“As a result, 25,000 students and staff at the University of Westminster now use Google Apps Education Edition — saving the university £1 million in the process“.

I suggested that if the UK HE sector were to follow this approach this might result in significant savings across the sector. I did acknowledge that there were risks, but these can be addressed, especially if there was centralised coordinated activities to address legal and technical issues. I made my views on whether such a move was desirable:

In an opinion piece entitled “The one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work for higher education” published in yesterday’s issue of the Times Higher Education University of Bath vice-chancellor Glynis Breakwell argued that “universities should stop assuming that everybody has to do a bit of everything“. We need to stop assuming that we need to host commodity services such as email, I feel.

 Yesterday it appeared that such coordinated activities have taken place. As summarised in a tweet from @janetcloud:

Over 18m students and staff to benefit from faster, more secure cloud-computing following agreement between ourselves and Microsoft…

A news item on the Jisc Web site entitled Over 18 million students and staff to benefit from faster, more secure cloud-computing described how:

More than 18 million students, staff and researchers at institutions across the UK could start to benefit from a faster and more secure connection when using their institution’s cloud-based IT services, thanks to a new peering arrangement being signed today between Microsoft and Janet, the UK’s research and education network.

This new agreement enables improved access to infrastructure and application services such as websites, virtual learning environments and research projects.

and went on to explain how:

The alliance agreement also means any UK education institution can benefit from standard terms and conditions on Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity software suite Office 365, negotiated by Janet.

The press release has been picked up by publication such as Computer Weekly (“Microsoft and Janet deal brings cloud to millions of academics“), TechWeek Europe (“Microsoft Plugs Azure Cloud Data Centre Into Janet Network“), Public Technology (“Janet connects with Microsoft’s Windows Azure Cloud platform“) and Cloud Pro (“Windows Azure to power Janet education cloud“) . These initial articles are based on the press release, with little additional commentary. It will be interesting to see how this news is received more widely.

From my perspective I welcome this announcement. I am particularly please the Janet are negotiating licence arrangements on behalf of the sector. As explained in an FAQ on Cloud Services for Education Agreements:

We have managed to negotiate exclusive amendments to Microsoft’s legal documents for Office 365, and carry out due diligence on Google Apps (currently ongoing) and Office 365 for the sector as a whole. One of the universities included in the test group estimates this work could save each institution up to £20,000 so it has a significant value.

A concern I would have is that the agreement would result in a Microsoft monoculture across the sector. I would also like to see a central deal provided for institutional access to Google Apps. In addition I would welcome such sector-wide deals being negotiated for other popular Cloud services, such as Dropbox. I am aware that some institutions are wary of such services, and use data protection issues or the fact that “the data is hosted in the US” as reasons why such services are not provided within the institution. Having a trusted and well-respected organisation such as Janet to address such issues in negotiations with the service providers can be beneficial to users across the sector.

And, of course, the fact that institutions need to pay a nominal institutional fee of £500 per year may address the concerns of those who argue “If You’re Not Paying for It; You’re the Product“. But perhaps that’s too much to expect! More seriously, I’d welcome comments on whether this deal is to be welcomed or not. If you’re rather not leave a comment a poll is available below.

Note that a 46 second summary of the announcement is available on Slideshare and is embedded below.

On Friday I asked for advice on home networking. I am having some work carried out on my house, which has included converting a bedroom into an office. I currently use Powerline Ethernet to provide network access to my main PC, but realised that with other networked devices (including a wide screen TV and Blu Ray player, both of which have Ethernet ports in addition to desktop computers) I should really be thinking about including cabling to ensure that adequate and reliable bandwidth is available across my home.

In response I came across a discussion about the merits of Powerline networking (plugging a device into a mains socket) and a variety of useful links, including advice on techniques for installing such cabling.

My colleague Marieke Guy highlighted the importance of reliable home networking in a tweet in which she commented:

We have crappy cables & telephone lines all set up wrong. BB [broadband] constantly goes. Have someone coming round on Monday to rewire!

Marieke followed up the comment by herself asking for advice from her Twitter network:

Can anyone recommend any good UK suppliers of promotional materials for conferences etc. Quick turnaround & good value for money imp.

The query relates  to Marieke’s new role  as project co-ordinator with the Open Knowledge Foundation in which, as she described in a post on Redundancies and Pastures New, she will be working on their LinkedUp project supporting the adoption of open data by educational organisations and institutions.

The Home Worker’s IT (and other) Support is in the Cloud!

For both myself and Marieke we have been seeking for advice from our networks. For both of us the main network we will use for such questions will be Twitter, but we may also use other online networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

These online networks will be particularly important for myself and Marieke after we are made redundant on 31 July and are forced to leave the comfort zone of UKOLN and the University of Bath. Previously advice on networks and other technical issues would have been asked of our IT support staff, and questions about conference schwagg would have been the responsibility of our events team. But in just over two months we will no longer have access to such expertise within our host organisation – as we will no longer have a host organisation!

For both of us the online networks we have cultivated should prove valuable when we start work as self-employed consultants. Marieke already has several year’s experience of how her Ramblings of a Remote Worker blog has proved valuable in obtaining advice on home working, including use of a variety of Cloud services. The need to be able to make productive and effective use of online tools when there is no it-support email address available will be important for both of use after 31 July. Indeed as Marieke tweeted in Friday as part of the discussion about the importance of a reliable home network:

New job requires constant access as *everything* is stored in the cloud.

The advice received on home networking and sources of conference materials illustrates the importance of being part of a thriving online network, especially for those of us who will be moving from working within an institution to working from home. For us, the face-to-face connections we have with our colleagues and the informal networks we have with people we meet over coffee or at lunchtime will have less importance and the links with our online communities will grow in importance and value.

Growing Your Network

I touched on such issues when I gave a seminar for UKOLN colleagues back in December 2012. The talk, entitled Managing Your Digital Profile, highlighted the importance of professional networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter. However the slides, which are available on Slideshare) didn’t really suggest ways in which one could grow one’s professional community. In this post I’ll therefore provide six tips on use of Twitter:

• Ensure that your Twitter biography summarises your main interests and has a link to further information.
• Follow relevant hashtags and follow people who are posting tweets which are relevant to you.
• Favourite (i.e. bookmark) tweets, as that action can be visible to the Tweeter who may chose to follow you if your Twitter biography and recent tweets are of interest.
• If you are giving a talk at a conference, include your Twitter ID on your title slide. People are more likely to tweet this ID than, say, your email address. This will enable others to easily find out more about you.
• If you can help others by sending them a tweet, do so. Spending time in writing 140 characters to provide advice or support to others will demonstrate that you are willing to help others. People will be more likely to help you if they see this.
• Show your personality and not just your work interests. If you enjoyed Eurovision on Saturday night, you missed an opportunity to join in the conversation.

Who knows, the person who has added you to your Twitter network, perhaps because they too, liked Ireland’s Eurovision song, might be the person who can give you the advice you need on home working, conference schwagg or whatever advice it is you are seeking.

I should add that Marieke has written a blog post on What’s with the Wiring? in which she summarised the discussion about home networking from her perspective.

How do you assess the impact of digital content which has been published? This is a question which is very relevant in the higher education sector, where indications of success often cannot be reduced to financial indicators. It is a question which is particularly relevant to researchers who have an interest in understanding the ways in which social media can be used to maximise the impact of research papers and scholarly publications. This was a topic which was addressed recently at the UKSG 2013 conference. At the conference Mike Taylor gave a presentation on “altmetrics and the Publisher” in which he admitted the lack of consensus on the value of such approaches:

• they’re great for measuring impact in [the] diverse scholarly ecosystem
• Altmetrics are cheap gimmickry that encourage gaming the system, ie dishonesty.

A second talk entitled “altmetrics: What Are They Good For?” was given at the session by Peter Paul Groth. In his trip report Paul commented that “my main point was that altmetrics is at a stage where it can be advantageously used by scholars, projects and institutions not to rank but instead tell a story about their research“.

But there was also an awareness of the need to develop a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of altmetrics. We can see the importance of such metrics not only for researchers, but also for organisations which make extensive use of online technologies, through the example of W3C, the organisation responsible for the development of Web standards. In their recent weekly news digest they provided the following statistics:

Notably this week :

- over 900 stories about W3C on Twitter in 7 days.
- over 3000 mentions of W3C in 7 days.
- With 59840 Twitter followers, net increase of 521 followers in the past week.
- 19 posts that dlvr.it posted between Apr 14 – Apr 21 got 29.9K (+17.3%) clicks and reached 69.1K (+0.7%) connections. 

In light of my long-standing interest in metrics I felt it would be useful to explore metrics for blog posts and tweets.

Metrics For My Redundancy Blog Post

An Opportunity to Gather Evidence

Last Wednesday I noticed that on the day the “My Redundancy Letter Arrived Today” blog post was published my blog had received over 3,000 views (more than double the previous most popular daily visits). I realised that this provided an opportunity to explore one aspect of altmetrics: the impact of a blog post on a topic related to one’s professional activities. Since the post was published a week ago today this gives me an opportunity to collate the evidence using a variety of services and develop a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of such tools.

Importance of Metrics for Funders

In the past we have been asked to provide metrics related to the services we’ve provided to our funders. I recently updated the footer for blog posts, which previously included icons which facilitated ‘frictionless sharing’ to include a number of links to services which provide evidence of the extent of such sharing (although, as pointed by by Alun Hughes, who chaired the review of UKOLN and CETIS, the work of the review group was subsequently overtaken by internal changes within Jisc and the review was not concluded).

The Potential Audience for the Blog Post: TweetReach

In order to estimate the potential audience for the blog post I used the TweetReach tool to obtain estimates of the numbers of Twitter users who may have seen a tweet with a link to the blog post.

As can be seen the estimated reach at 08.30 today was 77,669, based on 50 of an estimated 145 tweets.

TweetReach also provided statistics on the size of the Twitter communities of those who have tweeted links. As can be seen had between 1,000 and 10,000 followers, followed by a significant group with between 10,000 and 100,000 followers.

TweetReach provides an indication of the total reach, with this potential reach being significant due to the numbers of Twitter users with large numbers of followers who included a link to the blog post in their tweets.

But, of course, many of the tweets will not have been seen – most experienced Twitter users will nowadays regard Twitter as a stream of information to be dipped into, and not as information which should always be processed.

The Tweeters and Retweeters: Topsy

The Topsy tool provides a greater focus on Twitter users who tweet and retweet links to the blog post (although I should add that such information is also provided by TweetReach).

From Topsy it seems that there have been 142 tweets which include links to the blog post.

As well as this headline figure, as illustrated, Topsy also provides a graph of mentions of the post over the past thirty days, as well as an archive of the tweets which contain the link.

Statistics for the Shortened URL: Bit.ly

Finally I should mentioned the statistics which are provided by the URL shortening service I use in Twitter: bit.ly.

By appending a + to a bit.ly URL you can get usage figures (by default for the past hour, but the information is also available for an extended period of time).

Looking at the statistics for https://bitly.com/17WfrgB+ (and selecting the global option) I find that there have been 1,090 clicks on the ‘bitmark’.

The bit.ly service also provides location information: over a third are from the UK; 12% from the US and since the majority (39%) are unknown this gives a long tail of other countries form which people have followed the link.

Summaries

This blog post has summarised findings from a number of Twitter analytic services which may be of interest to others who have a need to provide evidence which may help to understand the ‘impact’ of a digital resource.

However, as I have described in a post on Paradata for Online Surveys, I feel that it is important to document the survey methodology and to be open about implied assumptions as well as documenting potential pitfalls for others who may wish to replicate the findings or apply the methodology for themselves in their own context.

Blog Usage Statistics

The first potential pitfall to be aware of is that the blog usage statistics relate to the entire blog, and will include visits during the week to any of the 1,199 posts which have been published previously. The following table therefore gives the number of visits to the Redundancy blog post as well as the number of visits to the blog’s home page during the week (when the post was shown at the top of the page).

It therefore appears that there have been 6,386 views of the posts during the past week, with 1,056 views of other posts on the blog.

Referrer Statistics

How did people arrive at the blog ? Looking at the referrer traffic for the past 7 days for the entire blog we can see that Twitter and Facebook were responsible for delivering most traffic, and that these two social media service were roughly comparable.

However we need to remember that referrer traffic is only provided when a Web link is followed. If visitors arrive by following a link in an email message or dedicated Twitter client, no referrer information is provided. Aggregating the referrer views it seems that 2,043 came from an identifiable Web site, with 5,399 views of all posts during the week coming either from a non-Web source or, possibly, by an anonymous Web source (e.g. a user who visits sites using an anonymising tool).

A summary of the top three ways in which people viewed content on this Web site during the past week is summarised below.

Seemingly clear indication of the social Web in delivering traffic for, admittedly, a post with human interest. Such findings will not necessarily apply in other areas, but it seems to me that such small scale indications might be useful in identifying ‘weak signals’ which would be worth investigating further in other areas.

Does the 1-9-90 Rule Apply?

As described in Wikipedia:

In Internet culture, the 1% rule or the 90–9–1 principle (sometimes also presented as 89:10:1 ratio)^[1] reflects a hypothesis that more people will lurk in a virtual community than will participate. This term is often used to refer to participation inequality in the context of the Internet.

Does this apply in the context of engagement with blog posts, I wondered? In this context I used the following definitions:

• Lurker: someone who only reads a post.
• Contributor: someone who facilitates engagement with others by lightweight ‘frictionless’ sharing, such as a tweet, a RT, a vote on the blog post, a Facebook like or a Google +1.
• Creator: someone who create new content by submitting a blog comment or commenting on Facebook.

The findings are summarised below.

