The Failure of Citizendium

Remembering Citizendium

A few days ago I read Steve Wheeler’s post on Content as Curriculum? having being alerted to it by Larry Sanger’s post on An example of educational anti-intellectualism to which Steve provided a riposte in which Steve argued the need to Play the ball, not the man.

From the blog posts I learnt that Larry Sanger is a co-founder of Wikipedia and, as described on his blog is the “‘Founding Editor-in-Chief’ of the Citizendium, the Citizens’ Compendium: a wiki encyclopedia project that is expert-guided, public participatory, and real-names-only”.

I have to admit that I had forgotten about Citizendium but the little spat caused me to revisit the Web site. While searching I came across a discussion entitled Why did Citizendium fail? and yes, it does seem that this “endeavor to achieve the highest standards of writing, reliability, and comprehensiveness through a unique collaboration between Authors and Editors” has failed. But although we often talk about success criteria, it can be more difficult to identify failures. How then, can we describe Citizendium as a failure?

Experiences With Citizendium

A few years ago I signed up for a Citizendium account. In order to register you need to provide your real name and include “a CV or resume … as well as some links to Web material that tends to support the claims made in the CV, such as conference proceedings, or a departmental home page. Both of these additional requirements may be fulfilled by a CV that is hosted on an official work Web page“.

I registered as I felt that if Citizendium became successful being an author could provide a valuable dissemination channel for those areas in which I have expertise. In particular I had an interest in helping to manage the Web accessibility entry in Citizendium. However I found that I did not have the time – or inclination – to edit this article. Looking at the article today it seems that the “page was last modified 09:25, 10 January 2008” and “has been accessed 221 times“. It is perhaps good news that the page has been viewed so little as it is not only very out-of-date but is also poorly written. It also seems that there have been no content added to the Talk, Related Articles, Bibliography or External Links pages or the also no entries

In comparison we can find that the Web Accessibility entry in Wikipedia has been edited 575 times by 277 users. There were also 10,911 views in November 2011.

Discussion

Perhaps there may be those who could argue that Citizendium isn’t a failure, but has a valuable role to play in a particular niche area which is not being addressed by Wikipedia. But how can this argument be made when Citizendium’s aim to “endeavor to achieve the highest standards of writing, reliability, and comprehensiveness through a unique collaboration between Authors and Editors” results in entries such as this one on Silverlight vs Flash:

With the rocket development of Internet, the techniques used for building web pages is improving all the time, which not only brings people more information but new experience of surfing on the Internet. Many techniques have been applied to enrich the web page these years, from totally the plaintext in early 90′s, first to web page with pictures and then that with embedded sounds. Later, Sun Microsystems proposed Java Applet, which was popular for not long time until being conquered by Adobe Flash.

Back in March 2008 the Citizendium FAQ asked the question:

How can you possibly succeed? Wikipedia is an enormous community. How can you go head-to-head with Wikipedia, now a veritable goliath?

The solid interest and growth of our project demonstrates that there are many people who love the vibrancy and basic concept of Wikipedia, but who believe it needs to be governed under more sensible rules, and with a special place for experts. We hope they will join the Citizendium effort. We obviously have a long way to go, but we just started. Give us a few years; Wikipedia has had a rather large head start.

Three and a half years later it seems clear that in the battle between the online encyclopedia “governed under more sensible rules, and with a special place for experts” has been unable to compete with the “vibrancy and basic concept of Wikipedia“.

I’m pleased that Steve Wheeler’s link to Larry Sanger’s blog post helped me to remember my initial curiosity regarding the more managed approach to gathering experts’ knowledge provided by Citizendium and demonstrated the failings in such an approach. Let’s continue making Wikipedia even better is my call for 2012.

The Web Management Community of Practice

Maximising Institutional Webmaster Impact

UKOLN’s IWMW 2011 event takes place at the University of Reading next week.  We’ve always felt that this event should not be constrained to the physical space and time. The event amplification will be provided again this year, with dedicated support providing an official Twitter stream for the remote audience watch the live video stream. In addition we have encouraged speakers and workshop facilitators to summarise their sessions on the IWMW 2011 blog. I was particularly interested in George Munroe’s post on his session on Maximising Institutional Webmaster Impact.

