (initially in a paper on “Forcing Standardization or Accommodating Diversity? A Framework for Applying the WCAG in the Real World” published in 2005) that expecting a combination of best practices for accessible Web content (WCAG), Web authoring tools (ATAG) and Web user agents (UAAG) to provide rich accessibility is naive. And, in addition, focussing on this model fails to provide any assistance on what content creators should be doing in a world of flawed browsers and a rich diversity of ways of creating Web content.

The valuable discussion I had made me realise that the flaws aren’t in the model itself. Rather it’s with the user community’s acceptance of the model as the approach which should be accepted in the real world. The WAI model is valuable in managing WAI’s development activities and clarifying different areas of responsibilities (how the content can be described; how tools can be used to create and manage that content and how user agents – browsers, automated agents; aggregators, etc. can then access and render such information). But this isn’t a model which we need to use ourselves when we are developing institutional policies for our approaches to enhancing the accessibility and usability of our services or when legislators are writing laws describing the legal responsibilities organisations have in providing accessible services.

Following my talk, Joshue and I had a brief chat. Despite the concerns I’d raised it seems that we had similar views. The difficulties, I feel, is in how the WAI approach is being adopted in the real world. So whilst I appreciate WAI’s advocacy in promoting take-up of their guidelines, I now have a better appreciation that their hands are tied when it comes to real world deployment challenges. WAI aren’t in a position to advise on how we should prioritise our (increasingly scarce) resources – such as the example I gave in my final slide on how higher educational institutions should go about enhancing the accessibility of PDFs in institutional repositories.

But perhaps WAI could help by openly stating that decisions on how WAI guidelines should be deployed is up to individual organisations to decide. We do need to remember that there are ‘accessibility fundamentalists’ who bought wholesale into the WCAG 1.0 vision and who may now be finding it difficult to come to terms with a more flexible approach. Let’s use the release of WCAG 2.0 to promote a more flexible approach to accessibility in the real world. And let’s also not forget that the UK Government’s blunt approach of “The minimum standard of accessibility for all public sector websites is Level Double-A … Websites owned by central government departments must be Double-A conformant by December 2009” . This policy fails to recognise the low penetration of UAAG-conformant browsers in the Government sector, the resources needed to implement this policy, the reduced level of funding which government departments will be faced with and the likelihood that risk-averse decisions-makers in government departments will use the policy as an excuse to deploy innovative Web-based services.

The slidecast and video of my talk at Techshare 2009 gives another illustration of how providing a diversity of resources might enhance the accessibility of a resource (my talk and the related ideas) which is, to my mind, preferable to not making these resources available as they aren’t universally accessible. And this view appeared to be shared by a number of people at the conference who couldn’t attend my talk but were interested in listening to what I had said.

A Lack of ‘Social’ and ‘Media’ at the Oxford Social Media Conference

The Oxford Social Media Conference

The Oxford Social Media Conference, held on Friday 18 September 2009 at Said Business Centre, University of Oxford, was one of the few events I’ve attended this year in which I haven’t spoken at. And it came at the end of a very busy two weeks, having facilitated workshops and given talks at the ALT-C, ALPSP and Techshare conferences and the Silos of the LAMs briefing event.

But despite not being on the programme, these days attendance at many conferences can provide opportunities for more active participation than was the case in the past, through use of Twitter and other ways in which Social Media can be used to engage with the audience (both local and remote) and facilitate informal discussions amongst the participants.

I have already described how the failure to announce a conference hashtag in advance led to participants being unable to meet up in advance (I’m sure I wasn’t the only participant to arrive the night before – and I was fortunate in spotting a colleague in my Twitter network who was also travelling to the conference). But what of use of Social Media at the conference itself?

Use of Social Media at the Event

The summary for the event began “With corporations, governments, newspapers and universities embracing blogs and Twitter feeds as key elements in their communication strategies, social media have finally come of age” and promised to “look back at the evolution of blogs and other social media to give a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which such tools have or have not made a difference at the social, political or economic level“.