One observation I would make is that the tweets about the post are only included if they continued a link to the post. Since subsequent discussions were not included, due to the difficulties in finding such tweets, it seems that the Contributors count is understated. It therefore appears that the 1-9-90 rule may not be too far out in this case.

I’ll be the first to admit that the distinction between a contributor and a creator are somewhat arbitrary: someone who spend time in composing a relevant tweet in 140 characters (such as “A poignant, perceptive and yet defiantly uplifting post from @briankelly“) is clearly being creative. However posting a tweet will normally be a frictionless activity carried out in one’s current application environment, unlike posting a comment which is likely to involve following a link, clicking a button and filling in authentication details before creating the content. I’m therefore happy to propose this approach as a possible approach for monitoring the extent of engagement with digital content. Might this be an approach which others may be interested in helping to develop and refine?

View Twitter conversation from: [Topsy] | View Twitter statistics from: [TweetReach] – [Bit.ly]

I have just been given my redundancy letter – I was the first of many to receive a redundancy letter on what will be a very busy two days for the University of Bath’s HR department. After over 16 years at UKOLN (I started on 30 October 1996) my redundancy letter informs me that I will be leaving on 31 July 2013.

This is clearly a sad moment for myself and my colleagues at UKOLN. The decision to cease the core funding for UKOLN (and CETIS) – which was made in October 2012 but not unofficially announced until December – has had severe implications for us. At the start of 2013 there were 26 people employed in UKOLN but after 31 July, based on current funding estimates for the next financial year, there is likely to be funding for just 3.7 FTEs (although, due to people working part-time, there should be more individuals still based at UKOLN.

The definition of ‘decimate’ is: ”to destroy a great number or proportion of [Example]: The population was decimated by a plague.” With cuts of the extent given above it would not be an exaggeration to say “UKOLN has been decimated by cuts” :-(

Sadly, it seems that there is a growing tendency in the sector to refuse to acknowledge bad news. Stephen Downes highlighted this just before Christmas:

Two vaguely worded announcements appeared today on the UKOLN and CETIS websites. As cited by Brian Kelly, “In response to the Wilson review of Jisc, the organisation has confirmed that it will only provide core funding to the UKOLN Innovation Support Centre, up to July 2013 but not beyond.” Same deal for CETIS. (Note that I changed Kelly’s headline, contrary to my usual practice, because the phrase “looking ahead” seems to deliberately obfuscate the content of the messages.)

There’s a danger in making bad news invisible that the value which the organisation has been provided in the past is ignored. It was pleased to See how Stephen (an acknowledged elearning expert from North America) concluded his post be describing how:

I know it’s another country and all that, but let me be clear that to my mind UKOLN and CETIS have been two of the most important organizations in the world of online learning, period, and that should their funding be discontinued it would be a significant loss to the field.

This contrasted starkly with the view from Jisc in response to a question about redundancies:

This is about reshaping our approach to deliver for our customers, organising what we need to do and then populating it with people who can do it reasonably well. I expect the vast majority of the roles and the posts that we need in the new organisation to be perfectly capable of being discharged by people who are in the existing Jisc, and we are not in the business of disenfranchising the existing Jiscers, that’s not the purpose.

This feeling that we are being airbrushed from Jisc’s history was compounded recently when significant UKOLN intellectual work was labelled as being produced by Jisc in an article in a national journal.

The Change Curve

Shock, Anger

Yesterday myself and a number of my colleagues attended a half-day Change Management workshop. We were presented with a Change Curve, which is illustrated. Many of us identified with the emotions listed in the diagram, and I’m conscious that this post may well reflect the shape of the curve.

The anger is compounded by the significant role that JISC has had over an extended period. The Wilson Review (PDF format) noted such successes: ‘There is no comparable body within the UK, and internationally its reputation is outstanding as a strategic leader and partner.’

Such successes have been based, I feel, on JISC’s willingness to embrace open practices in its approaches to helping to develop and embed innovative practices across the sector. But such open practices are now vanishing, as the Jisc comms department is now controlling messages from the organisation as part of the process of “reshaping our approach to deliver for our customers“. Expect to see good news on Jisc communications channels!

The anger myself and colleagues feel is compounded when we look at how CETIS, our fellow JISC Innovation Support centre has responded to the loss of its core funding. I was aware that a group of CETIS staff had been given responsibility to look at new funding streams and at the recent CETIS conference Paul Hollins, CETIS Director summarised the various proposals for new funding which have been submitted. It looks at though the future for CETIS is much more secure than ours. Although the decision to seek additional funding in the area of informatics appears to have provided an additional year’s funding, this is only for a tiny proportion of staff and it is still unclear as to whether such a small department with limited funding is sustainable (especially when one considers that the director will probably continue on the same salary, despite the organisation downsizing from a peak of over 30 people to 4.7 FTEs. A goal of transforming UKOLN from a organisation with its roots in the Library world to a research informatics organisation may have been successful, but this was clearly a phyrric victory.

Acceptance .. and a Better Future?

But rather than looking back, myself and my colleagues who received redundancy letters today, need to look forward. This will not be along the lines of the official announcement:

While the Innovation Support Centre will cease operating after July 2013, UKOLN will continue and as the organisation enters a new phase, it is a time to reflect on what we’ve achieved.

but the future for the large numbers of colleagues who, from 1 August, will be facing an uncertain future, with bills to pay, families to support and mortgages and other loans which will need paying.

Fortunately many UKOLN staff do have expertise, skills and connections which will continue to be needed (back in December when I carried out the calculation there was about 240 years of staff expertise based on our time in UKOLN!). We have been providing training and support for staff and will continue to do this over the next three months. In a post on Importance of Social Media for Finding New Opportunities I summarised a session I facilitated in December on ways in which social media can be valuable in developing new contacts, strengthening existing relationships and helping to discuss new opportunities. I suspect there will be a number of further sessions along these lines in which we can help each other in moving towards the ‘better future’.

But over the next three months there will be still be work to be done. I am in the process of preparing content hosted on UKOLN Web sites so that is is ready for archiving. I should add that, in light of my concerns that UKOLN’s value to the sector over a period of over 30 years will be marginalised, ignored or appropriated by others, I am working with colleagues to ensure that their involvement across a wide range of activities is acknowledged and that significant intellectual content is not lost. This process involved ensuring that my colleagues deposit copies of their papers, articles, project reports, etc. in Opus, the University of Bath’s institutional repository (and, at the time of writing, there appear to be 424 items in the repository). In addition I have also suggested that authors embed their ORCID ID within papers, which might be particularly important for project reports if the author details are not clear.

But in addition since the large majority of UKOLN staff will be leaving, we will be exploring ways in which our expertise can continue to be harnessed, perhaps through consultancy work. Don’t write us off, yet!

For now, I think I may be allowed to conclude on a rather emotional day by summarising the Change Curve with the words used by Father Jack “Arse, feck, drink, women“. Anyone fancy joining me in the pub tonight? Then maybe be could go clubbing.

Note: A Storify archive of the tweets related to this story is now available.

View Twitter conversation from: [Topsy] | View Twitter statistics from: [TweetReach] – [Bit.ly]

Gartner has finally come out and said it: The PC market is dying.

Except it hasn’t said that, quite. But it is, and saying so is really important.

and went on to add:

Gartner, however, can’t bring itself to say the PC market is shrinking toward irrelevance. Instead, it describes the PC market as “transitional,” in much the same way companies firing large swathes of their workforces insist that employees have been “downsized.” If Gartner was a brokerage firm, its analyst would have placed a “hold” rating on the PC market, with all the wishy-washy implications that word connotes.

The reason for such evasiveness was:

to protect the lucrative relationship that Gartner has with its clients. If Gartner declares an industry dead, why should a company like Dell spend thousands of dollars a pop for a report that says so?

 The talk was based on the work of the JISC Observatory which has been provided by UKOLN and CETIS. The JISC Observatory was not provided by JISC itself in order to provide some distance from existing services and development programmes. However in light of the cessation of core funding for UKOLN and CETIS (together with other JISC-funded bodies such as OSS Watch and the JISC Monitoring Unit) there do seem to be dangers that JISC (or Jisc as it is now known) will lose its ability to focus on the rapidly changing technological infrastructure, preferring to focus, instead, on the delivery of existing services. In light of such concerns in the talk I gave yesterday (and which will be repeated later today) I argued that there was a need for organisations themselves to have mechanisms in place for detecting signals which may indicate changes which institutions will need to prepare for, as well as sense-making processes to interpret the signals and their implications.

As I was invited to write an article about the talk after giving the presentation yesterday, there does seem to be interest across the sector in the approaches I described :-)

The slides for the talk are available on Slideshare and embedded below:

View Twitter conversation from: [Topsy] | View Twitter statistics from: [TweetReach] – [Bit.ly]

I remember buying the Guardian on the opening day of the conference and noticed the headline on the front cover: “Royal web war feared as Queen sets up site in cyberspace“. I decided to use this as an example of how the Web had gone beyond its roots in academia and was not clearly mainstream.

However I quickly discovered that I’d been taken in by an April Fool joke. If I’d have read beyond the plausible-sounding opening paragraphs I might have realised it was a joke:

However, friends of Princess Diana are setting up a web site in what looks like an effort to start a “web war”. Jo-Jo Williams, self-styled “Prince of the Net Surfers,” said: “Princess Di will be queen in our cyberspace and Charles will feel as though he has fallen into a black hole.”

A battle taking place between Princess Diane and Prince Charles – how preposterous!

In reality according to the British Monarchy’s Web site “ The Queen launched the British Monarchy’s official website in 1997. In 2007 the official British Monarchy YouTube channel was unveiled, swiftly followed by a Royal Twitter site (2009), Flickr page (2010) and Facebook page (also 2010)“. However it was in November 1995 when Diana admitted adultery in TV interview so the speculation that we would see a domestic squabble taking place in cyberspace was perhaps plausible.

In a recent paper on “What Next for Libraries? Making Sense of the Future” I described a methodology for helping to predict technology trends. I might have included use of jokes which highlighted technological advances which were felt to be absurd to a mainstream audience. Today, for example, we have seen an advertisement for a new product called Guardian Goggles:

But today, ending months of speculation and rumour, this newspaper announces a groundbreaking development in the modern history of the media: a pair of web-connected “augmented reality” spectacles that will beam its journalism directly into the wearer’s visual field, enabling users to see the world through the Guardian’s eyes at all times.

However today my Twitter stream gives me a view of the UK’s political environment through the filter of my Twitter stream, including various stories featured on the Guardian’s front cover.

Meanwhile this morning I came across a tweet from the Times Higher Education about a story which again may come true in the near future:

Major innovation: Social media (Twitter, Facebook) to be included in World University Rankings: http://ow.ly/1Ulc5w

The article began by sounding very plausible:

Data from social media, including You Tube viewing figures, Twitter follower counts and accumulated “likes” on Facebook will be developed into a new reputational indicator for the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, it was confirmed today.

The magazine said the move is designed to reflect the growing influence the internet has on a university’s reputational standing, and to recognize the key role social networking has in reflecting student opinion and influencing their study choices.

Phil S Batty, editor of Times Higher Education’s rankings, said: “We are living in a fast-moving information age, when a university’s reputational standing around the world is heavily influenced by its presence and its activities on the internet. It is time that global rankings reflected this reality. Social media is one of the most effective ways of capturing student views on institutions, and measuring an institution’s popularity.”

But needed to signal that it was an April Fool joke in a very clumsy fashion, citing Itzah Jaok:

Ivor Binhad, head of thinking, search engine optimisation and office services at the web marketing consultancy Itzah Jaok, based in Dalston, London, said: “Universities are just so 12th century, man, with their ivory towers and all those dusty books and old people sitting around. It is time for them to saddle up and straddle the information bridle path, whatever brand hurdles they may encounter on the way. I confidently predict that the Internet’s time has come, so bring your e-stirrups.

The Queen’s Web site was set up a year after the Guardian’s April Fool story appeared on the font cover. I wonder how long it will take before the World University Rankings includes online ranking scores?

As Martin Hamilton pointed out in his post on A Tale of Two Jiscs: Reflections on CETIS13, FutureLearn and the JISC Diaspora ”In many cases, JISC was farsighted enough to forsee requirements in the research and education sector that have subsequently turned into significant businesses in themselves“. But Martin then went on to describe how those benefits are about to be lost: “we are entering a new era, necessitated by funding reductions, changing student demographics and frankly an unwillingness to see “R&D” type activities (of which a large proportion can be expected to fail) facilitated through top sliced central funding“. For myself and many of my colleagues we are having to respond to the scenario depicted by Martin:”Behind the scenes, a lot of people who have been working for JISC on its various centres and services have been having meetings with their local HR departments about redundancy and redeployment“.

But what should you do if you wish to continue to make use of the skills and expertise you have developed over the years but new full-time posts appear to be in short supply? I suspect the changes in Jisc will provide new consultancy opportunities, with their current preoccupation in telling good news stories without addressing any of the underlying complexities or tensions leaving a void which can be filled by those who have a more realistic understanding of the complexities of exploiting IT to support institutional requirements.

The preparation for a new career will mean the loss of an IT infrastructure and the accompanying support which many of us will have grown accustomed to. But how can provide help and advice in the preparation for a move away from an institutional environment? One might expect the Library to provide support, especially for institutions which have a commitment to information literacy, which is defined as “the ability to find, use, evaluate and communicate information” and is “an essential skill in this digital age and era of life-long learning“. But as I will be describing next week at the LILAC 2013 conference this is not necessarily the case, with the role of librarians perhaps being to promote use of institutional rather than Cloud services. But since we will all, at some point, leave our host institution, this is not really providing staff and researchers with the life-long skills needed to thrive beyond an institutional context.

