Talk at Edspace Event, University of Southampton

I have been invited by the JISC-funded Edspace project, based at the University of Southampton to give a talk at an event on “Traditional educational repositories v. Web 2.0 resource sharing” to be held on Wednesday 4 November 2009. I have been asked speak on “the future for educational resources and services on the Web” – a rather grandiose topic, I think! I’ve entitled the talk “The Future for Educational Resource Repositories and Services in a Web 2.0 World” as its the Web 2.0 aspect I feel is important (and reflects my area of expertise – I don’t claim to have anything particularly significant to say on the repository side of things).

I’ll be saying that many of the technical aspects of Web 2.0 are now mainstream – and indeed the Edspace’s Edshare service provides RSS feeds, tag clouds, embed functionality and ‘cool URIs’.

But the term Web 2.0 also  covers the network as the platform and a culture of openness. The issue of openness of educational resources is being addressed in, for example, the JISC OER programme and although I personally seek to ensure that my content (such as blog posts, slides and papers) are available under a Creative Commons licence I know that there are added complexities in the area of educational resources – so I’ll not focus on the openness issue.

Instead I’ll raise the question of the network as the platform in the context of the futures for educational resource repositories.  I’ll suggest that as experts predict further cuts in the public sector, including higher education, wouldn’t it be appropriate for our repository services to be hosted in the cloud?  And the concerns which tend to be raised (sustainability, reliability, legal issues, etc.) are implementation details which do need to be addressed – but these aren’t the important policy issues.

The slides I’ll be using are available on Slideshare (in the Cloud(!) although a master copy is also held locally) and is embedded below.

Twitter Event Hashtagging Strategies

Background

In a recent post on the eFoundation’s blog Andy Powell wrote about “Flocking behaviour – why Twitter is for starlings, not buzzards“. Based on the statistics I had provided for use of  Twitter at the recent ALT C 2009 conference Andy picked up on the use of two tags (#altc2009 and #altc09) and pointed out that “if you don’t tweet using the generally agreed tag you are effectively invisible to much of the conference audience“.

I agree – so there’s probably a need to agree on  hashtagging strategies for events, which I’ll explore in this post. And I’ll use this as an opportunity to consider what hashtag UKOLN should be using for next year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2010).

Issues To Consider

What are the issues to consider when selecting a hashtag for use at an event?

Being brief

The initial requirement is that as tweets are limited to 140 characters,  hashtags should be brief in order to maximise the amount of content that can be containing in a tweet about an event.

Avoiding problems with non-alpha-numeric characters

It may be felt desirable to avoid use of certain non-alphanumeric characters which may cause problems in some Twitter clients.  For example, the hashtag #clip2.0 was initially suggested for an event on the relevance of Web 2.0 technologies for the CILIP organisation and CILIP members. However Twitter clients seem to truncate hashtags containing a full stop, so the hashtag #cilip2 was used. Similar problems have been observed with use of a dash (-) as illustrated in the display of a tweet in the TweetDeck client. In addition there was a complaint that use of an underscore (_) in the #cilip_lams event caused usability problems, especially on mobile devices. The advice would seem to be stick with alphanumeric characters in hashtags.

Avoid numbers at the start of hashtags

Hashtags which begin with a number (e.g. #2009foo ) are believed to cause hyperlinking problems in some clients.

Should you be consistent with other tagging services?

Although those who make intensive use of Twitter may feel that the first two points are all that need to be considered when formulating a hashtag for an event, there may be an argument for being consistent with recommendations for tags using in other environments such as other Flickr, YouTube, etc. These services do not suffer for the length constraints imposed by Twitter and so can provide more flexibility. There may be an argument for using a Twitter-safe hashtag in these other services, but what if these other services are the more widely-used services (e.g. events with an established use of Flickr)?

Should the year be included?

Many of the events I’ve attended or followed on Twitter have included the year in the hashtag (e.g. #iwmw2009, #altc2009 and #solo09) but some have not (#alpsp and #cilip_lams). Does the year have to be included, especially as the tweets will be readily accessible via the Twitter search APIs for only a short period?  But might a decision to save space by omitting the year cause problems if the Twitter API changes or other tools are used? And might this cause additional confusions with tags for which date encoding may be useful.

One hashtag or several?

If there are multiple events associated with a main event (e.g. pre-conference workshops or fringe events) you will need to consider whether to recommend use of the main event hashtag for these peripheral events or to suggest an alternative hashtag.

Branding issues

There may be pressure to ensure that an event hasthtag provides the correct branding for the organising bodies. The hashtag for the CILIP’s Umbrella 2009 conference, for example, was #cilipumbrella.

Multi-lingual issues

Welsh institutions  may need to consider use of bilingual tashtags. Note, for example, that for the CILIP Wales 2009 conference the conference hashtag was cilip-cymru09. I should add, however, that I haven’t any experience of the implications of use of non Latin characters (ironically, as Im (sic) typing this sentence on a Croatian keyboard and cant find the single quote character!)

Being memorable

Perhaps because I’m getting older I am finding it difficult to remember random strings of characters – so I wouldn’t appreciate a tag such as #xuj740n9 (having to re-authenticate a username and password with a similar pattern can also be irritating). I found the hashtags used for the recent Oxford Social Media Conference (#oxsmc09) and Science Online London (#solo09) events easy to remember  as the conference names themselves were memorable.

Being different

Having an event hashtag which could clashes with other hashtags is likely to lead to confusion.

Avoiding ambiguities in the characters

Many years ago I was an information officer and I was very aware of the need to avoid confusions between characters such as 1 and i and o and 0 (in some fonts these many be indistinguishable). Note that this may be very relevant for events held next year. The (fictitious) Input Output’s annual conference hashtag #io10 could be particularly confusing depending on the font used on your computer.

Being timely and promoting the hashtag effectively

As mentioned recently, it is important to finalise a hashtag in advance of the event and to ensure that participants and other interested parties are aware of the official hashtag for the event. In many cases participants are likely to tweet about an event prior to the event, perhaps when a call for paper has been published e.g. “Looking for partners to write a proposal for #altc2010 with“.

Obtaining buy-in from users of the tag

As it is not possible to mandate use of an official event hashtag you should seek to ensure that users of the tag will be inclined to use the hashtag. If the hashtag is too long the users may choose to use a shorter one.

Explaining the tag

As well as promoting the hashtag to the event participants you should also try to ensure that other interested parties, who perhaps might notice a stream of tweets with the tag, can easily discover more about the associated event.  One way of doing this might be to ensure that a Web page containing details of the hashtag and the event is published early so that it may be indexed by Google. In addition it may be useful to describe the event in Twitter aggregation services such as WThashtag (e.g. see the description for the IWMW 2009 event).

#iwmw2010, #iwmw10, #iwmw – or something else?

This post has described some of the issues which should be considered when choosing an event hashtag. But to put such discussions into context, I’d like to consider the hashtag UKOLN should be using for next year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2010) – the fourteenth in this series of annual events for members of institutional Web management teams.

I’ve recently attended four events which had a Twitter hashtag, each of which took a different approach: #altc2009, #techshare09, #alpsp and #cilip_lams.

As there aren’t pressures to brand our host institution, UKOLN, there’s no need for a ‘#ukoln_iwmw” style tag. The options, and arguments for and against, are therefore:

#iwmw2010
For:  Consistency with previous years and consistency with tags used in Flickr, YouTube, etc. Also consistency with URL used on UKOLN Web site.
Against: Uses 9 characters – this could be shorter.

#iwmw10
For: Saves two characters over #iwmw2010.
Against: Loses consistency with previous years and with other tag services. Possible confusion over the characters (could it be confused with #iwmwi0?)