As can be seen from the accompanying slides the focus of George’s session is “how institutional webmasters can be more effective at their work“. As described in the accompanying abstract:

This workshop session will explore how institutional web managers can be most effective at their work by considering a number of areas that influence a webmaster’s effectiveness, including (but not limited to):

• Users—ensuring empathy with users, conflicting requests, ambitious or difficult users
• Process—introducing and maintaining disciplines, embracing change methodically
• Technology—adopting appropriate technology (HTML5, CSS3, RDFa, linked data…)
• Skills—learning and sharing with others, being aware of what is possible
• Metrics—for measuring the service, indicators of success
• Authority—dealing with non technical superiors and making the case for resources

The goal of the session is to compile a maximising institutional webmaster impact (MIWI) checklist that will draw from the experiences and views of those attending. Part of this goal is to ensure that the checklist is informed by the views of practitioners from many institutions and could therefore serve as a commonly accepted cross-institutional guide to webmaster best practice.

The Web Management Community of Practice

I am also running a 90-minute workshop session at IWMW 2011. The title of my session is The Web Management Community: Beyond IWMW and JISCMail Lists and it appears that this session complements George’s nicely. Rather than looking at institutional approaches for maximising a webmaster’s effectiveness, my session will explore ways in which engagement with one’s peers outside the host institution can also maximise one’s effectiveness.

The session will explore the notion of the Web Management Community of Practice (CoP). But what is a Cop? According to Wikipedia a Community of Practice is:

a group of people who share an interest, a craft, and / or a profession. The group can evolve naturally because of members’ common interest in a particular domain or area, or it can be created specifically with the goal of gaining knowledge related to their field. It is through the process of sharing information and experiences with the group that the members learn from each other, and have an opportunity to develop themselves personally and professionally.

CoPs can exist online, such as within discussion boards and newsgroups, or in real life, such as in a lunch room at work, in a field setting, on a factory floor, or elsewhere in the environment.

This definition seems to reflect the approaches which have been taken by the Web management community over the past 15 years or so, with the IWMW series of events having been “created specifically with the goal of gaining knowledge related to their field” and complemented by, for example, the web-support and website-info-mgt mailing lists which support “the process of sharing information and experiences with the group that the members learn from each other“.

But as reported in a recent survey use of the JISCMail lists have dropped significantly over the past five years. Does this signify the decline in the community or has the community migrated to other online environments?

Twitter as a Tool for Supporting Communities of Practice

A post on TWITTER AS A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE FOR EDUCATORS published in 2008 pointed out that “communities of practice are not static but subject to evolution” and described how “Membership of a [CoP] is voluntary and a community often grows informally around a need“.  The second part of the post provided examples of ways in which “educators find meaning in their enterprise through twitter and this is linked to their identity in very interesting ways” and concluded “Twitter is the platform of choice for many lifelong learners and, as a community of practice, it presents us with learning opportunities and presents a welcoming way to enter a network“.

A more recent post asked IS TWITTER A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE? Daniel Hooker felt that:

And even though now that Twitter (and many communities of practice within it, including #hcsm/ca/eu) has matured and is being used effectively by so many people, I am growing concerned about its future and about the deep reliance that we have on it for much of our day to day practice. The paradox of social media is that we are currently slave to the tools at our disposal.

But concluded that:

… framing Twitter as a transforming Community of Practice may help to contextualize the position that we are all in as we build and invest our communications strategies on top of tools that are often less interested in freedom of information and communication than we may care to think. Because I believe in the collaborative power of social media, however, I look forward to seeing Twitter and the communities within it transform. And I also look forward to whatever it is that comes next.

Beyond Twitter

Although the potential benefits of Twitter have been discussed for a number of years, there may be other technologies which complement or, perhaps, replace technologies such as Twitter. As Daniel Hooker concluded in his post which was published in March 2011 “I also look forward to whatever it is that comes next“.  Might Google + be that tool?  I think it is too soon to answer that question, especially as, from a personal0 perspective, I am in the phase of adding people to my UKWebFocus Google+ account (for which I have also claimed the shortner http://gplus.to/ukwebfocus and http://gotoplus.me/ukwebfocus) and have yet to see how (and, indeed if)  it will be integrated into my daily working practices – as Twitter is.

It will be interesting to see how the 25 or so participants in this session feel that the Web Management community of practice may develop in the future.  But since the workshop will take place next week I’ve welcome suggestions on ways in which emerging new technologies may be used to support communities in other areas of work.

Don’t Go To #ThatLondon in 2012!

Just over a week ago I had a meeting in London and, due to the early start, I went the day before, which had the benefits of getting a cheap train ticket and a night’s accommodation is cheaper than the full-priced return ticket from Bath. Normally that’s the case, but when I used Laterooms (which, as I’ve described previously, I’m a happy user of), I found that the cheapest room available cost about £300! Eventually I managed to find a room for about £80 but it made me wonder why there was a shortage of reasonable-priced hotel accommodation that night (with one colleague from CETIS having to book hotel accommodation well outside the city centre. It seems the reason was the meeting was taking place during the Wimbledon fortnight – which I would probably have realised if I was a tennis fan rather than a football supporter!