Surely it is timely for a change in focus, especially if the gloomy predictions are correct and we continue to see reductions in staffing levels in higher education institutions?

I’d welcome your thoughts and comments – especially if you have experience of leaving your host institution and continuing to work, perhaps as a consultant. My slides are available on Slideshare and embedded below:

View Twitter conversation from: [Topsy] | View Twitter statistics from: [TweetReach] – [Bit.ly]

The article described how:

This week we report on a 22 per cent rise in the sums spent by universities on direct marketing to students in 2011-12, with many planning to increase this further.

and went on to draw comparisons between the changing funding environment in the UK’s higher education sector and the US higher education marketplace:

According to a recent estimate reported by Reuters, the for-profit University of Phoenix, whose owner Apollo Group also controls BPP University College in the UK, was at one point spending nearly $400,000 (£254,000) a day on online adverts targeted at students.

In the UK:

There is little doubt that as far as universities in England are concerned, marketing to and competition for students are now far more pressing concerns than they once were. … The vice-chancellor of one Russell Group university confided that his institution had simply not anticipated the rapid impact of the government’s reforms, and had almost expected “business as usual” – a mistake he would not be making again.

In some quarters, some comments would be regarded with misgivings, since it would appear that scarce resources are being diverted from provision of front-line services. However I myself feel that marketing is important. In the context of research, for example we are seeing how social media services can enable researchers themselves to being their research papers to the attention of their peers, and engage in discussions about the ideas provided in the papers. Melissa Terras’s post on The verdict: is blogging or tweeting about research papers worth it? provided concrete advice for researchers based on her experiences:

If you want people to find and read your research, build up a digital presence in your discipline, and use it to promote your work when you have something interesting to share.

But although social media services enable researchers to promote their work with an authentic voice and engage in open discussions with their peers and other interested parties, there are dangers that traditional marketing departments who have a product (the institution) to promote will misuse social media services, in which there may be expectations of authenticity, openness, transparency, engagement and speed of response which may not be the case with traditional marketing channels.

In addition to such concerns I think we should be worried that the financial pressures on the sector will lead to a loss of openness and transparency and the sharing of practices which has characterised working in a public sector environment in which discussions of best practices for developing innovative approaches to teaching and learning and research have helped to develop better understanding and inform the deployment of new practices.

Innovation is defined in Wikipedia as “the development of new values through solutions that meet new needs, inarticulate needs, or old customer and market needs in value adding new ways“. As part of our work with the JISC Observatory we have sought to identify ‘weak signals’ which can help to identify early indications of developments which can be beneficial to the sector. In occurs to me, however, that there is also a need to identify signals which may suggest developments which may meet meet needs which we may question the value of. Is the need for institutions to give a positive portrayal of their activities to be welcomed, if this means that activities which could be improved cease to be discussed? Are we seeing any ‘anti-patterns’ in which marketing activities are hindering approaches to openness?

I #lovelibraries because they welcomed me as a child, educated me as a teenager and sustain me as an adult. #NLD13

Since it is National Libraries Day it was appropriate to see see a tweet which referenced a recent talk by Lorcan Dempsey, former UKOLN Director. In a recent talk presented at the Bobcatsss 2013 conference in Ankara last month Lorcan Dempsey revisited the concept of the Inside Out Library. Lorcan described how this was an idea he has spoken about previously, and cited his presentations on “The Inside Out Library: Libraries in the Age of Amazoogle” (MS PowerPoint format) presented at the 34th LIBER Conference in July 2005 and “The Library and the Network: Flattening the Library and Turning It Inside Out” (MS PowerPoint format) presented at the ACCESS 2005 Conference in October 2005.

In the slides Lorcan provided the following quotation from Seán O’Faoláin written in 1994:

 People should think not so much of the books that have gone into the National Library but rather of the books that have come out of it. A library, after all, feeds the people that go in there. 

A little research showed that Lorcan used this in a paper on Library places and digital information spaces: reflections on emerging network services in Alexandria, 11(1), 1999 – and a preprint of the paper is available on the UKOLN Web site.

Although it is 19 years since Seán O’Faoláin made this observation, Lorcan’s thoughts on the importance of revisiting not so much the resources in the library (which were physical objects in the 1990s) but on the ways in which the needs of library users are being addressed is particularly true in today’s political, economic and technical environment.

It is now several years since the “Library 2.0” term was coined but I do wonder the extent to which Library 2.0 which have been adopted in libraries are restricted to syndication technologies, such as RSS, and the notion as “the Web as the platform” is being lost, as libraries seek to replicate functionality at a local level and fail to gain the benefits of scale which working at a global level could provide.

To updated Seán O’Faoláin quotation for National Libraries day in 2013, should we not be saying:

 People should think not so much of the technologies that have gone into the Library but rather of the global technologies that come out of it. A library, after all, feeds the people that go in there. 

I should add that I appreciate that for public libraries in particular there will be a need to ensure that appropriate physical resources are provided. But aren’t things different in academic libraries?

Lorcan’s slides are available on Slideshare and embedded below:

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Back in July 1997 UKOLN held the first IWMW (Institutional Web Management Workshop) event. The event aimed to share examples of best practices and innovation for those involved in providing institutional Web services.

D0 you remember what your institution’s home page looked like in 1997? Back in 2002 we set up a service which provides a rolling display of University home pages. We subsequently used the same tool to provide a rolling display of University home pages taken from the Internet Archive.

It is therefore possible to see how University home pages looked before the first IWMW event took place and to compare this with how the pages look today.

How We Are Today

The following rolling displays show how Web sites look today:

• Institutional home pages
• Institutional 404 pages

• Library home pages
• Institutional Web gateways

Note that if links are broken this indicates that the URL of the original Web page no longer exists. It is interesting to note the high profile that was given to the provision to institutional Web gateways ten years ago; nowadays institutional Web sites are more likely, I suspect, tow ish visitors to stay on the Web sites with links to interesting resources elsewhere being minimised.

I should also add that historical displays which show the evolution of the home page are available for the following institutions:

• University of Bath
• University of Oxford
• JISC

Looking Forward to the Future

The theme of the IWMW 2013 event is “What Next?“. We are currently inviting submissions for talks and workshop sessions which will be of interest to those involved in the provision of institutional Web services. Participants will be interested in looking to the future and to hear about approaches to the management of large-scale institutional Web services which are applicable in today’s environment.

It seems to me that it would be useful to look into the lessons which can be learnt from the history of institutional Web development when making plans for the future. I hope the resources mentioned above will be useful for those who wish to travel back in time and see how Web sites have evolved over the past 17 years.

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Yesterday a post of mine entitled “Why every researcher should sign up for their ORCID ID” was republished on the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog. The announcement made by @lseimpactblog was subsequently widely retweeted, as illustrated.

It was subsequently pointed out the sentence contained a grammatical error: “every researcher” is singular and therefore shouldn’t be followed by a plural form of the pronoun: “their ORCID ID“. Coincidentally yesterday I came across as tweet which linked to the announcement that “The [University of Washington] Daily adopts gender-neutral pronoun“. I responded to the tweet questioning whether this was a wise decision:

Univ of WA adopts gender neutral pronouns – they as singular pronoun: ow.ly/hgwD6 Surely a thumbs down?

In response it seems that several people were in agreement with the decision taken at the University of Washington that “The Daily will join the efforts of these organizations by implementing gender-neutral language, using “they” as a singular pronoun when applicable“. I received several responses shortly after publishing my tweet:

• It was good enough for Jane Austen! :)
• Meh. It’s been around since at least 1595 – better than ubiquitous ‘he’, generally less clumsy than ‘he/she’, so why not?
• I use ‘they’ as a gender neutral pronoun. Better than s/he surely?
• why? I can live with it for the sake of less gendered conversations (and have been doing it for years anyway)

However one person made the point that:

• I really HATE the use of “they” as a singular pronoun!

I would agree with the view that “Why every researcher should sign up for his/her ORCID ID” is ugly. I also feel that “Why every researcher should sign up for his ORCID ID” is sexist and “Why every researcher should sign up for her ORCID ID” seeks to make a political point which, although I might be sympathetic towards, will distract from the purpose of the sentence.

In light of the comments and subsequent discussion on Twitter this morning I now realise that I agree that this construct is now acceptable. However as a comment made on the English StackExchange forum put it:

It’s not ungrammatical per se on the basis of analysis of actual usage using reasonable linguistic methods. But use it at your own risk of being criticized by the self-righteous but misinformed.

The question seems to no longer a question of one’s understanding correct and incorrect language use but one’s willingness to potentially alienate the “self-righteous but misinformed“. And note that before anyone suggests that there is no such things as incorrect language use I’ll highlight a tweet I saw this morning which provided an ironical perspective on language misuse:

Somewhere, someone who writes “should of” instead of “should have” gets paid more than me.

The particular example discussed in this post clearly has ‘political’ connotations as one form which was popular in the past makes 50% of the population invisible (it was interesting to observe, y the way, that 4 of the 5 initial responses were from women). It would be possible to sidestep such controversy by restructuring the sentence e.g. “Why all researcher should sign up for an ORCID ID” or “Why all researchers should sign up for their ORCID ID“. But what about the more general question regarding changing rules of grammar?

“Data Is” or “Data Are”?

As recorded in a Storify summary of the subsequent Twitter discussion, last year a reviewer of a paper which asked “Can Linkedin and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories?” commented that:

“the word ‘data’ is still a plural noun, no matter how many times people may erroneously use it in the singular“

Myself and my co-author Jenny Delasalle disagreed and the paper was published containing the sentence:

As described by Delasalle [8] the data for Academia.edu was obtained by entering the institution’s name in the search box; the number of entries were then displayed

But what if reviewers or editors insist that text must conform with specific house rules in order for a submitted article to be published? Should one’s approach to writing and grammar be based on one’s own views on what is appropriate or on what may be appropriate for the readers? And if that latter, whose opinions should one prioritise: the editors and reviewers or general readers?

It seems to me that it can be helpful to gauge opinion on such matters. I have therefore set up two surveys to solicit views on whether the following grammatical constructs are felt to be appropriate in scholarly works: “Anyone who loves the English language should have a copy of this book in their bookcase” and (b) “The data was obtained from an online survey“.

I invite responses to the survey and comments on this topic.

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As described in a paper on What Next for Libraries? Making Sense of the Future the JISC Observatory “provides horizon-scanning of technological developments which may be of relevance to the UK’s higher and further education sectors“. The paper, available in MS Word and PDF formats, describes the systematic processes for the scanning, sense-making and synthesis activities to support this work. The paper focuses on the processes for observing technical developments. However there is also a need to observe signals of institutional interests in IT developments, especially in light of the recent announcement of Jisc’s objective to “address a number of specific priorities for universities and colleges through the development of resources, tools and supported infrastructure“.

Strategic plans published by institutions can provide a valuable starting point to help identifying areas of institutional interests. For example, Lorcan Dempsey recently drew attention to the strategic goals which have been identified by the University of Edinburgh:

mm.. U Edinburgh strategy targets include improving citation score in the THE World Uni Rankings. docs.sasg.ed.ac.uk/ gasp/strategic…

The document, The University of Edinburgh Strategic Plan 2012-2016, (which is available in PDF format) is interesting not so much for the way it identifies strategic goals and the key enablers who will be needed to ensure the goals are attained, but the list of specific KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and the associated targets.

Of particular interest is the strategic goal of excellence in research for which the KPI is listed as “Russell Group market share of research income (spend)“. The corresponding targets are:

• Increase our average number of PhD students per member of academic staff to at least 2.5
• Increase our score (relative to the highest scoring institution) for the citations-based measure in the THE World University Rankings to at least 94/100

The strategic goal of excellence in innovation states that the KPIs are “Knowledge exchange metrics: number of disclosures, patents, licences and new company formation“. The targets for this goal are:

• Achieve at least 200 public policy impacts per annum
• Increase our economic impact, measured by GVA, by at least 8%

The Importance of Metrics

It is interesting to see how the University of Edinburgh has clearly targets which are based on measurable criteria: “Increase our average number of PhD students per member of academic staff to at least 2.5“; “Increase our score … for the citations-based measure in the THE World university rankings to at least 94/100“; “Achieve at least 200 public policy impacts per annum“; “Increase our economic impact, measured by GVA, by at least 8%“; “Increase the proportion of our building condition at grades A and B on a year-on-year basis, aiming for at least 90% by 2020“; “Increase our total income per staff FTE year-on-year, aiming for an increase of at least 10% in real terms“; ”Increase the level of overall satisfaction expressed in responses to the NSS, PTES and PRES student surveys to at least 88%“; “Increase the number of our students who have achieved the Edinburgh Award to at least 500“; “Create at least 800 new opportunities for our students to gain an international experience as part of their Edinburgh degree“; “Increase our headcount of non-EU international students by at least 2,000“; “Increase our research grant income from EU and other overseas sources so that we enter the Russell Group upper quartile“; “Increase our number of masters students on programmes established through our Global Academies by at least 500“; “reduce absolute CO2 emissions by 29% by 2020, against a 2007 baseline (interim target of 20% savings by 2015)” and “Increase our number of PhD students on programmes jointly awarded with international partners by at least 50%” (emphasis added).

The importance of metrics in the context of learning is being addressed by CETIS, with the CETIS Analytics Series being announced by Sheila MacNeill on 23 November 2012 with a follow-up post the next week addressing Legal, Risk and Ethical Aspects of Analytics in Education, The following week Sheila provided a broader perspective in a post on Analytics for Understanding Research, with the series of posts concluding with one on Institutional Readiness for Analytics – practice and policy.

