This blog functions as an open notebook which provides personal thoughts, reflections and observations on the role of the Web in higher and further education which I hope will inform readers and stimulate discussion and debate, both on this blog and elsewhere, including on Twitter.
This is the UK Web Focus blog, written by Brian Kelly, UKOLN. UKOLN is a national centre of expertise in digital information management, based at the University of Bath. UKOLN is funded by the JISC.
The views expressed in this blog do not necessarily reflect those of UKOLN or the JISC.
For further information see the blog policies.
Contact Details
Brian's email address is b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk. You can also follow him on Twitter using the ID briankelly. Also note that the ukwebfocus Twitter ID provides automated alerts of new blog posts.
This blog is hosted by WordPress.com which uses Google Analytics (which makes use of 'cookie' technologies) to provide the blog owner with information on usage of this blog.
Other Privacy Issues
If you wish to make a comment on this blog you must provide an email address. This is required in order to minimise comment spamming. The email address will not be made public.
UKOLN’s annual Institutional Web Management Workshop will be held at the University of Edinburgh on 18-20th June 2012. IWMW 2012 is the sixteenth in the series of events which is aimed at those involved in the provision of institutional Web management services.
This year’s theme is “Embedding Innovation“. At the IWMW 2010 we explored the theme of The Web in Turbulent Times and last year we described institutional approaches for Responding to Change. Now, after having absorbed the implications of reductions in funding and begun the processes of new approaches to delivering services we now wish to explore ways in which embed changes related to new working practices and the rapidly changing technical environment and user expectations, especially from students who will be paying significant amounts of money to attend University.
The call for proposals is now open. Since the event is aimed at a broad section of those involved in the provision of institutional Web services we welcome proposals which cover the spectrum of interests ranging including the technical challenges of managing institutional Web service, the ways in which a diversity of user needs can be addressed, the ways in which content and services can be managed, the increasingly challenging legal implications of providing online services, they ways in which the Web can be used to support a broad range of business requirements, the growing importance of social media, the opportunities and challenges posed by Cloud Services, strategies for dealing with a mobile environment, staff development issues, etc.
We welcome submissions for plenary talks. There will be a small number of plenary talks which typically last for 45 minutes and should be of relevance to a broad section of the audience. Since the event has always sought to provide opportunities for active participation we will be providing a larger number of workshop sessions, which normally last for 90 minutes and aim to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to participate actively. In addition we welcome other ideas, perhaps for panel sessions, debates, and other ways in which the challenges of managing large-scale Web services can be addressed in an informative and, perhaps, fun ways.
If you have never attended an IWMW event before you may wish to view the programme for the IWMW 2011, IWMW 2010 and IWMW 2009 events to get a feel for the range of topics which have been covered.
If you have any queries or would simply like to have a chat about possible contributions, feel free to get in touch with me.
On Thursday 17th November 2011 my colleague Marieke Guy is giving a talk on “The Benefits of Amplified Events” as part of the University of Bath’s Green Impact seminar series. There will be a live stream of the talk which is being provided by my colleagues Julian Prior and Marie Salter from the eDevelopment team in the Division for Lifelong Learning.
Marieke will be explaining the benefits of amplified events, including ways in which amplified events can help to maximise the impact of ideas presented at an event and provide access to people who are unable to physically attend. One additional important area, which is being addressed in our participation in the JISC-funded Green Events II project, is the environmental impact of events. Clearly avoiding the necessity to travel can provide environmental benefits, and I’m pleased that there has been participation from Spain, Denmark, the US, Canada and Australia at amplified events hosted by UKOLN.
But what of the environmental costs of the video streaming itself? We would like to explore these issues by encouraging remote participants to record details of the bandwidth used in viewing a live video stream of forthcoming amplified events.
Thursday’s seminar will be streamed using the University of Bath’s Adobe Connect service which can host up to 20 participants. If you wish to view the live video stream please register on the EventBrite system. In addition we would like to invite people to give their feedback on the experience and, if possible, to provide statistics on the bandwidth usage. Ideally, ideally it would be useful if remote participants could run simple network tests such as ‘traceroute’ or possibly use the Firebug plugin for FireFox (which tracks data volumes and provides information on the IP addresses and domains used) together with the NetExport extension to save a log called NetExport (which adds the ability to Firebug to ‘export’ the HAR file to your hard drive). If. however, you are not able to install these tools but have an interest in this topic, feel free to sign up – although we’ll be asking you to describe your experiences, including any problems, which will help us to improve our amplification services and advise others on best practices.
Note (added on 16 Nov 2011): If you wish to take part in the exercise of monitoring network traffic for watching the video stream, once you have installed Firebug and the NetExport extension to Firebug you should use the following steps:
Switch Firebug on for all pages using Firebug icon in top right corner of Firefox. Click the down arrow and choose ‘On for all pages’.
Click on the Net tab at the top of the Firebug pane that appears and that should bring up a new menu directly below it. That will probably be on ‘All’ (greyed out) if not click on ‘All’.
Navigate to the relevant Web page. Firebug will start logging all the connections/downloads on that page (don’t navigate away from that page in that tab) it will continue to log all activity from that page.
When you want to save the log file clink on the ‘Export’ button on the lower Firebug menu – choose ‘Save as’ and save the ‘.har’ to disk, from where it can be e-mailed to the event organisers!
Note, however, that it is currently unclear as to whether this technique will work with the Adobe Connect interface.
The paper summarised the findings of the report (which are illustrated) including the technological developments which have (now) arrived; developments which are expected to have a time-to-adoption horizon of two to three years and those with an expected time-to-adoption horizon of four to five years.
The focus of the short paper and the accompanying presentation at the ILI 2011 conference was “how should the sector respond to such predictions?” Since I was expecting significant numbers of participants in the session to have mobile devices I intended to encourage the participants to contribute their thoughts on how the library sector should be responding. When the response to my question “How many of you have smart phones or table computers?” showed positive responses for over 90% of those present I was hopeful that we would be able to crowd-source suggestions for appropriate actions in preparing for the technological developments.
As shown below, I provided some examples of how I might expect libraries to be preparing for technological developments which should now have arrived, with each brief sentence being provided in a form suitable for tweeting.
Area
Actions
Mobile and Tablet Computing
Personal use of mobile phones & tablets in order to gain experiences of new working practices; experiences of accessing library services, etc. Update Acceptable Use Policies to address use of mobile devices. Update Web developments tools and standards to ensure mobile access is treated as ‘first class citizen’.
Cloud Computing
Staff development to provide better understanding of Cloud Computing concepts and implications. Update Acceptable Use Policies to address use of cloud services. Ensure potential risks are understood as well as opportunities. Develop risk minimisation strategies.
Open Content
Staff development to provide better understanding of open data as well as open access including licensing issues for open content. Understand personal and organisational barriers to provision of open content as well as consuming open content. Seek ways in which the Library can provide open content.
Table 2: Actions for developments for today’s technologies
If each of the hundred of so participants in the room could tweet one or two similar summaries, I suggested, we would have a significant resource based on suggestions from practitioning librarians and information professions. This would be particularly valuable for those technological developments which may not yet be impacting on daily activities which are listed below:
Area
Actions
Game-Based Learning
Learning Analytics
New Scholarship
Semantic Applications
Table 3: Actions for developments expected to be adopted in two to three years
Area
Actions
Augmented Reality
Collective Intelligence
Smart Objects
Telepresence
Table 4: Actions for developments expected to be adopted in four to five years
I had hoped that, following the talk by Åke Nygren who was giving an alternative view of the future, we would have time available to actively solicit feedback from the audience. Unfortunately due to technical difficulties Åke’s talk overran and we didn’t have time to discuss the ways in which libraries should be responding to these predictions. In addition I was unable to record a video of my talk due to the video application on my camera stopping after my camera received an SMS alert :-(
RT @abbybarker #ili2011 #a101 I have two mobile devices with me and neither if them are connecting to the wifi properly! Ditto.
In retrospect I think I was too ambitious in seeking to use small group exercises which are more suited to a workshop session than a short presentation, with the limited time and technical delays conspiring against me. However perhaps a blog post can provide the opportunity for feedback which wasn’t forthcoming during my talk. My question, then is, what actions are you taking today in response to the technologies which seen now to be mainstream and those which are expected to arrive in the next two to five years?
As I said to one of the two video bloggers who recorded participants’ thoughts and comments about the Internet Librarian International (ILI) conference, ILI is probably my favourite conference as it provides an opportunity to catch up in developments in the online Library world in the UK, Europe, North America and Australasia. This year at ILI 2011 I could only attend for the first day, but this did give me an opportunity to hear about, amongst other topics, JISC-funded developments in the areas of usage data, analysis techniques which can help to prove value and three cutting-edge technology developments taking place in Norway, Belgium and the USA.
Unfortunately I don’t have the time to give detailed thoughts on the sessions I attended. However an analysis of Twitter usage at the conference might help to provide some insights into how Twitter was used at the conference.
As perhaps might be expected for an event with over 300 librarians and information professions the Twitter users understood the benefits of providing distinct tags for the three parallel streams. This is a bit of a hobbyhorse for me and I was pleased that I was able to set a precedent in the first set of parallel sessions when I encouraged the 100 or so participants in the session on “A101 – What’s on the Technology Horizon?” to use the tag #A101 to be able to differentiate the conversation from those taking part in sessions “B101 – Not So Secret Weapons – Advocacy and Influence” and “C101 – The e-Book Revolution in Libraries“:
The easily-identifiable tweets will help myself and Åke Nygren, my fellow speaker in the session, to be able to see what was being discussed during our talk, so such session tagging provides a useful way for speakers to gain feedback for their talks. Our opening track seems to have been the only one in which significant numbers of session-tagged tweets were used. However it seems that the benefits of such tagging were quickly spotted with the second, third and fourth parallel sessions (which end in 2, 3 and 4) being included in the above list of the top ten hashtag contained in the TwapperKeeper archive. I should also add that in revisiting my post on Thoughts on ILI 2010 it seems that use of session hashtags is new this year, with only session #C102 being included in the list of top ten hashtag for last year’s event. (Having just looked at last year’s programme it seems that Session C102 on Monitoring and Maximising Organisational Impact was given by myself and Joy Palmar, so it seems it has taken a year for this practice to become embedded!)
The list of the top Twitterers at the conference included several of the ‘normal suspects’ who have a proven track record of tweeting at conferences headed, as was the case for ILI 2010 by @bethanar and @Mimomurr.
Comparing the overall numbers of tweets at the year’s events with ILI 2010 it seems that Twitter usage has now stabilised:
ILI 2011: 80% (2150) of the tweets in this TwapperKeeper archive were made by 14% (45) of the twitterers. The top 10 (3%) twitterers account for 46% (1241) of the tweets. 56% (175) of the twitterers only tweeted once.
ILI 2010: 80% (2032) of the tweets in this TwapperKeeper archive were made by 15% (57) of the twitterers. The top 10 (2%) twitterers account for 45% (1143) of the tweets. 61% (229) of the twitterers only tweeted once.
It should also be noted that once again there were very few geo-located tweets: 39 tweets this year compared with 18 last year, both of which represent no more than 1% of the total number of tweets.
Feedback From Twitter
The event organisers have sent out a SurveyMonkey form to ILI 2011 participants which will help to inform planning for next year’s events. But in addition the event organisers will also be able to analyse the content of the tweets.
We were told about changes in ILI conference organisation, with next year’s event being the responsibility of Information Today’s office based in Oxford. Although I’ve enjoyed previous ILIs, I do feel it will be beneficial to have greater participation from the UK and mainland Europe. I felt that it was somewhat strange, for example, that although there was much interest in use of social media, there was little discussion about privacy issues and the implications of EU privacy legislation related to cookie use.
In light of the changes to the event organisation I would like to conclude by making some suggestions related to use of social media at the event, based on the ideas I’ve described in this post which I hope with be useful for other event organisers.
Create a TwapperKeeper (or equivalent) archive of event tweets well in advance of the conference. Note that I discovered that a TwapperKeeper archive hadn’t been set up for the #ILI2011 tweets during the opening talk. I created an archive during the talk, but this meant that tweets made in the run-up to the event will not be included in the archive
Be aware of the benefits of session-related (or room-related) hashtags for parallel sessions and ensure that you clearly publicise such hashtags if you wish to encourage their use.
Be aware of how tweets can be used in the evaluation of an event.
Finally I’d also suggest that event organisers should consider being pro-active in promoting use of the Lanyrd service. It was suggested that participants badges should include their Twitter ID. But in addition, the Lanyrd page for ILI2011 provides an electronic means for participants to develop their professional network. No fewer than 24 of the speakers at the conference are listed on Lanyrd, but as there are only an overall total of 42 participants, this means that the majority of the 311 people who tweeted (or the 136 who tweeted more than once) aren’t included in this network. I think that’s a shame, as I’m a great fan of Lanyrd and have included details of my talk on the Lanyrd page. But that should be the topic of another post!
The W3C are hosting their first conference: “W3Conf: Practical Standards for Web Professionals” which will take on 15-16 November 2011 at the Redmond Marriot Town Center, Redmond, USA. Although the early bird registration fee of $199 for the two day event seems very reasonable I suspect that despite the event’s focus on HTML5 and the Open Web Platform probably being of interest to many readers of this blog, not many will be able to travel to the US to attend this conference (but if you do wish to attend note that the deadline for the early bird registration is 1 November when the fee will go up to $299).
However the event Web site states that“The recordings of the presentations will be freely available” and goes on to add that “During the event, there will be a live stream of the sessions, with English subtitling. After the event, each session will be archived for future reference“.
