The JISC SIS Landscape Study

The JISC is funding a landscape study on the UK HE sector use of content, communication and social networking services developed by commercial companies (or, perhaps more accurately, outside of the JISC sector).

As we know although JISC has developed a number of services specifically for use within the UK higher and further education sector (e.g. Jorum, JISCmail, etc.) people within the sector are increasingly using services developed outside the sector, either in addition to – or in some cases instead of – JISC-provided services.

Since evidence of this usage is fragmented and often anecdotal, the JISC SIS Landscape study aims to provide a snapshot of the current situation in the UK.

My colleagues Ann Chapman and Rosemary Russell are leading this work and have set up the JISC SIS Landscape Study blog to facilitate their work. We welcome  contributions to this blog in order to collate evidence on how such services are being used within the sector. Please note that JISC are primarily interested in use of such services within the UK higher and further education sectors. If you are outside this sector, feel free to contribute but please make it clear in  your comments the sector you work or study in.

Who’ll Last Longer – Gordon or Google?

On Friday I gave a talk on Benefits of the Social Web at the Association of Independent Museum’s (AIM) annual conference. In the subsequent workshop sessions the issue of the sustainability of the services provided by companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr was raised. In response I asked “Which do you think is likely to be more sustainable – Gordon Brown or Google?” And that was a question I asked before I heard Friday’s announcement that DIUS (Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills) was no more, being replaced by DBIS (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills).

Now the question of the sustainability of instiuional services is something I’ve raised previously, ever since the Guardian had a front page article on the Secret List of Universities Facing Collapse, which I described in a post entitled “Universities, Not Facebook, May Be Facing Collapse“.

But this news item (which the Guardian subsequently admitted was inacurate) was concerned with higher educational institutions which were in financial difficulties. The demise of DIUS made lead us to the situation in which well-regarded bodies and initiatives cease to be funded due to political manouvering in Westminster, Matt Jukes, whilst admitting that he is “no expert on the comings and goings in Westminster” goes on to add that “I really don’t see how this can be anything but bad news for FE and HE“. I would agree with this – as, it would seem, would many people I know on Twitter who sharing similar misgivings since the announcement on Friday. Indeed Andy Powell created a Wordle map of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skill press release which formed the basis of discussion on the lack of  any mention of learning and the emphasis on skills and the economy.

And such concerns shoudn’t be restricted to the higher education sector. I suspect we’ll see other significant changes which affect public sector organisations such as libraries, museums and archives, either before or after the election.

Shouldn’t we now be including the dangers that our funding bodies and government quangos won’t be around for very much longer in our risk assessments and scenario planning exercises?  And just as IBM has lived through the rise and fall of several generations of governments and government policies, might not Google provide a level of stability amid the current uncertainies in the government?

Reflections on eLib and Other National Digital Library Programmes

I have been invited to give a talk at the CILIPS Annual Conference 2009 on “Inspiring Excellence: Yourself, Your Service, Our Future” which will take place in Peebles on 1-3^rd June 2009.

I have been invited to give a talk  in a session on “How Far Have We Come?” and the draft title of my talk is “From eLib to NOF-digi and Beyond“. In the talk I’ll give my thoughts on a number of national digital library development programmes which I have had some invovement with: namely eLib, DNER (which was subsequently renamed the JISC Information Environment) and the NOF-digitise programme.

Rather than looking at the outputs of such programmes I’ll  be exploring the technical guidelines which funded projects were expected to follow. This will include a review of the standards documents developed to support these programmes and some of the important architectural decisions which had an influence across a range of projects. I’ll also explore the things I feel we got write – and also the things we missed or were late in adopting. The intention is to try to inform large-scale initiatives in the future by learning from our successes and failures.

I’ll write a number of blog posts in which I’ll describe my thoughts prior to writing the presentation. And I’d welcome comments from people who may have been involved in these programmes or have views and opinions they would like to share.

Critical Friends, Friendly Critics and Hostile Opponents

I recently wrote a blog post on We Need More Critical Friends! and have made this point in several of my recent talks on A Risks and Opportunities Framework For Archives 2.0 and Time To Stop Doing and Start Thinking: A Framework For Exploiting Web 2.0 Services and in a workshop I facilitated at the Museums and the Web 2009 conference on Openness in the Cloud.

In recently discussions with my colleague Paul Walk Paul has suggested that there is a need to differentiate between Critical Friends and Friendly Critics and I think this is a useful distinction. In the real world the critical friend is the person who would be honest about a response to a question such as “Does my bum look big in this?“  But the friendship would mean that this response would be given in private and not in a public space. The friendly critic, in contrast, might be someone who is willing to be critical in public, but would not do so in a way which is rude or undermines confidence.

Comments in response to my blog post by Pete Johnston and Mia Ridge made similar points arguing that “our choice of style and language matters – a lot” and “communication has to be both appropriately private and timely“.

But Mia goes on to conclude “That said, I’m not sure what happens when you raise concerns privately and don’t get an acknowledgement or other response“. And this is a legitimate concern to raise. What happens in one’s concerns are ignored? And in the context of services provided bu public sector funding don’t we all, as citizens,  tax-payers and, possibly users, have responsibilities to raise concerns which we have.   After all, aren’t we correct in raising objections to a wide range of mistakes which the Government has made? Weren’t we right in our objections to the Iraq war, despite being told that the Government had evidence of ownership of weapons of mass destruction and the ability to launch an attack within 45 minutes?

Of course there are huge differences between declaring wars and engaging in IT development work! But if we are in favour of openness and transparency in our development work this tension between open and closed criticisms is something which needs to be addressed.

In discussions I had at the Museums and the Web 2009 conference there was an understanding of the need for projects to welcome feedback, especially in the current environment we find ourselves in in which there  is an increasing diversity of approaches to developments. But there is also a need for critics to appreciate the complexities of a specific development environment, aspects of which will not always be appreciated by the remote observer.

Based on the discussions I had will various people at the conference and my suggestion in the final session at the MW2009 that “We need more formal approaches for structuring feedback to the diversity of approaches to development work which can help to de-personalise criticisms” I have produced a diagram which is embedded in this post  which provides an initial attempt at providing a structure approach for gaining feedback.

The diagram acknowledges that there will be areas (such as policies, the local environment, sensitivities and levels of resources) within which a development project will have to work. Concerns about such issues are likely to be out-of-scope for Critical Friends. This should help to scope the areas in which input, comments and concerns can be raised and which should be able to be acted upon. The development project will need to provide an infrastructure for engaging with a Critical Friends community. We are finding in some areas of the JISC development sector that a Critical Friends approach is becoming a formal part of a bidding process. However it is likely that in many any cases it may not be possible to adopt such a formal approach. Perhaps then it is the responsibility of the the project team to open up their development processes, perhaps by making use of a blog for use by the developers to describe their development plans and decisions and any complications which may not be apparent to others, ideally at an early stage in the development process. This, I think, reflects the approaches take by the COPAC development team in their COPAC development blog which, for example, described back in August 2008, the reasons why they removed and then reinstated links to Google Book following feedback from “a vociferous few who questioned why Copac would give Google ‘personal data’ about them as users“.  As I wrote back in November 2008 “raising these issues in an open fashion is to be applauded“.

Our IT development work does need to have a reviewing process and I feel that we should be pro-active in seeking ways of opening up such processes. Let’s be aware of sensitivities, but let’s not use that as an excuse for being closed. And if there is a failure to open up feedback to development ideas remember that this may leave the concerned tax-payer to act not as a friendly critic but as an unfriendly, and perhaps even hostile, opponent.

I Won’t Be Censored!