Prior to CETI’s work in this area the importance of metrics had been identified by the JISC in 2010 when they asked UKOLN to facilitate the Evidence, Impact, Metrics activity. A series of reports on this work were published just over a year ago. As described in the document on Why the Need for this Work?:

There is a need for publicly-funded organisations, such as higher education institutions, to provide evidence of the value of the services they provide. Such accountability has always been required, but at a time of economic concerns the need to gather, analyse and publicise evidence of such value is even more pressing.

Unlike commercial organisations it is not normally possible to make use of financial evidence (e.g. profits, turnover, etc) in public sector organisations. There is therefore a need to develop other approaches which can support evidence-based accounts of the value of our services.

A series of three workshops were held between November 2010 and July 2011. It was interesting to reflect on how, at the initial workshop, there was a feeling that an emphasis metrics could be counter-productive in failing to appreciate the complexities of the work being carried out in the higher education sector. However the feedback from the second workshop included an awareness of the need for “More strategic consideration of gathering evidence) both for our own purposes and those of projects we work with/evaluate)“. The work concluded by highlighting the importance of metric-based approaches for projects:

Which should I bother with metrics?
Metrics can provide quantitative evidence of the value of aspects of project work. Metrics which indicate the success of a project can be useful in promoting the value of the work. Metrics can also be useful in helping to identify failures and limitations which may help to inform decisions on continued work in the area addressed by the metrics.

What are the benefits for funders?
In addition to providing supporting evidence of the benefits of successful projects funders can also benefit by obtaining quantitative evidence from a range of projects which can be used to help identify emerging patterns of usage.

What are the benefits for projects?
Metrics can inform project development work by helping to identify deviations from expected behaviours of usage patterns and inform decision-making processes.

What are the risks in using metrics?
Metrics only give a partial understand and need to be interpreted careful. Metrics could lead to the publication of league tables, with risks that projects seek to maximise their metrics rather than treating metrics as a proxy indicator of value.

It will be interesting to see if other institutions emulate the University of Edinburgh in stating specific targets for their institutional strategic plans – and how pressures on staff within the institutions to achieve the targets affects operational practices.

Is anyone aware of other institutions which are taking similar approaches?

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As it’s New Year’s Eve I thought I’d provide this visualisation of the content of recent posts on the UK Web Focus blog.

Here’s looking forward to a peaceful 2013.

From August 2013, we will continue to build on this reputation and we very much look forward to working with you again in the future.

In order to support UKOLN staff in exploiting new opportunities I recently gave a training session on “Managing Your Digital Profile“. In the talk I described the value of social media in developing relationships with potential new partners, co-authors and funders which can be of value in one’s current job as well as in finding new jobs and opportunities.

During the session I was asked if there was one key service to make use of. I highlighted the importance of LinkedIn and provided examples of effective uses of LinkedIn. Just before Christmas @suebecks alerted me to a post entitled For job recruiters, Monster out, LinkedIn in. This post provided evidence of the ways in which LinkedIn is being used:

LinkedIn, the biggest professional-network​ing website, got into the field early with the introduction of Recruiter in 2008. The service lets headhunters search its more than 187 million profiles and contact potential candidates.

Since last year, Adobe has found more than half its new hires through LinkedIn. Adobe, the biggest graphic-design software company, uses job boards to fill only about 5% of openings.

In the session I went on to describe how I felt it was a mistake to think there was a single key service to use. I argued that there were a range of services which provided different functions and were used by different communities. I went on to describe how researchers could find value in claiming a Google Scholar profile and providing access to their research publications using services such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate, as well as claiming an ORCID ID.

I was asked if Facebook had a role to play. I described how this would relate to the personal ways in which one uses the service – but mentioned that Facebook is the third most important referrer of traffic to this blog. In addition I suggested that Facebook may have a role to play in finding new opportunities, and illustrated this by showing how a Google search for “Facebook Bath jobs“ found a Facebook page for jobs at Future Publishing. The potential relevance of Facebook for job-seekers was highlighted in the article For job recruiters, Monster out, LinkedIn in:

Two-thirds of companies already use Facebook, the world’s largest social-networking service, to find recruits using the site’s friend-finding search function, according to a June survey of more than 1,000 human resources professionals by recruiting software maker Jobvite. Fifty-four percent use micro-blogging service Twitter to learn about potential candidates’ views and interests, the survey found.

The article then went on to suggest new developments we may see for people looking for new opportunities:

The next challenge is to develop advanced tools that find greater detail on candidates from more social networks, says Brian O’Malley, a general partner at Battery Ventures. His firm has invested in social job-search startup Entelo, which trawls Twitter, Google’s Google+ and other sites, using proprietary algorithms to find candidates for specific positions and predict who among them may be open to offers.

Can you afford not to make use of social media if you are looking for new business opportunities in the future?

Note as mentioned above the slides on “Managing Your Digital Profile” are available on Slideshare and embedded below:

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A year ago, on 29 December 2011, I gave My Predictions for 2012. The post began “How will the technology environment develop during 2012? I’m willing to set myself up for a fall my outlining my predictions for 2012 :-)” To be honest the predictions were fairly predictable:

Tablet Computers …

After a couple of years in which use of smart phones, whether based on Apple’s iOS or Goole’s Android operating system), became mainstream for many when away from the office, 2012 will see use of Tablets becoming mainstream, with the competition provided by vendors of Android continue to bring the prices for those reluctant to pay a premium for an iPad.

Once the new term starts we’ll see increased numbers of students who received a Tablet PC for Christmas making use of them, not only for watching videos and listening to music in their accommodation, but also in lectures. As well as note-taking the devices, together with smart phones, will be used for recording lectures. In some cases this will lead to concerns regarding ownership and privacy infringements but students will argue that they are paying for their education and they should be entitled to time-shift their lecturers. Since it will be difficult to prevent students from making such recordings lecturers will start to encourage such practices and will seek to develop an understanding of when comments made during lecturers and tutorials should be treated as ‘off-the-record’.

Open Practices …

Such lecturers will be providing one example of an ‘open practice’. Such encouragement of recording or broadcasting lecturers will become the norm in several research areas, with organisers of research conferences acknowledging that they will need to provide an event amplification infrastructure (including free WiFi for participants, an event hashtag, live streaming or recording of key talks) in order to satisfy the expectations of those who are active in participation in research events.

Such open practices will complement more well-established examples of openness including open access and open content, such as open educational resources. We’ll see much greater use of Creative Commons licences, especially licence which minimise barriers to reuse.

Social Applications …

Social applications will become ubiquitous, although the term may be rebranded in order to avoid the barrier to use faced by those who regard the term ‘social’ as meaning ‘personal’ or ‘trivial’. Just as Web 2.0 became rebranded as the Social Web and the Semantic Web as Linked Data, we shall see such applications being marked as collaborative or interactive services.

Social networking services will continue to grow in importance across the higher education sector. However the view that the popularity of such services will be dependent on conformance with a particular set of development (open source and distributed) or ownership criteria (must not be owned by a successful multi-national company) will be seen to be of little significance. Rather than a growth in services such as identi.ca or Diaspora, we will see Facebook continue to develop (with its use by organisations helped by mandatory legal requirements regarding conformance with EU privacy legislation described in a post on 45 Privacy Changes Facebook Will Make To Comply With Data Protection Law). In addition to Facebook, Twitter and Google+ will continue to be of importance across the sector.

Learning and Knowledge Analytics ….

The ubiquity of mobile devices coupled with greater use of social applications as part of a developing cultural of open practices will lead to an awareness of the importance of learning and knowledge analytics. Just as in the sporting arena we have seen huge developments in using analytic tools to understand and maximise sporting performances, we will see similar approaches being taken to understand and maximise intellectual performance, in both teaching and learning and research areas.

With just one of the predictions being more speculative:

Collective Intelligence

Just as the combination of developments will help us to have a better understanding of intellectual performance, so too will these development help to in the growth of Collective Intelligence, described in Wikipedia as the “shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans and computer networks“. The driving forces behind Collective Intelligence will be the global players which have access to large volumes of data and the computational resources (processing power and storage) to analyse the data.

However rather than simply presenting a list of predictions the post went on to describe how “a greater challenge is being able to demonstrate that such predictions have come true. How might we go about deciding, in December 2012, whether these predictions reflect reality?“.

The methodology used to support the predictions of technological developments was one used to support the JISC Observatory and described in more detail in a paper on “What Next for Libraries? Making Sense of the Future” which was presented at EMTACL12, an international conference on Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries held in Trondheim, Norway on 1-3 October 2012.

The Ghosts of Christmas Present

In this post I will not go into details on the validity of the predictions. The importance of tablet computers and social applications should be self-evident whilst, as described in a post on Institutional Readiness for Analytics – practice and policy, CETIS have been pro-active in the areas os learnig and knowledge analytics, having recently published a series of briefing paper on analytics. The prediction on collective intelligence was intended to be more speculative, so perhaps discussion would be best focussed on open practices.

However in retrospect all of the predictions were based on an assumption that evidence would demonstrate the value of technological developments for high education. Although the paper ”What Next for Libraries? Making Sense of the Future” highlighted the need to distinguish between invention, innovation and improvements, there was an assumption that technological developments would continue to enhance the value of higher education. But is this a valid assumption? And what if other other developments – economic, political, demographic, etc. – undermine the relevance of technical developments?

The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come

These questions came to mind earlier today when I saw the following tweet from @phil_batty, the editor at large for Times Higher Education (@timeshighered) & editor of the World University Rankings (@THEWorldUniRank):

Current monopoly of HE will be lost & just few universities will survive RT @Lennie_SW: The Perfect Storm for Unis: http://wp.me/s2bamO-storm

The post on The Perfect Storm for Universities was published on 3 December 2012 by Dr Stefan Popenici, an academic, public speaker, author and international consultant with extensive experience in leadership in the global higher education arena including the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Israel, Austria, Canada, the People’s Republic of China, France, Italy, Hungary, Philippines, Serbia, the Republic of Moldova, Portugal, Spain, Poland, Romania, Belgium, Georgia.

The post begins:

Even if universities may look well on the surface there is an increasing (and justified) concern that all will change soon. New data and analysis increase the anxiety that the current monopoly of higher education will be lost and just few universities will survive. No one knows which, how many or even if any university will have the chance to celebrate the middle of this century. Deafened by the noise of various bureaucrats and mediocre academics interested to say only what their masters like to hear, some universities and academic groups struggle to see beyond fads and slogans what is shaping the future that will change their existence. This hidden uneasiness is justified. An increasing number of disruptive factors – adding to the obvious and massive impact of Internet and online education – already are changing the landscape for higher education: the significant increase of youth isolation and marginalization, graduate unemployment and persistent underemployment, a concerning economic forecast of a constant slowdown of global growth (with implications for numbers of international students) and issues evolving from the global ageing population (and implications on lifelong learning strategies and numbers of local students). There is even more on the horizon and – while teaching and learning are still organized within university walls by models designed in early 1960s – the pace of change is accelerating.

I’d recommend that those who have an interest in the future of higher education should read this post. The (rather long) post concludes:

In the middle of this storm, universities that continue to glorify mediocrity and impose compliant thinking are condemned to perish. These victims of the storm may still consider that is safer to shut their eyes and stay comfortable within the limits of the status quo. After all, this is what has worked well for the last century. However, on the day after the storm, higher education will be anything but comfortable. The era of compliance and contentment is over!

It’s interesting to see how the damning conclusions are targetted at institutions which “glorify mediocrity and impose compliant thinking“. If that reflects the current culture within your organisation, I’d be worried.

It will be interesting to start observing signals of a future for higher education in which the “current monopoly of HE will be lost & just a few universities will survive”. As it’s Christmas Eve I’ll not comment on such signals today, but may revisit this post in a year’s time. To update the comment I made last year “a greater challenge is being able to demonstrate that such predictions have come true. How might we go about deciding, in December 2013, whether these predictions reflect reality?“.

Merry Christmas!

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Following nearly 20 years of supporting Jisc innovation activities, UKOLN is now looking ahead to new challenges. In response to the Wilson review of Jisc, the organisation has confirmed that it will only provide core funding to the UKOLN Innovation Support Centre, up to July 2013 but not beyond.

Since Jisc’s inception in 1993, UKOLN has worked collaboratively to support the development and use of digital libraries and digital information management in many innovative areas. The decision to cease funding in no way reflects on the contribution of UKOLN to this agenda for education and research, but rather the new ways in which Jisc innovation activity will need to be taken forward into the future. There will be more targeted innovation where Jisc works directly with its stakeholders and although the scale of activity will be reduced, there will be new innovation taking place in line with the changes in the environment.

During these years, UKOLN has established a substantive global reputation, and has led innovation work to develop information environments, repositories, resource discovery, metadata registries, metadata standards, collection level descriptions and software tools. We are currently supporting innovation in areas such as research information management, repository metadata and infrastructure, and resource discovery. We continue to support and facilitate communities of practice, notably Web managers and software developers working in higher education. UKOLN has also published the Ariadne Web journal since 1996.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the many people with whom we have worked closely, for your participation and engagement in our Innovation Support Centre activities. While the Innovation Support Centre will cease operating after July 2013, UKOLN will continue and as the organisation enters a new phase, it is a time to reflect on what we’ve achieved. We’d be interested to hear from you about how UKOLN’s work has made an impact. From August 2013, we will continue to build on this reputation and we very much look forward to working with you again in the future.

Dr Liz Lyon, Director UKOLN
Paul Walk, Deputy Director UKOLN

Note that a similar announcement has been published by CETIS. I think it is clear that 2013 will provide interesting challenges!

Merry Christmas.