I then realised that we would be encountering these difficulties to a much greater extent if we have trips to London, next year, during the Olympics 2012. And although they take place outside of the normal time for meetings and conferences (27 July – 12 August) we’ll need to bear in mind the various associated events, such as the Cultural Olympiad which culminates in the “London 2012 Festival, bringing leading artists from all over the world together from 21 June 2012 in the UK’s biggest ever festival“, to say nothing of the Rapperlympics, during which “rapper teams from across the globe descend on London to cross swords at the prestigious DERT tournament” of the weekend on 30 March – 1 April (thinks: the Olympic Committee will use anyone misusing the symbol of five interlocking circle -are five interlocking swords permitted?).

It seems then that those of us working in the public sector would be advised to avoided organising meetings and events in London at a time when the city is likely to be even more crowded than normal and venues and accommodation will be expensive.

As I suggested to JISC, this might provide an opportunity to explore ways in which technological solutions may be used to provide alternatives to travel, which may not only be particularly more cost-effective next summer but also provide environmental benefits. Now is the time to be exploring ways in which online meetings and events can become more embedded as alternatives to face-to-face meeting or amplified / hybrid events used to provide interested participants with the flexibility of choosing whether or not to travel (Monday’s workshop on “Metrics and Social Web Services: Quantitative Evidence for their Use and Impact“, for example, has about 50 registered participants with another 20 remote participants who will be watching the live video stream).

My initial thoughts were clearly based on use of video-streaming and related technologies. But inevitably we will be travelling to London on business purposes next year. How might we be able to share our experiences of possible problems in a lightweight fashion across the sector? It seems to me that the answer lies in Twitter, if we can agree on a common relevant hashtag.

I was reminded of these ideas yesterday after asking my colleague Paul Walk about a recent trip he had to London. On his way he tweeted:

Off to that London. I don’t regret moving away from London but sometimes I wonder how successfully I did…

Paul has used the expression “that London” on a number of occasions, and I wondered where it came from. Paul and I think we remember it from ‘kitchen sink dramas’ of the late 50s/ early 60s (Saturday Night & Sunday Morning’, perhaps). Last night I tried to discover the origin of the expression. This proved more difficult that I had expected – but it was also provided an interesting exercise in the various approaches to resource discovery which I though would be worth sharing.

I had little joy with a search for “that London” using Google. Initially if discovered “that London is the capital of England“! Using search terms such as “Origin of expression ‘That London’” gave no further insights, so at around midnight I asked by networks on Twitter and Facebook for their suggestions. A couple of people discovered the Harry Enfield “The Scousers go To London” sketch from YouTube. Might the expression have originated from this popular comedy programme?

Dave Pattern pointed me in the direction of John Popham’s post on the Our Society blog on “What goes on in “That London?” in which he reflected on the differences in approaches to social action between the north and the south and suggested that:

Maybe the old northern adage is true after all, “they do things differently in that London”, but what they do affects us all.

This usage reflects my interpretation of the term with, as discussed on Twitter earlier today “that London” having a somewhat derogatory connotation.

If we wish to agree on a tag so that we can complain about the difficulties of travelling to London next year, the costs of the accommodation and the difficulties of finding something to eat, could we use the #ThatLondon hashtag, so that we avoid having to mint and then popularise a new tag? But perhaps this tag will be used in too many other contexts (I should add that the tag was mentioned in a comment by Paul Webster on John Popham’s post and I have created a TwapperKeeper archive in order to gain a better understanding of its current and future usage). My suggestion:

The #ThatLondon12 hashtag can be used to share experiences of problems and difficulties related to travelling to or being in London during the Olympic 2012 year.

Any takers? Or should we just use #’ThatLondon?

Meanwhile can anyone with better searching skills than I have find evidence of use of the “that London” term which predates Harry Enfield?

Reflections on UKOLN’s Activities at #UniofBath During #UniWeek

This week is Universities Week - a national campaign demonstrating the benefits of universities in Britain. The theme for Friday is “Big Ideas for the Future“.  Today there will be a ’24-hour Twitter marathon’ in which universities from across the UK are taking part. The aim is to “tweet about the research, work or volunteering you are doing and how it impacts on people outside the University“.

The University of Bath is supporting this campaign and those of us who use Twitter have been encouraged to join using the hashtags #UniWeek and #UniofBath.

Since not everyone is aware that UKOLN is based at the University of Bath, it struck me that this campaign provides an opportunity to highlight UKOLN’s role in supporting innovation and research across the Higher Education sector.