#iwmw
For: Saves four characters over #iwmw2010. No confusion with the ‘10′ characters.
Against: Loses consistency with previous years and with other tag services. Loss of the date may cause problems if data is to be used in content of other years (but not necessarily so as the tweets do have a machine-readable date)

What do you think we should go for? And are there other issues one should consider when choosing a hashtag for an event which I haven’t mentioned?

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.

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.

Hashtags for the ALT-C 2009 Conference

This Year’s ALT-C Conference

I will be attending the ALT-C 2009 Conference at the University of Manchester in a couple of weeks time where I’ll be facilitating a session with Martin Weller on “Realising Dreams, Avoiding Nightmares, Accepting Responsibilities” – a title chosen to reflect the conference theme of “In dreams begins responsibility“.

Yesterday I was involved in discussions on Twitter regarding use of hashtags (hash tags?) for referring to specific sessions at the conference. The conference tag has already been agreed – it is altc2009 and this has been announced on the conference home page. Let’s hope that this high visibility avoids tag fragmentation.

But there are many sessions at ALT-C and many parallel sessions. So an active Twitter community – which we are likely to find at the conference – may well find itself talking at cross-purposes if nothing is done to differentiate between the sessions. It may also be useful to be able to be able to identify particular sessions using a short and unambiguous tag e.g. so people can say “Are you going to Brian’s session?” or “What did you think of Martin’s session?” without confusion and using fewer characters.

Experiences of Using Hashtags at UKOLN’s IWMW 2009 Event

At UKOLN’s recent IWMW 2009 event we allocated a two-digit code for the plenary talks (P1-P8) and the parallel sessions (A1-A9, B1-B4 and C1-C5) . This short code was used consistently on the Web site, initially for selection of the parallel sessions.

Shortly before the event we encouraged use of these codes, together with the codes we assigned for the plenary talks, in Twitter. And, as I’ve described previously, after the event we captured the tweets for the plenary talks and provided links to this record of discussions which used the Twitter hashtags in this fashion (see, for example, the tweets made during Paul Boag’s plenary talk P3 which is illustrated).

After the event we used the Archivist Twitter archiving tool in order to capture these tweets are store them locally. These local archives are available in CSV and XMLformats. As can be seen, for Paul Boag’s talk, 78 tweets containing the pair of hastags were found.

What To Do For ALT-C?

What approach should be taken to use of hashtags at this year’s ALT-C conference? A similar answer might be to do nothing other than use the event’s hashtag. After all, some may argue, Twitter’s strength is its simplicity and adding anything new is likely to undermine this simplicity. Whilst I’d agree with this sentiment I don’t feel that adding an additional optional tag is complex. And we know have some examples of the benefits of doing this, which I’ve described in a recent screencast published on this blog.

But how should we select the hashtags for the session? I recently discovered that the unique identifier for the workshop myself and Martin Weller are facilitating is 113. And looking at the conference introduction and abstracts which arrived in the post a few days ago it seems that the session ids range from 0012 to 0322. I’m assuming that the unique ids were assigned when the proposals were submitted as the numbers aren’t consecutive (hmm, were the first 11 proposals rejected, I wonder?). To avoid confusion and to save space I’d suggest that leading zeroes are ignored. So my proposal for a hashtag to identify the session would be #snnn – in my case this would be #altc321 and James Clay’s four sessions would have the identifiers #s208, #s221, #s286 and #s301.

These tags would be used in conjunction with the main conference tag. A Twitter search for “#altc2009 #s321″ should find tweets referring to my session. Simple? Indeed a simplification of my initial suggestion of #altcnnn as a session identifier.

But although this approach worked at IWMW 2009 and would work for my workshop session it has been pointed out to me that this approach won’t work for the sessions which have multiple papers being presented. Although the individual papers have a unique identifier, the sessions themselves do not. Owen Stephens suggested that the identifier used in the conference’s CrowdVine social networking environmentcould be used but this then causes potential confusion with the identifiers allocated by the conference and won’t easily be found by conference participants who aren’t using CrowdVine. And further discussions is only likely to lead to confusions and unnecessary complexity.

So my proposal is this:

• The conference hashtag is #altc2009.
• If Twitter users wish to identify a specific session they should use the #altc2009 hashtag in conjunction with a session tag which has the format #snnn when nnn is a the session identifier given in the conference programme, with leading zeroes omitted (the prefix s standards for the session identifier).

Is this approach worth trying?

In light of the workshop session on Teaching With Twitter which Steve Wheeler will be giving at the ALT-C Conference, I can’t help but think we do need to be experimenting with ways in which Twitter can be used in a learning context and in enriching its use in community building.

Reflecting on Tony Hirst’s recent post on “A Quick Peek at the IWMW2009 Twitter Network“ which analysed and visualised tweets at the IWMW 20009 event in order to “help to identify amplification networks” it occurs to me that something similar might be useful at a larger event such as ALT-C. Do, for example, the Twitterers who @ each other and RT tweets tend to go to the same sessions, I wonder?

And if you still think this may be too complicated I intend to include details of the session hashtag on the opening slide for the session Martin Weller and I will be facilitating, as illustrated.

The Use of Blogs and Wikis in Scholarly Communication

I have been invited to give a talk on “The Use of Blogs and Wikis in Scholarly Communication” ALPSP 2009 conference to be held at the at  The Oxford Belfry, Milton Common, Thame on 9-11^th September. The talk will will take place on the final day in the closing session on “The Transformation of Scholarly Practice”. The abstract for this session is given below:

The way that researchers work is changing and so is the way they interact with the scholarly literature. Publishers and academics are experimenting with different types of scholarly content ranging from ‘informal’ scholarly communication on wikis and blogs through different ways of writing books and journal articles, linking data to the primary literature and on to new technologies that render information in ways that transform online content beyond a mere digital facsimile of print. This session will provide food for thought for publishers by exploring this transformation and examining the new ways in which scholars and practitioners are generating and interacting with the literature.

But what should my take be, I wonder? I suspect that a simple promotion of the potential benefits of blogs and wikis in the research community could easily be too bland for a final session at the conference. Some ideas which reflect my areas of interest which I could cover in the 25 minute talk include how micro-blogging fits in; the risks of reliance on services in the cloud and using the Social Web to help to maximise the impact of research activities.

I’d welcome comments on ideas which I could explore in this session? And if any readers are using blogs and wikis in innovative ways to support the “Transformation of Scholarly Practice” I’d love to hear about such approaches.

The Live Video Streaming Of IWMW 2009

This year, once again, we provided a live video stream of the plenary talks at IWMW 2009, something we have been doing since IWMW 2006.

But how many people watched the live stream? Last year 160 remote viewers watched the final plenary talk given by Ewan McIntosh. The statistics provided by the University of Essex are not directly comparable, but indicate that there were about 50 viewers for Derek Law’s opening plenary talk with slightly larger numbers for the opening plenary talks on the second day of the event.

As can be seen, a location map of the viewers has also been provided by the University of Essex. And clicking on the icons will provide further details on the numbers of viewers at the IP address together with the total time spent viewing the streaming video.

A good example of the global impact of the event? On an initial view of the map this would seem to be the case. But on further examination we can see that some of the views were only for a few seconds. For example the information for the viewer in Africa tells us that:

Kinshasa, Kinshasa, Congo, The Democratic Republic of the
1 hits (1 unique IPs), 0d0h0m12s total.