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[I] first came across the World-Wide Web (WWW) at a workshop on Internet tools organised by the Information Exchange Special Interest Group, University of Leeds on 9th December 1992. In January 1993 the Computing Service installed the CERN httpd server on its central Unix system – this was probably the first WWW service provided by a central service in the UK academic community.

The  workshop included demonstrations of a number of Internet applications. The aim of the workshop, was to raise awareness of the importance of the Internet to support institutional research, teaching and marketing activities.

At the time I was familiar with Gopher, Veronica, WAIS and Archie but the Web was new to me. The applications were probably demonstrated on  Silicon Graphics or possibly Sun workstations.  The Web browser I saw was the Viola which was publicly released in May 1992.

A screenshot of Viola running under X-Windows is illustrated. It should be noted, however, that this image shows a later release of the browser since, in December 1992, the Web was text-only with inline images only becoming available with the release of the NCSA Mosaic browser.

Despite its text-only origins the potential of the Web was apparent to me from the first time I saw it.  The ability to have have links within a document, as opposed to Gopher which provided only links from menu items, was a clear strength of the application as was the integration with a range of existing Internet services, such as FTP and Gopher, as well as links with a variety of backend services, such as directory applications which were already starting to be integrated with the Web.

At that time I was the Information Officer in the University Computing Service and was looking for a tool which could be used to provide access to online information provided by the Computing Service as well as, I hoped, form the basis of a Campus Wide Information Service (CWIS).

A small number of Universities were at that time starting to explore the potential of Gopher to provide a CWIS and that was the technology I expected would be used at Leeds.  But on 9 December 1992 I saw the Web for this first time and was convinced that I have seen a new vision of the future.  It was twenty years ago today, but it’s another set of Beatles lyrics which are more appropriate:

Roll up for the mystery tour.
The magical mystery tour is waiting to take you away,
Waiting to take you away.

When were you taken away by the Web?

Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

I work a few offices away from Brian Kelly and Paul Walk and other colleagues in UKOLN. We chat often in the corridors and today I told Brian about last week’s trip to Delhi, India. Because of my enthusiasm about what we found in relation to e-learning, new technologies and connectivity for the public good, Brian asked me to blog and share some of the inspiration. For context, when I say ‘we’ I am not being royal, I am just also referring to Kyriaki Anagnostopoulou, our Head of e-Learning at Bath who has the kind of international reputation that got us invited to India in the first place.

The Indian government works with the HE sector on increasing access to HE for learners who cannot access HE at the moment. The HE system in India is highly regulated and it isn’t a market where entry is easily possible. Many UK universities are working to establish themselves there, but this is far from easy. Moreover, there isn’t enough Indian faculty to grow the existing universities or establish new ones and student places are very, very limited considering the interest in university study that there is. We heard that for one of the Institutes of Technology, there are over 40 students for each available place. So, a different approach is required. Against this background there is a bigger drive to educate India out of poverty. Experiencing New Delhi, you can see what is possible. But driving into old Delhi, we saw what still is to be achieved. It is a country of zest, opportunity, large numbers (1 Billion people) and great economic and social challenges…

The Ministry of Human Resources Development which oversees HE, is investing $1 billion into growing HE. Crucial to their plan is the National Mission on Education through ICT. Growth is going to come through reaching all corners of India with connectivity, and that is why there is an incredible project of taking glass fibre cable into the farthest ends of India. A huge development, and often combined with putting solar energy provision in place, where no electricity existed before. WiFi connections are going to become available through 40 rupees a year subscriptions. That’s about 50 pence. It shows some clear government financial commitment. And it’s all for learning, how inspiring is that?

Aakash tablet (image from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aakash_(tablet))

The second step is to have the learning platforms that connect learners to the curriculum, teaching and assessment. This too is addressed in the most imaginative way. You may have heard of the Indian invention of a $30 tablet, the Aakash (illustrated). I understood that Aakash means ‘clouds’, or ‘sky’, and that shows again how India is reaching for the sky here. The Aakash 1 apparently didn’t get past the pilot, but I’ve held the Aakash 2, played with it (thanks Prof Kannan Moudgalya) and sat in amazement at what a smart little thing this is.  It’s less than half the size of an i-pad but large enough to work comfortably with. It has some good processing power and I saw some software on it that allows you to do programming –useful for Comp Sci students and e-developers. The current pilot means 100.000 learners are testing it out, and we understood from government officials that another 1.5 Million are to be piloted in early Spring next year.

With connectivity and the technology platform under way, the content needs to get out there, and this is where our discussions came in. At the moment universities are encouraged to make as much content available as possible. They all do it in different ways. In some cases it is curriculum, sometimes just content and in some cases there is a larger or smaller effort towards designing materials for learning. Designing content for learning is clearly a developing field and again, full of challenges in India, such as the need for various language versions, cultural context adjustment and then there are also issues about what text/ expression/ content may or may not be used for cultural, religious or property right sensitivities. (On that note, this entry is not a statement sanctioned or approved by the Indian government or any partners we have worked with. It’s just my own account!)

Interestingly, at the conference – courtesy of the British Council and Indira Gandhi National Open University – the Ministry’s Secretary told us that developments now in universities have to be about quality, not quantity. It isn’t good enough to just put content online, if ICT is not used effectively to actually improve learning. Excellent.

The three step approach is incredible considering the size of the country: 1 billion people, 17 million students, 500+ colleges and millions of eager learners wanting to get ahead. We were impressed by the university colleagues we met from all over India. They were genuinely driven by seeing universities as a public good: educating the country out of poverty and developing the technologies to do it. It explains where all these inspired e-ideas are coming from. Watch that space, I can’t help thinking there is more to come from the East.

Gwen van der Velden
Director
Learning and Teaching Enhancement
University of Bath.

Email: g.m.vandervelden@bath.ac.uk
Web page: http://www.bath.ac.uk/learningandteaching/about/staff/g.vandervelden.html
Twitter: @gwenvdv

Kyriaki Anagnostopoulou
Head of e-Learning
Learning and Teaching Enhancement
University of Bath.

Email: k.anagnostopoulou@bath.ac.uk
Web page: http://www.bath.ac.uk/learningandteaching/about/staff/k-anagnostopoulou.html

View Twitter conversation from: [Topsy]

Amber’s post included a poster entitled JISC on C21st Scholarship and the role of Wikipedia which I’ve embedded in this post.

Amber described the image as an “infographic” which generated some debate on Twitter regarded the difference between an infographic and a post. Thus led to recollection of a passionate discussion at the IWMW 2012 event on the difference between infographics and data visualisation.

It seems that data visualisation provides a view on an entire data set, whereas an infographic is a lossy process which focusses on a particular aspect of the data which the creator of the infographic wishes to focus on. A poster might be described as an infographic without the data.

The accompanying image does, in the depiction of the education level of Wikipedia users, a certain amount of ‘infographical’ information, but the remainder is a poster. I think we can conclude that there are fuzzy boundaries between posters and infographics.

This is probably, however, less fuzziness between those who find infographics useful and those who dismiss them as marketing mechanisms for presenting a particular viewpoint, but hiding the underlying complexities. This, at least, lay behind the passionate discussion that took place late one evening at IWMW 2012!

Such discussions frequently take place in the context of scientific communications. There are those who value the importance of communicating the implications of scientific research to the general public and feel that going into the details will tend to alienate the public. However such approaches can be dismissed by others who feel that such approaches results in a dumbing-down of the complexities.

I came across these issues earlier this year when I spoke at a day’s event on “Dealing With the Media” organised by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council. The event was aimed at recipients of AHRC grants and outlines the experiences of those who had been successful if maximising the visibility of their research through engagement with mass media. Other speakers described strategies for ‘selling’ your story to those who would commission articles for the BBC or publications such as the Guardian and the Times Higher Education. The importance of giving a brief and simple message was made by a number of the speakers.

I am in favour of use of infographics to help put across complex arguments. I was particularly impressed with Amber’s approach, as she not only produced the infographics which I have illustrated but also integrated the points given in the infographic in the slides she used in her presentation. In addition Amber has provided a document giving the source of the materials she used in her presentation.

Amber seems to be suggesting approaches which could benefit others who might wish to enhance the impact of their work. This is, of course, of importance across the sector as can be seen from the EPSRC’s recent announcement of their Impact Toolkit. This addresses areas such as What is impact?; Why make an impact?; What the ESRC expects; How to maximise impact; Developing a strategy; Impact tools; Taking research to Westminster; Contact government organisations; Getting social science research into the evidence base in government; Knowledge exchange; Public engagement; Impact resources and ESRC Pathways to Impact for Je-S applications.

It strikes me that as well as learning from such resources, it may also be helpful to share the tools and the approaches taken in producing infographics and posters. It may be that such work will be provided by a graphics unit who have expertise in this area. But this may only be a realistic solution for high profile outputs. Perhaps we should all seek to develop expertise in this area? The tool Amber used in the production of her poster, easel.ly, might provide a useful starting point. We can find examples of other tools for creating infographics which are available. But perhaps more importantly besides Amber’s example has anyone examples of good posters and infographics related to development work which we can learn from?

NOTE: Tony Hirst has provided Delicious bookmarks of services for creating infographics which include Piktochart- Infographic & Presentation Tool, Venngage, infogr.am and easel.ly.

Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

It was, however, when I spotted the post when it appeared in one of the personalised newspapers I used that I appreciated the skill of Talat’s opening paragraph and the image he used to accompany the post.

The opening paragraph began:

Imagine that you are a senior manager in an institution within the UK Higher Education sector with responsibilities for research: you have read some basic details about unique researcher identifiers and perhaps institutional identifiers. However, it may not be immediately apparent just how important these issues are, which may seem on the face of it to be a relatively superficial and/or trivial organisational matter.

This, I felt, encouraged the reader to read more, and click on the link to the full article. In addition, as can be seen from the accompanying image, an attractive image accompanied the post, which helped to differentiate it from the many other posts on the page.

Sometimes I hear people talk about the importance of attractive PDF designs which aim to encourage reading. A problem with that approach is that there is only one view of the report. As described in a previous post images in blog posts can enhance the user’s experience across a wide range of personalised newspaper services such as Pulse, Flipboard and Zite. This can provide a greater range of dissemination channels to reach the intended audiences, as well as providing the audiences with the flexibility to choose their preferred environment for reading such reports.

But as suggested in the title of this post, blog authors will need to give thought to the opening paragraph for a blog post, and images which can be used to complement the post. In addition, it will probably be useful to summarise a post or a report in a Twitter-friendly fashion. For this report you could use the opening line (which may happen if you use an auto-tweeting service):

Imagine you are a senior manager in an institution within the UK HE sector with responsibilities for research: bit.ly/OAg4VT

Although my preference is for a human-crafted summary, such as the one Talat used to announce the report:

Why should universities care about identifiers? Review on UKOLN’s Technical Foundations blog: bit.ly/OAg4VT

It seems blogs and Twitter are turning us into headline writers as well as picture editors. And if you don’t feel you have the expertise to make your make use of visual imagery the Hubspot Inbound Internet Marketing blog provides some suggestions on six creative ways to make your content more visual.

The New Statesman (13 August 2012) featured an interesting article on “The Olympic Afterglow” by Ed Smith. As described in a summary of the current issue the article provides a left-of-centre perspective on the Olympic Games:

Team GB could not have won many of its medals without the support of the state. Only a few sports can nurture elite athletes (and their coaches, equipment and nutritionists) in a free market; most require handouts from the taxpayer.

But it was the issues of “talent” and “effort” which I found most interesting. The article explains how:

“Talent” has often been used as a dirty word, replaced by nouns with a clear moral dimension – guts, determination, sacrifice. The message is clear: medals should be earned by an effort of willpower, preferably a triumph over adversity.

The article went on to challenges such views:

Yet the natural human instinct – what viewers feel before they are told what to think – is to thrill to raw talent whenever we see it. Usain Bolt cheerfully admits that Yohan Blake trains much harder. “But I have a talent”, Bolt adds truthfully. And it is his talent that is so wonderful. he is one of the world’s most popular sportsmen because he has not been dulled by the platitudes of professionalism. At the Beijing Olympic in 200m, in the 100 metres final, he stopped trying at 70 metres. In London, he sprinted almost for the full 100 metres. But he never lost his boyish incredulity at his own brilliance. Nor have we.

I suspect it was the New Statesman’s copy deadlines which meant that they didn’t include any references to Usain Bolt’s late night celebration’s after winning the 100 metres, but before competing in the 200 metres and 4×100 metres relay races. This was described in The Telegraph under the headline: Usain Bolt celebrates 100m gold with Swedish women’s handball team with Bolt himself supplying the accompanying photograph.

Roundheads and Cavaliers

The article reminded me of a programme on BBC 4 entitled Roundhead or a Cavalier? Which Are You? which I had been alerted to recently. The BBC Web site provides the following summary of the programme:

In the middle of the 17th century, Britain was devastated by a civil war that divided the nation into two tribes – the Roundheads and the Cavaliers. In this programme, celebrities and historians reveal that modern Britain is still defined by the battle between the two tribes. The Cavaliers represent a Britain of panache, pleasure and individuality. They are confronted by the Roundheads, who stand for modesty, discipline, equality and state intervention.

Updating this to our current environment this could begin:

In the early part of the 21st century, the UK’s higher education sector is mildly agitated by disagreements that are dividing the sector into two tribes 

with those who take up the freedom and opportunities provided by blogs, Twitter and other social media services in encouraging individualistic approaches to their work continuing the Cavalier tradition, but encountering resistance from Roundheads who wish to see a continuation of the modest, disinterested and managed approaches to such activities and are willing to endorse institutional interventions in order to ensure such traditions continue.