There is of course an official summary about UKOLN but to explain briefly, UKOLN’s work is to advise on policy and practice in areas of Higher Education which support research, study and teaching, such as digital libraries, metadata and resource discovery, distributed library and information systems, research information management, Web preservation, etc. It provides network information services including the Ariadne magazine and also runs workshops and conferences.

UKOLN is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher and Further Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the European Union. UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based. More details on UKOLN activities can be found on the UKOLN Web site.  UKOLN aims to inform practice and influence policy in the areas of: digital libraries, metadata and resource discovery, distributed library and information systems, bibliographic management, and web technologies. It provides network information services, including the Ariadne magazine, and runs workshops and conferences.

UKOLN began life in 1977 when the British Library funded the University of Bath Programme of Catalogue Research. A celebration of UKOLN’s 30 years of work took place in the British Library in 2008 and a timeline of our activities was produced for the event which is illustrated below.

Looking at some of the activities mentioned in the timeline, we can see some examples of how UKOLN has helped to “inform practice and influence policy“:

• The Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) series was launched in 1997 and has been held annually ever since. This year’s event takes place at the University of Reading on 26-27 July.  The IWMW event helps to support the work and professional development of university Web managers and developers. Since 1995 the event has exploited event amplification technologies in order to maximise the impact of events such as conferences by providing video and other information and communication services over the Web to people who cannot be there in person.
• UKOLN contributed a great deal to the development of better ways to make whole collections of resources more accessible to students and academics through its  Collection Description Focus work.
• UKOLN is a major partner in the Digital Curation Centre which was established in March 2000. The DDC helps universities to realise and meet the challenge of managing academic data so that it remains accessible and understandable for many decades to come. The aim is not only to save information but also money for a long time into the future. UKOLN’s work as part of the DCC has included the production of the International Journal of Digital Curation and organisation of the International Digital Curation Conference: “an annual highlight in the digital curator’s calendar, providing an opportunity to get together with like-minded data practitioners to discuss policy and practice“. This year’s conference, incidentally, takes place in Bristol in December (and there’s still over a month before the closing date for submission of papers).

Some of many other achievements I might include:

• The influential consultative report by Dr Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN, Open Science at Web-Scale: Optimising Participation and Predictive Potential – Consultative Report which reviews the evidence and opinion surrounding data-intensive Open Science and considers the radical effect it will have on the way research is conducted.
• UKOLN’s DevCSI work to support software developers and other HE professionals to help  ”realise their full potential, by creating the conditions for them to be able to learn, network effectively, share ideas, collaborate and innovate creating a ‘community’ of developers in the learning provider sector which is greater than the sum of its parts“.
• In another initiative to save digital information from disappearing – a very serious issue for all organisations – UKOLN led the JISC-funded  JISC PoWR (Preservation of Web Resources) project which provided universities and other institutions with guidelines on how best to preserve the resources they hold on the Web.
• Our remote-working champion, Marieke Guy, has sought to develop best practice for UKOLN colleagues who work away from the University of Bath campus.  The open approach Marieke has taken for this work includes the use of her Ramblings of a Remote Worker blog which was instrumental in her winning the national Remote Worker Award.

One of the themes Universities Week is looking at is how “innovative research currently underway in university communities will bring great change within the next 20 years“. During its 30+ years – and during my 15 years since I moved to UKOLN – we have seen tremendous changes in the ways in which networked technologies have altered teaching and learning activities, the research community, and work in the wider sector. I feel that such innovation is likely to continue – current economic pressures will create even more demand for improvements in working practice across the Higher Education sector. My colleagues and I at UKOLN look forward to supporting such innovation further, both here at the University of Bath and across the wider Higher Education community.

Education: Addressing the gaps between the fun and the anxieties

Later today if my 3 minute talk is selected I’ll be giving my thoughts on education at the  #purposedpsi event in Sheffield.   Purpos/ed is “a non-partisan, location-independent organization aiming to kickstart a debate around the question: What’s the purpose of education?”. I have made my contribution on a recent post entitled “Education Will Make Us Anxious“. My brief presentation builds on this idea (which was taken from a post by Dave White)  and mashes it up with Tom Barrett’s comment that “Education should be about cradling happiness”.  I feel that both ideas are true – and the challenge for those of us working in the education profession is in understanding and addressing the gap.

A 3 minute  slidecast of a rehearsal of my talk is available on Slideshare and is embedded below.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to give acknowledgements for use of the photograph entitled “Hippie Carnival Arambol (Goa)” used on slide two which was taken by ’PeterQ‘ and is available on Flickr and the photograph used on slide three entitled “Anxious” which was taken by ‘Phoney Nickle‘ and is available on Flickr under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence. I am grateful for permission to use these images.