The following sessions will be held at the conference:
Day 1, 15 November:
Welcome: Contributing to Open Standards, Ian Jacobs (W3C)
Testing to Perfection, Philippe Le Hégaret (W3C)
Community Groups: a Case Study With Web Payments, Manu Sporny (Digital Bazaar)
Developer Documentation, Doug Schepers (W3C)
HTMl5 Games
Web Graphics – a Large Creative Palette, Vincent Hardy (Adobe)
Modern Layout: How Do You Build Layout in 2011 (CSS3)?, Divya Manian (Opera)
Shortcuts: Getting Off (Line) With the HTML5 Appcache, John Allsopp (Web Designs)
The n-Screens Problem: Building Apps in a World Of TV and Mobiles, Rajesh Lal (Nokia)
The Great HTML5 Divide: How Polyfills and Shims Let You Light Up Your Sites in Non-Modern Browsers, Rey Bango (Microsoft)
HTML5: the Foundation of the Web Platform, Paul Irish (Google)
Day 2, 16 November:
HTML5 Demo Fest: The Best From The Web, Giorgio Sardo (Microsoft)
Shortcuts: Data Visualisation With Web Standards, Mike Bostock (Square)
Universal Access: A Practical Guide To Accessibility, Aria, And Script, Becky Gibson (Ibm)
Security and Privacy: Securing User Identities and Applications, Brad Hill (Paypal), Scott Stender (Isec Partners)
Shortcuts: Touch Events, Grant Goodale (Massively Fun)
Mobile Web Development Topic: Building For Mobile Devices
Shortcuts: Modernizr, Faruk Ateş (Apture)
Browsers and Standards: Where the Rubber Hits the Road, Paul Cotton (Microsoft), Tantek Çelik (Mozilla), Chris Wilson (Google), Divya Manian (Opera)
It was very timely to read about this conference during Open Access 2011 Week, which the JISC, among many other organisations, are supporting. The free access to the talks and resources which will be used illustrates how openness can be used to enhance learning and creativity, in this context for developers who are looking to use Web standards to enhance their services.
The provision of remote access to the conference is also very timely in the context of the JISC-funded Greening Events II project which is being provided by ILRT and UKOLN. It would be valuable if the conference organisers were able to provide statistics on remote participation during the event. How many people viewed from the UK, for example, and for how long. It would be interesting to see if the environmental costs of delivering the steaming video and hosting videos and slides for subsequent viewing could be compared with the costs of flying to the US.
In a post entitled “I Predict A Riot”: Thoughts on Collective Intelligence” I described how “the report highlights Collective Intelligence as one emerging technology which is predicted to have an time-to-adoption horizon of 4-5 years“. Two areas which are expected to have a time-to-adoption horizon of 2-3 years are Learning Analytics and New Scholarship. I would agree that these areas are likely to have an impact on mainstream university activities before collective intelligence, but are these areas really 2-3 years away? It does seem to me that early adopters in these areas are already having an impact on the mainstream.
Learning Analytics
Dave Pattern, systems librarian in the Library at the University of Huddersfield, for example, is also giving a talk at the ILI 2011 conference about the JISC-funded Library Impact Data Project (LIDP). The slides Dave will be using, together with an accompanying handout, are available from the University of Huddersfield repository. In addition the slides are also available on Slideshare which, perhaps somewhat ironically, means that the slides are more interoperable, as they can be easily viewed on mobile devices such as an iPhone through Slideshare’s HTML5 interface and can be embedded on third party Web sites, such as this blog:
The talk will describe how “The project looked at the final degree classification of over 33,000 undergraduates, in particular the honours degree result they achieved and the library usage of each student” and explored the hypothesis “There is a statistically significant correlation across a number of universities between library activity data and student attainment‘.
This project is one of several which have been funded under the JISC’s Activity Data Programme. These other projects are providing engagement and dissemination activities on the project blogs which includes:
It therefore does seem to me that we are seeing JISC project-funded activities which are helping to explore the relevance of, in this case, activity data related to student achievements and their use of library resources and that the findings are being made available to a wider audience through this contribution to the ILI 2011 conference. But what of New Scholarship?
New Scholarship
The Technology Outlook report (PDF format) describes how:
Increasingly, scholars are beginning to employ methods unavailable to their counterparts of several years ago, including prepublication releases of their work, distribution through non-traditional channels, dynamic visualization of data and results, and new ways to conduct peer reviews using online collaboration. New forms of scholarship, including creative models of publication and non-traditional scholarly products, are evolving along with the changing process.
Some of these forms are very common — blogs and video clips, for instance — but academia has been slow to recognize and accept them. Proponents of these new forms argue that they serve a different purpose than traditional writing and research — a purpose that improves, rather than runs counter to, other kinds of scholarly work. Blogging scholars report that the forum for airing ideas and receiving comments from their colleagues helps them to hone their thinking and explore avenues they might otherwise have overlooked.
As we have seen from the above the library sector seems to be willing to make use of blogs in supporting scholarly activities. We can also see an example of pre-publication of scholarly work. Readers of this blog are also likely to be aware of ways in which Twitter is being much more readily accepted as a means of supporting a variety of educational and research activities, with a recent post on Les Carr’s Repository Man’s blog describing ways of Using EPrints Repositories to Collect Twitter Data.
Beyond the library and repository sector, as described in a post on Recognising, Appreciating, Measuring and Evaluating the Impact of Open Science the recent Science Online London 2011 conference provided an example of how scientific researchers are making use of open approaches which can be regarded as new scholarship and the Beyond Impact project, ”an Open Society Foundations funded project that aims to facilitate a conversation between researchers, their funders, and developers about what we mean by the “impact” of research and how we can make its measurement more reliable, more useful, and more accepted by the research community” is looking to ensure that appropriate ‘reward’ mechanisms can be provided for researchers who wish to engage in scientific research beyond the traditional publication of peer-reviewed papers.
Conclusions
In this post I am suggesting that both Learning Analytics and New Scholarship are moving beyond the early adopters and starting to be embraced by the mainstream. I also feel that the Open Access 2011 Week, which is taking place this week, provides a timely opportunity to welcome such developments since New Scholarship, in particular,often encourages use of blogs, Twitter and similar tools to work in a more open fashion and Learning Analytics can benefit from the provision of open, although also perhaps anonymised, data. I am looking forward to seeing the level of interest in these areas at participants at the ILI 2011 conference. But is my optimism misplaced? Åke Nygren is also speaking in the session on ”What’s on the Technology Horizon?” and, as can be seen from his slides which are also available on Slideshare and embedded below, he has a very different view to mine! Both of our slides are embedded below to make it easier to compare the contrasting visions.
As described on the JISC Observatory blog the JISC Observatory is a “JISC-funded initiative to systematise the way in which the JISC anticipates and responds to projected future trends and scenarios in the context of the use of technology in Higher & Further Education, and Research in the UK“.
The Technology Outlook report explores the impact of emerging technologies on teaching, learning, research or information management in UK tertiary education over the next five years, as identified by the Horizon.JISC advisory board: a group of experts comprised of an international body of knowledgeable individuals, all highly regarded in their fields representing a range of diverse perspectives across the learning sector. The methodology taken by the Horizon.JISC advisory board is described on the Horizon Project | JISC Observatory Wiki. The work includes monitoring appropriate press clippings, identifying key trends, discussing and then refining the trends and critical challenges before a voting process to seek consensus.
Implications for Librarians
Next month I will be speaking at the Internet Library International ILI 2011 conference. The conference takes place in London on 27-28 October 2011 and I’ll be talking with Åke Nygren, Stockholm Public Libraries in the opening session of the Technology Developments and Trends track on the topic on “What’s on the Technology Horizon?“
Rather than having to come up with my own thoughts on new technological developments relevant to the library sector, I will be summarising some of the predictions which have been made in the Technology Outlook report and, in the 15 minutes available to me, discuss the implications of these developments for information professions. In addition to summarising the key predicted developments I’d like to provide examples of early adopters within the sector. If you have been involved in development work in the areas listed below feel free to let me know, either in a comment on this blog or my email, and I’ll see if I can include the example in my presentation.
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One year or less:
Cloud Computing
Mobiles
Tablet Computing
Open Content
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two-three years
Learning Analytics
Semantic Applications
New Scholarship
Semantic Applications
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four-five years
Augmented Reality
Collective Intelligence
Telepresence
Smart Objects
And whilst I’m happy to hear about libraries which may be nmaking use of mobile devices and tablets or using Cloud Services, I’d be much more interested to hear of library uses of Augmented Reality, Collective Intelligence, Telepresence or Smart Objects!
A coalition of the willing is battling legal, logistical and technical obstacles to archive the riches of the mercurial World Wide Web for the benefit of future scholars
The article went on to illustrate a use case from the preservation of Web resources:
It is 2031 and a researcher wants to study what London’s bloggers were saying about the riots taking place in their city in 2011. Many of the relevant websites have long since disappeared, so she turns to the archives to find out what has been preserved. But she comes up against a brick wall: much of the material was never stored or has been only partially archived. It will be impossible to get the full picture.
But, as I describe below, we don’t need to wait until 2031 to have a reason to analyse Web content which may have been thought to be ephemeral.
Analysis of Twitter Usage at Recent ALT-C Conferences
The article in the Times Higher Education referred to an archiving initiative led by the Library of Congress which is archiving Twitter posts which will allow, at some time in the future, researchers to analyse public tweets. The article could also have mentioned the TwapperKeeper archiving service which benefitted from JISC-funding to enhance its archiving capabilities to address requirements of the UK HE’s sector. The TwapperKeeper service was used to keep an archive of tweets posted about last week’s ALT-C 2011 conference. The JISC-funded developments to the service included the provision of enhanced API access which led to development of the Summarizr analysis service by Andy Powell at Eduserv.
In order to make valid comparisons across annual events I have previously suggested that the Twitter traffic for a week is analysed, so that discussions in advance of an event and shortly afterwards can be analysed. The Summarizr statistics for tweets at the ALT-C conferences for the past three years are given in the following table.
Note: Following the publication of this post Martin Hawksey pointed out in a comment on the post that the Twapper Keeperr archive was not available at the start of the ALT-C 2011 conference, until he created the archive on the opening morning of the conference. An updated column has been published, but note that this does not include tweets form the opening morning of the conference.
Archiving of the tweets allows us to provide such analyses in order to see the importance of Twitter at such events and identify the people who are particularly active Twitter users at the events. The figures also suggest that the amount of Twitter traffic seems to have stabilised over the past two years and the geo-located tweets, although growing in numbers, is not yet being used to any significant extent.
The Coalition of the Willing – Should Include You
The article published in the Times Higher Education highlighted a number of examples of initiatives designed for archiving the broad ranges of resources available on the Web, including work being undertaken at the British Library, the Library of Congress and the Internet Archive as well as a number of national libraries in Europe.
The emphasis of national and international organisations may lead to the impression that archiving of Web resources is being addressed by others and so there is no need for individual universities to need to consider web preservation issues. This is, I feel, a mistaken view. Indeed not only should those who have a responsibility for the management of institutional digital resources need to address preservation issues, so too do those who manage project resources as well as, as we have seen above, those who may wish to preserve content associated with events.
JISC has recognised the importance of Web archiving and will be hosting an event on “The Future of the Past of the Web” which will be held at the British Library Conference Centre on 7 October 2011. This free event is the third joint Web archiving workshop which has been organised by the JISC in conjunction with the British Library and the DCC. The event is aimed at:
Curators, librarians, archivists interested in the preservation of web resources
Organisations that are engaged in web archiving and digital preservation
Researchers who depend on access to stable web resources for their research
Web developers and content creators who value their content
Information managers with responsibility for legal compliance
If this event is of interest to you note that bookings should be made before 12:00 on Friday 30th September 2011.
On Friday and Saturday, 2-3 September 2011 I attended the Science Online London 2011 event, SOLO11. This event was launched in 2008 with a focus on science blogging. I attended the second in the series (and published a post entitled The Back Channels for the Science Online 2009 Conference) by which time the event had broadened in scope to address a wider range of issues of interest to scientists and researchers, those involved in journal publishing and those involved in science communication. In light of the popularity of the event last year the event moved from the Royal Institution to the British Library which enabled up to 250 people to attend, double the previous capacity. Unfortunately I couldn’t attend last year’s event but I was pleased that I was able to get to the event this year.
Use of Twitter at SOLO11
I’ll not comment on the talks and sessions at the SOLO 2011 conference – I suspect we will see a lot of detailed posts about the event over the next few days, particularly since the event will have attracted those who are pro-active in making use of blogs, Twitter, etc. Rather I’ll provide some comments on metrics of the event’s use of the #solo11 Twitter event hashtag.
In addition to the various tools Tony uses to produced such visualisations the TwapperKeeper service is increasing being used to keep archives on event tweets with the Summarizr service providing a statistical summaries of usage.
Although not very well documented it is possible to restrict a Summarizr analysis to a particular date range. In a blog post on Conventions For Metrics For Event-Related Tweets I pointed out that in order to make valid comparisons between the use of Twitter at events there will be a need to use comparable date ranges. The Summarizr tool can therefore provide comparable statistics for the SOLO10 and SOLO11 events (note that the SOLO09 event only lasted for one day, with an evening event the day before):
SOLO11 (2-3 Sept 2011)
Summarizr stats for 2 days for 2 full day event: There were 2,132 tweets from 413 users. There were a total of 114 hashtags and 120 URLs tweeted. There were 41 geo-located tweets (1% of the total).
SOLO10 (3-4 Sept 2010)
Summarizr stats for 2 days for 2 full day event: There were 2,148 tweets from 410 users. There were a total of 96 hashtags and 140 URLs tweeted. There were 28 geo-located tweets (1% of the total).
SOLO09 (22 August + evening event on 21 August 2009)
Summarizr stats for 2 days for 1 full day and 1 evening event: There were 72 tweets from 46 users. There were a total of 5 hashtags and 20 URLs tweeted. There were 0 geo-located tweets (0% of the total).
Science Blogging 08 (1 July 2008)
No TwapperKeeper archive of tweets available.
We can therefore see that Twitter usage for SOLO10 and SOLO11 seems to be at fully similar levels.
What Else Do We Need?
At events such as SOLO we can expect to see intensive use of Twitter. The participants and organisers are also likely to have an interest in how Twitter was being usage and the impact which its use may have had. In order to carry out subsequent analyses there will be a need to have an archive of tweets. There will also, as the scientists who attend the event will be aware of, be a need to ensure that analyses are carried out in a reproducible and consistent fashion. In addition there will be a need for various analysis and visualisation tools.
Are we in a position in which the data capture processes, tools and methodologies for analysis and interpretation are available in a systematic way? I’d welcome feedback from those who attended SOLO11 and the wider community. For me there seems to be a failure in the lack of a consistent URI to refer to SOLO conferences – how do I cite the SOLO10 event, for example?