This reminded me of my recent paper on “Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories?“. In my one-minute summary of the paper, available on Vimeo, I described how I responded to our Pro Vice-Chancellor’s question on how I had managed to have the largest number of downloads in the University of Bath by saying “Simple, it’s about the incoming links from LinkedIn and Academic.edu and similar services“. But repository managers don’t appear to be proactive in encouraging researchers to link to papers in open access repositories, unlike commercial publishers who, we have found, do encourage researchers to link to papers hosted behind the publishers’ paywalls. “Why! tell me why?” I asked at the end of the summary.

I think I now understand the reason why. Some people don’t choose to make use of simple solutions to provide professional benefits because of their Roundhead tendencies and feel benefits should only be gained after hard work and discipline. On the other hand I’ll admit to being a Cavalier and am happy to use technologies which work for me, even – no, especially – if they don’t require any hard work. So for me using the social media service which works is the ideal. if you’re a Roundhead you’re more likely to prefer the hard work and disciplined approaches which installing open source software on you own server and the domain you manage.

I’ll also admit to admiring the Cavaliering approach taken by Usain Bolt who won 3 Gold medals in less than 2 minutes of competitive racing at the Olympics (with times for partying between races) to the Roundheads’ hero, Mo Farah, who spent almost an hour winning his 2 gold medals at the Olympics.

What approach do you prefer?  

Last month Steve Wheeler on his Learning With E’s blog published a couple of posts which explored the development of the “Content is King” meme and the variations on the “Content is Dead” ripostes.

Steve began by suggesting that “Content is a tyrant…” – a lengthy and well-written post which generated 79 tweets and 14 likes on Facebook.

The following day Steve published his own riposte: “…context is king” which he introduced by providing the context to his initial post:

In yesterday’s post I made the statement that the internet is better as a creative space than it is as a repository.

and went on to conclude that:

As I argued yesterday however, content is no longer the driving force of the web, and should not be viewed in isolation. The context within which the content is situated should also be focused upon as an important component of any analysis of web based learning activity.

I contributed to the discussion in a comment on the post:

I’ve previously suggested that “Communications is king” (if the network goes down people say “I can’t access my email” and not “I can’t access the VLE or the OPAC“.

I then realised that “Community is king” – communication channels are no use if you’ve no-one to chat with“.

Although some people are dismissive of use of such soundbites I find that it can be helpful to be able to crystallise a viewpoint in a few brief words, whilst acknowledging that the true picture will be more complex.

Communicating Succinctly

I was reflecting on ways in which one may communicate an “elevator pitch” if, for example, you are in the lift with a senior manager and have a brief opportunity to explain the value of one’s professional activities. As described in a post on How Twitter Expertise Helps Your Writing and Dissemination  Twitter is a valuable tool for developing the skills in being able to communicate succinctly.

From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2011/may/25/steve-bell-bell-epoque-cartoon

As an aside I should also add how funny I find many of the @guardianstyle tweets, which demonstrate that if you have skills in writing headlines you can include an initial comment and a witty reply is 140 characters. As an example the following tweets were posted while I was writing this post:

RT @caffyrelf: RT @suzanne_moore: The past, present and future walked into a bar. It was tense. [source]

Having walked into a bar, the barman served a dangling participle. [source]

Into the bar, a man walked and bought a drink – what linguists call thematic ordering. #grammar #language [source]

So this zeugma came into a bar and some money … [source]

I have to admit that I didn’t know what zeugma meant (did you) but was sufficiently motivated to Google it and then understood that last tweet – and have expanded my vocabulary:-)

The Guardian is renowned for its headlines. As described in the Guardian style guide:

In the 1970s and 80s the Guardian suffered from a reputation for excruciating puns; today, we want to be known for clever, original and witty headlines.

In addition the Guardian is also famous for its cartoon’s especially those made by Steve Bell. An example of how a political point can be made in a single image is illustrated in this cartoon from the Steve Bell: Bell Époque – in pictures article published in the Guardian (25 May 2011). If you are a Guardian reader of a particular age this cartoon of Margaret Thatcher, Geoffrey Howe and Michael Hesletine published in 1990 will still, 22 years on (!) still bring back strong memories of those Thatcherite times.

Communicating Visually

As I do not have any drawing skills I also felt that being able to communicate using cartoon was not foe me. However I was recently introduced to Pixton and decided to give this cartoon creation tool a try.

The aim of the cartoon was to explain succinctly and visually the origin of the term “Content is king” and how it was challenged by the notion that “Communications is king“; how communication channels are of little value unless there is a significant community of users and how such a community may leave an established and thriving service if alternatives are provided and adopted. In light of such complexities, rather than seeking to identify a single best environment, there is a need to acknowledge that that a variety of tools will be used to reflect different user preferences, functionality and, indeed trends and fashions. Or to put it briefly: “Context is king“.

Cartoon 1: [source] (35 words)

Cartoon 2: [source] (46 words)

Cartoon 3: [source] (37 words)

Cartoon 4: [source] (44 words)

This came to a total of 162 words. But what Steve Wheeler actually said, in 183 words, was:

In essence, Kozma and McLuhan both believed that context (i.e. the tools, the media), were at least as important as the content they delivered, whilst Clark agreed with Gates that the content was king. Increasingly, in today’s digital age, many of us are following Clark’s perspective, focusing on content, without paying much attention to the tools we use to make sense of it. In some ways, this is a natural progression, because tools and technologies are becoming more transparent and easy to use without too much thought. Yet in focusing on the content, as McLuhan warned, we may miss the entire message. Highly digitally literate individuals are able to communicate effectively across several platforms without loss of power or nuance. This is known as ‘transliteracy’, a sophisticated grasp of the affordances of the media and technologies that is becoming the passport to success for today’s digital learner and scholar. Transliteracy goes beyond content, and exploits the power and potential of many different tools and services, giving the user an edge over content, enabling them to connect, communicate, consume, create and collaborate more effectively.

Of course both approaches can be equally valid – after all, context is king.

The question I am now asking myself is whether I should continue to make use of Pixton? This post contains the first four cartoons I created. I am conscious of the stereotypes in the characters) bearded professor advising bright young (white) female student. I wonder how easy it is to edit the characters and the scenes in Pixton. Hmm, it seems it’s very easy:

Note: the cartoons as well as the text in this blog post is provided under a Creative Commons licence. The image from The Guardian has been used to illustrate the power of a cartoon. A link has been provided to the source material. It is not felt that use of this cartoon will deprive the Guardian or the cartoonist of funding or undermine their status. However the cartoon will be removed if the copyright holder requests this.

On Saturday, while having a few day’s holiday in Madrid, I came across a guide to the Internet The guide will be familiar to many, but I hadn’t realised that it was to be found in the Prado Museum in Madrid. The strange thing about the guide was that it was created between 1490 and 1510. The guide is shown below and in case you are unfamiliar with the name, as I was, it is known as The Garden of Earthly Delights by the Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch.

Image from Wikipedia

When I saw the painting (a triptych) I was reminded of the poster entitled The Web Is Agreement by Paul Downey which I highlighted in post entitled Tower of WS-Babel in January 2008.

Image from thewebisagreement.com. Available under a Creative Commons licence.

Paul’s poster illustrated the Web as a place containing both good and evil, with the dark places representing both inappropriate content and inaccessible places which could not easily be visited due to a failure to abide by the Web’s commandments.

The Role of The Librarian

Bosch’s painting is described in Wikipedia as providing “a didactic warning on the perils of life’s temptations“. Whilst the title of Borsch’s painting focusses on earthly perils, we now know there are perils to be faced in the online environment. But what is the role of librarians in a world in which we need to acknowledge that there are perils to be faced online?

In the early days of the Web there was a feeling that the role of librarians was to identify the safe areas of the Web and to provide maps of such areas. Initially librarians who had HTML authoring expertise would provide such links and later services such as the RDN, which later was renamed Intute, provide links to trusted sources.

The role of the librarian was, it seems, to provide guides to the safe areas of the Web; areas in which, perhaps, unicorns would safely graze with no beasties to be found.

But today we know that such patronising approaches are no longer applicable, especially in a higher education context. Instead the role of the librarian continues to provide maps of the online environment, but in addition to provide advice if the visitor chooses to explore off the beaten path. The librarian is also well-positioned to warn of the dangers in unquestioning trust in maps provided by others – Karen Blakeman, for example,frequently highlights the risks in treating Google as an infallible guide, views which have been echoed by Phil Bradley. It should also be noted that the warnings depicted in The Web is Agreement poster also highlight terrain which it might be difficult to access, special browser technologies, such as Flash support, may be needed – but again the emphasis is on providing education on dangers rather than imposing barriers to travel.

What of the Marketing Department?

If the role of the librarian is a be a supportive guide, which is the role of the marketing department?

Traditionally we probably feel that our institution’s marketing department tends to provide a positive gloss on our institution: the sky is cloudless; the sun is shining and the students are attractive. The marketing department at Borsch’s institution would , no doubt, pick on the unicorns as a positive image, and highlight statistics on unicorn satisfaction levels and future employability.

A post by Karin Joly entitled Not your usual #highered Admissions Video: Beer, Blood and Applications? published on the CollegeWebEditor.com blog suggested an alternative way of making your institution appealing to potential students. This time, as can be seen on the YouTube video, rather than the cliché of a happy student environment, we had a unearthly guide who magical powers sadly came to an unfortunate end.

Exactly six years ago today, on Friday 24^th February 2006 myself and John Heap (from Leeds Metropolitan University and, at the time, a UCISA committee member) organised a joint workshop at Warwick University on “Initiatives & Innovation: Managing Disruptive Technologies“. The abstract for the event is described how:

Computing, IT and Learning Technology Services within HE institutions must maintain reliable, stable, high availability services whilst undertaking development work on new systems, applications and technologies. All this is done within a framework of new opportunities, and occasionally new constraints, provided by national and regional managed initiatives and development projects.

Additionally, as technology is increasingly used in the direct support of teaching and learning, new ideas and technologies arise not from the Computing Service itself, but from academic staff who, understandably, want maximum flexibility in their ability to introduce and exploit new technologies.

This workshop will explore the issues involved in managing these potentially disruptive technologies and will work towards a framework that can be used to balance the demands for innovation and constant development with the need for stability and security.

The following definitions of disruptive technologies were provided:

The Free Online Dictionary defines disruptive technology as: “A new technology that has a serious impact on the status quo and changes the way people have been dealing with something, perhaps for decades. Music CDs all but wiped out the phonograph industry within a few years, and digital cameras are destined to eliminate the film industry. The most disruptive technologies in history have been the telephone, the computer (and all of its offshoots) and the Internet.

Another definition from Christian Brothers University defines disruptive technology as: “Technologies that enable the breaking of long-held business rules that inhibit organizations from making radical business changes”.

It is interesting looking at the objectives for the event, which aimed to ensure that the workshop participants:

• Gained an understanding of JISC’s E-Framework strategy and the role of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) in JISC-funded development activities.
• Had an opportunity to discuss the implications of the E-Framework for institutional IT Service departments.
• Learnt about the potential to support teaching and learning and research of a variety of Internet technologies such as instant messaging, Blogs, Wikis, Skype, etc.
• Discussed some of the potential difficulties in providing, maintaining and supporting such technologies.
• Explored approaches to reconciling the tensions between the user community’s desires to make use of such technologies and the difficulties in satisfying such requests.

“IT Services: Help or Hindrance?”

It was around this time, which coincided with the height of Little Britain’s popularity, that I made use of the catchphrase “Computer Says No” to point out the popular stereotype of IT Service departments, which we also saw in the IT Crowd. Interestingly it seems that Little Britain also had a following in the US, with Michael Stephens noticing a presentation I gave and writing a blog post which featured the accompanying image.

At the UCISA Management Conference 2006 I posed the, somewhat provocative, question “IT Services: Help Or Hindrance?” in which I raised concerns which I had previously described in a paper on IT Services – Help Or Hindrance To National IT Development Programmes?. As described in the abstract for the paper:

There is a danger that development work, including development funded by national and international funding programmes, can be hindered by institutional IT services departments. However IT services may feel that developers fail to understand the security, performance and support issues which deployment of applications is likely to entail.

Around that time there were concerns over the provision of instant messaging clients, such as MSN Messenger, for student use. Such applications were, some IT staff suggested, only used for trivial purposes. The arguments for blocking access to Skype covered both performance issues (“Skype can turn PCs  into a ‘Supernode’ and consume bandwidth“), ideological (?) (“Skype uses a proprietary standard – we should only provide access to SIP-compliant Internet teleph0ny applications“) and policy (“Use of Skype contravenes the JANET AUP so we can’t use it“). The arguments concerns regarding provision of blogs and wikis tended to relate to concerns about inappropriate content being published and the associated difficulties in managing the content and the legal and reputational risks.

How Have Things Changed?

How have things changed over the past six years?

Some of the specific concerns I listed above are now, surely, no longer an issue. The value provided by Skype to the sector has, I feel, been accepted and although SIP-compliant VoIP services may be used as part of an institution’s telephony infrastructure on the desktop (and, indeed, on mobile phones) Skype probably is the safe mainstream option.

Similarly the desire to block access to instant messaging services probably became untenable once web-based client became popular, as well as many instant messaging facilities in a host of other applications: it seems strange when editing a collaborative document in Google Docs and having realtime chat with co-authors that at one time such activities were regarded as trivial.