Stephen Downes recently published a blog post entitled “Lessons From Slidesharegate” which began “Brian Kelly wrote, in a post he later deleted“. In his blog post Stephen described some of his concerns regarding Slideshare and concluded by “wondering why Kelly deleted his Slideboom post“.

The answer to that is simple – I’d accidentally published the post prematurely, as I wanted to see if Slideshare published their comments on “Slidesharegate” before describing how I was evaluating alternatives to Slideshare.

No big deal – but I did wonder whether Stephen (or readers of his blog) had thought that I had deleted the blog post, perhaps having been ‘got at’ by Slideshare. The answer is no, there is no conspiracy. But could this happen?

Well as we have seen, once a blog post is published it is “out there” – and even if I delete the original there will be copies in people’s RSS readers and blog aggregators. And attempting to delete a blog post may well result in drawing people’s attention to it with people wondering, perhaps, if the post has been censored,

So I know that deleting a post once it has been published can be fraught with possible dangers. So if I publish a post and am subsequently asked to delete it, I can point to this post. Of course this also means that if I’m embarrassed about something I’ve written it will be difficult for me to erase it from public view. But that’s something I’m prepared to accept.

And I can’t help but think that the former Downing Street adviser Damian McBride should have been aware of the difficulties of deleting copies of digital resources once they have been published.

How Many Publishers Does It Take To Change a Light Bulb?

“Submit Comments By Easter Monday”

I’m feeling a bit grumpy. On Wednesday night while listening to some excellent live music at The Bell, Bath I checked my email in the interval. There was an email from a publisher with the final corrections for an accessibility paper which had been accepted for publication. The email message give the blunt instructions:

“Please approve these proofs, or return any corrections by 13 Apr 2009. Failure to do so may result in delay of your publication, reallocation to a later issue, or review and approval of your article by the journal’s Editor-in-Chief.”

That’s right on Wednesday 8 April at 21:50 I received an email telling me my updates had to be submitted by Monday – that’s Easter Monday. And today (Good Friday) I’m in a cyber cafe in London sorting out the corrections before heading off the the Museums and the Web 2009 conference.

The email message (which was sent from India) also contained the stark warning:

PLEASE NOTE: The CATS system only supports Internet Explorer versions 5.5 and up, or Firefox 1.0 browser software. Popup blockers should be disabled. If you have any difficulty using CATS, please contact me.

And there’s me using FireFox 3.0 (not supported, it would seem).

As for the comments themselves, they were fine, asking us to supply, for example, years of publication which we had omitted for a couple of the references. But for one reference the Production Editor had requested the page numbers of one of my previous papers, and the URL of the online version of the paper had been removed. It would appear that the publishers are trying to help the reader of the printed journal by providing the page number, but hindering users who wish to access the paper online. Good business for the publishers who might expect to receive additional income for requests for the journal or paper but bad news for other researchers who might wish to access such papers which are freely avaailble online.

Why Do I Bother?

Why do I bother writing peer-reviewed papers, I sometimes ask myself. In this particular case myself and David Sloan were invited to submit a paper based on an update to a paper published at the W4A 2008 conference. As I received this request when I was preparing an invited keynote presentation at the OzeWAI 2009 conference I felt this would provide an ideal opportunity to publish my updated views on Web accessibility, which I described to a small but supportive audience at the OzeWAI conference. And after I gave my talk I discussed my ideas further with two delegates who, I discovered, had similar interests regarding the complexities of Web accessibility in the context of accessibility for the Deaf and implementing best practices for Web accessibility when challenged with limited budgets and short deadlines in a Government context. As I was in the process of finalising the paper, the meeting with Lisa Herrod and Ruth Ellison provided an opportunity for me to strengthen the paper with these two case studies.

I should also add that the (anonymous) reviewer’s comments we received were invaluable, pointing out flaws in our arguments, ways in which are ideas might be misinterpretted and suggestions for how the paper could be improved. The updated version of the paper was improved greatly following these comments, so you could argue that the publishers had a role to play in enhancing the quality. But why do I suspect that the reviewer was an academic who was doing this work for free?

Look on the Bright Side

I have now submitted the corrections to the production editor and am feeling less grumpy (I started this post yesterday evening).  And to cheer myself up (and others who might have had similar problems with publishes, here’s a joke:

Q. How many publishers does it take to change a lighbulb?

A. It’s a trick question – publishers are living in the drak ages and the light bulb hasn’t been invented yet. Mind you, they’ll charge you for use of a candle if you want to read your manuscript.

Have a good Easter.

Must Institutional Repository and Open Science Software be Open Source?

“Institutional Repositories Should Be Built on Open Source Software” is one topic in “Institutional Repositories: The Great Debate“  which is being held in the current issue (April/May 2009 -PDF format) of “The Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology”.

Meanwhile over on Glyn Moody’s Open … blog an argument is being made that “Open Science Requires Open Source“. Here we read that:

“The central argument is important: that you can’t do science with closed source software, because you can’t examine its assumptions or logic (that “incomplete scientific record”). Open science demands open source.“

And who could possibly disagree?

Well I’d challenge such conclusions. I feel that we need to reflect on the over-hyping of open source software over the past decade: we should now, if you believed the hype, all be using open source office software on our desktop PCs, and those desktop machines would all be running Linux. But this doesn’t reflect the working environment for most people, with open source email clients now seemingly in need of saving.

Despite its failure to live up to the expectations of the evangelists, we are now seeing more effective use of open source software. But for me this is because open source software is now being evaluated on par with licenced software, and not because open source software is felt to have any natural advantages. I would argue, in fact, that uncritical acceptance of open source software in the past led to disillusioned end users and the ‘counter-culture’ approach adopted by some open source developers led to the software development which failed to have a community to ensure that the software was sustainable  in the long-term future.

Despite the frequently cited examples of Apache, email server software and the like, is there evidence that open source software has a significant role to play beyond the server environment?

And in cases in which open source software is growing in use, such as Open Office on cheap Netbook computers such as the Asus EEE PC, isn’t it the case that the advantages provided by such software are in avoiding licence costs  rather than in the other benefits which open source evangelists promote?  Aren’t the benefits for most users to be found inthe amntra that the software is  “free as in beer” rather than “free as in speech”?

At the JISC OSS Watch’s inaugural conference Jeremy Wray, Business Development Executive for Public Sector, IBM argued that it would be a mistake to compete in well-established markets such as office software, citing IBM’s failures in competing with Microsoft. Perhaps open source software should be positioned in more niche sectors such as institutional repositories and open science?  And yet even here I have my doubts. If we are passionate about open access to research publications and open access to scientific data, then shouldn’t we be focussed on such issues and be neutral on the production mechanisms used to develop the associated software? And the argument that you need open source software to examine the assumptions and logic is flawed – source code can be made available for inspection without it being licensed under an OSI-conformant open source licence.

Yes, use open source institutional repository software and open source open science software. But do so because the software satisfies its intended purpose and is better than proprietary alternatives and not just because it is open source. And let’s not forget the associated risks of using open source solutions: many of the more widely used open source applications are bankrolled by large IT companies which are suffering from the economic downturn. And if widely used open source solutions start to suffer from a lack of ongoing inverstment, where will that leave the more niche solutions?

Lessons From ‘Slidesharegate’

Blog posts from Phil Bradley and myself published at lunch time on 1 April 2009 where amongst the first to take Slideshare to task for the April fool’s prank. Now although a number of people felt that people should have expected such gags’s on April Fool’s Day, many others were very critical. And now Slideshare have admitted they were wrong and have just published a blog post in which they ask their users to “accept our whole-hearted apologies“.