Afterthought
After publishing this post it occurred to me that there may be both individual and organisational benefits for being able to analyse SOLO event tweets. During the event I spoke to Martin Fenner and Lou Woodley and, after realising that we had shared interests, started to follow them on Twitter. There were other people I followed during the event, but I can’t remember who they were. It occurs to me that it would be interesting to be able to record details of people one starts to folow at events, especially if this leads to subsequent significant joint work (as I described in a post on 5,000 Tweets On Twitter has led to contributions to a joint paper including one which won an award for the Best Communication Paper at W4A 2010).
From an event organiser’s perspective it would be interesting to gather evidence of growth of networks from a broader perspective. Would it be possible, I wonder, to see how the Twitter networks for participants at an event develop over the duration of an event and might it be possible to relate this to more tangible evidence of impacts or other benefits?
For several year’s we have explored ways in which a range of technologies can be used to enhance discussions at an event and maximise the impact of events by providing what has become known as amplified or hybrid events. Back in 2005 we made use of an IRC channel to enhance discussions at the IWMW 2005 event (which was notable for alerting the small numbers of people who brought along a laptop to news of the London bombings). Over the years we have explored use of wiki technologies and social networking services. However as the technologies mature and we have an opportunity to reflect on our experiences and the feedback we have received we are now better positioned to provide advice on best practices for providing an amplified event as a service, as opposed to an experiment.
Our interest in providing such advice is based on our involvement with the JISC-funded Greening Events II project. This project is led by ILRT, University of Bristol who host the Greening Events II blog. Our involvement in this work is to develop:
An Events Planning Toolkit to help event organisers think through what type of event they need to hold (physical, virtual or hybrid) and then to provide assistance in the form of guidelines and technology tools with each stage in the process to enable them to reduce the negative sustainability impacts of their event.
Our experiences in running a wide range of amplified events over the years will inform our development of the toolkit. Some initial thoughts, based on our recent provision of the amplification of the IWMW 2011 event and summarised in the posts on the Evaluation of UKOLN’s IWMW 2011 Event and Reflections on Technologies Used at IWMW 2011, is given below.
Amplified Event Planning
As part of the planning processes for an amplified event we suggest use of the following template.
Purpose(s): Document the intended purpose(s) of the event amplification. This should also include a summary of the main beneficiaries (which could be the local audience, remote participants, speakers, etc.).
Technologies Used: Describe the technologies which will be used to support the purposes described above
Resources: Describe the additional resources which will be needed to provide the event amplification.
Risk assessment: Provide a risk assessment associated with the provision of the event amplification service.
Evaluation: Describe how you will evaluate the effectiveness of the event amplification.
Metrics: Describe the metrics you intent to collect in order to provide quantitative evidence of use of (and possibly value of) the event amplification.
Based on event amplification at previous IWMW events we are aware that participants make use of an online back-channel to discuss the contents of the sessions as well as communicate with other participants and the event organisers.
Engaging with remote participants
Based on event amplification at previous IWMW events we are aware that there are people with an interest in the topics being discussed at the event who will be willing to view the talks remotely and discuss the issues raised.
Maximise the impact of the ideas and resources
We wish to ensure that the ideas and experiences shared by the speakers and workshop participants are made available as widely as possible.
Enabling resources to be accessed after event
Based on an analysis of usage of slides used at previous events after the event is over we are aware that there is a demand to access speakers’ slides after the event is over.
Support community-building
Based on experiences at previous events we are aware that participants value the opportunities for participants to expand their community of practice.
Technologies Used
Twitter
A Twitter event hashtag was used to support an event back-channel. In addition a Twapper Keeper archive of the tweets was used to provide an archive of the tweets so that we could analyse the content to help identify the strengths and weaknesses of the event as well provide evidence of the usage of Twitter through use of the related Summarizr service.
Adobe Connect
The Adobe Connect service was used to provide a live video stream of the plenary talks.
The Slideshare service was used to provide access to slides from the plenary talks and workshop sessions after the event was over.
Resources
Event Amplifier
A dedicated event amplifier had responsibility for providing a Twitter summary of the plenary talks, publishing summaries of the plenary talks and carrying out and publishing interviews on the event blog.
Event Video Streamer
A dedicated video streamer had responsibility for providing the live video stream of the plenary talks and publishing the videos of the talks and the video interviews.
Event Organisers
The event organisers had responsibilities for monitoring the Twitter and video-streaming channels and responding to comments and queries.
Monitoring of Twitter, Shhmooze and video streaming systems
Monitoring of the various online channels enabled the event organisers to respond to any concerns which were raised. In addition an archive of the channels will enable the content to be analysed.
Evaluation form
An online evaluation form provided feedback on the event and of the provision of the event amplification.
The feedback we have received from remote participants at a variety of UKOLN’s amplified events has demonstrated the level of interest in participation in events remotely. We hope that the guidance which we will be developing will be beneficial to both those involved in organising events and those who are looking to participate in events remotely. We welcome feedback on the initial set of advice provided in this blog post.
The Need to Reflect on Changes to Working Practices
UKOLN’s annual IWMW event provides a useful opportunity to evaluate new technologies with participants from across the UK HE sector being able to identify successes which may be of valuable for use in their own institutions. In addition there will be a need to reflect on technologies which have failed to live up to their expectation since this will help to minimise others making similar mistakes. This post provides a summary of our experiences, in part to ensure that the experiences can inform future UKOLN events and, in addition, so that others can learn from our experiences.
Technologies Now Embedded
Twitter
Certain technologies are now embedded at IWMW events. Twitter, for example, is well-established and is used in conjunction with TwapperKepper which provides an archive of the #iwmw11 tweets. The Summarizr service for the week of 23-29 July shows that there were a total of 1,514 tweets from 185 users. This compares with 3,080 tweets from 282 users for a similar 7-day period for the IWMW 2010 event which probably reflects the reduction in the length of the event from 3 to 2 days.
The number of geo-located tweets has also decreased slightly since last year, with the 100 such tweets representing 6% of the total number of tweets. The Summarizr service, developed by Andy Powell, Eduserv, allows you to zoom in on the location of the tweets. From the map we can see the locations of the main lecture theatre, the halls of residence and the bar, together with the pub I visited on the night before the event.
From the list of the top 10 tweeted hashtags we can see how the use of a clearly defined hashtag for the plenary talks is being used to associate tweets with a specific talk. We might also speculate whether the number of tweets has a relationship with the interest generated in the talks, as suggested by the evidence that the most highly rated talk was the opening talk on “ OK, we know what you do, so how much is it worth?” given by Ranjit Sudhu also generated the largest number of tweets:
Note also that a Scoot.it summary of tweets, blog posts and photos about the event was also published.
Slideshare
Slideshare is another mature technology which has been used for the past 5 years at IWMW events. As mentioned in a post which described Evidence of Slideshare’s Impact Slideshare has proved successful in enhancing access to plenary talks given at the events. This year we have encouraged facilitators of the parallel sessions to make their slides available in the IWMW 2011 event group. We have also provided a Slideshare pack of all of the presentations (as illustrated). This resource is available on the IWMW 2011 Web site and can also be embedded elsewhere.
Note that we noticed that the event group for previous years had attract spam comments and spam presentations (which have now been deleted). We will shortly change the access permissions so that no new presentations can be added in order to ensure that this group contains appropriate content.
The IWMW 2011 Blog
For the third year running a blog was used to support the event. The IWMW 2011 blog was launched on 8 June 2011. It was used before the event to promote the event and highlight key features. During the event interviews with speakers and participants were published on the blog and after the event various summaries of the event were published.
For the IWMW 2010 blog we used the BuddyPress plugin to provide social networking capabilities. However this was little used and we have come to realise that people tend not to make use of a social networking service dedicated to an event; rather they prefer to use existing social networking tools, such as Twitter. We therefore decided not to use BuddyPress this year.
As might be expected the blog attracted the largest number of visits during the event, as can be seen below.
Note that the image also shows the traffic from mobile devices. On Monday 25 July there were a total of 157 visits, which included 31 from mobile devices (this high proportion probably due to participants being away from their office and therefore using a mobile device). In total there have been 1,306 visits to date, with 162 from mobile devices. Google Analytics provides the following summary of browser usage: FireFox (38.9%), Chrome (25%); Safari (30% including 4.3% from mobile device); Internet Explorer (12.9%) and a Mozilla-compatible browser (5.7%). This year ~10% of the visits to the blog have been from a mobile device. It will be interesting to see how next year’s statistics will compare with this.
This Year’s Experimentation
Live video streaming
Whilst we have provided live streaming of the plenary talks for a number of years this has normally been provided by the host institution. At this year’s event the host institution did not provide a video streaming service. We therefore had to select a service for ourselves and take responsibility for delivering the video streaming.
Following a suggestion from the eDevelopments Team in the Division for Lifelong Learning we decided to make use of the Adobe Connect tool. A Summer Update post on the eDevelopments Team blog described how the team are planning to ”Us[e] collaborative web-conferencing technology to enhance participation by prospective students from widening participation backgrounds“. We were happy to support the team by carrying out an evaluation and sharing our experiences.
My colleague Marieke Guy has already posted her summary of Event Amplifying With Adobe Connect and concluded “I would thoroughly recommend Adobe Connect for any event amplification, it was slick, fully customisable and easy to use“. I would agree with Marieke. As shown in the accompanying image (click for larger view) the tool provided the integration of the video-streaming, speaker’s slide and Twitter discussions which meant that the remote audience did not have to switch between different applications as has been the case for several of our previous amplified events. It should also be noted that although the tool does use a Fl;ash interface a dedicated Adobe Connect client for iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad devices is also available.
Shhmooze
A recent post described Shhmoozing at Metrics and Social Web Workshop. Following this initial pilot we encouraged participants at IWMW 2011 who had an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad to install this app and use it to be able to communicate with other users whilst at the event.
A total of 35 participants used the app at the event. Whilst I am not aware of any significant use being made of the tool I did receive a message saying that six people couldn’t find their way to the bar on the first evening of the event. This suggested a potentially valuable use for Shhmooze: being able to contact event organisers without having to post publicly (as would be the case with Twitter unless the organisers followed all the participants’ Twitter accounts) or having to divulge mobile phones numbers.
For the IWMW 2011 event I suspect that most participants would be happy to make use of Twitter as a communications channel and so did not feel the need to use Shhmmooze to support their interactions with others at the event. However for events in which use of Twitter isn’t the norm I do feel that a service such as Shhmooze could have a useful role to play.
Eventstreams
As part of our explorations of services to support the management of the content related to events we made use of the Eventstreamsapp service. This hosted information about the programme and speakers. However the service did not allow us to manage other aspects of the event Web site and from the blog we found that there appears to have been no development work since January. We therefore decided to stop using the service and hosted the content on the main IWMW 2011 Web site which was used in conjunction with the Lanyrd service as described below.
Lanyrd
Following our decision to stop using Eventstreams we decided to make greater use of the Lanyrd site for the IWMW 2011 event. Lanyrd was launched after the IWMW 2010 event had been held last year. However we were aware of significant interest in the service and so created a Lanyrd site for IWMW 2010 in order to provide details of the Twitter accounts for speakers at the event which could be linked to other events which the speakers had participated in. We subsequently updated the Lanyrd site with information about the various session at the event, included embedded videos and slides.
This year we provided the abstracts and timings of the sessions in advance, and included the slides and video recordings when they became available. It should be noted that our use of Lanyrd should help to enhance exposure to the content provided at the event in ways that would not be the case if the content was hosted only on the IWMW 2011 Web site.
This service is easy to use and does seem to be improving in functionality. Initially we felt that its strength was in providing social networking capabilities around speakers and participants at events (as can be seen from my Lanyrd profile page). However Lanyrd now seems to have developing into providing a richer hosting environment for event content. It will be interesting to see how the service may have developed by the time IWMW 2012 arrives.
Conclusions
Using new technologies is not without an element of risk. We therefore publish a risk assessment page for the event which summarises the services used and our assessment of the associated risks. In addition we hope that these reflections on the use of the services will be beneficial to others who may be considering making use of similar technologies at their events.
UKOLN’s annual institutional Web management workshop, IWMW 2011, took place at the University 0f Reading on 25-26 July. This year’s event was reduced from three to two days since it was unclear how the economic downturn would affect bookings. The event attracted 163 bookings, which was only slightly down on last year’s attendance. The weather was great during the event, but what did the participants gain form their attendance at the event? We have analysed the responses provided on the online evaluation form and a summary is given below. Note that a more complete summary of the event feedback is available on the IWMW 2011 Web site.
IWMW 2011: Numerical Ratings
The workshop content at the event had an average overall score of 4.02 on a scale of 1 [poor] to 5 [excellent] from the 62 responses we received. This included 19 5s (excellent), 28 4s (very good), 13 3s (good), 2 2s (fair) and 0 1s (poor).
The workshop organisation did even better with an average overall score of 4.16, with 25 5s (excellent), 26 4s (very good), 7 3s (good), 4 2 (fair) and 0 1s (poor).
The highest ranked plenary speaker was Ranjit Sidu with an average score of 4.28, with 17 5s (excellent), 13 4s (very good), 5 3s (good), 1 2 (fair) and 0 1s (poor), followed by Martin Hamilton with an average overall score of 3.94, with 11 5s (excellent), 12 4s (very good), 9 3s (good), 2 2s (fair) and 0 1s (poor). The workshop conclusions, which included brief presentations from several of the workshop participants was also highly regarded with an average overall score of 3.91, with 12 5s (excellent), 17 4s (very good), 14 3s (good), 1 2s (fair) and 0 1s (poor).
It was interesting to observe that the overall score for the workshop content (4.02) was beaten by only one of the plenary speakers which I think indicates that the workshop in its entirety (including the parallel sessions, discussions, networking and social events) is valued more highly than the individual parts.