Script

Note also that the script for the talk is given below.

My name is Brian Kelly. I’m based at UKOLN at the University of Bath and this is my contribution to the Purpos/ed campaign on the future of education.

In his blog post on the purpose of education Tom Barrett suggested that “Education should be about cradling happiness” .  Another way of putting this which we will be familiar with is that “learning should be fun”.  And the fun that we can have in learning new things – which can include social learning, such as the dancing illustrated in this photograph – as well as scholarly learning need  not be restricted to the learner.  It can also be fun teaching.

In contrast to Tom Barratt’s comment, Dave White felt that “Education should make us anxious”.  We will have all experienced feeling of anxiety whether it’s due, as in my case, to the  difficulties in memorising irregular French verbs, understanding molecular chemistry or, more recently, trying to lean a new rapper sword dance.

But just as the fun aspects of learning aren’t restricted to the learner, so the feelings of anxiety will be felt by others involved in learning: the teacher wondering whether the approaches they are taking are working and whether they’ve chosen the right resources for the learner.  Similarly those involved in use of technology to enhance learning may be worried whether the right technological approaches are being used.  Is the Social Web, for example, really an appropriate mechanism for supporting informal learning?  Was the open source VLE environment the right choice? And policy makers may secretly be anxious over changes in policies: “I’m suggesting that new approaches to learning will be more effective than those used 30 years ago – but I did OK from the old styles of learning – what if I’m wrong and the ‘back to basics’ campaigners are right?  After all, I’ve little evidence of the benefits of the new approaches.”

For me, then, education is about understanding and addressing the gaps between the feeling of fun and excitement in learning something new and the feelings of anxiety which we may sometimes forget about.  And let me point out that I’m not suggesting that the gap should be removed – I don’t think this is possible.  Let me quote in full Dave White’s comment on anxiety:

 “… education should make us anxious: anxious to discover new ways of understanding and influencing the world.  It should challenge our ways of seeing and force us to question our identities and our positions.”

Learning professionals – and learning organisations – will continually strive to discover new ways of influencing learners and the learning processes. We will always be anxious. There will always be tensions. This is the challenge of the profession we have chosen.

Education Will Make Us Anxious

#Purposed, #purposedpsi and #500words

On Saturday I am attending the #purposedpsi event in Sheffield.  Purpos/ed is “a non-partisan, location-independent organization aiming to kickstart a debate around the question: What’s the purpose of education?” In the run-up to the event the campaign has encouraged people to contribute 500 words on their own blogs on the purpose of education.

This has been followed with the 3×5 Flickr mashups campaign which encourages people to read the blogs, identify an interesting quotation and post an annotated image illustrating the quotation to the Purpos/ed Flickr group.

I was a bit late finding out about the campaign but as I’ll be attending the afternoon meeting later this week I thought I would give my thoughts in 500 words on a post by Dave White, a member of the ALT 2010 learning Technologist Team of the Year, entitled Education should make us anxious.

“Education should make us anxious”

The comment which Dave White published on his blog as part of the #500 words campaign is worth reading in context:

My view is that education should make us anxious: anxious to discover new ways of understanding and influencing the world.  It should challenge our ways of seeing and force us to question our identities and our positions. Education should disrupt as much as it builds, ultimately teaching how to learn not what to learn.

I’m sure we have all had that feeling of anxiety, when one’s world view is being disrupted by new ideas we start to understand and influence how we behave and how we act.  These unsettling moments were also mentioned by Josie Fraser, who in her contribution to the debate suggested that:

Education should critically ensure children, young people and adults are equipped to be unsettled, to be confronted by difference, to be changed, and to effect change.

In my attempt to belatedly participate in the #purposed campaigns I looked for a Flickr image which could be used to illustrate the quotations from Dave White’s post.

Rather than using an image of an individual looking anxious I noticed this poster showing different types of sport anxieties. It’s easy to see how some of these idea could be applied to the anxieties felt by learners:

• I’ll look stupid and be belittled by cleverer kids.
• They’ll make fun of my mistakes.

The poster also suggests that teachers and learning technologists  as well as learners can be anxious:

• I do my best as a teacher and all I get back is booed at.

If they were capable of feelings the learning technologies themselves might be anxious.  Perhaps Mr Blackboard might be saying “I get shot at and can’t escape“.  On the other hand it might be the institutions themselves which are being short at.