As to whether IT Services should provide access to blogs, with the associated risks related to the lack of formal editorial control processes, the arguments for the need to control use of such applications became marginalised as academic, researchers and, indeed, IT Service staff themselves, started to make use of cloud-based solutions such as WordPress.com and Blogspot.com. On 17 October 2007, for example, Christine Sexton, IT Services Director at the University of Sheffield launched her blog on Blogspot published 62 posts in the remainder of the year and 208 in 2008, heralding the first generation of senior managers in IT Services who were willing to make use of blogs. And as well as use of third party blog platforms by those who wanted to exploit the potential of blogs to support their professional activities, we also saw institutions starting to install, and in some cases, develop blog platforms hosted within the institution. The lead in this area was taken by the University of Warwick Blogbuilder platform. Interestingly although people have been known to swear on their blog posts, the world hasn’t collapsed and there are now 8,311 blogs, 160,810 entries, 27,497 tags, 217,208 comments and 119925 images!

Have we then seen over the past six years “[Disruptive] Technologies that enable the breaking of long-held business rules that inhibit organizations from making radical business changes” which have transformed of the education business – the role of IT Service departments? I don’t really feel that this is the case. Rather we have seen IT Services (in higher education – this is not necessarily the case in schools or across other public sector organisations) IT Services becoming more flexible and more user-focussed in their approaches. In part this is due to the leadership shown by senior managers such as Chris Sexton (who, in 2010 when she was also UCISA chair managed to published 162 blog posts). But, ironically, to an extent we also have the financial crisis to thank for the culture change we are seeing, with a realisation that at a time of reductions in funding and opportunities provided by cloud services (especially those which are free to use) that the priority should be to support the needs of the user community. So I’m prepared to acknowledge the (unforeseen) benefits which the international banking sector helped to instigate :-)

But I’d be interested in your views on changes in the provision and support of IT across the sector over the past six years. Do you agree with my view that things have improved or would you prefer to go back to the way we were?

I was particularly interested in the infographic on the volume of tweets which are currently being produced, which, as shown below, Liz included in her slides.

The Twitter infographic was produced by Touchagency.com and the infographic is free for reuse. I think it succeeds in putting across the importance of Twitter in a very succinct way – although, of course, the volume of tweets should not be regarding as providing an indicator of its value and, beneath the surface, there will be a need to question the figures presented – for example, is 5pm the best time to get retweeted if you have an international following or will you need to take into account these numbers of international followers and their time zone?

But I feel that people will be aware that infographics will only provide a summary, and not the full picture. Or, as Wikipedia puts it “Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics present complex information quickly and clearly“.

The need to be able to put across complex information quickly and clearly is becoming increasingly important in today’s environment in which, as Liz states in her slides “A single sequencer can now generate in a day what it took 10 years to collect for the Human Genome Project”  (see reference).

I’m therefore pleased to see that a recent JISC Call on Activity Data: Analytics and Metrics is inviting submissions for a report on Activity Data: Analytics and Metrics which will be one of a series of high profile reports JISC is commissioning to inform the UK FE/HE sector on key issues relating to digital infrastructure which states that:

It is intended that this Report will be made available in a web format, and that it will contain a lot of visuals, including “infographics” where appropriate. 

I’m aware, however, that some people feel that infographics ‘dumb down’ complex issues. But for me this is simply restating the aims of infographics in a negative way: what is the difference between “infographics present complex information quickly and clearly” and ”infographics present complex information is a trivial and superficial way“? You may make the second point if you disagree with the arguments being presented in an infographic rather than responding to the points being made.

Which isn’t to say that there can’t be bad infographics as well as good infographics. For me it will be important that the sources of information used to provide an infographic are readily available, so that if you disagree with the arguments being presented in an infographic you are able to provide a different interpretations from the same source.

Filed under: General ]]> http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/the-growing-importance-of-infographics/feed/ 2 51.379915 -2.331708 51.379915 -2.331708 Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) Liz Lyon at VALA 2012 Scale of information growth http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/has-machine-translation-come-of-age/ http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/has-machine-translation-come-of-age/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:10:34 +0000 Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/?p=8813 ]]> Over two years ago in a post entitled Extending Your Community – Through Machine Translation I suggested that although in the past machine translation was felt to be of little use, developments with services such as Google Translate may mean that “machine translation now does have a role to play“.

A few weeks ago I came across a referrer link to a blog post from a post entitled “Google Scholar Citations y la emergencia de nuevos actores en la evaluación de la investigación“. My Chrome browser helpfully informed me that the page was in Spanish and provided a link to an automated translation of the page. The post began:

The launch of a few months ago Google Scholar Citations [1], the tool for measuring the impact of research publications in indexed by popular search engine, leads us to revise this and other bibliometric applications such efforts to measure the visibility of academic and researchers on the web. This impact is not limited to traditional media (citations received from other scientific works) but embraces new ways of scientific communication and their associated indicators, as the number of downloads of a job, people store it in your manager references or the time that a presentation is envisioned online. It discusses briefly the extent to affect the emergence of these new tools to the traditional databases for evaluation of science, Thomson Reuters, Web of Science [2], and Scopus, Elsevier [3].

I think this provides a comprehensible summary of what the post will cover. The post concluded:

Since the level of university policy and research evaluation, the question to be made ​​is whether any of the products mentioned both Microsoft and Google mainly but also alt-metrics initiatives can be serious competitors in the near future to the two large databases that provide information bibliometric, important cost, especially in an era marked by budget cuts. Traditional products are more creditworthy and stable than new ones by offering a wide range of possibilities and associated metrics, not just jobs but also to journals in which they are published. Besides its use is widespread and there are some metrics validated by professionals and bibliometrics by agencies with responsibility for research. However, it is legitimate debate about whether these databases are essential in research assessment processes. In our opinion, at present these databases (ISI Web of Science or Scopus, no need for two) are essential for the evaluation, however the new generation Science Information Systems (CRIS) [28] together seekers free scientists such as Google Scholar, and metrics based on the use of information may provide new solutions to the evaluation of science, perhaps the medium term by decreasing the need for costly citation indexes. Making prospective fiction might think how it would change the market for scientific information and assessment if Google decided to launch its own “impact index” from the indexed information, which does not seem unreasonable since its popular search management PageRank is based on a principle that already apply other bibliometric indicators. In any case, what is certain is that new products and tools available to researchers and evaluators to facilitate the dissemination and the retrieval of scientific information and open new possibilities for the exchange of scientific information and assessment.

The meaning is less clear, but it does seem that the authors, Alvaro Cabezas Clavijo and Daniel Torres-Salinas of the EC3 Evaluation Group Scientific and Scientific Communication at the Hospital Universitario Virgen de las Nieves in Granada, have been asking whether new tools and approaches for identifying the value of scientific research are challenging the well-established tools provided by ISI Web of Science and Scopus. They seem to feel that researchers will need to continue to make use of ISI Web of Science or Scopus but new approaches may increasingly be relevant, especially if Google make a business decision to further enhance their Google Citation service.

Although not mentioned in the conclusions, the article also reviews Microsoft Academic Search and suggests that “compared to Google Scholar Citations, the process of updating the cv is heavier“; a conclusion which reflects my experiences in the long delay in having updates accepted. The article also mentions the altmetrics initiative and provides links to a number of examples of such approaches including “Total Impact [19] where, in the same line, we can find metrics posted on Slideshare presentations [20], the times they shared a scientific article on Facebook [21], or the number of groups Mendeley which has collected a certain job”.

I found the article of interest and I’m pleased to have found it via the referrer link. Should searches of online foreign language resources now become a significant part of a research strategy I wonder? I also wonder what the term “prospective fiction“, mentioned in the conclusions, means? Can any Spanish speakers explain what a better translation for the following sentence could be:

Haciendo prospectiva-ficción cabría pensar cómo cambiaría el mercado de la información y evaluación científica si Google decidiera lanzar su propio “índice de impacto” a partir de la información que indiza, lo cual no parece descabellado ya que su popular sistema de ordenación de búsqueda PageRank se basa en un principio que ya aplican otros índices bibliométricos.

Note that “prospectiva-ficción” was italicised in the original article.

“Learning is performance” Steve Wheeler tells us in his opening sentence in his first blog post of the year. Steve goes on to describe how:

Some of our earliest performances, particularly in formal learning contexts (school, college, university), are under the scrutiny of subject experts who award grades, and ultimately, some form of accreditation. This kind of performance is commonly referred to as formal assessment. Sadly, it is often the case that the measure of performance is not fit for purpose, as we have all witnessed recently in the universal failure of standardised testing, or the exam paper fiascos that continually assail our senses via the media.

The implication may to be that since sometimes (is there evidence that the term ‘often’ should be used in this context?) a “measure of performance is not fit for purpose” we should avoid assessment. However as Steve goes on to point out:

[Assessment] is important for the community, because the community needs skilled and knowledgeable members, and some form of check is required to ensure that the skill or knowledge is up to date, safe to use, and is relevant for the needs of society. If we get assessment wrong, we fail the student, and ultimately we fail society.

The JISC CETIS service has had a long-standing involvement in exploring issues related to assessment. But Steve Wheeler’s comment that ”Learning is performance” has reminded me that it may be beneficial to explore approaches to assessment beyond the tools, projects and resources which CETIS have documented on their web site.

Sporting Performance

One lunch time a few months ago I met Doctor Ken Bray, a Senior Visiting Fellow in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Bath.

Ken’s work has been featured in a couple of press releases published by the University of Bath. In January 2009 the focus was on work related to the physics of darts:

As the British Darts Organisation’s (BDO) Lakeside World Professional Darts Championships gets into full swing this week, new research from the University of Bath shows that the secret of true darts skills is all in the maths.

Visiting fellow Dr Ken Bray’s calculations for the Get On campaign shows how darts stars taking to the oche this week will have to master geometry, physics and algebra to win their place in the sport’s hall of fame.

However Ken’s main interest is in the science of football. Ken is author of How to Score: Science and the Beautiful Game which was published in 2006. His interests in this area have continued and were featured on the This Is Bath Web site in March 2011:

​They may not realise it, but the best footballers are actually skilled mathematicians, according to an expert from Bath.

University of Bath sports scientist Dr Ken Bray has analysed hours of football footage to conclude that as much as 30 per cent of a player’s technique is down to an intuitive understanding of maths and science.

A criticism of which could be made of a scientific study of sports is that ”We all use mathematical principles – we’d fall over when walking if we didn’t!” And it would clearly be wrong to suggest that David Beckam’s success in taking free kicks is due to a conscious analysis of the variables (the distance, the weather conditions, the angles, …) and the implementation of the appropriate formula which will ensure that the ball succeeds in bending around the defensive wall and out of the reach of the goalkeeper to ensure that England reach the final stages of the World Cup, as Beckham famously did with his 30-yard free kick, three minutes into injury-time of the game against Greece in 2006.

However although footballers and other sports stars may have an “intuitive understanding of maths and science” those involved in coaching nowadays do have an understanding of the maths and physics associates with sports success and are developing measurement techniques which can provide ways of helping to ensure success.

Some approaches will be related to the individual sportsman, for example their diet and general fitness. However others will relate directly to their sporting performance and the performance of the opposition. This is now a major industry with companies such as Prozone analysing sporting performance and selling their methodologies, tools and data to interested parties, including sporting clubs, sportsmen and women, coaches, agents, newspapers and TV companies and sports fans.

As described on the Prozone web site the company provides:

Post match analysis: Analyse every aspect of team and player performance via a range of interactive platforms.

Opposition Analysis: Prozone can provide pre-match performance information on your forthcoming opponents. Commonly known as ‘technical scouting’ this allows you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of upcoming teams and individual players.

Through interactive coaching tools, users are able to gain a unique insight into the performance of upcoming opposition teams. These can help to supplement the knowledge of your scouts and enable you to better prepare for upcoming matches. Scouting analysis can be delivered using a range of video clips, in-depth data and multi-layered graphics and can be accessed online or sent direct to the training ground.

Live Performance Analysis: By offering ‘real time’ information about the game, our Live Analysis service gives management and coaching staff an immediate insight into the performance of players on the pitch.

Enhanced Player Trading: An advanced online solution allowing clubs to make objective and better informed decisions on player trading through the use of accurate performance data.

I wonder to what extend these approaches may have some relevance to the higher education sector? Back in October in a post on  Learning Analytics and New Scholarship: Now on the Technology Horizon I summarised Dave Pattern’s talk at the ILI 2011 conference which described 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‘.  Hmm, does this have parallels with analyses of Arsenal’s defensive frailties and strategies for playing against them.  And should we be looking to provide services similar to Prozone’s:

Live Performance Analysis: By offering ‘real time’ information about students’ learning experiences, our Live Analysis service gives management and academic staff an immediate insight into the performance of students in their learning.

Steve Wheeler concluding his blog post by suggesting that:

Knowledge performance is at the centre of community as curriculum. From the sharing of knowledge comes the discourse that adds to everyone’s collective knowledge within the community of practice, and extends its boundaries. It is this sharing of experience, new ideas, contention and support that advances the community of practice exponentially. The tools are here to achieve it. Performance of knowledge through social media will be one of the vital components of education and training in the coming years.

I agree with that final sentence: “Performance of knowledge through social media will be one of the vital components of education and training in the coming years“. But this will not be restricted to learning and teaching. I would slightly modify this conclusion by saying: “Performance of knowledge through social media will be one of the vital components of research, education and training in the coming years“. And being able to analyse the performance will be a major growth area. Or at least that is what the  NMC Horizon Report > 2012 Higher Education Edition seems to be suggesting with the NMC Horizon’s 2012 Preview Report (PDF format) suggesting that Learning Analytics has a time-to-adoption horizon of 2-3 years.

The report defines Learning analytics as

the interpretation of a wide range of data produced by and gathered on behalf of students in order to assess academic progress, predict future performance, and spot potential issues. Data are collected from explicit student actions, such as completing assignments and taking exams, and from tacit actions, including online social interactions, extracurricular activities, posts on discussion forums, and other activities that are not directly assessed as part of the student’s educational progress.