Although the event did not have a technical focus, I expected it to embrace use of various aspects of Social Media as the opening statement suggested universities are doing. I was pleased, therefore, when it became clear that the panelists in the opening session were using Twitter to observe what the participants were discussing. And, following a Twitter response from Bill Thompson to a my tweet in which I linked to a screenshot of an Augmented Reality view of twitterers in the nearby locality, I took the opportunity ask (slightly tongue in cheek) whether such engagement by the panel with the audience’s ‘backchannel’ wasn’t a somewhat worrying appropriation by those in a position of power (the speakers) of what may be regarded as a democratising tool. I went on to ask whether the expected spamming of the event’s hashtag (which happened) provided an example of the inevitable commercialisation of the Social Web. We were naive in 1993 and 1994, I suggested to Bill (whom I first met at the first WWW conference in Geneva in 1994) when we described that conference as the “Woodstock of the 1990s” and predicted that what we might now refer to as ‘Web 1.0″ would bring about a radical democratisation of society. Aren’t we being equally naive to suggest that the Social Web will bring about this change?

The response was, not unexpectedly, uncertain, with the panelists pointing out that it is difficult to predict the future and that the Social Web is likely to develop in unexpected ways, and what may be regarded by some as spam (I gave an example of advertising from a taxi firm at the end of the Techshare conference) could equally be felt to be useful information by others.

For me this opening session established a lack of experts in Social Media and would be followed by more open discussions – and would avoid the lengthy responses to questions made by each member of the panel. But what happened throughout the rest of the day was a repetition of the opening panel session: talks from each of the panelists, with the occasional question or comment being made by the chairperson. I felt like I was a member of the audience at a Radio 4 programme.

So for a conference on Social Media the event was missing on the ‘social’ aspect, with little opportunity for participants to engage with the discussions. There was also little ‘media’ at the conference, with none of the speakers using any visual aids. For me meant the day was very repetitious, with little visual stimulation. It was also at odds with a comment made in the final session that “it’s all about video, video, video. There will be screens EVERYWHERE very soon“.

Now perhaps I’m being unfair. I have to admit my recent intensive spate of travelling meant that I was probably suffering from an overdose of conferences – and the enjoyable lunch provided did mean that I wasn’t paying full attention to the sessions after lunch. And an early departure meant that I missed the panel session on corporate blogging which was described as “by far the most entertaining and informative of the day, mostly dealing with the politics of setting corporate blog tone and complaint/query response rate“.

Final Thoughts

I’ve described how the description for the conference suggested that “With corporations, governments, newspapers and universities embracing blogs and Twitter feeds as key elements in their communication strategies, social media have finally come of age“.

For me many of the events I now attend make use of technologies such as Twitter, blogs and video streaming as a key part of the ‘amplification’ of the event – and this amplification takes place before, during and after the event. For an event about Social Media such expectations do not seem unreasonable. It is pleasing, therefore, to note that a number of blog posts about the conference have already been published including:

• What we learned at the Oxford Social Media Convention, Digital Content Blog, The Guardian
• How social networking is changing journalism, Digital Content Blog, The Guardian
• A social media proposal (you’re not going to like it) #oxsmc09, jennifr.net
• Kara Visits the Oxford Social Media Convention: I Say Twitt-er, You Say Twitt-ah, BoomTown
• Oxford Social Media Convention 2009, MarkAttwood.com

The first of these links, from The Guardian, concludes: “PS: To find more detailed bits about the conference, look up the hashtag #oxsmc09 on twitter“. However as I have described previously, content posted to twitter becomes unavailable via Twitter’s search interface after about 10 days. Since media organisations such as The Guardian are likely to ensure that such evidence does not disappear, I have created a copy of the #oxsmc09 tweets which should make subsequent analysis of the discussions easier to carry out. And looking at the HTML version of the archive there is a noticeable lack of tweets by the conference organisers – unlike, say, the recent ALT C and Techshare conferences, both of which used Twitter during and after the event.

What! No Event Hashtag?

Tim Berners-Lee at the Science Museum

Last Monday I attended a talk on “The Web Revealed” given by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the Science Museum as part of the centenary celebrations for 100 years of the Science Museum. This was a last minute decision – I was about to head off to London as I was taking part in a session at the CILIP Executive Briefing on “Beyond the Silos of the LAMS” the following day and spotted a tweet about a spare ticket for the event which was available.