IWMW 2011: Overall Comments
The responses to the question “Please give your overall views on the workshop” included the following:
I thought the programme was the most consistent and coherent of all the ones I have attended, and also probably the most relevant. Much as I’ve enjoyed forays into the unknown (eg FOAF/RDF) in previous years, this was a very practical and useful programme. It was good giving the DevCSI geeks some bigging up as it would appear that they can do useful things ;-)
The balance of plenaries and parallels worked for me and the timings were good.
The organisation was faultless as usual.
Still a totally essential part of the HE web management calendar. Not only are the talks and sessions really useful and thought provoking, the networking element is so reassuring. It’s fab to discover that everyone is tacking the same issues.
It is an essential part of my year and cannot imagine it not running, I thought that there was easily enough content for a 3 day conference. The topics covered were current and key issues that we are grappling with on a daily basis. I felt that the old model allowed a chance to build on the content in workshops and this year felt rushed..
I’ve been to the IWMW twice now. On each occasion I found it an excellent opportunity to meet with the people working in same area as myself and learnt a huge amount. Coming from IWMW2011 I have new ideas for improving the way we work and communicate to managers and some great new contacts that should may lead to improving personal development of resources across institutions.
This event is brilliant value for money, expecially compared to the eye-wateringly expensive events my colleagues in the Marketing department attend … . My institution benefits hugely from my attending every year, because we are a small HEI and can’t afford: (a) outside consultants to buy in expertise and new thinking, or (b) a big team to cover all the specialist areas related to the web. I especially value being able go the IWMW website to download presentations etc, when I get back.
IWMW 2011: Most Valuable Aspects
The responses to the question “State up to three aspects of the workshop which were most valuable” included the following:
informative topics, especially on social media, open data, statistics analysis, SEO
use of social media: iwmw & iwmwlive twitter and iwmw11 blog are great tools and help in terms of connecting, catching up and following up.
networking with other university guys, getting to know their situations and problems, and how they deal with them.
1) Opportunity to share my own work and gain invaluable feedback and insight in my parallel session (which is why I haven’t voted on it’s quality!)
2) Opportunity to meet and connect with others in my field
3) Opportunity to hear from insightful and interesting speakers – Dave Raggett and Paul Walk were particular highlights for me.
1. The opening and closing sessions were really informative about the general state, direction and interesting developments of universities.
2. Parallel sessions were very useful.
3. Evening BBQ (social event) was great for meeting and getting to know people from other universities.
Opportunity to network with other web teams
Ideas on how to best promote my teams good work
Real examples of best practice
1. The ‘Web cooperative’ session / workshop was really, really useful -lots of shared ideas, and a real toolkit I’m starting to implement already.
2. The ‘cookie finder’ presentation in the wrap-up: brilliant way to present easily-findable data, but resulting in a really great product for the end-user, eg up-to-date menus and ‘where to buy’ mapping.
IWMW 2011: Aspects Which Could be Improved
The responses to the question “State up to three aspects of the workshop which were disappointing or could be improved” included the following:
I preferred the feel of the 3 day event so would like to see it return to that format. I know organisers were keen to take account of the current work / financial climate but for many people, given the location, the event was a 3-day one anyway and to a certain extent, cost is not a deciding factor as long as the event remains under £500 per person. I felt the catering was mediocre, especially the lunch – houmous & dips is not a very bright option with ~150 trying to get fed at once. Wireless access was an issue – this is a conference which will likely see in excess of 200 devices connected; the host institution MUST take account of this to ensure amplification and backchannel activity is as impactful as possible.
1. Not enough time to network – all had to be done on the evening of the conference dinner / BBQ. Please revert back to the 3 day setup for future IWMW’s
2. No hot water in the accommodation on the Wednesday morning
It was a shame that there was nothing on KIS, perhaps in future events there could be sessions left empty to accommodate last minute issues? Alternatively some sort of bar camp-style sessions so that attendees can deliver short sessions themselves?
Lecture theatre not designed for attendees with various laptops, tablets and so on – no where to put them but on your laps and lack of power outlets. Given the nature of the conference and the delegates attending then think that the sourcing of a venue which lends itself to these key aspects would be beneficial (increased comfort for delegates leaving them paying full attention to workshops).
1. A reliable Internet connection – there were attempts to interact and encouragement to tweet and, in the end, I had to rely on the 3G on my phone as the wifi just wasn’t stable another (it was stressful!)
2. It was stated that Universities are often years behind the private sector in terms of our activities but rather than just play catch-up, how about pushing some more leading edge ideas to get us to the front?
3. 2 hours without a drink is too long – dehydration = reduced capacity to concentrate
IWMW 2011: Additional Comments
The responses to the question “Please give any additional comments on the event including the administration, venue etc.” included the following:
Would be good opportunity for attendees to engage in a “festival of blogging”, maybe showcasing things they get up to locally and want to show off. This might even just arise from a commitment to post comments on a series of round up blogposts? eg I pulled together a couple examples of campus maps http://blog.ouseful.info/2011/07/26/innovations-in-campus-mapping/ If folk contributed links to anything innovative they’re doing, with a brief explanation why its innovative, or as same ilk as something covered in the review, it would give Brian a batchload of “”free”" sector survey results for different themes?”
I enjoyed the event overall and would happily attend again in a similar role – as facilitator, speaker, or similar. I am not sure I took away enough from the day to attend only to listen and take part in the workshops but, as I have already said, I am not really the core target audience for this event.
I thought the accommodation was excellent the first night but it was hard to overlook the lack of hot water on day two and that was a shame. I thought it was strange that there was no wifi in such modern halls although I was delighted to have access to proper broadband and this helped me keep up with work in the evenings. I was also able to liveblog thanks to Eduroam. I would have much preferred more comfortable seats in the theatre though – I arrived home with rather bruised knees from the seats in front! I really appreciated the availability of extension cords in the main theatre and thought that all of the amplifyers did a great job of managing the online and remote experience of IWMW.
Can we get Tony Hirst to come next year? He is so great. His presentation (at the OU) on the perils of measuring social media was terrific.
The (non-eduroam) wifi was useless, had to login a number of times and it kept dropping out. Paid for 3G data on the second day instead.
I was not impressed that there was no hot water in the Halls.
IWMW 2011: Comments on Topics Covered
The responses to the question “Please give your comments on the range of topics covered” included the following:
Every year I wonder what could possibly be covered the next year but you seem to bring together a range of topics and speakers that interest the majority.
The range of topics felt well balanced. Not all were high on my priority list, but the discussion around the event balances this very well.”social media (Nicola Osborne’s A7 session) I do not have a chance to attend this session, but her Prezi slides give a lot of information and tips on this topic which I could learn from.
Linked data: Christopher and Dave have cleared up all the questions in my mind about this topic. I now have a better understanding on linked data, open data and RDF. Looking forward to practicals.
All the plenary speakers were good, I got something out of all of them. I often find it hard to judge how relevant a speaker will be to my role / team (these day’s I’m primarily a designer) from the session title alone, but this year they all exceeded my expectations. There was nothing too techy that I couldn’t follow it, or at least see a practical application for.
I think there was some tension between demand for technical/specific content and the very general. However the blend, especially depending on selected parallel sessions, was pretty good and interesting. I don’t feel I am the core target audience for this event though and attend many specialist events in my field so there were some sessions where I know I did not get as much value from the sessions as I could have.
Reflections
The week before the event I wrote a post on The Web Management Community of Practice in which I described how the IWMW 2011 event would provide an opportunity for the Web Management community of practice to consider how it should develop in the future. A more complete summary of the event feedback is available on the IWMW 2011 Web site which indicates that there is a strong and thriving community who understand the benefits which can be gained from acting collaboratively, sharing experiences and avoiding reinvention of the wheel. A large number of those who responded felt that the event should revert to its three-day format, although a minority preferred the two-day format. Once we’ve had an opportunity to more fully reflect on the feedback we have received we will start to make out plans for IWMW 2012.
I should conclude by saying that at the end of the event myself and Marieke Guy gave out thanks to the speakers, facilitators, session chairs, events team and the local support provided by the University of Reading. It would be appropriate in this post to give thanks to the participants and especially those who took time to complete the evaluation form.
On Monday I facilitated a workshop on “Metrics and Social Web Services: Quantitative Evidence for their Use & Impact ” which was held at the Open University. There were over 30 participants at the workshop with another 20 or so participants watching the live video stream and engaging in discussions on the video streaming channel or using the #ukolneim Twitter hashtag.
A report on the content of the workshop is currently being prepared. In addition the feedback from the remote participants will be analysed and a report published on this blog (the provision of the remote amplification of the workshop was carried out as part of the JISC-funded Greening Event II project which UKOLN together with ILRT, University of Bristol are providing.
The post will summarise one additional area of experimentation which took place at he workshop. As described in a post on “Plans for “Metrics and Social Web Services” Workshop on Monday” in addition to the provision of the live streaming service we used the event as an opportunity to evaluate the potential of the Shhmooze app.
As described in the post the Shhmooze Web site states that:
Research by Shhmooze shows that 75% of conference delegates find networking to be hard work or ‘a nightmare’!
That’s because it’s really hard to find the right person to talk to within a crowd of dozens, hundreds or thousands of people. And, for many people, it’s even harder to strike a conversation out of nowhere with a complete stranger.
Since myself and colleagues at UKOLN organise many events we are always looking for ways to improve the effectiveness of our events. The use of the event amplification provide a means of improving the effectiveness of an event by enabling people who are not present to learn from the talks and engage in the discussions, thus potentially enhancing the event for those who are physically present. But how might a proximity-based application such as Shhmooze enhance an event for those who are present?
For an answer to that question you just have to see the first message I received from he small number of people who installed the Shhmooze app on the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch device and checked in when they arrived at the Open University in Milton Keynes. The message read:
Help! Four of us stick downstairs – Jenni Lee building.
Yes, it seems that several of the participants had arrived at the venue early and found that they couldn’t get in to the building. It would be nice to use this as an example of a success story illustrating one possibly benefit for the app – in reality, however, I failed to check posts to the app when I arrived at the building and the first notification I received actually arrived my an SMS text message from one of the four participants who had my mobile phone number. But on reflection I think this shows that if use of an app such as Shhmooze becomes embedded at an event it can have benefits from making contact with event organisers as well as its stated purpose in supporting networking by event attendees.
I found that the app working in providing an opportunity to establish a useful contact – after Elena Villaespese sent me a ‘wave’ I noticed from her Shhmooze profile that she was a PhD student at the University of Leicester and also affiliated with the Tate Gallery. This provided me with an opportunity to discuss my previous interests in supporting the museum sector and shared contacts in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester.
It total, however, only size people seemed to have used the application, so it is difficult to get a feel for whether it will have a significant role to play at events. In part the low numbers may be due to the app only being available for mobile Apple devices and the relatively low numbers of users of mobile devices at the workshop in comparison with other events I have attended recently.
It does see to me that it will be worth carrying out further experimentation, with the IWMW 2011 event, which takes place on 26-27 July will provide an ideal opportunity to explore its potential further, and with over 150 participants we should be able to see how well use of the application scales with larger numbers of people checking in.
And whilst I appreciate that those participants who don’t have an Apple device might feel disenfranchised, it is worth noting that the Shhmooze blog has a post entitled We’re hiring, again. Android Developer Needed which indicates that there are plans to make the application available on a large number of platforms.
I previously commented that I felt the Shhmooze marketing material which suggested that the app can help you “find useful, interesting people” was rather cheesy. From my initial experimentation I rather suggest that the app:
Allows you to contact event organisers without having to reveal mobile phones numbers
Enables you to chat with fellow participants without having to clutter up your Twitter stream with conference-specific discussions
Enables your event-specific engagement to fade away after the event is over
And as was posted to me in a final comment I received just as I ‘waved’ to a couple of Shhmooze users as the event was concluding: “It’s like being poked but more British“. A very appropriate comment, I felt, especially, as described on their blog, Shhmooze was launched last November at Bizcamp Belfast – it does seem that schmoozing is an Irish thing and more friendly and without the double entendres to be found in Facebook.
On Monday 11th July I am facilitating a one-day workshop on “Metrics and Social Web Services: Quantitative Evidence for their Use & Impact ” which will be held at the Open University. There has been a lot of interest in this workshop which I think is indicative in the perceived importance of the need to gather evidence to be able to demonstrate the use, impact and value of online services, with, in this case, a particular focus on Social Web services.
Since there is such interest in the workshop we have decided to attempt to video stream the talks. However we are not in a position to guarantee that we will be able to provide a high quality video streaming service since we will be setting up the infrastructure on the morning of the workshop and will be keeping our fingers crossed that the bandwidth is up to it and there are no firewall problems.
We do intend to record the talks given at the workshop and make these available shortly afterwards. In addition in order to help to provide a context to the workshop I have pre-recorded an audio presentation of the Welcome slides for the workshop which is available as a slidecast of the talk is available and embedded below.
If you feel this workshop is of interest to you please sign up on the Eventbrite booking system as a remote participant so that we can email you details of the video stream.
Evaluating Shhmooze for the Local Audience
I should also add that for those who will be physically present we will be evaluating the Shhmooze app. The Shhmooze marketing material states that:
Research by Shhmooze shows that 75% of conference delegates find networking to be hard work or ‘a nightmare’!
That’s because it’s really hard to find the right person to talk to within a crowd of dozens, hundreds or thousands of people. And, for many people, it’s even harder to strike a conversation out of nowhere with a complete stranger.
Shhmooze takes the pain out of networking by making it easy to find the 3 people at the event you really need to talk to!
and goes on to suggest that event organisers can tailor the following:
But networking’s not always easy. That’s why we’ve teamed up with Shhmooze to bring you a free smartphone app you can use to
find useful, interesting people
broadcast your professional profile to other event attendees
privately contact the people you want to talk with face-to-face
Whilst the marketing rhetoric grates somewhat (how will it ensure that I find useful, interesting people and not useless dull ones?!) I do feel it would be useful to explore the potential of geo-located social apps in the context of events. Perhaps a one-day workshop with 50 participants isn’t the ideal event but we’d like to evaluate its potential prior to using it at a large event, such as the forthcoming IWMW 2011 event which will have about 150 participants (and note that bookings are due to close on Friday).