I would agree Phil Bradley’s response to the blog post:

You’ve put this really nicely and thoughtfully. It’s going to be a harsh critic who’s still unhappy. As I said elsewhere, it’s not making the mistake, it’s how you deal with, and recover from the mistake. This makes you a bigger and better company. Thank you.

But what lessons can others learn from what by colleague Paul Walk has described as ‘Slidesharegate‘? I would like to suggest three areas in which pranksters for next year’s April Fool should give some thought to:

Don’t tamper with data: Rashmi Sinha, SlideShare’s CEO has admitted that “Statistics are sacred. (don’t mess with them, even in a prank!)”.  Concerns were expressed by many Slideshare users over the way in which their usage statistics had been artificially boosted. But as well as modifications to such data can upset the owners of the data and other users, there are also dangers that data could be reused (by screen-scraping software) and displayed in other environments. Let’s not foget that that software does not have a sense of humour and won’t be aware of April Fool pranks.

Time zones: Of course software could know that it is before midday on 1^st April. But in the global environment of the Web, somewhere it will not be April Fool’s day. I have just come across the concept of the ‘International day’, on the CSS Naked Day Web site: this event lasts for one international day, so that “to ensure that everyone’s website will be publicly nude for the entire world to see at any given time during April 9”  the day when Web site owners are encouraged to remove CSS from there Web site will technically speaking, will be correct somewhere in the world for 48 hours. But until a standards body agrees to internationalise April Fool’s day there’s a need to remember that somewhere in the world it will not be April Fool’s day (which isn’t to say that one shouldn’t carry out April Fools gags, however).

Unsolicited mail: The use of email to encourage users of a service to view an April Fool’s gag is probably a mistake, since most users are likely to read such email when ‘April Fool is past and gone’ .

Rashmi Sinha has asked for comments on his blog post. I welcome his her apology and hope that my suggestions can help the Slideshare team in deciding what to do next year. Will it be like last year’s “hoax announcement that SlideShare would not allow bullets in presentations anymore” I wonder?

We Need More Critical Friends!

My First Encounter With The Term ‘Critical Friend’

I first came across the term ‘critical friend’ when it was used to describe my colleague Paul Walk when he was interviewed at the JISC-funded Dev8D event. Shortly after the event I noticed the term being tweeted by a number of participants at an e-learning event.

The Critical Friend Network

On further investigation I found the Critical Friends Network which quotes Professor John MacBeath, Professor of Education Leadership, University of Cambridge:

“The Critical Friend is a powerful idea, perhaps because it contains an inherent tension. Friends bring a high degree of unconditional positive regard. Critics are, at first sight at least, conditional, negative and intolerant of failure.

Perhaps the critical friend comes closest to what might be regarded as ‘true friendship’ – a successful marrying of unconditional support and unconditional critique.“

The Critical Friend’s Network has been funded by the JISC Users and Innovation (U&I) Benefits Realisation programme and aims to build a community of shared effective practice for current and future JISC Programme Critical Friends. Membership of the CF Network is open to Critical Friends, JISC Programme Management and project teams as well as the HE/FE sector as a whole.

Critical Friends I’ve Encountered

The term ‘critical friends’ would seem to be self-explanatory. And I find it a valuable concept to describe, for example, the approaches myself, David Sloan and a number of other accessibility researchers and practitioners have been taking over the past four years in our criticisms of the approaches taken by WAI in the developments of guidelines to enhance the accessibility of Web resources.

Peter Murray-Rust is applying similar critical thinking in a series of blog posts on “Libraries of the Future” which will inform his talk at the ‘Libraries of the Future’ debate to be held at the Bodleian Library on 2 April 2009.

We Need More Critical Friends!

I feel we need more critical friends, especially at a time in which organisations will find funding increasingly difficult to obtain. We can see the need for such critical thinking by looking at recent history, such as the rise and fall of the UK eUniversity, from the HEFCE Press Release published in 2002 described the appointment of the senior management team for the “government-backed initiative to provide online delivery of UK higher education courses to students worldwide and to give improved access to higher education for under-represented groups of students in the UK” through to the The Real Story Behind the Failure of U.K. eUniversity (PDF) which described how “The picture behind the public failure of the UKeU is more complex, interesting and salutary than many reports would suggest“.

Frankie Roberto demonstrated how the role of a critical friend need not be resource intensive when he initiated a discussion on the MCG (Museums Computer Group) JISCMail list with the one-word question “Why?” about the launch of the Creative Spaces service by a group of museums. In the email messages  about this newly launched service, questions were raised as to whether the debate was really needed with the complexities of, for example, copyright issues being suggested as a reason why discussions on an open mailing list where not helpful. Paul Walk responded to this by saying:

So, this thread was started by Frankie Roberto asking the question, “Why?”. His approach, a simple one-word question, was criticised – unfairly I think. Implicit in Frankie’s question is a challenge – it invites someone to explain, very succinctly and convincingly what it is that that Creative Spaces (in its guise as a user-facing application) is for. I think this challenge is well made, and deserves to be answered.

Well-said Paul.  And if the general public can listen to, read about and , if they so desire, engage in discussions about complex issues such as sub-prime markets and global warming professionals in the sector should also be not allowed but encouraged to contribute to the discussions about the networked services we are seeking to develop.

UKOLN and the FE Sector

A number of years ago, following the announcement that the LSC (Learning and Skills Council) was to be a co-funder of JISC along with the various funding councils the various JISC-funded organisations set about extending their remit to provide support for Further Education (FE) colleges. I was involved, for example, in running several workshops which were organising in conjunction with JISC Regional Support Centres). However following subsequent changes in funding it was suggested to us that we need not be pro-active in engaging with the FE sector.

But recently we have been asked to provide evidence of ways in which we have engaged with the FE sector. Now although some people are uncomfortable with the notion of metrics and impact measures, I am happy to go along with this New Labour phenomenum, as am aware that the people requesting such information have no say over the policy decisions. The question for me is how to gather such evidence, especially as we had felt that there was no need to record such information.

At the recent JISC09 conference I was told that this blog is read by practitioners in the FE sector and it was suggested that the blog may also be embedded in FE college Web sites – who may read the blog without being aware of its provenance.

So if you are in the FE sector and are a regular reader of this blog , have attended any of our talks or workshops, have made use of our QA Focus or Cultural Heritagebriefing documents or have benefitted from UKOLN’s work in other ways (perhaps being influenced by our work in the area of Web accessibility, for example) then please let me know, either by leaving a comment on this post or sending an email message to b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk.

Attention – Services Unavailable!

Background

Bath University Computing Services (BUCS) is planning engineering work from 4:30 pm on Friday 27 March until 9:00 am on Monday 30^th March 2009. This means that no UKOLN Web sites or services will be available for that period. Further information is available on the BUCS Web site.

Dissemination

As a variety of UKOLN services will be unavailable over the period (which is the weekend after next) we will need to ensure that our key stakeholders are informed (including our funders, JISC and MLA) and take steps to ensure that we alert anyone who may be making use of such services over this period – and possibly afterwards, if any unexpected problems are encountered.

Before alerting the key stakeholders we needed to identify affected services. As well as the obvious Web sites on a .ukoln.ac.uk domain there are also the Web sites, such as Exploit Interactive (http://www.exploit-lib.org/) and Cultivate Interactive (http://www.cultivate-int.org/)  which, although they are hosted locally, do not have an obvious dependency on UKOLN servers.