When I joined the queue for the event I tweeted my location – to indicate to any Twitter followers where I was, with the possibility of meeting up and perhaps going for a drink afterwards. As I commented at the time it felt slightly strange to be at an event about the Web which did not have an event hashtag, thus making it difficult to make links with other Twitterers at the event and share thoughts on the content. However one of my Twitter followers, @brian@condon, who was following the event from a distance, spotted my tweet and suggested “How about #bernerslee?” as a tag for the event. A few minutes later he tweeted:

RT @martingoode: Am following the #Berners-Lee talk via twitter thanks to @joannabutler :) @briankelly- seems to be a hashtag!

So now it seems we have two people (@martinegoode and @brian_condon)  following the talk on Twitter, via tweets from myself and @joannabutler, with two hashtags (#Berners-Lee and #bernerslee) having being suggested. I also spotted some tweet from @filce who concluded:

Sir Tim Burners-lee was amazing. Very interesting and brilliant. It was recorded so hopefully it will be available the web!

And thanks to @filce I’ve spotted a recording of the opening of Sir Tim’s talk. as well as a link to his slides (the URL was displayed very quickly at the end of his talk, and I had no time to make a note of the URI). Without following up on @filce’s tweets, I would probably have missed out on this information.

But how could have it been made easier for the event Twitterers to be found and for them to be aware of each other’s presence? Perhaps the Science Museum should be suggesting hashtags for its anniversary talks (especially with another distinguished Web luminary – Dame Wendy Hall scheduled to talk in November). And what approach should be taken to coining the hashtag? Should it be related to the venue (“I’m at the @sciencemuseum to listen to Sir Tim Berners-Lee”), the anniversary series (“I’m at the @sciencemuseum-100 talk”) or, as mentioned above, should the tag be based on the individual speaker’s name?  If the latter, there will probably be a need to avoid possible organisers – @timberners-lee (note the hyphen can cause hyperlinking problems in some Twitter clients) or @timbl, for example. Or in the case of Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Dame Wendy Hall and other members of  The Knightage, will an updated version of Debretts guide to forms of address require the title to be included, so we’ll have to use #sirtim and #damewendy?

The Oxford Social Media Conference (#oxsmc09)

On Friday I attended the Oxford Social Media Convention 2009 held at Said Business School, University of Oxford. As might be expected for an event which promised to “look back at the evolution of blogs and other social media to give a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which such tools have or have not made a difference at the social, political or economic level” the event did have a hashtag (#oxsmc09) which was widely used by the Twitterers in the audience. Indeed, following a suggestion I made at the event a colleague set up a wthashtag page for the tag, so that we can see that there were almost 1,000 tweets during the day, from 200 contributors (note there would probably have been more, but the conference WiFi network went down during the conference).

But as can be seen from the histogram of the event tweets, nothing was said prior to the event. This was due to the hashtag only being announced in the conference pack when the delegates registered at the event.

This resulted in a missed opportunity for participants at this conference on Social Media to, for example, meet up prior to the event and, err, be social.  Indeed it was rather fortuitous that while travelling from London to Oxford I spotted a number of tweet from EDINA’s Nicola Osborne  who was travelling from Edinburgh to London Heathrow and then, I noticed, to Oxford. In response to my tweet:

@suchprettyeyesI’m on way to Oxford for Social Media conf. Fancy drink tonight? Am sure someone can suggest decent real ale pub.

I discovered that Nicola was going to the same event and we met up at the Eagle and Child (thanks to @sboneham for the suggestion). But despite asking:

Is there a tag for Social Media conf at Said College? Would be good to meet up with others.

it wasn’t until the next morning that we found out the event’s hashtag (with the first event tweet coming from Nicola ). A missed opportunity, I feel, which was echoed by Bill Thompson, one of the conference speakers:

@deejacksonI’m looking forward to Oxford Social Media Convention tomorrow – no idea of hashtag but will be tweeting…

The need to find the information containing the hashtag also caused confusion for people who had arrived and, in the absence of advance notification, had started to make us of their own hashtag. As rohanjay commented:

foxed by random hashtagging, calls for order at the Oxford social media bunfight -is it #oii or #oxsoc or #oxsmc09?