The 8 hits from Finland, which lasted for over 4 hours, appear to indicate a commitment to watching several of the talks (assuming the video wasn’t simply left on over lunch). But is there a viable business model for providing live video-streaming for such events? As the event was fully subscribed (as it has been for a number of years) we can argue that the live stream helps to maximise access and the impact of the talks, especially to the core target audience in the UK.  And the (apparent) popularity of the video stream in North America help to enhance the UK’s activities to a wider audience.

But perhaps the most important aspect of the video streaming have been the experiences we have gained in the delivery of ‘amplified events’.  The four years’ of video streaming of IWMW events have helped us to gain a better understanding of the best practices. And we have tried to summarise our experiences in a briefing paper on “Using Video at Events“.

Event Amplification at IWMW 2009

IWMW 2009

This year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop, IWMW 2009, is now over. Despite being the 13^th in the series on annual events aimed at members of institutional Web management teams, the event was not unlucky! The largest event audience for an IWMW event (200 registered delegates) arrived at the University of Essex campus which began on Tuesday 28 July with the opening plenary talk on “Headlights on Dark Roads” given by Professor Derek Law. And despite a rail dispute on Thursday (the final day of the event) there was still a large audience for the final talk on “How the BBC make Web sites“, an entertaining session on the importance of developers by the two Mikes (Ellis and Nolan) and my closing summary.

Amplification of the IWMW 2009 Event

I’ll not attempt to summarise everything that took place at IWMW 2009 in this blog. However there were a number of issues which were raised during the event which will be worth exploring in future posts. But for now I thought I’d summarise three aspects of the event organisation (rather than the content) which I feel are particularly noteworthy.

The IWMW 2009 Blog

Last year we provided a Ning social network for use by the workshop participants. This year. inspired by the approaches taken at the Dev8D and Mashed Library Oop North events, we decided to set up a IWMW 2009 blog. The aim was to provide a less formal environment than the main event Web site, for  both published information about the event and about the workshop participants, including their interests, recollections of previous IWMW events from those who have attended previous event and reasons why newcomers at the event have decided to travel to Essex in the last week of July.  The blog proved very successful. We will be continuing to encourage some further posts to the blog before the participants disappear off for their summer holiday.

Video Streaming

For the third year running we provided a live video stream of the plenary talks. I understand that there were about 50 people viewing the opening plenary talk. It will be interesting to see the viewing statistics for the second and third days.

In order to provide a richer experience for the remote audience we ensured that the slides for the plenary speakers who used PowerPoint were available on Slideshare (and note that many of the slideshows used in the parallel sessions are also available) .

Live Blogging

In addition an official live blogger used the iwmwlive Twitter account to provide a running commentary of the plenary talks. Kirsty McGill, who provided the live blogging service, also used these notes as the basis of a summary of the talks which was posted to the blog shortly afterwards.

We made a conscious effort to treat the remote audience as ‘first class citizens’. As well as the technologies listed above, we also tried to ensure that everyone used a microphone so that the remote audience could hear not only the speakers, but also the session chair and any questions posed by the live audience.

Twitter Channel

As well as the official use of Twitter for recording plenary talks and an IWMW Twitter account for administrative use (I’m pleased the missing phone reported on Twitter was found) we also encouraged participants to use the #iwmw2009 tag when tweeting about the event.

Links with the US

Thus year, for the first time, we worked with Higher Ed Experts who provide professional development and social networking online opportunities to higher education professionals working in Web, marketing, PR and admissions offices in the USA. Two of the parallel sessions,  Where’s the University? Building an institutional geolocation service by Janet McKnight and Sebastian Rahtz (Oxford University Computing Services) and Using Amazon Web Services by Mike Richwalsky (Allegheny College) had been pre-recorded in advance of IWMW 2009 and were provided as free Webinars on the Higher Ed Experts Web site.

Reflections on the Event Amplification

None of the aspects of IWMW 2009  I have described is significantly new. We have made use of wikis (at IWMW 2007) and social networks at previous events; the use of communication technologies to facilitate discussions during plenary talks dates back to IWMW 2005 when we made use of IRC (as you can see from the archive of the IRC discussions)  and we have been video streaming the plenary talks since 2007.

In previous years use of these technologies to ‘amplify’ the ideas and thinking beyond the physical event and enhance the discussions and debate at the event has been experimental. This year we have attempted to provide this as a service. The local participants have expectations of reasonable levels of service for the food and accommodation at the event. But now we can expect remote participants to have similar expectations regarding access to the content and the discussions and debate.

Did we provide a satisfactory level of service? Please let us know.

Enthusiastic Amateurs and Overcoming Institutional Inertia

I was very pleased but also slightly embarrassed when Dave Pattern invited me to speak at the Mashed Library UK 2009 event (also known as ‘Mash Oop North‘). Pleased because this event, which is building on the success of the  first event which took place at Birkbeck College in November 2008, reflects the interests I have in this area and will provide an opportunity to learn from some of the people (such as Tony Hirst, Mike Ellis and Dave Pattern) who are actively engaged in significant development activities. But embarrassed because I’ve been asked to speak to an audience who would, I suspect, prefer to listen to and talk to the gurus of mashup developments!

Dave convinced me, however, that as there appear to be a significant number of participants at the event who don’t regard themselves as mainstream developers, but rather as ‘enthusiastic amateurs’ that there is a role to play in exploring how the learning which will take place at the event can be exploted.

So I will be giving a talk and inviting discussion on the topic of “Enthusiastic Amateurs and Overcoming Institutional Inertia“.  This session will take place on Tuesday 7 July 2009. My slides are embedded below (and are also available on Slideshare). If you have any thoughts on this subject, especially if you regard yourself as an ‘enthusiastic amateur’ yourself I’d welcome your comments. Of you may wish to particuipate in the Twitter back channel, using the hastag “#mashlib09″.

Openness and IWMW 2009

IWMW 2009 Fully Subscribed

Bookings are now closed for this year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2009), with the event again fully subscribed with 190 participants (the limit imposed by the numbers of bedrooms available and the size of the venue for the reception).

Amplification of IWMW 2009

If you haven’t booked a place but do have an interest in the range of plenary talks which will be given, don’t worry – the event will be ‘amplified’.

This reflects our commitment to openness which I argued the higher educational community should embrace more fully in a recent post on Respect Copyright (and Subvert It!).  In that post I also suggested that we need to be more open about the risks and the approaches taken to managing the risks. So here is a summary of the various approaches we are taken to encouraging openness for the event.

Maximising the Impact of the Plenary Talks

The plenary talks at IWMW 2007 and IWMW 2008 were streamed live and we will be doing the same again this year.

We hope to have an official ‘live-blogger’ who will take responsibility for providing a live summary of the plenary talks. This will be available using the event hashtag #iwmw2009 and may also be aggregated in another environment (such as Coveritlive, use of which has described in a Review of Web2.0 amplification at CILIPS Conference) to allow people to contribute to the discussions if they don’t have a Twitter account.

Due to logistical reasons (only one screen display in the lecture theatre)  we will not be providing a live display of tweets during the talks (which means we aren’t addressing the issue of whether a live display would be valuable or distracting). However we intend to make use of a live Twitter display (a ‘Twitterwall’) during the opening of the event and at other times in order to allow participants to say hello to each other if they are not sat in adjacent seats, an approach I felt worked well at the Museums and the Web 2009 conference.

We will also try to ensure that the speaker’s slides are available on Slideshare so that the remote audience is able to view the slides and the talk simultaneously. We know that speakers sometimes change the slides at the last moment – we’ll try and keep the versions in synch, but can’t guarantee this.

Note we’ll need speaker’s permissions for this – and will respect their (e.g. if their organisation doesn’t allow this; they want the freedom to be more open; etc.).