There was also a need to identify other network services besides Web sites. Being unable to send email messages or receive incoming email may be obvious, but do we have any services which rely on automated processing of emails (such as various Listserv mailing lists we host?)  Similarly what about other networked services besides Web and email – what about any LDAP services, streaming video services, Z39.50 services, etc. , etc.? And what about the services outside of Bath which may make use of our services? Will they degrade gracefully if our servers are unavailable over the weekend or mwill such services (which are not only external to us, but we may not even know they exist) fail or timeout as they await a response from our servers?

Having (we hope!) identified the key services we need to disseminate the news of the unavailability of our services and the possible implications for other service providers who have dependencies on our services and the end user communities we need to make use of the various dissemination challenges in order to alert the various affected communities.

Clearly email has an important role to play in communication with the key stakeholders.  And we have provided an alert on UKOLN’s news service, which is also available via RSS. These are the obvious dissemination channels, but what else can we use?

In this blog post about the associated issues (which I’ll expand on in the following section) I’m also alerting readers of this blog (who may also be users of UKOLN – and Bath – services) of the scheduled downtime. And I will also use Twitter to send out an announcement about this post which will be followed by another tweet shortly before the services are brought down.

I’ve also updated the RSS feed for the QA Focus Web site and will do something similar shortly for the Exploit Interactive and Cultivate Interactive news feeds.

General Issues

For this scheduled downtime we have had time to discuss the implications and make plans for informing our users. And we’ve had useful discussions with other affected parties in the University, including the e-learning unit.  But what about the wider issues such as whether a weekend of service down-time should be regarded as acceptable, whether we should provide mechanisms for prov9ding backup services which aren’t dependent on the local network or even looking to migrate our services to external providers?

We, of course, aren’t alone in having to consider such issues. Last week there were a number of Twitter posts about service problems with a number of MIMAS services including COPAC and the Archives Hub. And although  a MIMAS news item was published when the service was restored I felt that the various tweets which were published when the services first became at risk demonstrated how Twitted can be useful in immediate feedback and also a mechanism for feedback.

Back in January 2008 I wrote a post entitled  When Web Sites Go Down which was concerned with the announcement by the University of Southampton that its Web site was down for scheduled maintenance from 2-4^th January 2008. In light of the service unavailable of well-established services hosted by prestigious institutions such as the universities of Bath, Manchester and Southampton it might be timely to ask ourselves whether educational institutions need still to be   involved in the hosting of widely used services? Wouldn’t it be better, we may ask, to leave hosting to the global organisations such as Google and Yahoo? But if that’s your view, reflect on a recent email sent out by Yahoo to users of the Yahoo Mail service:

From: “Yahoo! Mail” <noreply@email.yahoo-inc.com>

Date: 10 March 2009 23:50:43 GMT

To: Subject: Scheduled Maintenance

We are undertaking some essential, but extensive, maintenance to improve Yahoo! Mail this weekend. The maintenance is part of our ongoing efforts to give you the best Mail service we can.

Beginning the evening of Friday March 13th (PDT) you may experience problems accessing your Yahoo! Mail account. If your account is affected, it should be available again by midday on Saturday March 14th (PDT).

We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience.

Best regards,

The Yahoo! Mail team

I think we do need to keep asking such questions. But we also need to remember that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the fence. And I hope the email send by Yahoo’s support team on the 10 March about the downtime on 13-14 March wasn’t the only notification which Yahoo Mail users received!

But as well as asking ourselves the longer term question about how our services should be hosted, we still need to address the issues of service downtime (whether scheduled or not) and how we alert our users and other service providers who may be affected. Any thoughts?

The Long Tail of the Topless Swedish Model

What is the usage profile like for a typical blog post on this blog? I suspect the statistics for the post on “Are You Able?” is fairly typical (although, as I confessed recently I did pimp up this post on Twitter.

What we can see is the post was viewed by most users on the day it was published, with a steady drop after that, although there was a slight increase in the numbers of viewers on the Monday after the weekend. It was also pleasing to note that most uses have been via the syndicated RSS feed. This is good news and provides evidence that much greater use is being made of RSS readers, by readers of this blog at least.

But let’s look at another blog post to see a very different usage profile. As can be seen we again saw a peak of about 200 views  (again mostly views of the syndicated feed) on the day the post was published. But since the post was published there has been a long tail of daily views of the post and with a current total of 1,946 views on 23^rd February 2009, most of the views of this post have taken place in the weeks and months after it was published.

What’s the reason for the difference? Although it may be felt that there aren’t significant differences as, over time, the Are You Able post might have a long tail of views. I’ll address that point by concluding this post with the usage statistics for a post published around the same time as the one mentioned above. And the title of that post “Pinky and Perky and Swedish Topless Model Caught in Use as Learning Objects” might give a indication for its popularity.

Yes, you’re right. This post is so popular because of the numbers of people searching for “topless model” and “Swedish topless model“. And I’ve been caught out for the unethical approach of using an inappropriate title with the sole intention of boosting the blog’s usage figures. Well, not (quite) true in my opinion. I did have a legitimate interest in how use of such phrases could effect the amount of traffic. But I also have a need to think of new titles for blog posts (I’ve published over 500 posts, and I can’t call them all stuff I think is interesting about Twitter, Facebook, …). And I’ll continue to think of puns and word plays for the titles of the blog posts – and I know I’m not alone in this.  I will, though, try to ensure that the titles are relevant to the post (there was a photograph of a topless Swedish model included in the post) – but a post called “Britney Spears nude” purely to pull in the traffic would be inappropriate (as well as showing that I’m not up-to-date with the latest pop babe).

But what about concerns that although it may help to motivate me as the author to think up interesting titles, this can skew the usage figures may may be requested by funding agencies? My response is that there are many ways to enhance usage statistics – as I illustrated in a post on  Lies, Dammed Lies, Blog Statistics and Unexpected Spikes. So for me, if funding bodies wish to request inappropriate metrics, then that is their prerogative. But at least I’ve been open about my awareness that the usage statistics are flawed. And hopefully going public about the dangers of over-simplistic metrics will discourage the civil servants and bean-counters from mandating their use.

As I mentioned above in order to provide a meaningful comparison a graph of the usage statistics for a post on Butler Group Report on “Enterprise Web 2, published on 11^th December 2008, a week after the Swedish model post, is shown. As can be seen, after the first week the number of views dropped off sharply, confirming, I believe, the reasons for the popularity of the Swedish model post.

Now isn’t it strange that the Swedish topless model has the long tail and not Pinky and Perky? I guess she must be a mermaid.

What Are the #jiscbid Evaluators Thinking?

A few weeks ago Gráinne Conole, a professor of e-learning at the Open University, used Twitter to ask for suggestions on how to go about writing a bid for one of the forthcoming JISC calls. And, as I recently described, many useful suggestions were given – despite that fact that this was a competitive process and the suggestions were being provided in an open space.  A great example of a community working in an open fashion, I feel. And the benefits (better prepared submissions, clearer ideas of approaches to project management and dissemination described, etc.) will be beneficial to many stakeholders, including the JISC programme managers, evaluators of the proposals and, eventually, the users of the project deliverables.

But did this happen? Were the bids well-written and had they followed the guidelines? Or was marking the bids a time-consuming and difficult process for the many evaluators who were involved in marking the bids?

Well we can get an insight into the evaluators though processes by looking at the Twitter stream for tweets tagged with “jiscbids”.  I think this tag was originally developed by an informal process, although at one point Amber Thomas (JISC Programme Manager) did suggest that this should be the tag adopted for sharing thoughts on the evaluation process:

#jiscbids dons [corporate hat] i am assuming all other markers are using this hashtag to offer constructive comments on anonymised bids too

Subsequently Sam Easterby-Smith (CETIS) commented that he was:

Finding the #jiscbids tweet feed rather too fascinating… @briankelly MUST do follow up to his blog post from feb 5th – woo

I’ll not, however, discuss the details of the tweets, other than to say that having the opportunity to observe evaluators’ thoughts on the marking process should provide immensely valuable feedback to those at JISC who are responsible for managing the evaluation process. There have been discussions, for example, on whether bids which were over the maximum number of pages allowed should be automatically discarded (possibly before reaching the markers) or whether such bids should be marked down, but could still be funded it the bid is strong enough.