There are lessons which can be learnt from such confusions, especially for anyone organising events about Social Media.

Augmented Reality and Geo-Location

But need an event’s Twitter discussions necessarily require agreement on a hashtag? Following problem’s with the conference WiFi network I started to use my HTC Magic Android mobile phone to follow the conference tweets. Due to the phone’s poor user interface, I didn’t contribute significantly to the discussions. However it did occur to me that the event might provide an opportunity to make use of the LayarAugmented Reality application which I’d installed the previous week, after hearing about it from Joss Winn, a fan of the HTC Android phone (he has the newer model which has, I understand, an improved user interface).

I had first started to use the application the previous night in the pub, using it to find information on nearby pubs and historic building which could be viewed on a map and relevant Wikipedia pages or geo-located photos displayed.

The Layar environment also has two Twitter applications which enable me to view nearby Twitter users and Twitter posts. I used this at the conference and posted a link to a screenshot of my mobile phone display, which is illustrated. 

It would be nice if the display showed that a prolific Twitter user was located in from of my and slightly to the left, with another prolific user being near the front of the lecture theatre. However that wasn’t the case – the image shows tweets within about a mile of my location, some of which had been posted the previous day. So this isn’t a way of finding tweets from others at the same conference – yet!

Conclusions

To conclude, events such as Tim Berner’s Lee’s talk at the Science Museum and the Oxford Social Media Conference need an event hashtag. There’s also a need for the tag to be announced in a timely fashion and not just on the day itself. There’s also a need for process for selecting a tag (which I’ll discuss in more detail in a future post). But perhaps the importance of hashtagging at events may be complemented by developments such as geo-location application. But as we will still need to talk about the events we are planning to attend as well as the event we are at, we’ll still need the event hashtag,

Use of Twitter at the ALTC 2009 Conference

Back After A Week Away

Last week was unusual – not a single blog post published in the week. Although there were suggestions at last week’s ALT-C 2009 conference that blogging is in decline with established bloggers making greater use of Twitter, my failure to blog last week was due to being away all week at the ALT-C conference followed by the ALPSP 2009 conference.  And although I’d brought along my ASUS EEE PC, I couldn’t get it connected to the network in my bedroom at either of the conferences. So my connectivity was restricted to use of my iPod Touch and HTC Magic mobile phone – which I used for reading email messages, tweets and RSS feeds and writing the occasional Twitter post.

ALT-C 2009 Summaries

A number of valuable summaries of the conference have already been published. I don’t intend to repeat what has already been said, apart from mentioning that the two plenary talks I saw (from Michael Wesch and Martin Bean ) were both excellent (I had to leave on the final morning and so unfortunately missed Terry Anderson’s closing plenary talk); the VLE is Dead debate was entertaining, with witty contributions made from the four speakers and was useful in raising issues and providing insights which I hadn’t previously considered.

Twitter at ALT-C 2009

But what of the use of Twitter at ALT-C 2009? Philip Paasuke, an e-learning enthusiast based in Adelaide, Australia, has described how he followed the conference from home using a variety of technologies: watching the keynote plenary talks on Elluminate and using Tweetdeck to follow the back channel discussions. As Philip describes: “The Twitter postings gave me an interesting perspective on what participants at the conference and those observing it remotely were thinking about the various presentations“. Philip went on to add that “Following ALT-C 2009 on Twitter has also led me to increase the number of people that I am following using this service from what might loosely be called ’the elearning community’. The Twitter posts also included a lot of useful links to more detailed blog postings by some of the conference participants“.

But how extensively was Twitter used at the conference? And what was the profile of its usage?

I have previously described how I used a variety of Twitter analysis and management tools to analyse use of Twitter at UKOLN’s IWMW 2009 event. For that event, which had 200 participants, there were 1,530 tweets. For the ALTC 2009 conference, with had over 700 participants, there were over 4,300 tweets published in a week! This figure, which was obtained using the wthashtag service, provides a summary, illustrated above, based on tweets posted from Monday 6 to Sunday 13 September. We can expected further tweets this week, as other participants get round to writing their reports on the conference and continue the discussions. And I should add that Philip Paasuke’s blog post mistakenly gives #altc09 as the official Twitter hashtag –  there were a further 128 tweets using this tag from 51 contributors.