If you are attending the workshop please consider installing the app (iPhone/iPod Touch/ iPad only at present) and try and track me down on Monday. I’m sure you are an interesting person and I’ll try and be useful :-)
UKOLN’s DevCSI (Developer Community Supporting Innovation) has recently announced that it will be running a workshop on “Open Data and the Institutional Web” which will take place at the University of Reading on 25-26 July.
This free workshop, which will address ways in which institutional data can be surfaced, used and reused, is aimed at developers, web developers, information specialists, data managers and policy makers who are interested in the provision of open data to support a variety of institutional activities. The event will provide an opportunity to engage in development work related to either institutional data sources of data sources of relevance to institutions.
The value of open access to institutional data has long been promoted by many developers who have explained how open data which is made available in open and structured formats and unencumbered by licence restrictions can help to stimulate innovation. The benefits of such approaches have been demonstrated recently in a variety of hack events which have exploited open data provided by government departments, local authorities and related organisations. However despite the advocacy we have seen from developers and others who have argued that those working in the public sector in particular should adopt more open and transparent working practices, there have been difficulties in embracing a more open approaches due to concerns regarding the quality of the data, fears that the data may be misinterpreted, legal concerns such as data protection legislation and the technical difficulties in opening up access to data.
However in its recent White Paper on Higher Education the Government announced that Universities would be expected to publish data related to its activities and various aspects of the student experiences. In a section entitled “Well-informed students driving teaching excellence” the White Paper states (emphasis mine):
We will expect higher education institutions to provide a standard set of information about their courses, and we will make it easier for prospective students to find and compare this information.
We encourage higher education institutions to publish anonymised information for prospective and existing students about the teaching qualifications, fellowships and expertise of their teaching staff at all levels.
We are asking HEFCE to improve Unistats, so prospective students can make more useful comparisons between subjects at different institutions. From summer 2012, graduate salary information will be added onto Unistats.
We will ask the main organisations that hold student data to make detailed data available publicly, including on employment and earnings outcomes, so it can be analysed and presented in a variety of formats to meet the needs of students, parents and advisors.
We are asking UCAS and higher education institutions to make available, course by course, new data showing the type and subjects of actual qualifications held by previously successful applicants. This should help young people choose which subjects and qualifications to study at school.
The DevCSI workshop is therefore particularly timely in enabling participants to hear about initiatives which have been taken by the institutions which have taken a lead in providing open access to institutional data as well as providing an opportunity for managers and policy makers to engage with developers in order to understand what developers can do in as short period of time if presented with open data and, ideally, APIs (together with supplies of pizza!)
The DevCSI workshop will begin on the day before the start of IWMW 2011. This will allow those involved in institutional Web management activities who have a particular interest in open data to participate in the workshop. The workshop will continue on the opening morning of the IWMW 2011 event, with DevCSI participants having the opportunity to continue their development activities whilst those who have signed up for IWMW 2011 can attend the opening two plenary talks at the event or, if the development work is going well, stay on at the DevCSI session until lunchtime.
Note that since there are only 30 places available for the DevCSI workshop you should book your place soon. Also note that, in light of this late announcement, we will be keeping bookings for the IWMW 2011 event open for another week, and we have decided to provide day tickets for those who are unable to attend the full 2-day event.
On Tuesday and Wednesday I attended the DevCSI’s Accessibility Hackdays – A11y hackspace which was described as “A two day workshop bringing accessibility (a11y) users, experts and developers together to hack on ideas, prototypes and mashups, while exploring the challenges in providing usable accessibility“.
Unfortunately I arrived late on Tuesday and so didn’t have an opportunity to join in the discussions which aimed to identify development areas related to accessibility ( for which the Twitter tag “#a11y” is often used). So yesterday I used the development time as an opportunity to identify existing Twitter applications which might be used to support the event.
In response to my colleague’s Mahendra Mahey’s invitation for participants to describe the problem space prior to summarising the development activities which had taken place I stated that:
UKOLN’s DevCSI work has a focus on the building of communities. There have been community activities over 2 days. But what evidence do we have of community engagement; sharing and the sustainability of such communities and how do we enable participants to understand, interpret and curate their own communities?
I then demonstrated a number of applications and summarised how the applications can help to address the problems described above.
What Twitter Told us About The Event
TwapperKeeper and Summarizr
I began my mentioning the TwapperKeeper archive for the #a11yhack hashtag which I created on the train on Tuesday afternoon after I noticed that the archive hadn’t been set up. I then showed the output from the Summarizr analysis service for the #a11yhack tag and pointed out that @maccymacx was the top Twitterer and was also mentioned or replied to the most. As she tweeted shortly afterwards” @briankelly preso: #twitterstreamgraphs shows that I’m top of most #a11yhack twitter ratings, should I be worried? :S“. Note I also pointed out that there were only two geo-located tweets, one from Birmingham and one from London. Such low levels of usage has been recorded for many of the Summarizr summaries I had examined, indicated that Twitter is not currently being used to geo-locate tweets.
As Tony described in a blog post entitled OUseful.info: Using Protovis to Visualise Connections Between People Tweeting a Particular Term this service was developed in April in order to “publish a service that lets folk generate their own network visualisations”. In his post Tony described how “the app demonstrates whether folk recently tweeting a particular term or hashtag all know each other, or whther the discussion going on around the term/tag is taking place outside of an echo chamber“.
Twitter StreamGraph
After discussed how the service described above helped to gain a better understanding of the connections between people using the event’s hashtag I demonstrated the Twitter StreamGraph timeline for the #a11yhack hashtag.
From this we could clearly see that the peak time for the tweeting had been at about 11am yesterday morning, with a second peak after we had returned from lunch. Perhaps most interesting, however, are the much smaller visualisations of a small number of tweets at 2am (just before the hackers were heading off to bed) and at about 7am (when they were getting ready to start hacking on the final day). I think this demonstrates that such DevCSI events do have a requirement for network access at unexpected times of the day!
Using Gephi To Map Twitter Networks
In a recent post Tony Hirst described A Map of My Twitter Follower Network. The production of the map requires some manual intervention so it was not possible to be able to provide a live demonstration of Twitter networks related to, say, the @devcsi account. However I suggested that since the DevCSI had an important role to play in supporting the development of communities that it might be useful exercise to see the develop of Twitter communities around the various topics areas which have been addressed at DevCSI events.
A point of showing this display was to demonstrate how a wide range of visualisations of Twitter streams can be provided, which can allow users to choose an interface which reflects their personal preferences, rather than expecting every Web-based interface to be universally accessible to all users – as some felt to be the case in the early years in the development of accessible Web sites.
Conclusions
Shortly after the DevCSI event was over Sandi Wassmer, the invited keynote speaker at the event, in giving her thanks to the event organisers picked up on how the DevCSI #a11yhack event had appeared to have fulfilled its purpose:
An example of the collaboration, innovation and creativity was seen when, following Bruce Lawson’s demonstration of webVTT in his invited talk on HTML5, Scott Wilson of the JISC-funded CETIS service developed a W3C widget to generate WebVTT (the Web Video Text Track file format that is under development for solving time-aligned text challenges for video.). Bruce, who was only present at the event on this first day, was alerted to this development on Twitter and shared the news across his Twitter community, as illustrated in the above image.
Further summaries about the event should be published shortly on the DevCSI blog. I’d like to conclude by echoing Sandi’s comments on how the DevCSI event helps to support collaboration, innovation and creativity and to give thanks to my colleague Mahendra Mahey, the DevCSI project manager for his willingness to take risks in providing the environment which supports the rapid development environment we saw over the last couple of days and Steve Lee, the co-facilitaor of the event, and wish Steve well in his new venture with the OpenDirective, spin-off company from the JISC OSS Watch service.
The fifteenth in UKOLN’s annual Institutional Web Management Workshop series, IWMW 2011, will be held at the University of Reading on 26-27 July. The programme is available and bookings are open. Note that this year the event has been changed from a 3 day to a 2 day format in order to reduce the time participants will have to spend away from their office and to ensure that the event is affordable (but as we’re starting in the morning rather than after lunch and finishing in the afternoon rather than at lunch time we have reduced the amount of content by only a small amount). The cost this year has been reduced to £250 which includes one night’s accommodation or only £200 if no accommodation is required. We feel this is a very affordable event especially in comparison with similar events aimed at those with responsibilities in providing large-scale institutional Web services.
Also note that an IWMW 2011 Lanyrd page has been set up which currently has details for the speakers and workshop facilitators, but we’d welcome delegates and others who may like to track the event to add their details to this page.
If you’d like to attend this year’s event we suggest that you book your place quickly – over two-thirds of the places have already been booked and some of the more popular parallel sessions are almost full.
UKOLN is organising a one-day workshop entitled “Metrics and Social Web Services: Quantitative Evidence for Their Use and Impact” which will be held at the Open University in Milton Keynes on Monday 11 July 2011. The workshop will explore ways in which metrics related to the use of Social Web services can be employed in order to provide evidence of how the services are being use, make comparisons with their peers and enable trends to be identified.
Attendance at the workshop is free for those working in the higher/further education sector. Bookings should be made using the online Eventbrite booking system.
Last year I wrote a post in which I commented on the popularity of an individual’s slides and speculated on ways in which the 12,000+ views (now 24,400 views!) on Slideshare for Steve Wheeler’s talk on Web 3.0 The way Forward could be related to impact and value. In this post I will discuss the implications of usage statistics for a event’s use of Slideshare over a period of four years.
UKOLN’s annual IWMW (Institutional Web Management Workshop) series has made use of Slideshare for hosting slides since 2006 (note that since Slideshare was launched in October 2006 this means that we uploaded the slides for IWMW 2006 after the event was held).
The slideshows for each year are available in the following Slideshow event groups: IWMW-2006, IWMW-2007, IWMW2008, IWMW2009 and IWMW2010 (note we changed the naming convention in 2008 once Twitter started to gain in popularity). Also note that since not all of the slideshows have been added to the event groups the analysis also made use of the Slideshare tags: IWMW2006, IWMW2007, IWMW2008, IWMW2009 and IWMW10.
The numbers of views for each slide are available on Slideshare. A Google Spreadsheet has been created which summarises the figures. The overall totals are given below.
Year
Nos. of views
Total nos.
of slides
Nos. of
plenary slides
Nos. of slides from
parallel sessions
Comments
2006
48,360
11
11
0
Slides added retrospectively.
Most popular plenary: 10,190 views
2007
44,495
7
5
2
Slides from 2 w/shop sessions included.
Most popular plenary: 21,679 views; w/shop: 9,838 views
2008
94,629
17
8
9
W/shop facilitators encouraged to use Slideshare.
Most popular plenary: 26,005 views; w/shop: 18,369 views
These figures help to identify changing patterns of usage which I was not previously aware of. It would appear that when Slideshare was first launch we uploaded the slides for the plenary talks (which we had available on the UKOLN Web site). The following year we continued to make the slides available on Slideshare, although I don’t know if this was done in advance or not. In addition we subsequently noticed that two facilitators of parallel sessions (Phil Wilson, University of Bath and Adrian Stevenson, at the time at the University of Manchester) has uploaded their slides (on University 2.0 and Knowing Me Knowing YouTube) with the event hashtag. Since we were aware that participants at the event where interested in seeing the slides from parallel sessions they were not able to attend in 2008 we encouraged workshop facilitators to make there slides available using the event hashtag. It was possibly around this time that Slideshare ‘groups’ and ‘events’ became available and so we tried to ensure that such slides were also aggregated in this way.
The IWMW 2006 event also marked the first ‘amplified’ IWMW event with a WiFi network available for participants. In addition there was also a limited amount of video streaming at the event (using Access Grid technologies). Since IWMW 2007 we have, I think, live-streamed all of the plenary talks and encouraged the remote audience to participate in discussions.
Slideshare Use at IWMW 2008
In order to make it easy for the remote audience to view the speakers’ slides we have sought to make slides available using Slideshare when the talk is being given. The initial use case, therefore, was primarily for the live remote audience, which peaked at about 170 viewers for Ewan McIntosh’s talk at IWMW 2008 - any additional views may be considered an unexpected bonus. In this case, since there have been 26,021 views to date, we might regard this as a significant bonus. However this would be misleading since the Slideshare is actually a Slidecast containing an audiostream which had been created for another version of this talk.
Seeing the data on the numbers of views of the various slideshows over the years made me wonder which were the most popular slides and if there were any identifiable patterns for these popular slides.
The table below lists the most popular slides for the plenary sessions and the parallel sessions. With the exception of 2006 the most popular slides have been presented by people outside the higher education sector, although Ewan McIntosh of his presentation at the time worked for LTScotland, a public sector educational body. Does this suggest that speakers form outside the HE sector are better speakers, provide better slide shows or perhaps have more effective online professional networks – in the case of Ewan McIntosh in particular he attracted a large live audience for the live video stream of his talk and with 9,691 Twitter followers currently would be well positioned to make his professional community aware of this resource (incidentally Jeff Barr also has an extensive Twitter network with 8,333 followers).
The workshop facilitators and barcamp presenters with the largest numbers of views of their slides are, however, from the HE sector. It was interesting to observe that these popular slides seem to have an personalised design, such as the slides used by Adrian Stevenson in his Knowing Me, Knowing YouTube presentation. Might this suggest that a corporate design for slides is off-putting to potential viewers? After all whilst participants at the live presentation have no freedom of choice, those who chose to view slides on Slideshare may be more like to access attractive-looking slides. Alternatively perhaps those who are prepared to challenge organisational branding guidelines may be more likely to have interesting ideas to present? Back in 2009 in a post on The Slideshare Lessons Martin Weller reflected on how over a period of three years through his use of Slideshare he had migrated from use of the OU corporate identity to a personalised style of presentation.
It was also interesting to note that all of the popular slides have been embedded in other Web pages, blogs, etc. For me this is an important part of the social sharing provided by Slideshare – it allows the content to be easily reused and discussed elsewhere. Martin Weller made this point in his post on The Slideshare Lessons when he said: “by sharing good Slideshare presentations you are sharing ideas, and people will react to these. It can be in the form of comments on your blog post which features the presentation, on the Slideshare site itself, or through other social media such as twitter“. Why, I wonder, are people still hosting their slides in the silo of an institutional Web site when the slides can easily be made available as a social object?