The Risks

I’ve described what we are planning on doing. But what about the risks of embracing openness more fully at an event?

We will be seeking permission from the speakers for the live streaming of their talks. And we do appreciate that there may be reasons why such permission may not be given (the speaker wishes to be able to speak freely or the speaker’s organisation may not allow this). We also intend to have a Creative Commons notice on the lectern (as we did last year) so that a rights  statement will be embedded in the video. We will allow the speaker to change their mind about making a recording of the talk available after the event (we will clarify this immediately after the talk, so that we do not have to write off time which may be spend on post-processing the video).

We will be providing a ‘quiet zone’ in the lecture theatre for participants who wish to avoid possible distractions caused by live-blogging and who do not wish to be photographed or videoed.  We will also ask other participants to respect the guidelines for this area.

We will, of course, be evaluating the event, including the innovative aspects as well as the mainstream aspects.  As we would like to share the user feedback more widely the evaluation form will state that anonymised comments may be published openly.

We appreciate that amplified conferences are still in their infancy, and there may be a diverse range of expectations from the audience, both local and remote. We are interested in learning from related events, such as Dev8D,  Mashed Library UK 2009 ‘Mash Oop North’, Amplifiedat Nlab 09 day and the Eduserv Symposium.

We’d welcome feedback and suggestions. But, please no suggestions that will take too much time and effort – there’s not much time left!

There Is No Institutional Blueprint for Web 2.0 – So Let’s Develop One

Last week I gave a talk on “The ‘Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World’ Report: Implications For IT Service Departments” to staff in BUCS (the Bath University Computer Services Department.

The following day, as she described in a blog post, Chris Sexton, IT Services Director at the University of Sheffield and UCISA chair, facilitated a similar session on “IT Service 2.0“.

Chris concluded that “There was a general acceptance of the conclusions of the report which was that Universities need to change, and that change will be driven by students and what they will demand“. Such comments could also apply to the discussions at the BUCS seminar. And the reservations which Chris described:

“However, there was some opinion expressed that the report was an exaggeration of the change that web 2.0/social web will make in students. There was also a concern that we could be in the situation of using technology to cut costs – to deliver more with less – to the detriment of what a University education means“.

also reflected some concerns which were aired here at Bath.

Both of these events were  based on the recent report on the recent “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” CLEX report.

One of the points made in the report was the lack of a clear institutional blueprint for action:

Decisions on whether or not to implement Web 2.0 technologies are, however, the responsibility of each institution individually having regard to its particular ethos and circumstances. Here, experience can be shared, but there is no blueprint for action and, indeed, it may not be possible to develop a blueprint in an area that is so highly context specific.

Senior managers in IT Services at the Universities of Bath and Sheffield have started the discussions regarding such an institutional blueprint. I’m also aware of a forthcoming Web Community event at the University of Bradford which will address how the Web can be used to support the University’s mission and objectives.

Is there scope, I wonder, for an event for the community on exploiting the potential of Web 2.0 which could help in the process of developing an institutional blueprint? In November 2006 UKOLN organised an event on “Exploiting the Potential of Wikis” followed a year later by a similar one-day event on “Exploiting the Potential of Blogs and Social Networks“.

Both of these events, which were fully subscribed, provided an opportunity to explore some of the policy issues associated with provision of or access to wikis, blogs and social networks.

I think we are now in a situation in which we need to address the institutional issues associated with use of services in ‘The Cloud’ (e.g. sustainability, reliability, and legal issues) , the relationships between the bottom-up and personal use of networked services and the institutional provision of such services and the relevance of ‘Social Web’ technologies to support teaching and leaning and research activities within our institutions.

I’ll start exploring the possibilities of organising such an event. I’d welcome suggestions on the topics which should be addressed at such an event and possible speakers.

I’ll conclude by sharing the resources for the talk I gave at Bath. The slides are available on Slideshare (and embedded below) and a video of my talk is available on Vimeo.  In addition local-hosted copies of the resources are also available on the UKOLN Web site.

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Please note that this post originally had a link to an incorrect version of the slides (a version which had been uploaded to a guest account). The post has been updated with a link to and an embedded versionof the managed resource. However the original version of the slides has not been deleted.

IWMW 2009 Event Open For Bookings

This year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2009) is now open for bookings. This year the 3-day event, which is aimed at members of institutional Web management teams and  others with interests in institutional  use of Web services, will be held at the University of Essex, Colchester on 28-30^th July 2009.

Although the event is well-established, having been launched in 1997, the event continues to develop in response to the ever-changing Web environment and the needs and expectations of the Web management community. We will continue to have a number of plenary talks which will provide a shared context for all workshop participants. However this year, in response to feedback we’ve received from previous events, we are splitting the talks (and related workshop sessions) on the second afternoon into two strands: a ‘front-end’ strand which focusses on the services as perceived by the end user and a ‘back-end’ strand which addresses the ‘behind-the-scenes’ activities which are needed in order to deliver the user services.

We will also continue to provide the parallel workshop sessions. These sessions aim to provide all participants with the opportunity to contribute actively to the sessions, rather than simply sit back and listen to talks!

A significant development to the event, which was trialled for the first time last year, are the bar camp sessions. These sessions will be more informal than the workshops, and ideas can be submitted during the event itself. 

Another new development is the developer’s lounge. We will be encouraging active participation from the development community but will let developers provide a structure to how this will develop.

The cost is £350 per person which includes two nights ensuite accommodation (or £300 with no accommodation). The delegate fee includes attendance at the workshop, conference materials, refreshments and lunch, workshop dinner and social events.

We hope to see you in July!

Lessons Learnt from the Amplification of the CILIP2 Event

Reasons for This Post

At last week’s CILIP2 Open Session both Phil Bradley and myself argued that there was a need for the Library community to actively engage with Web 2.0 tools and even be prepared to make mistakes. Without making mistakes, it will not be possible to innovate, we argued. We also felt that we should be open about our mistakes, in order to learn from them and to help others in the sector from repeating such mistakes.

Such views echo the sentiment expressed by Mia Ridge who, in a blog post about the recent Museums and the Web 2009 conference entitled  “Oh noes, a FAIL! Notes from the unconference session on ‘failure’ at MW2009 ” explained her “motivation in suggesting the ['Failure' unconference] session – intelligent, constructive failure is important. Finding ways to create a space for that conversation isn’t something we do well at the moment“.

This post is my attempt at explaining aspects of the ‘amplification’ of the CILIP2 open session which failed or could have been improved, and to identify ways in which the next attempt at amplifying a physical event to a wider remote audience can be improved. (Note the term amplified conference was coined by Lorcan Demsey Dempsey and a summary is provided on Wikipedia).

Things Which Worked

Before describing areas for improvement it is worth summarising the things that worked!

I was pleased that the pre-event publicity of use of Twitter at the event succeeded in attracting large numbers of participants, with some, I think, being willing to subscribe to Twitter and possibly even install a Twitter client in order to participate on the day itself.

The event organisers played their in supporting the amplification of the event. Caroline Moss-Gibbon, who chaired the event, described the live-blogging at the event and asked the participants physically present at the meeting at CILIP Headquarters to regard any comments they made or questions they asked as being in the public domain. The evnt organisers had also arranged for two official bloggers, who would act as public note-keepers at the event, using both a Twitter channel and a CILIP blog post as a means of keeping the remote audience up-to-date with the talks and discussions.

The Twitterfall client which was suggested as a way in which remote participant could keep up-to-date with Twitter posts containing the ‘cilip2′ tag also seemed to prove popular judging from subsequent comments I read of various blog posts. And the goodwill of software developers – in particular Dave Patten – was appreciated by the CILIP community for his transcript of the tweets and his Wordle visualisation of the content of the tweets.