During my analysis of #iwmw2009 event Tweets, I discovered that tweets seem to disappear after a short period of time. I subsequently came across a TechCrunch post which reported that tweets currently become unavailable from the Twitter search API after about 10 days.

In order to carry pout more detailed analyses, it will be necessary to ensure that a copy of the relevant tweets is kept, ideally in a format suitable for data analysis. I have therefore once again used the wthashtag, Twapperkeeper and Tweetdoc services to keep a local copy of the conference tweets. Links to the data and to these servicesis available on the UKOLN Web site.

Why The Interest?

What is the point of the analysis of the Twitter posts made at the ALTC 2009 conference? Isn’t the point of Twitter it’s spontaneity and perhaps its subversive use?

Well although that may be one use case for Twitter, it’s not the only one. The interest in use of Twitter as an educational tool can be gauged from the popularity of the Teaching With Twitter workshop facilitated by Steve Wheeler and colleague. And mining the data might also provide interesting insights into the event, the community and the ideas discussed and shared. Looking at the summary of trending words provided by the Tweetdocs service, for example, might indicate an interest in Twitter (to be expected) but also in openness and people. And the two people who seem to have been most discussed (or, in the case of James Clay, contributed to the discussions) seem to be James Clay and Anderson (probably Terry Anderson, the final plenary speaker).

The conference organisers might be pleased to see the popularity of the words “good” and “great” – but what about the criticisms that were made of the queues for the food and coffee and the conference accommodation? Will analysis of the Twitter discussions start to form part of an organisation’s debriefing after an event –  and might not the venue itself have an interest in what was said about the facilities?  Well the data is now available for reuse.

“Realising Dreams, Avoiding Nightmares, Accepting Responsibilities”

Martin Weller and I will be facilitating a workshop session entitled “Realising Dreams, Avoiding Nightmares, Accepting Responsibilities” at the ALT-C 2009 conference. Martin and I met over blog comments and Twitter posts and discovered we had similar interests. In particular Martin and I bounced around some ideas on the theme of “Even if we’re wrong, were right”, which started with a blog post by Martin on “Web 2.0 – even if we’re wrong, we’re right“.

When a few months ago I saw a tweet from someone saying they were find it difficult to think of a proposal top submit which fitted in with this year’s ALT-C theme of “In dreams begins responsibility” I felt that this theme provided the ideal opportunity to write a joint proposal.

So on Wednesday 9 September, starting at 9 am, we’ll be facilitating a workshop session. In the 90 minute session the participants will explore the (probably) diverse visions (the dreams) they have for e-learning and the barriers (nightmares) which may be faced. We will then explore the approaches (the responsibilities) we may need to avoid the nightmares and bring about a realisation of the dream.

The workshop session itself has a dream in which interested participants, including those who may not be physically present at the session, will engage in the discussions and debates and contribute to examples or the dreams and nightmares and suggestions for the responsibilities.

In order to bring about this dream we hope to provide live streaming of the talks in the session using the Bambuser service on my HTC Magic Android mobile phone. Discussions will take place on Twitter and contributions to the session can be made by tagging tweets with the tags “#altc2009″ and “#s113″ (as described previously, the second hashtag will enable tweets to be differentiated from other Twitter posts at the conference).

My nightmare is that video streaming won’t work (will there be a mobile phone signal for the venue, I wonder) or will be of poor quality. My responsibility, however, will be to write a summary of the session so that if you tried to participate remotely but failed you will at least be able to read a summary of the discussions.

“From Web Accessibility To Web Adaptability” Talk at Techshare 2009

A proposal for a talk I submitted to the RNIB’s Techshare 2009 conference has been accepted. The talk on “From Web Accessibility to Web Adaptability” will be given on 17 September 2009.

The talk is based on the paper of the same name which was published recently in the Disability and Rehability: Assistive Technology journal. The talk at the Techshare conference will provide an opportunity for the ideas in the paper (which I have also outlined in a recent blog post and in an article published in the e-Access Bulletin) to be described to those in the disability community who may not read academic journals or blogs.