Having been involved in bid marking in the past it has only just struck me that  in my experience there has been very little discussions on the evaluation process itself, perhaps because once the marks are returned to JISC the programme managers will be busy comparing the responses, making final decisions, suggesting changes to proposals, etc. By the time this is all over, I suspect there will be little energy left for reflecting on the evaluation process.

So I hope that someone will find the time and energy to go through the various tweets made by the evaluators (including those which did not have a #jiscbids tag). But as well as identifying aspects of the reviewing process which can be improved, there will also be a need to consider whether the openness and informality which Twitter has provided could be in conflict with a closed reviewing process. I disagree with Mike Ellis’s view that Twitter “needs an edge, a voice, a riskiness” – in some cases this may be true, but in discussing a bidding process or, as my colleague Marieke Guy has recently commented,  in the context of discussing talks at conferences, we need to establish best practices. But I hope the best practices which emerge acknowledge the benefits which can be gained from using services such as Twitter.

Impact Of This Blog On My Publication Record

Does The “Blogging Bug” Affect Academic Publishing?

Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University, recently wrote a blog post on Blogging impacts on formal academic output in which he describes how the numbers of his published articles had declined since being “bitten by the blog bug“. He didn’t regard this as necessarily a bad thing, though, as Martin feels that “Blogging meets these needs [to share ideas and fulfill a creative urge to write] better than formal publications” and the benefits of networking, which was an important factor in submitting papers to conferences can now be achieved using online communications technologies such as blogs and micro-blogs.

My Publishing History

Martin asked if anyone else noticed a similar trend. So I checked my publication record – the figures are illustrated in the accompanying diagram.

I  started to write papers for peer-reviewed journals and conferences seriously in 2004 with four papers being published: two based on a JISC-founded QA Focus which I was the project manager of, one on standards and the fourth a short paper I co-authored with Andy Powell and Pete Johnston, then colleagues at UKOLN. Interestingly, although one of the QA Focus papers was co-authored by fellow team members the second was written jointly with staff from the University of Strathclyde, following a discussion in the pub after I gave a seminar in Glasgow.

The following year another four papers were published which cover three of my main areas of interest: Web accessibility, social networks and interoperability.  Again three of the papers were written with contacts I had made professionally but another one arose from discussions in a pub in Bath, at a Semantic Web Southwest meeting.

My most productive year for publications was 2005 with nine papers published, covering accessibility, social networking and standards. In retrospect this was the year in which I had gained the confidence that I had something worthy of publishing, the necessary writing skills, a good appreciation of the effort needed and contacts who I knew could contribute to a joint papers.

By 2006 I was able to further develop ideas on Web accessibility and standards and contribute to a short paper in a new area which I suspected would be of increasing relevance to myself and UKOLN, preservation of Web resources. A total of six paper were published that year.

The UK Web Focus blog was launch in November 2006, so during 2007 I was developing my skills in writing blog posts and responding to comments. But I still managed to publish four papers in the year, on accessibility, open standards and the first on Web 2.0 – the lead author of this latter paper, incidentally, was Mike Ellis whom I first got talking to in a pub in Leicester after the UK Museums on the Web conference.  “Let’s write a paper” was my parting shot to Mike as he left the pub – which we went on to do (and subsequently much more).

Six further papers were published in 2008, together with two contributions to books.  The papers included one on Web site preservation with fellow members of the JISC PoWR project (I was correct in 2007 when I felt this would be an important area). The final paper of the year was an invited paper which was presented at the Bridging Worlds Conference in Singapore. The co-authors for that paper included people I had met once at a workshop in Wales, had met at a conference several year’s ago but re-established informal contact through Twitter  and one person who I have met primarily via blog posts, blog comments and on Twitter.

Discussion

Preamble

The first comment I should make is that I’m not attempting to suggest that there is any equivalence in quality between my papers and Martin Weller’s. My papers, for example, include those which have been accepted by a formal peer-reviewing processes, but also include short papers, papers for which only the abstract has been reviewed and, in the final example, an invited paper for presentation at an international conference. But at least I am aware of a level of consistency across my publications.

Finding Co-Authors

Writing this post has given my an insight into the ways I have gone about the  task of discovering people to collaborate with in writing such papers (I’ve realised that, apart from the two books, there have been only two papers which I have written on my own). The approaches I have taken can be summarised as:

Initially the papers were a dissemination activity of a funded project (initially the QA Focus project) and this has continued with, for example the recent JISC PoWR project).

I had also supported the staff development of colleagues in my team at UKOLN and regarded joint authorship of papers as a way of developing writing skills and adding valuable content to their CVs.

Several of the papers were written with staff from our strategic partners – other JISC services with whom we have good links with and a desire to work with (and be seen to work with) including JISC TechDis, CETIS and OSS Watch.

But I was surprised when I did this analysis and found that significant numbers of my papers had been written with people with whom I had developed good social links. And this is even more important than I’d realised as the papers with strategic partners and project partners also reflected good social contacts with individuals within those organisations.

For me it seems that the social contacts can be important in the writing process. On a number of occasions a paper has arisen from discussions and a shared understanding which have taken place over several pints which has led to papers been written and accepted for publication.  More recently it seems that discussions based abound blog posts and on Twitter have served to support the social lubrication when a pint (or two) of real ale was not available.

Quality Issues

Discussions based on the content of blog posts supported by getting to know people on Twitter may have helped to build links with authors and potential authors, but has blogging affected the quality of the papers themselves? I feel my papers have improved in quality, although clearly this would be expected as one gains experience and gets a better understanding of the topics of the papers.

But I also feel that blogging has been beneficial to the process of writing papers. I’ve used my blog as an open notebook, recording ideas which previously I may have forgotten when it came around to writing a paper. And as the ideas have been exposed to a wide audience I have benefitted from comments I have received (and perhaps even a lack of comments which may possibly that the idea isn’t too outrageous).

And as a number of my papers have been about observing how the world is approaching particular uses of technologies (such as Web accessibility) I’ve made use of blogs and microblogs (both as an author and reader) in order to gain a better understanding of patterns of usage.

Dissemination

The dissemination aspect of the blog for my papers is self-evident. For papers presented at conferences I normally publish something on this blog. Over the past six months of so I have also recorded my talk on video, providing an additional dimension for those who prefer the more chatty explanation of the ideas to the more formal prose of the scholarly publication.

Conclusions

Returning to the question posed by Marin Weller “Does the ‘Blogging Bug’ Affect Academic Publishing?” I would say it does. But for me, unlike Martin, I feel it has enhanced the quality of my publications, enhanced awareness of the papers and the ideas they have explored and widened my circle of peers with whom I collaborate with.

And although I recognise that thing may be different in other disciplines and for people with different working styles and organisational priorities (e.g. the RAE) for me blogging and engaging with blogs (reading other blogs and commenting on them) is now an essential part of my paper-writing process.

“Slowly, One By One, The Stars Were Going Out”

I recently asked on Twitter “Who remembers the SciFi short story ‘Slowly, one by one, the stars were going out’?” I went on to add “It’s happening with Twitter profile pictures“.

It turned out that this came from Arthur C Clark’s short story “The Nine Billion Names of God, although I’d misremembered the final sentence which, according to the entry in Wikipedia, actually read “overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out“.