Discussion
The post has explored some of the implications associated with views of slides hosted in Slideshare. Although the statistics provided in the free version of Slideshare do not provide trend analyses (for richer statistics a Pro account is needed which costs from $19/month) I think we can assume that significant numbers of views take place after the event and such usage patterns can be decoupled from use by a remote audience viewing the slides whilst watching a live video stream of the talks (and, in any case there is no video stream for the parallel workshop sessions).
The slides may be being viewed by attendees at the workshop who wish to review the information at their own pace after having watch ed the live talk. In addition as discussed in a post on “I want to attend all the parallel sessions” participants often wish they could find out more about the parallel sessions which they were not able to attend. We are now seeing more of these materials being made available by the facilitators of these workshop sessions. Since we now have evidence that such resources are being used we will make greater effort to encourage people to share their slides using the event hashtag and group for this year’s event.
But in addition to the 170-200 people who have attended the event in recent years it is likely that the slides will have been viewed by those who did not attend the event. Use of Slideshare provides a means of sharing the ideas discussed at the event more widely as well as raising the profile of the speakers. In addition this may also help to raise the visibility of the event itself.
The popularity of the slides also seems to challenge the criticisms of PowerPoint as a flawed tool for supporting learning. If this is really the case, then why are so many people choosing to view such slides?
What Next?
The popularity of the slides used at IWMW events may provide an indication of the value of the event itself for providing a forum for sharing of ideas. We will be looking to build on this by encouraging speakers and facilitators to make their slides available and also to suggest that they may wish to share access to these resources within their own professional networks.
The popularity of Ewan McIntosh’s screencast of his talk (which contains an embedded audio) suggests that providing synchronised audio with the slides could provide an even richer resources for use by others (and since my most popular slideshow, which has been seen on 19,501 occasions, is also one of my few screencasts I think this is the case). It would therefore appear desirable to capture the audio for talks – although, even if this provides value to others, it may be questionable as to whether the effort required to synchronise the audio with the slides can be justified.
It would be useful to make comparisons with other IT-focussed events which have also made use of Slideshare over a number of years. I know that the Eduserv Symposium have also used Slideshare event groups for their annual event which are labelled esym09, esym10 and esym11. These symposia last for a day, unlike the IWMW events which have taken place over three days. But although the numbers of slideshows will be less it would be interesting to see if the number of downloads shows a similar pattern.
It would also be interesting to make comparisons with similar events which have chosen not to make use of Slideshare, and perhaps provide access to PDF copies of slides on the event Web site. In light of the failure for such resources to be embedded elsewhere and the lack of a easily obtainable evidence of their reuse, can a decision not to make use of a social sharing resources for slides still be justified?
The statistics presented in this post may, however, be open to questioning. Did users really view all of the slides of did they just look at one or two? And if a slideshow is embedded in a blog will reading the blog without viewing the slides be treated as a view on Slideshare? It may be useful to investigate the statistics provided on the SlideShare PRO acount.
Conclusions
Back in February 2009 Martin Weller asked whether Slideshare is the best OER site?. The evidence Martin presented in the post at the time demonstrated the populairy of the Slideshare site. Martin went on to raise a number of interesting questions:
i) Are people more likely to share stuff through something like Slideshare?
ii) Is the basic unit of sharing (the presentation) at Slideshare, something people understand more than courses and units at OER sites?
iii) Is the comparison fair? Can we consider Slideshare an OER repository of sorts?
iv) Are commercial operations just better at this than educational ones?
v) Are people ‘learning’ from Slideshare? If so, how does it compare with learning from OERs?
I think it is clear that people are willing to share resources on Slideshare and people are also viewing the resources in significant numbers. For me the evidence I have gathered has confirmed my suspicion that Slideshare is established as part of the infrastructure for many events organised with in the HE sector and that its use provides value to the sector. Can we afford not to use it?
This report is an effort to begin to synthesize the evidence available under the JISC digitisation and eContent programmes to better understand the patterns of usage of digitised collections in research and teaching, in the UK and beyond. JISC has invested heavily in eContent and digitisation, funding dozens of projects of varying size since 2004. However, until recently, the value of these efforts has been mostly either taken as given, or asserted via anecdote. By drawing on evidence of the various impacts of twelve digitised resources, we can begin to build a base of evidence that moves beyond anecdotal evidence to a more empirically-based understanding on a variety of impacts that have been measured by qualitative and quantitative methods.
At the event a full room with about 100 participants heard Dr. Eric Meyer and his colleague Dr. Kathryn Eccles summarise the main finding of the report and introduce the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR), with summaries of the case studies being provided by contributors to the report.
As described recently I also spoke at this event and gave a talk on Evidence, Impact, Value: Metrics for Understanding Personal and Institutional Use of the Social Web. In the introduction I explained how my talk would discuss the role of Social Media in enhancing access to not only digital content but also physical resources (such as the workshop itself) and intangible objects (such as the ideas presented at such events). I explained how I had proposed a Twitter hashtag for the event (“#oiiimpacts11″ was chosen) and created a TwapperKeeper archive for tweets related to the event. I then showed the Summarizr statistics which can be used to provide evidence of how Twitter is being used at the event. Despite the relatively small numbers using Twitter (which does not appear to be widely used by those working in digital humanities) it was interesting to note that there were 23 tweets which provided links to a blog post which announced the launch of the report and a further 14 tweets (split between two URLs) which linked directly to the report. In addition the statistics for the bit.ly URL to the report shows that at the time of writing there have been 79 accesses to the report via the bit.ly link with 62 access taking place on the day the report was launched. We can also see the comments made in the tweets which enables us to see the initial announcement (made by the oiioxford Twitter account) and how subsequent tweets commented on the report:
The_archive: Interesting report on mpacts of digital #archives RT @oiioxford: Digital Impacts Report released today http://bit.ly/jHFesq #oiiimpacts11
hannerl: RT @The_archive: Interesting report on mpacts of digital #archives RT @oiioxford: Digital Impacts Report released today http://bit.ly/jHFesq #oiiimpacts11
The workshop, and the report, focussed on best practices for synthesing evidence of the impact of digital resources. It strikes me that there is also a need to share best practices on ways of gathering evidence of the impact of events and reports. Perhaps part of the process for organising such events should be in planning how social media can be used to both enhance impact and measure the impact. Twitter hashtags and use of bit.ly links may be useful tools to use – and in addition perhaps, as I suggested recently, making use of Slideshare for speakers slides might also be useful. Indeed looking at the slides used by Ewan McIntosh in his talk on “Unleashing The Tribe: small passionate communities” at UKOLN’s IWMW 2008 event I find that there have been 25,941 views of the slides and other slideshows used at the event having been viewed by between 2,00 and 21,000 times. Perhaps there is an opportunity for further examples to be provided in the Analytics section of the
Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR).
On Thursday I attended another excellent Eduserv Symposium event. I enjoyed last year’s event on “The Mobile University” – although the Web site itself and the various presentations seem to have disappeared from the original location so I’m reliant on blog posts, such as Mike’ Jones’ Fairly Positive blog to remind me of the details. (Update last year’s Web site was moved so although many report’s on last year’s event will have broken links, the Web site is still available).
This year’s event was on “ Virtualisation and the Cloud: Realising the benefits of shared infrastructure” and once again Andy Powell and colleagues did a great job in providing a fascinating series of talks at an excellent venue and, from all accounts, a great experience for the remote audience viewing the live video stream and participating in discussions using the #esym11 Twitter hashtag.
It struck me during the day that the discussions we were hearing about development of Cloud Services for UK higher educational institutions and the question “Do Universities want to be providers or consumers of Cloud Services?” reflected similar issues related to institutional and national provision of services and sectoral development of services versus procurement of services developed elsewhere which have surfaced repeatedly within the sector for several decades.
I raised this issue during the day in the context of procurement policies for mainframe computers during, I think, the 1970s when UK Universities were ‘encouraged’ to purchase ICL mainframes (this was, of course, when ICL was a British computer manufacturer, and before it was purchased by Fujitsu and before it developed the ICL Perq workstation). I heard stories that some Universities chose to break rank and purchase mainframes from other manufacturers – although reasons for doing this were not only to exploit the benefits of scale provided by embracing the commercial sector but also to exploit operating system environment developed within an educational environment (by which I mean MTS, the Michigan Terminal System which I remember using as a research students at Newcastle University in the late 1970s).
The suggestions about development of a small number of solutions within the sector also reminded me of the experiences of the MAC initiative, which sought to harmonise MIS systems around two (or three?) families of solutions. This was described in an article on “ Theory and Practice of the Virtual University” published in Ariadne as “the ill-fated UK University Funding Council ‘MAC’ initiative ” (let me add that there doesn’t seem to be an article about the MAC Initiative available in Wikipedia, which I fund unfortunate as it means that it is not easy to unearth details about this activity and learn lessons about what went wrong).
The experiences of mainframe procurement policies during the 1960s and 70s and the MAC Initiative of course took place at a time prior to the importance of networked services and in which policies and sectoral cultures reflected the UK’s environment. During Armando Fox’s reflections on use of Cloud services at UC Berkeley it struck me that the story he told reflected a US perspective in which national solutions would not be considered in the way that they may be in the UK, with our background of national organisations dating back to the Computer Board and funding regimes and national strategies which have been coordinated by organisations such as the JISC.
I feel that we need to reflect on lessons of IT developments in the past in order that we don’t repeat mistakes which have been made. Looking at the notes of the symposium which Chris Sexton made it does seem to be that there are a number of interesting questions and differing approaches which need to be considered in more detail:
Simon Wardley’s opening plenary talk highlighted issues such as risks and benefits and the need for institutions to have “a willingness to adopt new models“.
Kenji Takeda from the University of Southampton reported on work at the University of Southampton: “in the short term they included developing an institutional data repository and develop a scaleable business model“.
Terence Harmer, from the Belfast eScience Centre (BeSC) an alternative approach to use of Cloud Services: “The BeSC is entirely self funding, don’t use shared resources within the University infrastructure. They have no internal infrastructure for mail, calendars, chat rooms, and all project shared services have migrated to utility resources. They are in the business of turning internal kit off. Users are not interested in kit, but capabilities. They buy capacity and storage on demand, and play the market.“
Armando Fox, in the closing plenary talk described how at UC Berkely “they had moved their services to Amazon’s EC2 in 2008, and since then have spent $350,000 on amazon web services. That’s about 1/3 of a PhD student a month. It’s allowed them to carry out many experiments, have large scale storage and carry out cloud programming“.
I think it is clear that The Cloud isn’t the silver bullet which funders may hope will provide a simple way of gaining efficiency gains across the sector. I am pleased that the Eduserv Symposium helped to identify some of the different approaches which are being developed – even if we didn’t really reach any agreement on what solutions may be most appropriate for the sector.
On 21-22 June 2011 UKOLN’s DevCSI project is organised the #a11y hackspace event, which is described as “A two day workshop bringing developers, accessibility (a11y) users and experts together to hack on ideas, prototypes and mashups, while exploring the challenges in providing usable accessibility“.
It seems to be that this event could provide an ideal opportunity for developers with an interest in accessibility to explore solutions and approaches which could be used in the context of the BS 8878 Code of Practice on Web accessibility (which is summarised on the AbilityNet Web site).
In a post on Web Accessibility, Institutional Repositories and BS 8878 I have previously described how the 16 steps defined in BS 8878 could be applied in the context of defining the accessibility policies and processes for enhancing the accessibility of institutional repositories. One of the steps is to “Assure the Web products accessibility through production (i.e. at all stages)“. I suggested that this could be addressed by use of tools to monitor the extent to which PDFs hosted in institutional repositories are conforming with accessibility guidelines for PDFs. This suggestion was based on a paper on ”Supporting PDF accessibility evaluation: Early results from the FixRep project” which I described in a blog post last year. Might there be an opportunity for developers to build on this initial work, I wonder?
If you have other suggestions which could be addressed at the hackday note that a wiki has been set up. Also note that the event is free to attend and the online booking form is open for bookings.
Later today if my 3 minute talk is selected I’ll be giving my thoughts on education at the #purposedpsi event in Sheffield. Purpos/ed is “a non-partisan, location-independent organization aiming to kickstart a debate around the question: What’s the purpose of education?”. I have made my contribution on a recent post entitled “Education Will Make Us Anxious“. My brief presentation builds on this idea (which was taken from a post by Dave White) and mashes it up with Tom Barrett’s comment that “Education should be about cradling happiness”. I feel that both ideas are true – and the challenge for those of us working in the education profession is in understanding and addressing the gap.
I’d like to give acknowledgements for use of the photograph entitled “Hippie Carnival Arambol (Goa)” used on slide two which was taken by ’PeterQ‘ and is available on Flickr and the photograph used on slide three entitled “Anxious” which was taken by ‘Phoney Nickle‘ and is available on Flickr under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence. I am grateful for permission to use these images.
Script
Note also that the script for the talk is given below.
My name is Brian Kelly. I’m based at UKOLN at the University of Bath and this is my contribution to the Purpos/ed campaign on the future of education.
In his blog post on the purpose of education Tom Barrett suggested that “Education should be about cradling happiness” . Another way of putting this which we will be familiar with is that “learning should be fun”. And the fun that we can have in learning new things – which can include social learning, such as the dancing illustrated in this photograph – as well as scholarly learning need not be restricted to the learner. It can also be fun teaching.
In contrast to Tom Barratt’s comment, Dave White felt that “Education should make us anxious”. We will have all experienced feeling of anxiety whether it’s due, as in my case, to the difficulties in memorising irregular French verbs, understanding molecular chemistry or, more recently, trying to lean a new rapper sword dance.
But just as the fun aspects of learning aren’t restricted to the learner, so the feelings of anxiety will be felt by others involved in learning: the teacher wondering whether the approaches they are taking are working and whether they’ve chosen the right resources for the learner. Similarly those involved in use of technology to enhance learning may be worried whether the right technological approaches are being used. Is the Social Web, for example, really an appropriate mechanism for supporting informal learning? Was the open source VLE environment the right choice? And policy makers may secretly be anxious over changes in policies: “I’m suggesting that new approaches to learning will be more effective than those used 30 years ago – but I did OK from the old styles of learning – what if I’m wrong and the ‘back to basics’ campaigners are right? After all, I’ve little evidence of the benefits of the new approaches.”