Learning institutions are anxious

Rather than exploring the issue of the anxieties which education can cause for the learner I’d like to conclude my 500 words by reflecting on the anxieties which educational institutions will be facing. But rather than commenting on the easy target of the cuts the educational sector is currently facing I’d like to suggest that tensions between learning organisations, and learners will always be present.   This was something I was unaware of when I was an Information Officer in an IT Services department at the University of Leeds.  Colleagues in the department had to identify the ‘best application in various areas with my role being to  provide documentation and training for the recommended applications.   We’d chosen the most appropriate office applications, data visualisation tools and statistical applications and around that time I left IT support I was hearing the ‘VLE’ term being used.  Which would be the best VLE, I wondered?   Blackboard and WebCT seemed popular, although the open source Moodle application  had its supporters.  It turned out that, at the time, a home-grown solution – the Bodington VLE, was to provide the VLE environment across the institution.

But now the PLE is the new VLE – and this disrupts the view that the central IT services, working closely with users, can identify the most appropriate solution for the institution and ensure that cost-effective support services are provided. This can also be disruptive for those who felt that the solution must inevitable be an open source solution.  If the learners are using their mobile phones to access learning on YouTube and a range other Google services, where does this leave a vision for an open e-learning environment?  The learning environment can be an anxious environment for us all.

Are Mailing Lists Now Primarily A Broadcast Medium?

In a post entitled DCMI and JISCMail: Profiling Trends of Use of Mailing Lists I provided evidence of the decline in usage of mailing lists across a research community – those involved in development and use of Dublin Core metadata standard.

This analysis followed a previous survey which was described in a post on The Decline in JISCMail Use Across the Web Management Community and is illustrated in the accompanying histogram.

Since it appears that  the various functions provided by mailing lists are being replaced by use of other channels (such as blogs, Twitter, etc.) over Christmas I decided to unsubscribe from quite a number of JISCMail lists.  Those that I remained on (primarily library-related lists) I receive via daily digests.

On Saturday I received four messages from JISCMail lists.  I noticed they contained following messages:

JISC-INNOVATION Digest – 24 Mar 2011 to 1 Apr 2011 (#2011-7)
CFP: Digital Classicist Seminars 2011: Announcement of a call for papers.

JISC-REPOSITORIES Digest – 31 Mar 2011 to 1 Apr 2011 (#2011-56)
Brief survey about initiatives to encourage deposit: Request to complete survey.
ISKO UK Biennial Conference 4th-5th July 2011 – Early Bird registration during April: Conference announcement.

LIS-WEB2 Digest – 29 Mar 2011 to 1 Apr 2011 (#2011-35)
Event: Registration now open for Usability and User-Centred Design Day: Event announcement.

LIS-LINK Digest – 31 Mar 2011 to 1 Apr 2011 (#2011-75)
Lis-Link: LCF 2011 Conference: Conference announcement.
Brief survey on work of the Coalition for LIS Research: Request to complete survey.
UKeiG Course – Don’t miss out: Mobile access to information resources: Event announcement.
Copyright Query: User query.
UKSG – win the new Kindle 3g Wifi – Credo Reference on Stand 55: Company advertisement.
Customer Services post at St George’s: Job announcement.
Fully funded PhD studentship: Loughborough University/ Amateur Swimming Association: Research vacancy announcement.
ALPSP Seminar: Making Sense of Social Media, 24 June – London UK: Event announcement.

Of these twelve message only one (the Copyright Query message) was looking to instigate a response on the mailing list: the other eleven were all looking for people to visit a Web resource.  It should also be noted that a number of the messages included “Apologies for cross-posting” comments indicating that the message were been published to multiple lists.

I can’t help but feel that although email is convenient to use with the information coming to the user, this isn’t necessarily the most efficient way of working in light of the many other tools which are now available. At a time in which there are accusations that there are efficiency savings to be made across the public  sector in general, with libraries in particular under close scrutiny, it does seem timely to revisit the question of whether continued usage of mailing lists as a default communications and alerting mechanism is the best way for the sector to proceed.  I also feel that the Library sector, with its expertise in information management, should be taking a leading role in exploring new working practices and ensuring that their user communities are made aware of the possibility of new approaches to working.

At the CILIP’s School Libraries Group Skills for the Future event held over the weekend I noticed from the tweets (archived on Twapper Keeper) that speakers at event addressed the need for school librarians to embrace such new technologies, with Phil Bradley arguing that “we are ‘cybernomadic’ and need to be able to move all the time to where the conversation is“. I’d not heard the term “cybernomad” before; according to the Urban Dictionary it describes “someone who uses internet cafe’s a lot because they think going outside and using someone elses computer is better than using their own“. But I like Phil’s reinterpretation of the word.   I agree with Phil; there will be a need to move from the comfort of an existing online home and move to where others are – and this will be particularly true for a user-oriented service professions such as librarians, whether working on schools, pubic libraries or universities.