I was also pleased to have recorded a slidecast of a rehearsal of my talk prior to the event. A couple of people commented that they had listened to my talk prior to the event which enabled them to have a feel for the issues I would be raising in my talk.

Areas For Improvement

There are a number of areas in which I felt improvements could have been made. Most of these will not have been apparent to others and so I could feel safe in keeping them to myself. However sharing the experiences with others will remind me to do better next time and will allow others to make additional suggestions.

Reporting:
After the event it was pointed out to me that the description of ‘official’ Twitterers and bloggers at the event could have been interpretted as a way of ensuring that an official party line was documented which censored any criticisms of CILIP.  As Caroline Moss-Gibbons, chair of the CILIP Council, described in her brief report on the session the reporters ”had full editorial freedom of course, no ‘party line’ to follow“. Although Caroline made this point in her introduction to the session, the remote audience would not necessarily have picked up on this.
Lesson: next time I feel it would be helpful to provide a Web page about the amplification of the event which explictly clarifies the autonomy of the reporters.

Lack of audio/video recordings:
I recorded a video of Phil Bradley’s talk at the event using my Nokia N95 mobile phone – but despite having deleted old videos from the memory card the previous day, the phone ran out of memory after only two minutes.  I subsequently discovered that the phone was storing the video on its built-in memory rather than using the 2 Gb memory card.
Lesson: check configuration options on mobile phone to ensure recordings are being made to correct storage device.

I also brought along a digital camera which could take video recordings (and isn’t limited to the 10 minutes of video footage which my personal camera has). I also brought along a tripod to avoid camera shakes. As my intention was to record my own talk I needed a helper to start the recording. Unfortunately no recording was made, possibly because the camera had switched itself off.
Lesson: I need to remember that people who I ask to use my digital devices are unlikely to be familiar with them and there will be a need to provide some training.

Lack of streaming audio/video:
I brought along my Asus EE PC and intended to try out Skype in order to its potential for allowing a remote user to listen in to the two opening talks (and also possibly record the talks). I also brought along a Polycom Communciator device and tested that it worked correctly as a microphone and speaker. Unfortunately although the devices worked correctly I couldn’t connect to the two new Skype contacts who had expressed interest in listening to the talks.  This may have been due to user interface problems on my Linux-based Asus EEE.
Lesson: I need to authenticate remote users in advance, on user interfaces which I am more familiar with.

How Else Could the Event Amplification Have Been Improved?

What else could have been done to enhance the amplification of the event to the remote audience and to people who may have wished to hear the talks and discussions but did not have networked access at the time of the event?

I am aware that James Clay, e-learning resource manager at Gloucestershire College, has been using Qik at various conferences for some time. I did wonder whether a streaming video service such as Qik might have been used by members of the CILIP2 audience with a suitable mobile phoneand a contract which allowed for data to be transmitted within incurring significant charges.  However I suspect that this service is still being used by the early adopters, such as James, and hasn’t yet caught the attention of the early mainstream user community. Perhaps there’s an opportunity for its use at a forthcoming CILIP event?

But if members of the audience did not have a device and contarct which could be use for video streaming, I suspect many of them did have mobile phones which culd be used for sound recordings. SHould we have encouraged the audience to record the talks, I wonder?  Rather than a single centralised approach, which has a single point of failure (as I’ve described above!) possibly we should be adopting a LORKSS approach (Lots of Recording Keep Safe and Secure). Should we be encouraging others to take recording in order to minimise the risks of failures?

Sharing the Rehearsal of my Talk at the CILIP 2 Council Meeting

As I described a couple of day’s ago in a blog post on CILIP2.0 – Open Session on CILIP’s use of Web 2.0 myself and Phil Bradley will be giving brief talks about how we feel CILIP should respond to the opportunities and challenges of Web 2.0 at a CILIP Council meeting next Wednesday (29^th April 2009).

I have produced the first draft of my slides and I’ll be chatting to Phil how this may fit in with the approach he will be taking. I have also created a ’slidecast’ of the talk, by recording a rehearsal of the talk and synching the audio with a copy of the slide on Slideshare. This will help Phil to gain a better understanding of what I’ll be saying. But I also feel that their can be benefits to be gained by sharing this pre-release verion with a wider audience.  In suitably-configured browsers the slidecast will be embedded below:

I’m well of of some risks in doing this: I feel slightly self-conscious about listening to the sound of my own voice and towards the end of the talk I found myself forgetting what I was intending to say and start stuttering and repeating myself.  If I felt that as a professional all of my outputs mist be of high quality although I might write a script I would leave the reading of it to a trained actor. But this would undermine the key point in my presentation that information professionals (in particular) should be willing to make use of innovative approaches to one’s work, be prepared to make mistakes and learn from them and be prepared to be open with one’s user community in the early stages of development and not just when a service has been finalised.

Making this particular slidecast available can also provide some specific benefits:

• Users can comment on my talk.
• Users can suggest other relevant resources, either by commenting on this blog post on or Slideshare page or by bookmarking resources on del.icio.us using the same tag.
• Anyone who would like to attend the meeting but can’t make it will get a feel for my contribution.
• If I fail to attend the meeting (I’m ill or First Great Western fails to get my to London on time, for example) my slidecast can be used as a replacement.

But before you start listening to the slidecast (which lasts for about 20 minutes) I should say that the talk contains nothing that I haven’t written about in my blog previously. Indeed the talk is very similar to a talks on Time To Stop Doing and Start Thinking: A Framework For Exploiting Web 2.0 Services and A Risks and Opportunities Framework For Library 2.0 which I gave in the Indianapolis last week.

To summarise the key points.

The talk begins by reviewing examples of Library 2.0 approaches, add the University of Wolverhampton and the National Library of Wales.  A description of various barriers which have been identified at various UKOLN workshop for the cultural heritage sector is given. It is acknowledged that there are  legitimate concerns which need to be addressed such as sustainability, interoperability, staff development, cultural barriers, etc. The talk describes a variety of deployment strategies and outlines a risks and opportunities framework for the deployment of Library 2.0 services. The talk suggests how a ‘Critical Friends’ approach (which I will expand on next week) can be used in conjunction with this framework and help to identify possible problem areas. The need to balances such risks with the possible benefits to be gained and the risks of doing nothing – as well as the risks of doing something similar in-house which fails to meet user’s expectations.

The talk concludes by looking at what a professional organisation such as CILIP should be doing for a young librarian (using Jo Alcock as an example) and suggests that thinking about what might be provided in a ‘CILIP 2.0 Manifesto’ could be helpful in furthering the debate.

Your comments are welcomed!

CILIP2.0 – Open Session on CILIP’s use of Web 2.0

Phil Bradley and myself have been invited to take part in an open session on CILIP’s use of Web 2.0 (CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals is “the leading professional body for librarians, information specialists and knowledge managers“). This event, which is being referred to as CILIP2.0, will take place at CILIP offices, Ridgmount Street, London from 14.30-16.30 on 29^th April 2009.

The information about the event describes how Phil and myself (well-known ‘gurus’) will be “kicking off the Open Session with presentations about what has worked elsewhere, and the types of things CILIP could try out“. The aim of the session is to generate ideas about how the CILIP Council could be using Web 2.0 to engage better with the library and information community.  These ideas will be fed into CILIP’s Communications Framework which is due to be published in the summer.