Or if we, this time, apply this to a sporting context with the changes highlighted:

the interpretation of a wide range of data produced by and gathered on behalf of footballers in order to assess football progress, predict future performance, and spot potential issues. Data are collected from explicit sporting actions, such as completing passes and taking penalties, and from non-sporting actions, including online social interactions, extracurricular activities such as not been caught for drunken driving, posts on the footballer’s Twitter account, and other activities that are not directly assessed as part of the footballer’s sporting and non-sporting progress.

The major difference is that football is a game of two halves but an undergraduate course is a game of three years :-)

How will the technology environment develop during 2012? I’m willing to set myself up for a fall my outlining my predictions for 2012 :-)

Tablet Computers …

After a couple of years in which use of smart phones, whether based on Apple’s iOS or Goole’s Android operating system), became mainstream for many when away from the office, 2012 will see use of Tablets becoming mainstream, with the competition provided by vendors of Android continue to bring the prices for those reluctant to pay a premium for an iPad.

Once the new term starts we’ll see increased numbers of students who received a Tablet PC for Christmas making use of them, not only for watching videos and listening to music in their accommodation, but also in lectures. As well as note-taking the devices, together with smart phones, will be used for recording lectures. In some cases this will lead to concerns regarding ownership and privacy infringements but students will argue that they are paying for their education and they should be entitled to time-shift their lecturers. Since it will be difficult to prevent students from making such recordings lecturers will start to encourage such practices and will seek to develop an understanding of when comments made during lecturers and tutorials should be treated as ‘off-the-record’.

Open Practices …

Such lecturers will be providing one example of an ‘open practice’. Such encouragement of recording or broadcasting lecturers will become the norm in several research areas, with organisers of research conferences acknowledging that they will need to provide an event amplification infrastructure (including free WiFi for participants, an event hashtag, live streaming or recording of key talks) in order to satisfy the expectations of those who are active in participation in research events.

Such open practices will complement more well-established examples of openness including open access and open content, such as open educational resources. We’ll see much greater use of Creative Commons licences, especially licence which minimise barriers to reuse.

Social Applications …

Social applications will become ubiquitous, although the term may be rebranded in order to avoid the barrier to use faced by those who regard the term ‘social’ as meaning ‘personal’ or ‘trivial’. Just as Web 2.0 became rebranded as the Social Web and the Semantic Web as Linked Data, we shall see such applications being marked as collaborative or interactive services.

Social networking services will continue to grow in importance across the higher education sector. However the view that the popularity of such services will be dependent on conformance with a particular set of development (open source and distributed) or ownership criteria (must not be owned by a successful multi-national company) will be seen to be of little significance. Rather than a growth in services such as identi.ca or Diaspora, we will see Facebook continue to develop (with its use by organisations helped by mandatory legal requirements regarding conformance with EU privacy legislation described in a post on 45 Privacy Changes Facebook Will Make To Comply With Data Protection Law). In addition to Facebook, Twitter and Google+ will continue to be of importance across the sector.

Learning and Knowledge Analytics ….

The ubiquity of mobile devices coupled with greater use of social applications as part of a developing cultural of open practices will lead to an awareness of the importance of learning and knowledge analytics. Just as in the sporting arena we have seen huge developments in using analytic tools to understand and maximise sporting performances, we will see similar approaches being taken to understand and maximise intellectual performance, in both teaching and learning and research areas.

Collective Intelligence

Just as the combination of developments will help us to have a better understanding of intellectual performance, so too will these development help to in the growth of Collective Intelligence, described in Wikipedia as the “shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans and computer networks“. The driving forces behind Collective Intelligence will be the global players which have access to large volumes of data and the computational resources (processing power and storage) to analyse the data.

How Will I Know If I’m Right?

In a way it is easy to make predictions. A greater challenge is being able to demonstrate that such predictions have come true. How might we go about deciding, in December 2012, whether these predictions reflect reality?

Monitoring Trends

There will be statistics which can help support the predictions. For example a few days ago Glyn Moody tweeted that:

Google announces 3.7m #Android activations over the Christmas weekend - http://tnw.co/sjAZEd impressive

But there are a range of other indicators which can help to spot trends which may be applicable.

A Google Trend comparison of the terms ‘tablet computer’ and ‘smartphone’ currently show the greater popularity of the latter term although there was a peak in searches for ‘tablet computer’ after the news (labelled F in the screenshot) that “India launches $35 tablet computer“.

Using Wikipedia

Wikipedia articles may also have a role to play. For example we can compare the entries for tablet computer and collective intelligence between January and December 2011 which might help to provide a better understanding of how the Wikipedia community is describing these terms. Similarly looking for the usage statistics for these two entries shows 40,567 visits in January and 73,181 in November 2011 for the entry for tablet computer and 10,711 visits in January and 11,126 in November 2011 for the entry for collective intelligence.

In addition to the content coverage and usage statistics for Wikipedia articles, the creation of an article may also indicate that the term has become significant. It is interesting to note that there is currently no entry for ‘open practice’. Will this have changed by this time next year, I wonder?

Snapshots of Social Network Usage

I have previously provided snapshots of institutional use of Facebook from November 2007 up to January 2011, together with similar surveys of institutional use of services such as Twitter, YouTube and iTunes. It would be interesting to capture early examples of institutional uses of Google+, identi.ca and Diaspora. However I am currently unaware of such institutional uses. Until I discover some examples I will provide a personal summary of my uses of these services.

This data was gathered on 29 December 2011. It will be interesting to see how this compares with the data for the end of 2012. Of course the above table only indicates the extent of my interest and engagement with the services. I have documented these figures so I will be able to benchmark any changes on my usage of these services over the year.

Institutional Trends

It will be interesting to see examples of institutional trends, perhaps by observing topics presented at conferences and also by reading about new developments. One useful source of new developments is Chris Sexton’s From a Distance blog. Chris, Director of Corporate Information and Computing Services at the University of Sheffield, has recently published a post entitled Tablet News in which she describes how:

Today sees the publication of our newsletter, myCiCSnews, which can be downloaded as a pdf from here. There’s articles on learning technologies, research on the campus compute cloud, information security, and many more.
For the first time we’ve made it available in a tablet version, which works really well on iPads and other tablets, and includes embedded video etc.

The Flip Side

The flip side of the growth in use of new services and in discussions about the benefits of such services is the criticisms of such developments.

Criticism and scepticism can take several forms. We can probably remember when mobile phones were large and expensive and, together with the yuppies and businessmen who could afford such devices, were the butt of jokes on comedy sketches.

Mike Ellis has provided his take on the development of online reputation tools such as Klout in his Klunt parody which he announced on Twitter back in September.

We are unlikely to see this example in the Daily Mail but I think we can expect middle England to express outrage at some of the developments I’ve described in this post.

We have already come across examples of the way in which Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry phones have been used to organise illegal events or promote riots. I wonder if the Android tablet will be next in line to race the wrath of the Daily Mail?

Or perhaps the success will be indicated by the backlash. Might we find that the move towards open practices beyond the early adopters will be met by opposition from those who point out the legal risks of such practices, with examples of such risks becoming widely tweeted and retweeted?

Revisiting Predictions

On 29 December 2010 I asked Will #Quora Be Big In 2011? It is difficult to provide an answer to that question. Looking at the Wikipedia article for Quora I find that others also felt that the service would be significant:

Quora has been praised by several publications such as New York Times, USA Today, Time Magazine and The Daily Telegraph.^{[28][29][30][31]}

According to Robert Scoble, Quora succeeded in combining attributes of Twitter, Facebook, Google Wave and various websites that employ a system of users voting content up.^[32] Scoble later criticized Quora, however, saying that it was a “horrid service for blogging,” and while it was a decent question and answer website, it was not substantially better than competing sites.^[33] The Daily Telegraph of the United Kingdom has predicted that Quora will go on to become larger than Twitter in the future.^[31][34] Quora, along with Airbnb and Dropbox, has been named among the next generation of multibillion dollar start-ups by the New York Times.^[35]

Quora itself hosts a question which asks How fast is Quora growing on a weekly basis? What are the growth metrics? However the responses fail to give a clear answer to this question.

I intend to revisit this post in December 2012. I’d welcome suggestions on additional ways in which it will be possible to detect if predictions have become true. I’d also welcome comments on the predictions I’ve outlined in this post.

Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

Checking my email it seems that these were the words I used when I voted for Ian Anstice as this year’s IWR Information Professional of the Year. As described in the announcement about the award published in IWR “The judges – all previous winners- gave Anstice, a branch manager of a public library in Cheshire, the honour for his work in documenting the changes taking place across the public library sector as a whole“. Ian Anstice was quoted as saying “In a time of cuts to library services and being aware that knowledge is power, I was surprised to see there was no publicly available site to show what was going in each authority. I started the blog [at www.publiclibrariesnews.com] in October 2010. This includes all news articles on public library cuts, doing a map of the cuts, and producing a tally of cuts and proposals by authority.“

But what does “evidence-gathering” entail? There is a real danger that selective evidence-gathering is used in order to justify a particular position. This is an approach which has been discredited when governments in the UK and US sought evidence to demonstrate Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. Quite clearly we expect a higher level of integrity from the library sector!

A great example of an honest and open approach to the current challenges facing the library sector can be seen in Aaron Tay’s recent post which asked “Is librarianship in crisis and should we be talking about it?“ Aaron, a librarian at National University of Singapore, is a prolific blogger on his Musings About Librarianship blog. In his post Aaron described how:

Librarians are worriers, and one thing we like to worry a lot about is the future of libraries.

Veronica Arellano however thinks that we should stop writing about it. Why? She gives several reasons in “A Crisis of Our Own Making” but concludes with

“Writing about the ‘crisis’ in libraries tries to elicit change out of fear, rather than a desire to better serve our communities. By continuing to write our own obituaries, we are dissuading enthusiastic, forward-minded young scholars, technologists, and community leaders from entering the profession by painting ourselves as stuck in the past and obsolete.”

Really?  Should discussions of the implications of the perfect storm caused by the combination of the cuts being faced across many public sector organisations, the technical revolution caused initially by the first generation of the Web and subsequently by the popularity of Web 2.0 and the Social Web together with the changing expectations in the user community be ignored?

Aaron feels that “thinking that everything is fine, and business as usual, always choosing the options with the least risk (when there is no such option in fact) will suffice is equally perhaps a recipe for disaster” and this is a view which I would support.

Aaron’s post asks how one should advise potential newcomers to the profession:

Imagine a young potential librarian-to-be contacts you and asks you for advice on whether he should enter the profession. What picture of librarianship should you paint? I believe it would be irresponsible not to at least mention the challenges and potential stumbling blocks that libraries are facing in the future, so they will know what they will be up against.

and concludes by encouraging a response which is honest about the changing context to the library profession:

For the record, I don’t think libraries are definitely doomed to extinction, but there is much to be done and the library world needs passionate and energetic librarians to fight for the future of libraries and the last thing we need is for recruits to come in because they think libraries are a soft option or because the job outlook is stable.

We do need to continue to gather evidence of the value of services, and not just library services. But we need to understand that the evidence will not necessarily justify a continuation of established approaches to providing services. And if evidence is found which supports the view that libraries will be extinct by 2020 (PDF format) then the implications need to be openly and widely discussed. I’m pleased that Aaron is helping to encourage such a debate. And in light of Aaron’s post I’d like to slightly modify the reason why I supported Ian Anstice’s well-deserved award:

At a time when the library profession is suffering from the economic turmoil there is a need for an evidence-based approach to demonstrating the value for libraries and for open debate on the interpretation of such evidence and the implications of policy decisions based on such interpretations.

Perhaps 2011 has been the year of the mobile, with a range of new devices and applications transforming our work and study environment? When I asked for a show of hands at the start of the IWMW 2011 event for people who had a mobile device with them, the sea of hands was unexpected. But I also found that significant numbers had brought along multiple mobile devices and, in response to a question as to whether people preferred use a handheld device to, say, a laptop whilst at home in front of the TV, I was pleased to discover that I am not alone in using my mobile phone rather than my laptop when I wish to look up the TV guide, the football scores or take part in a Twitter discussion. But to be honest I feel that the growth in the importance of mobile has been gradual, with no sudden large scale change being noticeable, not even after the subdued launch of the latest iPhone – although whether we will see the expected large numbers of Android Tablet PCs being bought this Christmas (and cheaper models in the January sales) making 2012 the year of mobile remains to be seen.

Or has 2011 saw the belated arrival of Linked Data? Again despite the feeling that more pragmatic approaches to linking data from disparate sources are becoming accepted, Linked Data doesn’t seem to have yet set the world alight.

I don’t think there has been a significant new major technical development during 2011. But for me 2011 has been the year in which amplified events have started to grow beyond their roots in technologically-focussed events to become more widely embedded.

But what evidence do I have to back up this assertion? It does seem that we are finding that delegates at conferences:

• Expect events to have a WiFi network so that they can discuss talks with other attendees and share their thoughts with a remote audience.
• Expect event organisers to provide an event hashtag to make the event back channel easy to find.

In addition to seem to be finding that speakers:

• Are willing to be live streamed.
• Are appreciated that delegates who are using their mobile devices during their talks are likely to be actively engaged in the topic and helping to engage others in discussing the ideas

There is also a growing expectation that large-scale events will provide dedicated effort to support such activities:

• An event amplifier who will be responsible for expanding the audience, an enhancing the experience and spreading and sharing ideas.
• Technical support to manage video-streaming and/or recording of talk.

I’m looking forward to participating in more amplified events in 2012. But what have your technological highlights of 2011 been?