Revisiting the title of this post, “are mailing lists now primarily a broadcast medium?” it seems that for the one’s I’ve listed this may be the case.  But although this to be the case for my areas of interest, is it true more widely?  Indeed might Friday’s post have been an aberration,with the norm being discussions, debates and, possibly, arguments taking place on the lists?  To answer such questions – in order to inform personal decisions on use of mailing lists and polices on the establishment of new lists – it seems that there is a need to be able to easily monitor trends, including both personal usage patterns and wider developments. Unfortunately the Listserv software used on the JISCMail service does not seem to provide APIs to carry out such trend analysis. So perhaps the need is for list members to observe one’s personal uses and to be willing to question the effectiveness of continued use.  As for me, I would welcome the continuation of mailing lists as a discussion forum, and leave alerting to other tools.  Is that an unreasonable expectation?

ILI 2011 and the ‘New Normal’

This year’s Internet Librarian International conference (ILI 2011) will be held in London on 27-28 October.  The call for speakers begins:

We are now in a time best characterised as the “New Normal”. The new normal isn’t just about austere budgets or the old chestnut of “doing more with less” – it’s also about new technologies. The new normal is having library patrons, users, customers and clients who know as much or more about technology than we do. It’s about partnerships and transparency, about new ways to develop and disseminate knowledge, about the increasing importance of communication skills, about opening up access to information, data, and knowledge.

What is meant by the term the ‘New Normal’ and how does it apply to in a library context?  I found an article on “The Politics Of The ‘New Normal’” which was published in The Atlantic in July 2009.  This states that ”About a third of Americans, 32 percent, say they are spending less now and expect to make their present habits a “new normal” of their future budgetings“. The writer, Chris Good, goes on to add “One can’t help but wonder if the “new normal” has political ramifications“.

In a library (and educational) context in addition to the obvious economic and political changes there are also technological developments which are adding to the radical changes we are seeing across the sector.  But what might the implications of the ‘New Normal’ be in a Library context?  Let us assume that an accompanying discussion about such implications is based on an agreement that there are significant changes which will have an impact on working practices and will challenge orthodox thinking and working practices.   I should add that although the political and economic changes  are undoubtedly contentious there will be other changes which many will welcome.

Focussing on the technological developments we have seen in recent years it can  be argued that:

• Many users now have the skills and access to technologies to find and access resources which previously were mediated by librarians.
• We are seeing a decrease in the importance of finding via metadata and an increase in the importance of social discovery.
• We are seeing a decrease in the importance of libraries providing access to trusted resources. Instead users now wish to access resources they find in the wild – but will need to be able to evaluate such resources.
• We are seeing a  decrease in an unquestioning belief in the value of libraries and librarians and a need for the sector to be able to demonstrate value and pro-actively market themselves.

The Cabinet Office has recently published the Government ICT Strategy (PDF format).  The document provides many statements which, of the face of it, seem reasonable, especially for those who have been active  in IT development work.  For example:

• “projects tend to be too big, leading to greater risk and complexity, and limiting the range of suppliers who can compete“: Yes, there is value in agile development and rapid innovation projects which JISC, for example, has been funding.
• “Departments, agencies and public bodies too rarely reuse and adapt systems which are available ‘off the shelf’ or have already been commissioned by another part of government, leading to wasteful duplication“: The not-invented here syndrome we are familiar with.
• “systems are too rarely interoperable“: Again we are familiar with non-interoperable silos.

A number of solutions the government is proposing will we welcomed by many:

• “create a level playing field for open source software“: The JISC OSS Watch service has provided advice in this area  to the HE/FE sector.
• “impose compulsory open standards, starting with interoperability and security“: Many will see benefits in mandating use of open standards which can help public sector organisations from continuing to make use of proprietary formats.

Whilst there are aspects of the Government ICT Strategy which make for uncomfortable reading it does seem to me that there may be benefits in embracing new approaches which may build on experiences gained over recent years in working in a changing environment with changing user expectations and requirements.

I will be interested to see how speakers at the ILI 2011 conference will address the implications of the “New Normal”.  Note that the deadline for submissions is 8 April – so if you have an interest in sharing your experiences I’d encourage you to submit a proposal.  If you are not able to submit a proposal, I’d welcome suggestions on what the New Normal might mean to you – I’d especially welcome positive examples.

Time to Move to GMail?

The University of Bath email service is still down. The problems were first announced 0n Twitter at 06.02 on 24 February:

The University email is currently running at risk of failure we are working towards a fix – sorry for any disruption caused.