For me, then, education is about understanding and addressing the gaps between the feeling of fun and excitement in learning something new and the feelings of anxiety which we may sometimes forget about. And let me point out that I’m not suggesting that the gap should be removed – I don’t think this is possible. Let me quote in full Dave White’s comment on anxiety:
“… education should make us anxious: anxious to discover new ways of understanding and influencing the world. It should challenge our ways of seeing and force us to question our identities and our positions.”
Learning professionals – and learning organisations – will continually strive to discover new ways of influencing learners and the learning processes. We will always be anxious. There will always be tensions. This is the challenge of the profession we have chosen.
UKOLN’s seminar programme continues on Thursday 14 April 2011. Vic Jenkins and Alex Lydiate of the e-Learning team in LTEO (Learning & Teaching Enhancement Office) with describe the JISC-funded OSTRICH (OER Sustainability through Teaching & Research Innovation Cascading across HEIs) project. As described in the abstract for the seminar:
The progress of the OSTRICH project so far at the University of Bath will be described by Vic Jenkins (Learning Technologist in the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Office). This will include highlights and challenges encountered, discussions around IPR for learning and teaching resources, and the sustainability of processes for managing the release of OERs on an institutional basis.
Alex Lydiate (Educational Software and Systems Developer) will present an overview of the design of the Drupal-based OSTRICH distributed repository and the rationale behind it. This will include an outline of the proposed strategy for representing the OSTRICH OER records on the Web.
As with previous seminars this year the event is open to others in the sector with an interest in the development of open educational resources to attend. The seminar will also be streamed live. If you would like to attend, either in person or remotely, please complete the online booking form.
Note that following the most recent UKOLN seminar there was a suggestion that we should make use of the Ustream streaming video service rather than Bambuser.
In order to familiarise myself with this service I created a brief video clip which provides an announcement about the seminar. On replying the clip (which, I should add, contains no additional information) I discovered that as well as the advertisement on flights to Australia (illustrated) there is also another advert display as a caption on the screen and a video advert is played before my video starts.
It seems that:
Ustream is free because it is ad-supported, but if you want to get rid of ads on your stream ― no problem!
Going Ad-Free on Ustream is simple. With a few easy steps, you can remove ads from your channel to fully control the viewing experience.
And whilst going ad-free may be simple, it costs from $99 per month. The use of advertisement to fund online services is something we have tended to avoid in higher education in the past. But in light of reductions in funding, I wonder if we will start to see increased use of services which contain adverts, not only in sidebar widgets but also at the start of video clips. Will this, I wonder, be regarded as an appropriate response to addressing reductions in funding?
“Data Management: International Challenges, National Infrastructure and Institutional Responses – an Australian Perspective on Data Management“
Earlier today UKOLN hosted a seminar entitled “Data Management: International Challenges, National Infrastructure and Institutional Responses – an Australian Perspective on Data Management” which was given by Dr Andrew Treloar, Director of Technology for the Australian National Data Service (ANDS).
As part of our policy on widening access to our seminars as well as those physically present at the seminar we also provided a live video stream of Andrew talk’s (using the Bambuser video streaming service), together with an accompanying stream of the PowerPoint slides (provided using the Broadcast feature in MS PowerPoint 2010).
For those who could not attend this amplified seminar we are pleased to announced that recordings of the talk is now available. Due to some technical problems these are available in three parts:
I’m a believer in the maxim that “all bugs are shallow to many eyes“. I also feel that one can learn from mistakes that others make. In order to share help other learn from my experiences I’ll describe the approaches taken and summarise ways I improvements I plan to make for future amplified events.
The intention to provide a live video stream of the seminar was announced well in advance and we used EventBrite in order to get an indication of possible numbers of remote participants. We contacted the people in advance in order to inform them of the technologies we would be using. We also asked where they were based and discovered one remote participant was based in Melbourne, Australia.
The video stream went live about 40 minutes before the start of the seminar in order to test sound levels, position of Webcam, etc. I used a RocketFish Webcam on a Macbook Air laptop – and was informed that the autofocussing was slightly distracting if I moved around too much.
Information about the live steaming was announced on Twitter and the #ukolnseminar tag was used to help identify relevant tweets. An additional chat channel was created on Chatzy which was provided in case of problems with the chat facility in Bambuser (and it turned out that this facility was used when the video stream connection went down.
My colleague Marieke Guy viewed the seminar remotely and kept me informed of how things were working from her perspective. Marieke also capture a screen image of her computer which is available on Flickr and shown here.
The display shows the live video stream created using Bambuser, the streamed PowerPoint slides together with the Chatzy chat room on the bottom left and a tweet on the top right.
It should be noted that the Bambuser video stream appeared to lose connection on a couple of occasions and the video stream had to be restarted.
Afterwards Marieke provided the following summary based on her experiences:
The sound of typing from the computer used for the stream can be distracting.
Alerts from TweetDeck can also be distracting.
Sharing the URL for the live video stream can cause confusions if the stream is restarted – it might be better to give the URL of the channel rather than a specific video stream/
It can be confusing having displays of the PowerPoint slides, a video stream, a chat facility and a Twitter client open simultaneously.
There was a time lag on video so the display of the PowerPoint slides were slightly out of synch with the audio and video (althpugh this was not a significant problem).
The hyperlinks provided in MS PowerPoint were helpful and could be used from the streamed view of the slides.
The multiple chat facilities on Bambuser and on Chatzy were confusing. There is a need to be clear if there is a preferred channel and what its purpose is.
There is a need to be clear on how remote participants should ask questions.
Bambuser can be a bit flaky – the video stream disconnected several times.
It is sometime unclear if you are watching a live video stream or a recording.
With so much happening it can be hard to concentrate on actual content.
It would be useful to be able to show a live demonstration to the remote audience.
Questions raised during the talk should be repeated so that the remote audience can hear.
This feedback has been very useful and will help to inform the approaches we will take for future amplified events. Do others have additional comments or suggestions?
This year’s Internet Librarian International conference (ILI 2011) will be held in London on 27-28 October. The call for speakers begins:
We are now in a time best characterised as the “New Normal”. The new normal isn’t just about austere budgets or the old chestnut of “doing more with less” – it’s also about new technologies. The new normal is having library patrons, users, customers and clients who know as much or more about technology than we do. It’s about partnerships and transparency, about new ways to develop and disseminate knowledge, about the increasing importance of communication skills, about opening up access to information, data, and knowledge.
What is meant by the term the ‘New Normal’ and how does it apply to in a library context? I found an article on “The Politics Of The ‘New Normal’” which was published in The Atlantic in July 2009. This states that ”About a third of Americans, 32 percent, say they are spending less now and expect to make their present habits a “new normal” of their future budgetings“. The writer, Chris Good, goes on to add “One can’t help but wonder if the “new normal” has political ramifications“.
In a library (and educational) context in addition to the obvious economic and political changes there are also technological developments which are adding to the radical changes we are seeing across the sector. But what might the implications of the ‘New Normal’ be in a Library context? Let us assume that an accompanying discussion about such implications is based on an agreement that there are significant changes which will have an impact on working practices and will challenge orthodox thinking and working practices. I should add that although the political and economic changes are undoubtedly contentious there will be other changes which many will welcome.
Focussing on the technological developments we have seen in recent years it can be argued that:
Many users now have the skills and access to technologies to find and access resources which previously were mediated by librarians.
We are seeing a decrease in the importance of finding via metadata and an increase in the importance of social discovery.
We are seeing a decrease in the importance of libraries providing access to trusted resources. Instead users now wish to access resources they find in the wild – but will need to be able to evaluate such resources.
We are seeing a decrease in an unquestioning belief in the value of libraries and librarians and a need for the sector to be able to demonstrate value and pro-actively market themselves.
The Cabinet Office has recently published the Government ICT Strategy (PDF format). The document provides many statements which, of the face of it, seem reasonable, especially for those who have been active in IT development work. For example:
“projects tend to be too big, leading to greater risk and complexity, and limiting the range of suppliers who can compete“: Yes, there is value in agile development and rapid innovation projects which JISC, for example, has been funding.
“Departments, agencies and public bodies too rarely reuse and adapt systems which are available ‘off the shelf’ or have already been commissioned by another part of government, leading to wasteful duplication“: The not-invented here syndrome we are familiar with.
“systems are too rarely interoperable“: Again we are familiar with non-interoperable silos.
A number of solutions the government is proposing will we welcomed by many:
“create a level playing field for open source software“: The JISC OSS Watch service has provided advice in this area to the HE/FE sector.
“impose compulsory open standards, starting with interoperability and security“: Many will see benefits in mandating use of open standards which can help public sector organisations from continuing to make use of proprietary formats.
Whilst there are aspects of the Government ICT Strategy which make for uncomfortable reading it does seem to me that there may be benefits in embracing new approaches which may build on experiences gained over recent years in working in a changing environment with changing user expectations and requirements.
I will be interested to see how speakers at the ILI 2011 conference will address the implications of the “New Normal”. Note that the deadline for submissions is 8 April – so if you have an interest in sharing your experiences I’d encourage you to submit a proposal. If you are not able to submit a proposal, I’d welcome suggestions on what the New Normal might mean to you – I’d especially welcome positive examples.
A post entitled UKOLN Seminar on Elluminate Open to All described how we were opening up access to UKOLN seminars in order to help to maximise their impact.
The next seminar will take place on 1 April. Dr Andrew Treloar, Director of Technology for the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), will give a seminar entitled Data Management: International Challenges, National Infrastructure and Institutional Responses – an Australian Perspective. The abstract for the seminar is given below:
This seminar will first consider the international challenges arising from the shift towards data-intensive research and the rapid uptake of instruments that produce very large data volumes. It will then consider the national approach taken in Australia in the form of the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). The seminar will present the rationale for ANDS, its different programmes, and the services that are being developed and taken up. ANDS has adopted an explicit (but not exclusive) emphasis on institutional engagement. The seminar will conclude by considering the ways in which different institutions in Australia are responding to, and engaging with, ANDS programmes. The seminar should be relevant to anyone with an interest in data management.
The seminar will start at 11 am and will be open not only to UKOLN staff and researchers and other interested parties at the University of Bath but also to the wider community. In order to help us to gauge demand if you would like to attend please use the Eventbrite system to book a free ticket.
We also intend to provide a live video stream of the talk. If you would like to view the video stream you should also use the use the Eventbrite system to book a free ticket. The URL of the video stream will be sent out nearer the event.
I was recently invited to give a staff development session on mobile devices to staff from the University of Bath Library. The title of the seminar was ”Mobile Technologies: Why Library Staff Should be Interested” and the slides I used are available on Slideshare and embedded below. As well as described how I use mobile devices (in particular the iPod Touch) the seminar also provided an ideal opportunity to demonstrate various uses of mobile technologies. This included:
A live video stream of the talk published on Bambuser (taken using Rocketfish Webcam on an Apple Macbook)
Comments on the talk were made in Bambuser. In addition discussions also took place using the #bathlib Twitter hashtag. Afterwards Storify was used to aggregate these tweets.
The point of use of these technologies was to illustrate how mobile devices can be used to most publish and view lectures (on this occasion I used a portable Apple Mac to stream the video although I have previously used an iPod Touch and a HTC Desire Android phone to do this). There was some discussion about the quality of the video and audio. I was able to ask the remote audience for their feedback and received the following comments on Twitter:
Audio good, video patchy at first but now pretty good – bit blurry but very much what you’d expect from a phone and v. acceptable #bathlib
#bathlib Video quality better now than at start of session. Beard concealing lip-synch quality
Comments made on the Bambuser channel included:
11:26 anonymous: Hi Brian! Bir jerky on the video, audio is fine. :)
11:26 working pretty well brian: Yeah a bit jerky now
11:27 itsme: video jerky audio good
11:27 lescarr: Quality of video & audio very good. It does halt sometimes.
11:27 mhawksey: audio is great, vid a bit jerky cam keeps refocusing
11:29 Jo Alcock: Audio OK – video a bit jerky (but my connection isn’t very good here)
11:30 Jo Alcock: Started watching it on iPad (through Twitter app), works well but moved to desktop now to enable chat
11:30 Nicola: As tweeted: Audio good, video patchy at first but now pretty good – bit blurry but very much what you’d expect from a phone and v. acceptable #bathlib
11:33 working pretty well brian: Video fairly patchy – Mahendra, Audio ok
You can judged for yourself how good the video and audio were by viewing a recording of the video. It should be noted that the quality of the audio was the most important aspect with the video helping to provide a content to the slides being displayed.
During the talk I mentioned how such lightweight video and audio streaming devices (and video recording devices such as a Flip camera) can help to enhance the benefits of such staff development courses. I described how members of staff at the University of Bath Library who were unable to attend will be able to view the video. But in addition making such resources publicly available can help to enhance the ROI associated with the preparation and delivery of such courses. As can be seen from the accompanying image there have so far been 62 views of the talk (of which 40 were of the live video stream). As @annindk (Ann Priestly, an information professional currently working in Denmark) commented:
Watched yr seminar over lunch – thanks! Quality just fine, thinking ROI must be good for these quick sessions
The question of costs and ROI arose during the discussions after the presentation. ”What are the costs in making use of such technologies and can the investment be demonstrated to provide benefits?” was how I interpreted one question I received. Following a show of hands it appeared that everyone in the room (apart from possibly one person) had a phone which contained a camera. So we will probably find that the capital costs in the purchase of mobile devices has already been paid for and as phones are upgraded their functionality will continue to be enhanced. So rather than having to be able to justify the costs of centralised provision of, say, video recording systems in lecture theatres I suggested that it would be more appropriate to explore a bottom-up approaches, with individuals taking responsibility for recording themselves or their colleagues. A post on the DMU Mashed Library blog picked up on this idea:
One interesting point that came out was Brian’s description of people tweeting their comments on attending conferences to a wider (twitter reading) audience: Can this really be seen as engaging in support for the Big Society? I guess I was consciously doing this from Eduserv’s ‘Work Smarter, not Harder’ workshops #oa11.