There is an expectation that presentations at the conference will be accessible to those with visual impairments. An approach I have taken to enhancing the accessibility of the slides (and the ideas which will be described in the talk)  has been to create a slidecast of the talk, by synching the audio of a rehearsal of the talk with the slides. This slidecast is available on Slideshare and is embedded below.

The rehearsal also provided an opportunity for me to time the talk – and I found that at 34 minutes it was slightly too long, so the version I will give at the conference will be slightly shorter.

As well as helping me with the timings and allowing me to spot where the material can be improved, creating the slidecast prior to the talk has some additional benefits:

• It provides a back-up in case I lose my voice or am ill at the conference or fail to arrive at the conference venue due to travel difficulties.
• Conference delegates can listen to the talk after the event.
• The talk can be shared with others.
• The slidecast is a richer resources than the slides on their own

In addition there are parallels with open source software development – this early release of a talk and exposing it to many eyes ears can potentially allow my peers, including co-authors of the original paper, to listen to what I intend to say and provide comments and suggestions as to how the talk can be improved. The talk isn’t trapped in my head until the live delivery!

If you have a particular interest in Web accessibility your comments and questions are welcomed.

Skype, Two Years After Its Nightmare Weekend

The headline in the Technology Guardian supplement read “Skype’s nightmare weekend highlights peer-to-peer fears” two year’s ago back on 23 August 2007. The article described how “Skype’s popular internet telephone service went down on August 16 and was unavailable for between two and three days“.

I remember this incident as, with people’s attention focussed on the loss of this service (fortunately at a non-critical time in the academic year) our University IT Service department took the opportunity to remind the Skype users on campus (which included me) that Skype was a proprietary application. The recommended VoIP application, which was about to be deployed for the start of the academic year, was the FreeWire phone service. This, I was told, was recommended as it was based on open standards. This sounded interesting, especially if it provided the application independence which Skype lacks. So I looked at the FreeWire Web site and found that “It’s only when you call non-Freewire phones that you have to pay“. So it’s based on open standards, but you have to pay if you try to call a user who isn’t running the same software as you.  It’s no different from Skype, it would seem – except, perhaps, that as I speak there are almost 17 million Skype users online. In comparison the standards-based FreeWire service services a niche market (and perhaps a satisfied niche market as, here at Bath University several student residences now have Voice-over-IP telephones in the bedrooms).

But the promise of VoIP telephony services seems further away than it did two years ago (and the access problems Skype suffered from were due to a bug triggered by large numbers of automated Microsoft Windows updates – a bug now fixed). I now have Skype clients on my office PC and my laptop (both running MS Windows), my Asus EEE netbook PC (running Linux), my iPod Touch and my HTC Magic Android.  A proprietary application running on four different platforms seems pretty good!

So what’s the future for VoIP telephony services?  Yesterday the BBC News announced “eBay reaches deal to sell Skype“.  The article states that “Online auction site eBay has agreed to sell the majority of internet phone company Skype for about $2bn (£1.2bn)” and goes on to explain that the deal values Skype at $2.75bn, a slight increase on the $2.6bn it paid for the company in 2005.

Attempts by JANET to deploy a standards-based VoIP service (called JANET Talk) for the UK’s higher/further education community were abandoned a few months ago because, as described in JANET News (PDF format): ” The results from both trial feedback and market research showed that the appetite for a service like JANET Talk had diminished. The reasons cited include a preference for alternative solutions that are now available from the commercial sector. These solutions were deemed easier to use, reliable and free.“

Sometimes standards-based solutions don’t take off, it would seem, even when there are JISC-funded initiatives encouraging the take-up of such solutions. And as Nick Skelton suggested in a post entitled “Why did JANET Talk fail?” perhaps this is due to a failure to appreciate the importance of the network effect. Nick concluded:

“When planning a new service, see if it has built-in positive network effects. It is doesn’t have these naturally, find a way to connect it to larger networks so it can benefit from theirs. If you can’t find a way to do this then you are dooming your project from the start. You’re better off doing nothing, unless you want to see your service become irrelevant, pushed to one side by a larger, more popular one.“

I agree.