The reason many people are blacking out their profile image  is to express support for the New Zealand Internet Blackout campaign. This campaign, which has successfully made use of a number of social networking services (and not just Twitter) in a viral fashion to protest against a new law in New Zealand – the Guilt Upon Accusation law ‘Section 92A’. As described in a post on the Read Write Webblog “this law may have major implications for Internet users in NZ, because it calls for internet disconnection “based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny.“

The use of social networking services as a way of exploiting the network effects in protests against political decisions which seek to impose restrictions on Internet services is not restricted to just New Zealand. I was surprised to learn recently that in Australia, as described on the No Clean Feed Web site: “The Australian Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers [ISPs] to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and slow down Internet access“.  Regional protests, such as the No Clean Feed Canberra rally held in December 2008 made use of  Facebook event page. to provide details of the rally (with an alternate page provided for those who could not/would not access Facebook).

Now I haven’t blacked out my Twitter (or Facebook) profile, although I would agree that the proposed developments (in Australia as well as New Zealand) are to be regretted. I’ve chosen not to do this as I prefer to reserve any protests I may wish to make to something I feel more strongly about – and rationing such protests should enhance the impact of any campaigns which I may chose to support. I also find that blacked out profile pictures is reducing the usefulness of Twitter, as it is more difficult to see who is writing the tweets.

However that is not to say that I do not want to contribute to the protests, so I am writing this post in order to alert readers of this blog who may not be aware of the New Zealand Internet Blackout campaign (and I know that not everyone is a regular Twitter user and so may not have seen these blacked out images). I also thought it would be worth embedded this YouTube video:

Note that if you wish to join in with this campaign you’ll have to hurry as the dates of the campaign are 16-23 February 2009

Google Breaks!

There was much lively discussion from my Twitter community yesterday – and not on from the football fans whose teams were involved in a flurry of goals in the second half. Josie Fraser was one of the first to report the incident:

Google’s gone a bit mental. Every site it returns for any search comes with a ‘this site may harm your computer’ warning 2:52 PM yesterday

Phil Bradley commented seconds later:

Google malware error running wild http://tinyurl.com/akuar3 Everyone is seeing this from what I can tell. 2:54 PM yesterday

And then there was a flurry of comments from people confirming that the problem was widespread.

Now I could use this as an example of showing the benefits of Twitter when something significant happens in the world. And I suspect that when the next major incident (bombings, severe weather problems, major accidents, etc.)  occurs we’ll hear stories of how Twitter was used and we’ll have another of influx of subscribers.

But as I suspect that many readers of this blog will be aware of the benefits which Twitter can provide I’ll instead comment on the incident itself.

The official Google blog has described this incident in a post entitled “‘This site may harm your computer’ on every search result !?!?“.  The post summarised the incident:

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message “This site may harm your computer” accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

And goes on to explain what happened:

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. …

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs.

So a simple human error caused all results returned by Google to be flagged with a worrying message. Now the Google blog posts points out that the problem was quickly resolved, claiming that “the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes“.

But should this act a a wakeup call warning us of the dangers of a reliance on Web 2.0 companies?

It should be pointed out that this isn’t really a question of the ownership of the service. Does anyone really think that if a global search engine was nationalised that it would be immune to human errors? The incidents we’ve seen in recent years with government data clearly demonstrates this.

However as my colleague Paul Walk commented in an email shortly after this incident in a paper he had just submitted to the Museums and the Web conference “ I talked about distributed web services and chains of responsibility“. The Google incident would have provided a great example of such dangers, if it had only happened before he had submitted the paper!

Now Phil Bradley has already written about this incident, including a screen image of a Google search warning about the possible dangers of visiting the Goole Google site itself! But I think that I’d agree with Paul Walk that the more interesting issues are to do with the chains of responsibility, rather than a destination site which people visit, even one as popular as Google.

Google may have quickly fixed this particular problem. But we’ve not seen the end of discussions of the implications of breakdowns in cloud services. And what will this incident do for the trust people may previously have had in Google?

“Britain Faces Worst Year Since 1930s”

“Britain Faces Worst Year Since 1930s, warns IMF” screams an article on the front page of today’s Guardian.  It seems that that the International Monetary Fund has warned Britain that it will be at the bottom of the league table of major developed countries this year.

And although many will share a feeling of optimism at the recent political changes in the US, here in the UK we can’t blame Thatcher for this one.  And we can’t even blame Tony Blair – after all, who was the Chancellor of the Exchequer for all those years?

So what does this means for our networked services? What does it mean for those Web 2.0 services many of us know and love?

It now seems a long time since I used the line “People say Google may go out of business, but banks could also go out of business. But we don’t put our savings under the mattress just in case this happens “. That later evolved to “People say Google may go out of business, but, as we know, banks also go out of business. But we don’t put our savings under the mattress as we know this has happened“.  Should we now be saying “Google services have gone out of business – look at Jaiku, for example.  I’ve already moved my data to the safety of my institution.  You’re foolhardy if you don’t do likewise.“?

Well if you work at London Metropolitan University you’re probably more concerned about the sustainability of your own position and your institution rather than Britain’s economic woes.  As described on the UCU Web site “London Metropolitan University has recently had a cut of £18 million in its teaching budget and HEFCE has confirmed that it intends to ‘claw back’ £38 million in past funding as a result of inaccurate returns on student completion rates“.

But to shrug our shoulders and say “we’ll all doomed – not just economically, but also with global warning” is a defeatist attitude I don’t go along with.

I’ll be giving some thought about what I think we should be doing (in the context of  exploiting Web 2.0 service to support the aims of our institutions). But I’d welcome suggestions from others? Are any institutions making any strategic decisions in this area? After all, we were warned about the implications  for higher education last August by HEFCE’s John Selby.

Risk Management – the JISC infoNET Perspective

I’ve previously written about the need to adopt a risk management approach to the use of Web 2.0 services. This was something I started doing back in 2006, when I wrote a risk assessment page which covered use of a variety of Web 2.0 services which were used to support the IWMW 2006 event.

I’ve an interest in further developing a framework for the effective exploitation of Web 2.0 service and clearly the risks management approach should form an important part of such a framework. So I found it very useful to read  the JISC infoNET Risk Management infoKit.

As pointed out in the introduction to this document “In education, as in any other environment, you can’t decide not to take risks: that simply isn’t an option in today’s world. All of us take risks and it’s a question of which risks we take“.

So we can’t avoid risk-taking. And yet the document suggests that public-sector organisations – which will include the educational sector – tend to be very risk averse, as shown in the spectrum of attitudes to risk-taking:

There is therefore a challenge which we need to face, especially if we are seeking to be innovative. And an important aspect of this challenge will be cultural change. Now many of the early adopters of Web innovations might feel that this view of being risk adverse isn’t applicable to them. But my interest is in mainstream adoption of innovative services and this  requires a willingness to take risks associated with changes.  And the document provides examples of people who are likely to be adverse stakeholders:

• People who fear loss of their jobs
• People who will require re-training
• People who may be moved to a different department/team
• People who may be required to commit resources to the project
• People who fear loss of control over a function or resources
• People who will have to do their job in a different way
• People who will have to carry out new or additional functions
• People who will have to use a new technology

So what should the early adopters and developers do if they wish to see innovations which they feel will benefit the organisation be adopted more widely? As the document points out “At the risk of labouring a very obvious point you don’t create risks by identifying them. You are simply revealing them so that you can do something about them”.  So one thing we should be doing is being open about risks and failures (as I have done recently in describing the failure of Squirl and Pownce). But we should also be open about the failures of in-house developments and project work, too.