My suggestion that taking responsibility for making resources available beyond their immediate target audience could be regarded as a form of the ‘Big Society’ was slightly tongue-in-cheek. But surely if one can provide materials which will be of benefit to others at little additional cost or effort, we should be looking to do this? And as there were about 25 people in the seminar but 40 people watching the live video stream, can’t this be regarded as providing additional ROI?
As described in a recent post yesterday Marieke Guy and I facilitated a workshop session on “Amplified Events: What? Why? How?” at the JISC 2011 Conference. This was a very appropriate session for the conference in light of the emphasis that was given by the conference organisers on the amplification of the opening plenary session and the ongoing amplification during the rest of the day. The importance of Twitter to the event amplification can be gauged from the Summarizr statistics. At the time of writing there have been a total of 2,610 tweets with the #JISC11 event hashtag, from 544 Twitter users who have included 188 hashtags in their tweets and 349 URLs.
Others will be writing reports on the conference – with the first conference summary being published by Chris Sexton. I sat next to Chris in the opening session as she wrote her summary of the opening session on her iPad using the iPad virtual keyboard. This post was published at 11.39am, 39 minutes after the first session had finished. To those who feel that using a computer during a talk is rude and means you are note concentrating on what the speaker is saying I think Chris’s post demonstrates that this need not be the case. Chris also published two additional posts: one on the Clouds and clouds and feeling strange session and one on the two sessions in the afternoon: Innovation and Amplification.
Chris’s final post gave her thoughts on our Amplified Events session. In this post I will give some further thoughts on the issues raised during the session and some general points on the amplification of the JISC conference. I won’t, however, go into details of the talks given at the session as the three sets of slides were published in advance and embedded in the previous post. In addition my colleague Marieke Guy used by iPod Touch to record a video of the opening talk which is now available (in two parts) on YouTube and embedded below.
Curating Conference Tweets
The first think to say is that the tweets related to the session have been curated in a Storify archive. I used Storify to curate tweets which contained both the “#jisc11″ conference hashtag and the “#amp” hashtag I proposed to identify tweets related to the session. This will, however, have missed tweets which did not contain this set of tags. It was interesting to see from the Summarizr statistics the list of the top 10 tweeted hashtags: #jisc11 (2,449 tweets), #amp (89), #jiscdigital (41), #jiscassess (40), #mediasite (38), #ocstories (31), #ukoer (29), #jiscmrd (27), #cetisbos (23) and #jisc11oer (22). The #cetisbos hashtagwas used for a session facilitated by Paul Hollins, CETIS which I attended. I had suggested to Paul that he proposed a distinct tag for the session at the start and so they chose #cetisbos with ‘bos’ standing for benefits of open standards. I suspect most of the other tags also related to the workshop topic but, as possibly can be seen from the #ukoer and #jisc11oer there may be fragmentation of use of such tags – indeed this happened in my session with four uses of the ‘#jiscamp” tag (I should add that although I suggested the tag in advance and included the two tags on the title slide of the opening talk since the slides had been submitted to JISC in advance I used an old version of the slides which didn’t include details of the hashtag).
My advice to JISC (which I mentioned to JISC events staff on a crowded train returning from Liverpool last night) would be for the conference organisers to allocate each session a short ID. At UKOLN’s IWMW 2009 and IWMW 2010 events we identified the plenary sessions #P0-#P9 and the first set of parallel session #A1-#A9 and the second set #B1-#B9. Alternatively, as suggested by Chris Gutteridge and used at Dev8D, the identifier could relate to a code for room. Whichever convention is used I think it is clear that for a large event with multiple parallel sessions there is a clear need to be able to disambiguate the session tweets.
Time Travel and “The Persistence of Memory”
In the opening talk in which I described what an amplified event is and why such approaches are important I used two metaphors: an amplified event can provide a form of time travel, so that you can go back in time and watch a talk which was given in the past. In addition, as one’s memories of an event start to fade event amplification can help to make memories more persistent, both in providing access to the discussion which happened at the time and in enabling discussions about the topics to help clarify understanding.
We had intended to provide live video streaming of the talks at the session. Unfortunately due to problems with the WiFi network (ironic, as the conference was held in the BT Conference Centre) this was not possible. As I had not brought along a Flip camera and tripod (and failed to spot a tweet which offered to let me these devices) we had to use my iPod Touch to record the opening talk. The video was split into parts one and two since halfway through the talk I went into the audience to respond to some of the questions. Although the talks given by myself and Marieke were not amplified directly we had provided access to the slides on Slideshare in advance and these provided a context for the remote audience who were reading the session tweets.
Paul Shabajee, our third facilitator, could not attend the conference for personal reasons. However Paul had provided an audio version of his PowerPoint slides on “Amplification and Rethinking Events” – so if you view the slides (available in MS PowerPoint format) you will be able to access his talk in the same way in which the attendees did.
The Amplified Events Session Tweets
Unfortunately since Marieke was occupied videoing the opening talk she was not able to keep notes of the various reasons people gave for attending the session and the issues they hoped would be addressed – and now, the following day, I find that my recollections of the issues is somewhat hazy. I can recall people asking for advice on best practices for amplifying events and for ways in which evidence of the impact and benefits of event amplification can be gathered. But despite my fading memories of the opening session I am able to view the tweets which were posted during the session and can respond to the various issues raised. This is particularly useful as, although we did not have an opportunity to discus this much at the session, ILRT and UKOLN have been funded by the JISC for the Greening Events II project which will include development of “an Events Planning Toolkit to help event organisers think through what type of event they need to hold (physical, virtual or hybrid) and then to provide assistance in the form of guidelines and technology tools with each stage in the process to enable them to reduce the negative sustainability impacts of their event“. The notes given below will help to inform the identification of the guidelines we’ll be developing.
The first series of tweets tended to provide a summary of the opening two talks by myself and Marieke. However after these talks there was a more general discussion about issues relating to event amplification.
@adamhuffman commented:
Seems to be more reluctance to have live amplification in “traditional” subjects, whereas pretty much expected at tech. events #amp #jisc11
This is confirmed by my experiences – events attended by developers and Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 folk tend to expect to be able to participate in an event’s back channel, whereas more traditional events this is not the case. However this view was challenged by @dosticen (Lorna Prescott, who was a remote participant and, in a follow-up tweet, informed us that she has “been training social reporters today to help amplify event next week, such fun“ who responded to a tweet from @joeyanne:
RT @joeyanne: … type of people who will follow remotely, likely to be “techy” people #amp #jisc11 << not true in my case, the topic is key
Perhaps there is a split in the development community between the early adopters and those who have failed to be convinced which is not necessarily reflected in other sectors? I think there is a need to develop a better understanding of perceptions across different sectors.
A participant in the session raised concerned about possible dangers:
Good Q from the room: how do you avoid amplifying too much? #amp #jisc11
A follow-up question on the problems of tweets which represented the views of the speakers generated a fair amount of discussion in the session and on Twitter with a consensus seeming to agree that it is better to get errors published openly as ‘many eyes’ can help to spot,and possibly correct, such errors:
If you’re misrepresented you do get chance to correct and engage. #jisc11 #amp
@joeyanne Quite – it’s useful for speakers to have access to the backchannel, either during or after their talk. #amp #jisc11
In her blog post Chris Sexton’s followed up on her contribution to the discussion:
Someone also commented that tweets sometimes misrepresented the speaker – said things they didn’t say, or interpreted things wrongly. Did that mean they were only half listening because they were tweeting? I would say in general no. As someone who tweets a lot during talks, I find I concentrate much more – my mind doesn’t wander as much because I’m having to listen to be able to type the tweet. I also believe that speakers sometimes misremember what they’ve said. I’ve read tweets and thought “I didn’t say that”, and then gone back and checked the video, and I did! Also, if as a speaker you are misrepresented, twitter gives you the chance to correct, explain again, and engage with the listener.
The final talk was given by Paul Shabajee who discussed some on the economic and environmental factors related to the sustainability of events. In response to a tweet from @timbuckteeth (Professor Steve Wheeler) which summarised Paul’s talk @lesleywprice commented:
RT @timbuckteeth: Will conferences reduce due to economic problems? Survival of the fittest events? #jisc11 #amp < its happening already!
In response to a request for evidence to backup this remark Lesley made the following points:
RT @timbuckteeth: Examples? No of people attending #jisc11online lots of tweets over last couple days saying cost prevented attendance (see source)
RT @timbuckteeth: not just cost of event….cost of travel, cost of accommodation and cost of time out of office…events becoming a luxury (see source)
@timbuckteeth so good value or not…and to whom? Attendees get may value, but how does that transfer back to the organisation? (see source)
@timbuckteeth …Lots of confs full of presentations and keynotes..we know this is not effective learning so why does it still happen? (see source)
Chris Sexton concluded her post by touching on such environmental and economic issues and the importance of engaging with the amplification of events:
Very good session to end on, and I’m a great believer in amplified events – the concept can be extended to any event, including meetings – doesn’t just have to be conferences. With the need to reduce our carbon footprint and travel less I think it it will become more the norm.
The Resources Used
For me the important part of the session was the discussion summarised above. However I still feel there is a tweet for content around which a discussion can be held. The following resources were used in the session.
Tomorrow (Tuesday 15 March 2011) myself, my colleague Marieke Guy and Paul Shabajee from ILRT, University of Bristol will be facilitating a workshop session on “Amplified Events, Seminars, Conferences, …: What? Why? How?” at the JISC 2011 conference. This session will review UKOLN experiences in the provision of amplified events together with the experiences of the Greening Events project funded by the JISC and provided by staff at ILRT.
The workshop session is the first joint event by UKOLN and ILRT which is being carried out as part of the Greening Events II project in which UKOLN is supporting ILRT in this follow-up project. The session will support one of the main deliverables of the project which is:
An Events Planning Toolkit to help event organisers think through what type of event they need to hold (physical, virtual or hybrid) and then to provide assistance in the form of guidelines and technology tools with each stage in the process to enable them to reduce the negative sustainability impacts of their event.
We hope that the participants will provide feedback on the type of guidance and tools which will be needed when providing amplified (hybrid) or virtual events.
It would seem appropriate that a session on amplified events should itself be amplified. Although a WiFi network will be available at the conference we do not know how usable this will be of if there will be any barriers (such as firewalls) which would inhibit the amplification of the session. However if possible we will try and make the various resources available and also stream a video of the session.
Also note that, inspired by a suggestion from Cameron Neylon, the slides which provide an introduction to the session include a set of icons which make it clear that permission for amplification of the session has been granted. This is an illustration of a guideline which we will be proposing for those who wish to organise an amplified event – and we will be looking for feedback (from the participants at the session and readers of this post) as to whether you feel that this is a useful approach to adopt.
The session will take place from 15.00-16.00 on Tuesday. I will try to update this page with a link to information about the amplification of the session. I will also tweet details from my @briankelly account. Note the hashtag for the JISC 2011 conference is #JISC11 and in the absence of any official tags for the workshop sessions I suggest that the #amp tag is used to refer to tweets associated with the session.
As described in a recent post this year UKOLN is opening up access to its seminar programme to other staff and researchers at the University of Bath and the wider community. We are pleased to announce the first international speaker of the year: Professor Melius Weideman, Head of Department in the Faculty of Informatics and Design, Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town, South Africa. Professor Weideman will deliver a seminar on “Website Design – Down with Technicalities, Up with the User and Crawler” which will be held in the University Library at the University of Bath from 2-4 pm on Monday 21st February.
A small number of places are available for this seminar to those involved in the provision, management and promotion of Web services. An Eventbrite booking form is available for those who wish to reserve a free place. Details of the seminar are given below.
About The Seminar
Title: Website Design – Down with Technicalities, Up with the User and Crawler
Speaker: Professor Weideman, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa
Location: Level 4 meeting room, Library, University of Bath, BA2 7AY
Date and Time: Monday 21st February 2011 from 2-4 pm.
Further Information
The aim of this seminar is to provide the attendee with a holistic and practical view of website design, as seen from both the user and the search engine crawler side. Some of the outcomes include:
The attendees should be able to evaluate the website usability of a given website, while identifying and criticizing the important aspects of user-centred design.
The attendees should be able to evaluate the website visibility of a given website.
Target Audience
The target audience includes any person who has an interest in improving the usability, general functioning and the visibility to crawlers of a website. This could be members of institutional Web management team, Web developers, researchers and academics, CIOs and those involved in Web-based promotional and outreach activities.
Who Can Attend?
The seminar is open to UKOLN members of staff. In addition a limited number of places are available to members of Web management teams, marketing and outreach staff and researchers at the University of Bath and other HEIs.
Abstract
The speaker will attempt to merge the (sometimes clashing) demands of website visibility with human usability and the logic flow of websites. Through both theory sessions and short demos, the elements of websites contributing to the positive and negative sides of these three issues will be explored. Practical application rather than Internet programming technologies will be covered. The emphasis will be on understanding and identifying the contributing factors in a given website and on the evaluation of a website from these two perspectives.
Biographical Details
Melius Weideman is currently a Head of Department in the Faculty of Informatics and Design, Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town. After working in the electronics and computer industry, he joined the academe in 1984.
His research interests were initially focussed on computer viruses, but after 1994 the Internet, and specifically search engines started fascinating him.
He graduated with a Doctorate in Information Science from the University of Cape Town in 2001. Numerous of his publications have seen the light since the on topics including website visibility and usability, search engines and information retrieval. He published an academic book in 2009, titled: “Website Visibility: The theory and practice of improving rankings”.
This is the UK Web Focus blog, written by Brian Kelly, UKOLN. UKOLN is a national centre of expertise in digital information management, based at the University of Bath. UKOLN is funded by the JISC.
This year’s theme is “Embedding Innovation“. At the IWMW 2010 we explored the theme of The Web in Turbulent Times and last year we described institutional approaches for Responding to Change. Now, after having absorbed the implications of reductions in funding and begun the processes of new approaches to delivering services we now wish to explore ways in which embed changes related to new working practices and the rapidly changing technical environment and user expectations, especially from students who will be paying significant amounts of money to attend University.
Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) has already 
My colleague Marieke Guy viewed the seminar remotely and kept me informed of how things were working from her perspective. Marieke also capture a screen image of her computer which is 