The Open Forum was set up following a blog post entitled CILIP – Epic FAIL made by Phil Bradley in response to a post entitled All of a Twitter by Bob McKee, CILIP CEO. I’ll not revisit the different visions of the role of a professional organisation such as CILIP in today’s Web 2.0 environment, but will simply say how pleased I am that CILIP have invited Phil and myself to facilitate a discussion for an audience who will be physically present on the day and a remote audience who may follow the tweets and live blog.

Phil Bradley will probably provide his vision in which information professionals are comfortable in making use of a variety of networked tools and services which are available ‘out there’, and don’t restrict themselves to applications which may be managed in-house. And I intend to explore the risks of this way of working and suggest that, rather than seeking to develop a safe, risk-free environment, information professionals do need to engage with the networked environment that exists today and need to recognise that a failure to take risks can result in a failure to innovate.

I’d be interested in the views of reaers of this blog.  What are your views on how information professionals should engage with a Web 2.0 world and how CILIP should respond?

(TwitterFall) You’re My Wonder Wall

This year’s Museums and the Web conference (MW2009) marked the first occasion I have attended an event during which the Twitter back channel has been embraced by the conference organisers and by many conference participants and not just the usual early adopters.

At last year’s event (MW2008) we saw many developers making use of Twitter, with a display of the tweets about the conference (i.e. tagged with #mw2008) being shown near the registration area. And as a demonstration of the willingness of the conference organisers (David Bearman and Jennifer Trant) to embrace innovation at the conference a live display of the tweets, which were being aggregated by Mike Ellis’s Onetag software, were shown during Clifford Lynch’s closing talk at the conference. I have to admit, though, that there were concerns about this live, unmoderated display of Twitter posts during a talk: what if personal banter were displayed (“anyone fancy going for a drink later?”);  critical comments about the speakers (“this is a boring talk”) or bad language  or even spam from people who weren’t at the conference.

But whilst such concerns may be legitimate, David and Jennifer showed that they were willing to tak and risk and “just do it”. So when the conference delegates arrived at the auditorium for the conference welcome and opening talk we found two computer displays: one of the speaker’s slides and the other a display of Twitter posts tagged with the #mw2009 tag, using the Twitterfall software, 

And judging by comments made on the conference blog, many people found that this live display of tweets in the opening session provided a valuable way of developing a shared sense of community and active participation which continued throughout the conference, with many newcomers subscribing to Twitter, following the more well-established Twitter users and engaging with the discussions themselves.    In fact use of Twitter at the conference was so popular that, during the opening talk, there was a message displayed showing the the #mw2009 tag was ‘trending’ – and was one of the top ten tags used during the day.

Which is not to say that everyone found the Twitterfall display useful: some participants, for example, did find the display distracting. And once the tag was included in the top tags of the day it, perhaps inevitably, attracted the attention of Twitter spammers, with a tweet from ‘PantyGirl’ - and an associated image being included in the live Twitterfall display.

But despite such concerns, others identified some perhaps unexpected benefits of such displays of live tweets. After I published a tweet one person in the audience, with whom I had worked with a few years ago but hadn’t spoke to since, spotted my image in the display and sent me a direct message suggesting that we should meet up. The ability for participants at a large conference to make their prescence known in this way is a benefit which I hadn’t prevviously considered.

Someone else, who hadn’t used Twitter prior to the conference, reflected that in plenary talks people often lose concentration, even if the talks are interesteding (as the opening plenary talk at MW 2009 was). Having additional channels, in which other participants can share their thoughts and provide perhaps different views can help to provide richer insights into the talks.

But what of the dangers that people might make inappropriate comments. Well at MW2009, apart from the PantyGirl spam (which I suspect most people found inoffensive) I feel that the Twittering participants were aware of the issues and avoided tweets which others might have felt inoffensive or inappropriate.

The benefits of the conference Twitter back channel were also officially recognised in the firanl session at the conference when Jon Pratty provided prizes for the MW2009 Backchannel Stars for Saturday. And I was pleased to be the first in the list of prize-winners for my two tweets:

briankelly Due to lack of unions in museums sector @jtrant& David Bearman have got us working at #mw2009 on a Saturday. Capitalist oppressors.

briankelly: @bsletten is right – photo at http://tinyurl.com/3aessg (expand) could be me. Waiting for groupies to arrive at #mw2009

But what of next year? Clearly many particioants found the Twitter wall display useful, with one participant commenting that  ”based on how well tweets were working @ mw2009 I set up a twitter account for our staff intranet. Public site next? #mw2009“. But this wasn’t true for everyone.  Should this be managed by better use of the physical space, I wonder – perhaps suggesting that those who don’t wish to be distributed by the visual intrusion should sit on one side of the lecture theatre?  Or perhaps, with the growing popularity of iPhones and iPod Touches participants should  simply view the communal wall on their own mobile device?

Contrasting Visions of the Library of the Future

My Views From 2001

I was invited to take part in a panel session at the Internet Librarian International (ILI) conference way back in 2001. Myself and my fellow panellists (Greg Notess and Mary Peterson) had encountered a number of bland panel sessions at previous conferences in which panelists uttered trite sentiments which nobody could possibly disagree with (yes, user testing is a good thing and so is accessibility and quality information). We decided to  avoid falling into this trap and I found myself in the position of having to respond to Greg and Mary’s views of the key role the library sector had in supporting use of networked services and supporting users in a networked environment. I suggested that librarians were just another group of users who had nothing special to add to the development of innovative networked services and, indeed, could inhibit development by seeking to take inappropriate methodologies to the Web environment. Now although these remarks were somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it would be interesting to see how they may relate to today’s networked environment, 8 years later.

The Darien Manifesto

The authors of the Darien Manifesto (John Blyberg, Kathryn Greenhill and Cindi Trainor) have no doubts regarding the importance of librarians, with a manifesto which begins by giving their view that “the purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization“. And this “purpose of the Library will never change“! Whilst a number of people have expressed concern over this monolithic description of The Library, and pointed out the unease we would feel if other bodies made similar statements (“The purpose of the government/the police/the Freemasons is to preserve the integrity of civilization and this purpose will never change“) other comments do appear to more accurately reflect the role of libraries  (“provides the opportunity for personal enlightenment“; “encourages the love of learning” and “empowers people to fulfill their civic duty“) and librarians (“select, organize and facilitate creation of content” and “connect people with accurate information“), various commentators, including the Annoyed Librarian, are questioning the manifesto.

The Researcher’s Perspective

Here in the UK a debate is taken place on the Libraries of the Future which is being led by the JISC. At a recent debate on Libraries of the Future Professor Peter Murray-Rust gave his thoughts on what he expects from an academic library from a research/scientific perspective.

Peter’s views had been outlined in a series of blog posts prior to the debate (Peter was living his open vision and encouraged those interested in helping to shape a vision to engage with the ideas he was developing in his blog).

As described by Professor Bruce Royan in a report on the event, Peter’s views challenged current orthodox thinking regarding the libraries’ relevance in a networked world:

“The Librarians of the future will not emerge from the Libraries of today. The researchers of the future won’t want journals, they’ll want little bits of lots of papers, and they won’t respect faculty or subject boundaries, as their work will be interdisciplinary. If they need an information service, they’ll JUST DO IT for themselves“

What Does The Future Hold?

The official blog for the debate provided a summary of Peter’s talk which began:

What is happening in the world is bypassing university libraries.  I talk to colleagues and the feeling is that libraries for STM (science, technical, medical) are not useful. That’s not my polemic view – that’s reporting on having spoken to people.

Will librarians have a significant role to play in the academic library of the future (the future of public libraries, whilst important, was not touched on in Peter’s presentation)? And is Peter’s assertion and question in a recent blog post: “Wikipedia has won – how can we convince you?” further evidence that the librarians who warn their users against such popular Web 2.0 services are becoming marginalised?