The JISC infoNET infoKit goes on to list five stages in its approach to risk management: risk identification; qualitative risk analysis; quantative risk analysis; risk response planning and risk monitoring and control. In further blog posts I intend to further explore approaches to risk management in a Web 2.0 context. I’d be interested to hear if anyone else is taking a similar approach within their institution.

JISC to Increase UKOLN Funding Significantly from 2009

UKOLN received a pleasing Christmas present recently, in the form of the JISC announcement of a significant increase in our funding. As described in the press release “This increase is both a mark of confidence in the work of UKOLN but also a recognition of the increasing importance of investment in a national e-infrastructure to support the UK’s global competitiveness in science, research and innovation“.

Sarah Porter, Head of Innovation, JISC commented that “UKOLN has been central to the development of JISC digital information programmes and services; it gives me great pleasure to announce this investment that will help support the sector to respond to emerging requirements for research and learning and the opportunities that new technologies offer“.

Now that’s a great start to the New Year :-) And I should acknowledge the contributions made by my colleagues at UKOLN.

A Year In The Life of IWR’s Information Professional Of The Year

It was last year on 5^th December 2007 when I reported that I had been awarded the Information World Review’s Information Professional of the Year. With this year’s winner due to be announced at the Online Information 2008 conference in the next few days I thought it would be timely to summarise what I’ve been up to during my year as holder of the award (and also to update the portrait on the blog).

It’s been a very busy year for engaging with my user communities: I’ve given 32 presentations to date (with one more presentation to come) together with 2 online presentations. As can be seen from the accompanying map, talks have been given in Montreal (a half day blog workshop and a professional forum on openness at the Museums and the Web 2008 conference), Taiwan (an invited presentation on “Library 2.0: Opportunities and Challenges” at the NDAP 2008 conference), Singapore (an invited paper on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference) and Stockholm (an invited presentation on “Realising The Potential of Web 2.0” at the Nordlib 2.0 conference), as well as many talks throughout the UK.

This year has also seen an increased amount of direct engagement with the cultural heritage sector.  I’ve run a number of day-long workshops for MLA regional agencies, as well as additional events in Scotland and Wales. These have all gone done very well – one of the Sharing Made Simple workshops for example, was rated (on 1 score of 1 to 6) 5.91 for the facilitator’s knowledge of the subject, 5.82 for engagement with the participants and had an overall rating of 5.82.

The workshops have also provided an opportunity to gain a much better insight into the ways in which Web 2.0 can be used within the cultural heritage sector and also the barriers to its effective use. This information has being stored in a wiki (as opposed to the traditional approach of licking such potentially valuable information into the walled garden of flip charts!). A task on the new year will be to synthesise this information and to make the findings more widely available.

Reflections of my work activities have also been included in two books which I contributed to this year: “Web Accessibility: Practical Advice for the Library and Information Professional” by Jenny Craven (ed.) and “Information Literacy meets Library 2.0” by Peter Godwin and Jo Parker (eds).

This year has also seen me gaining more experiences in the support of Amplified Conferences and use of networked technologies to provide distance support, with a couple of examples of participation in online conferences.

In the past 12 months I have also published 190 blog posts on the UK Web Focus blog, with additional contributions made to the JISC PoWR blog.

It has been an enjoyable 12 months in my role as Information Professional of the Year, made particularly rewarding for seeing how the benefits of Web 2.0 are now becoming more widely accepted.  As one person commented on one of the workshop I facilitated earlier this year “Brian in particular displayed a real knowledge and enthusiasm for the topic, which was infectious“. I’m looking forward to continue to inflect others with my experise and enthusiams for many year’s to come :-)

Edupunk begets Eduprog at CETIS 2008 Conference

I commented on the “Edupunk” meme a while ago. For some people this provides a useful metaphor for describes a ‘anyone can do it’ approach to e-learning developments; although others are very critical of the term (and thus provide further support for the edupunk meme, you could argue, articulating the anger which was felt in the late 1970s by Radio 2 presenters and others who felt challenged by radically new ideas!)

At the recent CETIS 2008 conference, the term “Eduprog” was coined. Lorna Campbell was the first to blog about The dawn of eduprog and, as she describes “Eduprog has spread over the twittosphere like a gold lurex cape and has already generated considerable sage discussion and chin stroking”. The term “reflects a domain that generates questionable “concept” specifications of baroque complexity (cf. FRBR, IEEE LOM) and application profiles and reports the equivalent of extend guitar solos“.

Twitter discussions on the term have included:

#eduprog much better reflects the true state of education technology- long-winded, self-indulgent, boring standards-making

“long winded and self-indulgent” or virtuoso boundary pushing redefining forms and developing new techniques?

Now some people don’t like the coining of new metaphors, but I find that the term has helped in providing an additional insight into some of the criticism we have seen recently regarding the development of overblown standards. The term itself might not catch on, but it has been useful. A point Tony Hirst made to me at the CETIS conference about the ‘edupunk’ term – and he should know, as he did create what was possibly the first edupunk video. Now is there a concept album to follow?

Launch of UKOLN’s Resources for the Culture Heritage Sector

Resources For The Cultural Heritage Sector

I’m pleased to report that an area of the UKOLN Web site dedicated to the cultural heritage sector has now been launched.

Historical Context

UKOLN has had close links with the cultural heritage sector for many years – when I joined UKOLN back in 1996 UKOLN was funded by BLRIC (British Library Research and Innovation Centre) together with the JISC. Over time this funding body changed, initially to the LIC (Library and Information Commission) and then, as the library, museums and archives sectors moved more closely linked, by Resource which was subsequently renamed MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Council).

Engagement With The Sector

UKOLN is perhaps uniquely placed to exploit its close links with the higher and further education communities, libraries (both academic and public) and museums and archives. Over the past couple of years I have become very actively involved in supporting the museums sector, having been a program committee member, speaker, workshop facilitator and chair at the Museums and the Web conferences in 2007 and 2008 and a speaker at UK Museums on the Web conferences in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007.

But perhaps more significant to the broader cultural heritage sector are the workshops we have been running which have attracted participants from across a range of museums, libraries and archives. This has included workshops held on behalf of MLA London and MLA Yorkshire and CyMAL (the Welsh equivalent of MLA). We have also run workshops for the Society of Archives in 2007 and 2008, with a workshop for the Association of Scottish Visitor Attractions to be held in November.

Many of these workshops focus on ways in which Web 2.0 can provide benefits to the cultural heritage sector, although a rather wider perspective on the digital landscape is often provided, covering additional areas such as the preservation of digital resources.

Changing Political Context

The importance for UKOLN (which is a JISC Innovation Centre) to engage in this way with the cultural heritage sector was highlighted in Elspeth Hyams’ editorial in the CILIP Update magazine (June 2008, Vol. 7, No. 6) has the byline ”In This Climate, You Have To Innovate“.  As Elspeth described (and I commented upon recently) “The age of the quiescent library or information manager or service is dead“.

The editorial went on to describe the MLA’s action plan for public libraries and reports on the MLA’s Chief Executive, Roy Clare, calls for “radical action on structure, far-sighted leadership vision and more public Private Partnerships“. The editorial concludes with the warning that “It’s not just a challenge for the academic schools, but for all of us” but also suggests that “we should use tough times as a golden opportunity to focus on the strategy – and upgrade and refresh our skills“.

I think it is clear from these comments that significant changes will be needed within the cultural heritage sector. And indeed Roy Clare has commented on the failures of previous national initiatives to deliver compelling user-focussed services. As reported in a post on the MCG JISCmail list: “Roy Clare highlighted the NOF Digitise project as an example of where we went wrong in assuming that mass digitisation and online publishing of collections would be engaging“.