But maybe the Dryberg Darien manifesto does contain elements which reflect Peter’s views:

• Adopt technology that keeps data open and free, abandon technology that does not.
• Be willing and have the expertise to make frequent radical changes.
• Hire the best people and let them do their job; remove staff who cannot or will not.
• Trust each other and trust the users.

Perhaps Peter would endorse the third bullet point which calls for staff who aren’t prepared to adapt to a changing environment to be sacked. And there was me thinking that the manifesto simply endorsed woolly liberal values!

Crowd-sourcing Ideas for IWMW 2009

In a trip report on the Institutional Web Managers Workshop 2008 Andy Stewart was full of praise for the event: “it was absolutely fantastic“. Andy went on to say that although “The plenaries, parallel sessions, discussion groups and social events are all extremely useful in their own right” for him “it’s the inspiration and sense of belonging that one feels during and after the conference I think makes the difference“.

We’re currently inviting proposals for this year’s event, IWMW 2009, which will be held at the University of Essex on 28-30^th July 2009. Last year we providing an innovation competition and encouraged developers to make use of the data provided by the university of Aberdeen, Bath and Edge Hill University. This encouragement for openness within the community was welcomed by Andy:

“One theme which stuck out above all, to me, was that of transparency through initiatives to open up our information allowing others to do what they feel with it“.

We are looking to build on this culture of openness. So this year rather than simply inviting submissions for talks and workshop sessions to be sent to the chair of the event (my colleague Marieke Guy) we are using the Ideascale service in order to crowd-source suggestions for content at the workshop.
We’re doing this to allow potential participants and other interested parties to provide suggestions on topics they’ve like to see covered at the address (as well as provide other more general suggests for the event – such as what type of social event we should provide). Doing this in this open fashion, as illustrated below, enables participants to become more active participants in the processes of putting together the programme for the event.

Now we have to be honest and admit that we can’t guarantee that the most popular options will necessarily be provided or that seemingly unpopular topics won’t be covered. But at least everybody will have had the opportunity to participate in this process. And this is also a learning process for ourselves – in retrospect we realise that the suggested titles should have been neutral in tone, rather than the provocative title which could be suited for a session itself (we don’t know if people are voting on the sentiment expressed in the title or on whether the topic should be addressed at the workshop).

And I’m not sure what the usage statistics are meant to be saying. It doesn’t seem likely that 16 users have cast 1018 votes!

But if you have views on topics which members of institutional Web management teams should be discussing feel free to provude your suggestion. Now this won’t be regarded as a submission to the event, but if you would like to give a talk or run a session at this year’s event details of how to submit proposals are available on the IWMW 2009 Web site.

What Can We Learn From The eduWeb Conference?

Background to IWMW

The Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) series was launched in July 1997 and has been held every year since, with the 3 day format being used since 1998. This event is aimed at members of institutional Web management teams and has been attracting an audience of 150-200 for some time now.

The eduWeb Conference

But what, I’ve wondered, is the equivalent in the US?  I recently came across the eduWeb conference Web site, which appears to be similar to IWMW. Reading the history of the eduWeb conference page I find that the original conference started in 2000 although it previously had a different name and location. The event, which is privately owned, was relaunched in 2005.  I found it interesting to read about how it perceives its target audiences:

“The conference continues to focus on “both sides f the fence” (front end and back end) regarding a website’s development.

• The “front end” includes marketing, communications, advancement, admissions – it includes any non-IT office that now has a website and knows that part of its strategy is to communicate to internal and external audiences.

• The “back end” includes information technology, database development, applications, instructional design, mobile technology, RSS and more.

The core to having a conference like this was to bring these sides together…to learn from the other side, to learn to talk each other’s language and hopefully bring a better working relationship among the personnel that now create the Web.“

It was also interesting to view the call for papers, which has three strands: (1) Marketing Communications; (2) Design & Development and (3) a Guest Track on Getting It Done!. An accompanying page provides suggestions for possible topics. A draft timetable is also available which, although it doesn’t yet provide details of the individual sessions,  does show how the conference is themed into the three strands.

Comparisons

The IWMW event, like eduWeb, has sought to engage with the marketing, design and management communities as well as those involvement in development work.   And I have to admit that I find eduWeb’s terms ‘front end’ and ‘back end’ quite useful – although I’m unsure how those involved in RSS, XML and other TLA and XTLA work will take to the ‘back end’ term. I wonder if developers in the UK, with the pantomime tradition which is probably not significant in the US (“oh no it’s not”),  would resent being relegated to the back end of the pantomime horse?

Unlike eduWeb, plenary talks at IWMW are intended for all participants. We have wondered whether we should provide streamed plenary talks, but feel that having a small number of plenary talks (ideally by charismatic speakers, such as Ewan Mcinosh’s closing talk at IWMW 2008) can provide a unifying theme which we can all talk about during the conference and afterwards. But is it time for a change?

As all twelve IWMW events have been organised by UKOLN with myself, initially and my colleague Marieke Guy having responsibility for the events, we have been able to ensure continuity of access to the event Web sites.  This enables myself and Marieke to be able to review the content over the years and to  spot trends and themes – and as this Web site are publicly available, others can do the same.  In the past few years we have also provided RSS feeds for various data sources, which enables us to, for example, provide a Google Map of the locationof the events and locations of the plenary speakers.

Trying to find out what had happened at previous eduWeb conferences has proved somewhat difficult. The best I could find were the Google results for searches for “eduWeb 2008“, “eduWeb 2007“, etc. which typically take me to individual blog posts about the event. I could find an official Web site or even a page which aggregates content from blogs of the event.

In the bar at the recent dev8D event I did, however, learn that a number of developers from the UK repository community had attended the eduWeb 2008 event. The developers, who attended several events in the US thanks to funding from the JISC CRIG project, have provided a video in which Dave Flanders (who, despite his American accent is based at Bloomsbury Colleges consortium and will shortly be starting work at the JISC) describes how the University of Chicago winning web site could be made even more effective. As described in the accompanying description of the video:

The EduWeb Awards had the University of Chicago as the winning web site (CMS). It was acclaimed for its minamalistic design, but we thought it could even take it a step further by utilising the Google minamalist search approach. We also thought it might be worth looking into Google SiteMaps to provide a common way of presenting University web sites to the user which could be optimised via the kinds of searches that took place on the local search engine.Point being that better search facilities (analytics) should be put into the institutional search engine so as to guarantee that the user is getting back what they want

It seems that valuable links have already been established with eduWeb. What other links could be made, I wonder? And has anyone attended both the eduWeb and IWMW events? If so, it would be useful to hear about the similarities, differences and things we can learn from each other.

Note that eduWeb 2009 will be held in Chicago on 20-23 July and IWMW 2009 in the University of Essex on the following week (28-30 July). An enthusiastic University Web developer could therefore attend both!

Designing for Disability Seminar

The Designing for Disability

A recent blog post by Neil Witt on The VC’s New VLE inspired me to provide a new introduction to a talk I gave at the “Designing for Disability” seminar held on  Friday 5^th December 2008 at the British Museum.

I was an invited speaker at this event was organised by the Museums Association and the Jodi Awards. The title of my talk, the final talk of the day, was “Holistic Approaches To Web Accessibility“.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Let me tell you the tale, I began, of the benevolent emperor. He was kind and wished to do his best for his subjects.  So when he was told of a secret formulae produced by a wizard from a far-off land which would ensure that all of the subjects of his empire would be able to access all of his edicts, he wanted to know more. He was told that the secret formulae would ensure that the blind, the handicapped and the crippled of his land (this story, I should add, took place long ago, when,sadly, such politically incorrect words were the norm) were would all be able to read his edicts. “This sounds truly wonderful” the emperor announced (thinking that it would also be good if they could also read about the new taxes he intended to implement – for even in fairy tales, there is a need for financial prudence and long term sustainability).

And so the emperor announced that henceforth all official pronouncements, all new laws, all new taxes must comply with the WAI way (as the magic new approach became known. And so the lord chief justice issued the proclamation and the Knights of the Accessible Table rode through the kingdom to ensure that the magic was being used everywhere.  “Anyone for fails to comply with the magic will be banished“, it was announced.

Life was good, in the land. And when one of the knights who was made blind in a battle complained that he could read the edicts but couldn’t understand them, he was ignored. And when rumours appeared that there were places in the far-flung regions of the empire where the magic wasn’t being used, but people could still read the emperor’s edicts, this was dismissed.

“But it’s true!” said a little boy.  “There’s a new magic, that’s even better. It’s not the WAI way magic, it’s called ‘Inclusive design“.

And in my talk I described the story which the little boy told.

And this story is true, dear friends. For I was that little boy – and so, too, were David Sloan, Liddy Nevile, Jane Seale, EA Draffan, Helen Petrie, Caro Howell, Lawrie Phipps, Andy Heath, Hamilton Fraser, Elaine Swift and many others. For that little boy was a member of the Knights Who Gathered Evidence. And here is the tale I told, which is available on Google Video and Zentation and is also embedded below (note video was added on 9^th December 2008, after the post was originally published).

Holistic Approaches To Web Accessibility 52:16 Talk on ‘Holistic Approaches To Web Accessibility’

The Evidence From The Day

This tale introduced the talk I gave, in which I summarised the various peer0reviewed papers I’ve contributed to since 2004. I described the limitation of the WAI model and the WCAG guidelines, the evidence from a number of Web accessibility surveys which demonstrates that conforming with the guidelines does not necessarily provide accessible Web services and Web services which do not conform to the guidelines have been found to be very accessible.   I went on to describe some of the challenges to be faced in understanding what accessibility means in the context of learning and cultural appreciation.

I was particularly pleased that the holistic approach to Web accessibility which I described seemed to apply so closely to the various case studies which were described during the day.This included:

• Andy Minnion’s talk on “New Media for Access and Participation by People with Learning Disabilities“. He concluded that universal access with a single interface and minor changes of style and appearance do not meet the needs of this group. Content itself needs to be adapted and technical compliance, while important for other groups, is not in itserlf and accessibility solution.
• Linda Ellis’s talk on the use of  British Sign Language video guides to improve access for deaf visitors to Bantock House and Park. She argued that content aimed specifically for Deaf visitors was needed and that, as BSL is a language in its own right, information provided in BSL is needed, since Deaf visitors may find it difficult to understand information provided in English.
• Andrew Payne, The National Archives, on a project to maximise access to the Prisoner 4099 archives. Andrew mentioned how “Flash can be accessible, but you need to be careful”. Based on experiences such as this Andrew concluded by suggest that we “Don’t believe the box tickers”.

I very much agree with Andrew – don’t believe the box tickers. And don’t believe anyone who suggests there’s a simple solution to difficult and complex challenges – whether they be wicked elves or government policy makers!

Pinky and Perky and Swedish Topless Model Caught in Use as Learning Objects

I introduced Pinky and Perky in a recent blog post and I used them when I presented my paper on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference. And recently I used the dancing and singing pigs from the days of my youth when I gave the final invited plenary talk on “Realising The Potential of Web 2.0” at the “Nordlib 2.0 – Get Inspired by Web 2.0 for Libraries” conference held in Stockholm.

In Stockholm I used the video clip to illustrate how the dangers of an over-managed approach to popular culture wasn’t introduced in the Web era – Pinky and Perky were banned from the BBC in 1996: there was a general election about to be held and I assume the BBC were concerned about “pinko lefty” sentiments which they might try to influence young and impressionable minds (after all, where do you think the term pinko came from :-). This reference is available 47 minutes into the presentation (see Google Video or the Zentation link- where its synched to the slide on “Inappropriate Content“).

On the day before the conference I visited the Nordiska Museum where I saw a cigarette case (I think it was - I couldn’t read the Swedish description) which featured a topless model – from the 17^th or 18^th century. Again I felt that this provided a useful example I could use at the conference to illustrate my point that use of new technologies for ‘pornography’ is nothing new.

Now these two examples meant something to me and where likely to be new to the audience, thus avoiding reuse of cliched presentational devices. In the talk in Stockholm I also updated my slides a hour or so before delivering the talk, using a tweet and subsequent blog post from Karen Blakeman in which she commented that PageFlakes had added advertisments on its Web site overnight, without prior notice. “How would you respond if that happened to a Web 2.0 service you used in your organisation?” I asked the audience.

Non of these example made use of learning resources from a learning object repository. And for the objects I used (a YouTube video of Pinky and Perky, a photograph I had taken in a local museum and an interesting discussion point I’d came across a few hours previously) it would make little sense for me to deposit for reuse by others. Their value, I feel, comes from their relevance to me and my style of presentation, their (regional) links with the place I’m talking at and their timeliness. In fact I also made use of a Barack Obama image and the “Yes we can” slogan which again will time out very quickly.

Do we need repositories for learning objects, I might ask. Or are such repositories for the chore presentations (yet another talk on the same old subject to a large group of undergraduates), which won’t be used by speakers who want to provide fresh and relevant talks? On the other hand, perhaps this is mere indulgencies on the part of the speaker. After all, will a group of Nordic librarians ‘get’ Pinky and Perky?  Mm, maybe I should have used the Swedish chef from the Muppets? or Abba, perhaps, if I want to go for the more popular British stereotypes of Swedish culture?

Realising The Potential of Web 2.0

Earlier this year the JISC launched a debate of Libraries of the Future. UKOLN recently contributed to this debate by sponsoring the Mashed Library event which was facilitated by Owen Stephens, Imperial College.  My contribution has been in exploring best practices for exploiting the potential of Library 2.0. I presented a paper on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference on “Libraries in the 2.0 Age and Beyond” held at the National Library of Singapore and gave an updated version of the talk at the Nordlib 2.0 conference on “Nordlib 2.0 – Get Inspired by Web 2.0 for Libraries” held at Aula Magna, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden on 21^st November 2008.

It was a privilege to be asked to give the final talk at the conference, and to have a full hour to describe my thoughts on how libraries should go about “Realising The Potential of Web 2.0“.

The conference blog provides more information about the conference and the talks which were given. The talks were streamed live and the videos are currently being edited and will be uploaded shortly. In addition I used a Flip camera to record my own talk and this is available on Google Video (and Blip.tv) and embedded below.

In addition I have used Zentation to synch the video with the PowerPoint slides, as illustrated below. The slides are also available on Slideshare.

Realising The Potential of Web 2.0 59:32 Talk on Realising The Potential of Web 2.0

I hope these different versions of the talk are useful. But if I was to provide only one version of the talk what, I wonder, should it be. The PowerPoint file on the UKOLN Web site, the HTML equivalent, the Slideshare manifestation (with the ability to be embedded elsewhere), the original .AVI file (warning, large file), the Google Video or Blip.TV video of the talk or the synched version of the talk and the slides on Zentation? And is the provision of a variety of versions a sensible precaution at a time when the sustainability of Web 2.0 may be questionable or confusing to the end user?