The political and funding changes (it seems public sector money is now being used to fund the 2012 Olympics) are taking place at a time in which Web 2.0 approaches are steadily gaining momentum, with smaller organisations (and indeed organisations) now being able provide services which previously would have required significant amounts of funding.

The need to ensure that “engaging” digital services are provided by cultural heritage organisations underpins the workshops we have been providing. It also reflects the strategic thinking of various national bodies, including the National Library of Wales which in its Shaping the future: The Library’s strategy 2008-2009 to 2010-201 document (PDF format) states that:

We propose … Taking advantage of new online technology, including the construction of Web 2.0 services, to develop progressive ways of interacting with users. It is expected that the Library itself will provide only some specific services on its website. Instead, the intention is to promote and facilitate the use of the collections by external users, in accordance with specific guidelines.

A review of the uses of Web 2.0 services by the National Library of Wales was given in a talk by Paul Bevan at the first Sharing Made Simple: An Introduction to the Social Web workshop  – and I’m pleased to say that Paul describes this work as a co-author of an invited paper on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” which I’ll be presenting at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference in Singapore in a few weeks time.

UKOLN is well-positioned to identify such examples of best practices, make the examples available to wider audiences, encourage debate and use such case studies in the development of more general models for the sector.  In this respect our links with the higher education sector is particularly valuable, as higher eductaional institutions seem to be better positioned to make early use of innoovative new technologies and has a healthy tradition of encouraging open debate on the merits of such innovation.

Resources For The Sector

The new area of the UKOLN Web site provides access to a variety of resources on a range of issues of particular relevance to the cultural heritage sector, and brings together information previously distributed across the UKOLN Web site.

As well as providing access to the events we’ll be running another important area of the Web site is the IntroBytes area, which provides access to a range of briefing document we have produced, sometimes in conjunction with practitioners from the cultural heritage sector. These documents are used at many of the event we run, which helps to ensure that we receive feedbackon the content of the documents. It should also be noted that the documents are available under a Creative Commons licence, which permits their reuse for non-commercial purposes. This licence was chosen in order to ensure that the resources can be embedded for use within organisation in the cultureal heritage sector (and beyond).

Sustainability

We have received positive feedback on our results, as can be seen from comments provided at the recent workshops for CyMAL (which was given a rating of 5.35 out of a maximum score of 6) and MLA Yorkshire.

In order to ensure the ongoing sustainability of our work for the cultural heritage sector we are now running workshops on a cost-recovery basis for the wider sector. This has included workshops for the voluntary sector and CyMAL with additional workshops already scheduled for CyMAL and ASVA.

If anyone would be interested in organising a workshop along the lines described, feel free to get in touch.

The Markmail Service

In a recent tweet Matt Jukes alerted me to the MarkMail service. As Matt forms part of my trusted “interesting Web applications alerting services” I went to the Web site. What I found was a search interface across over 4,300 mailing lists. A search for ‘ukoln’ provided me with not only various posts containing this string, but also details of the person who made the post, the lists posted to and also, as shown, a graph of the numbers of posts over time.

Initially I felt that the graph supported my view that email is dying, but a search for a more general term, “web”, showed me that this was clearly an inappropriate conclusion to make based on this evidence.

But perhaps of more relevance is the main point that Matt made in his tweet:

just discovered http://markmail.org/would be cool if jiscmail lists were searchable here as well..

Yes it would be great if JISCMail exposed its mail archives to third party indexing services such as MarkMail. But to do that (or rather to do that effectively) would require the JISCMail mail archives to provide ‘cool’ application-independent and persistent URIs (which they don’t currently do) and allow robot software to access the resources.  Doing this will, of course, require the service to commit resources to develop work and make changes in policies.  A popular and large scale service, such as JISCMail, would only be in a position to do this if they could see tangible benefits to their user communities. I hope the example of the MarkMail service illustrates the potential benefits of opening up one’s data to third party services.  I have to admit that I find the JISCMail search interface so poor that I seldom use it.  Exposing the data to other services (whether MarkMail, Google or whatever) would enhance access to data available in the JISCMail Web archives, without JISCMail having to wait for the underlying Listserv software to conform with fundamental Web architectural principles.

Have I Got News For You

I’m sure many readers of this blog will be familiar with the Have I Got News For You TV programme. So I’d like to make my contribution. Which is the odd one out for the following: UMIST, AHDS, Lotus and Yahoo!?

For those unfamilar with this BBC programme, the convention is that the first responses are expected to be humourus, before attempting an answer. And note that there isn’t a single answer to the question.

It’s Not New Labour vs Old Labour, It’s Cato And Cicero (typos fixed)

I’ve previously suggested that there’s a need for political realism in the debates over ownership of social networks and the general direction of Web 2.0. And I’ve suggested that Old Labour is dead, and any expectations that the government will start nationalising services is being naive.

Well, I got that wrong didn’t I! However lefties in the US and Canada will probably be disappointed that the Government’s nationalisation of Northern Rock doesn’t herald a return to socialist principles – indeed even the Daily Mail acknowledges that nationalisation “is extremely rare and embarrassing for Labour“.

I think my mistake was in attempting to use political analogies which are still too relevant to many and capable of being reinterpretted in different ways.

So I was really pleased to read Martin Weller’s post on Downes vs Wiley – Cato and Cicero revisited on his Edtechie blog. As Martin describes:

Cato and Cicero both believed passionately in the same higher level goal, ie the establishment of the Roman Republic. Yet they frequently clashed about what was the best way to achieve it. In the same way I think Stephen (Downes) and David (Wiley both believe passionately in the overall aim of open education, but have differing views as to how it should be realised.

Cato was the purist, unbending and uncompromising. Cicero was the pragmatist, willing to compromise and work with a range of people to advance the republic. Cato often thought Cicero compromised too much, thus rendering his beliefs invalid. Cicero was often infuriated that Cato wouldn’t compromise and through this played in to the hands of the anti-republicans.

In his post Martin was suggesting that Stephen Downes’ objections to the Cape Town Declaration were based on the declaration’s inclusion of commercial entities, with Stephen arguing that “… the internet is already awash with really vile and intrusive commercial activity, do we have to export it too? We have the opportunity to do something really special in the world; why do we have to carve into every declaration of principle a paean to Things As They Are (and Those Who Profit From Them)?“.

Now I have to admit that, although my knowledge of Cicero and Cato is limited to having read Imperium, I have (mostly) taken a pragmatic approach to life generally and IT development in particular.

This struck me today when I read an article in CILIP Update about the inclusion of advertising leaflet in books borrowed from libraries and then returned home to find that my new passport had arrived – and a leaflet from a local estate agent was included in the letter (together with one from the NHS inviting me to join the NHS Organ Donor Register).

Now I personally don’t have any great concerns about the inclusion of adverts in library books or with my passport. Indeed if the income this generates can improve the quality of their services, then I would suggest that this is a good thing.

These particular issues, of course, aren’t about technologies. And neither, fundamentally, are the issues about ownership of social networks and use of commercially-provided services in the provision of educational and cultural heritage services (although I do acknowledge that the nature of IT can add extra complexities to the debate).

We need to recognise that the debates on the specifics of Facebook’s ownership, Bill Gates plans for Microsoft’s future role in Internet services and Rupert Murdoch’s plans for his media empire will only go so far. The Catos (Catoers, Catoists?) followers of Cato will need to convince the followers of Cicero that there vision have a realistic chance of being implemented, otherwise the debates are doomed to be endlessly repeated.