Later that day we heard:

University email will be unavailable for the rest of the day -for alternative use University Instant Messenger Jabber: http://bit.ly/fAshWi

The problems continued the following day and so BUCS (the Bath University Computing Service) announced an interim email service: I can now send and receive email but can’t access any email messages which I received prior to 25 February.  I must adit that this provides a strange feeling of bliss (my email folder is almost empty!), but I  know that the actions which I’m now running behind on will come back to haunt me when the full email service is restored.

Of course communications have continued, particularly on Twitter. I’m pleased, incidentally, that BUCS have been using Twitter as a communications channel to keep their users informed of developments.  It has also occurred to me how I am still able to continue working using Twitter to support my professional activities: how, I wonder, are others at the University of Bath who don’t use Twitter coping?

During this outage, whilst away in London, I suggested that use of Google’s GMail service might be appropriate.  In response I received the ironical reply:

Gmail never breaks. Oh. Wait. http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/38815/gmail-reset-deletes-correspondence-history :)

It seems that on the day Bath University email users were suffering as a consequence of hardware problems on its email servers Gmail was also having problems. As the PocketLint article rather dramatically announced:

Oh dear – looks like Google has dropped the bomb on hundreds of thousands of Gmail accounts, wiping out years of email and chat history.

You can’t trust GMail to provide a reliable email service seemed to be the sub-text of other Twitter followers who responded to my initial tweet.  But is that really the case? I have described the continuing problems with the BUCS email service (which are summaried in a BUCS FAQ). But what is the current status of GMail?

Whilst Computer Weekly has highlighted the problems of use of Web-based email services the CBC News has pointed out that “Gmail messages [are] being restored after bug“.  The article described how  emails “are being restored to Gmail accounts temporarily emptied out two days ago”. This problem was either small-scale – “About 0.02 per cent of Gmail users had their accounts completely emptied“) or significant – “media outlets estimate there are roughly 190 million Gmail users, so about 38,000 were affected”. The problem, caused by a bug which has now been fixed, did not affect me whereas the BUCS email outage clearly has.  Which, I wonder, is the more significant problem?

I have to admit that I have been affected by outages in externally-hosted communications services previously. In September 2009  I wrote a post entitled “Skype, Two Years After Its Nightmare Weekend” which described how “Skype’s popular internet telephone service went down on August 16 [2007] and was unavailable for between two and three days“. This was also due to a software bug (related to MS Windows automated updates) which has been fixed – and I have continued to be a happy Skype user and agree with last year’s Guardian article which described “Why Skype has conquered the world”.

So yes there will be problems with externally-hosted systems, just as there will be problems with in-house systems (and ironically the day before the BUCS email system went down and two days before GMail suffered its problems my desktop PC died and I had to spend half a day setting up a new PC!). It may therefore be desirable to develop plans for coping with such problems – and note that a number of resources which provide advice on backing up GMail have been provided recently, including a Techspot article on “How to Backup your Gmail Account” and a Techland article on “How to backup GMail“.

But in addition to such technical problems there are also policy challenges which need to be considered. At the University of Bath email accounts are deleted when staff and students leave the institution (and for a colleague who retired recently the email account was deleted a day or so before she left). One’s GMail account, on the other hand, won’t be affected by changes in one’s place of study or employment.  In light of likely redundancies due to Government cutbacks isn’t it sensible to consider migration from an institutional email service?  And shouldn’t those who are working or studying for a short period avoid making use of an institutional email account which will have a limited life span?

DCMI and JISCMail: Profiling Trends of Use of Mailing Lists

Earlier this year DCMI, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, celebrated 15 years of Dublin Core. The UK higher education community has had a significant role to play in the development of Dublin Core, with colleagues and former colleagues at UKOLN having been involved since 1995.

Much of the discussions related to the development of Dublin Core standards and related activities has taken place on a series of JISCMail lists.  But how has use of these lists developed over time?  This is a question which relates to work I am involved in in exploring ways of analysing and interpreting data related to use of networked services.  I have previous described trends related to the growth in use of Facebook within UK universities and have captured evidence of early use of institutional use of iTunesU and YouTube Edu in order that future analyses will have benchmark figures to make comparisons with.

In order to understand the trends in use of JISCMail lists by those involved in standardisation, deployment and use of Dublin Core metadata I used the DCMI’s list of mailing lists as my starting point. I used the JISCMail search facility to obtain information on the numbers of posts on each list by carrying out a search for messages containing an ‘@’ in the sender’s email address sent between 1990 and 2010.  I have also included information on the date on which the mailing lists were established.

List	Established	Total Nos. of Posts
DCMI General Mailing List
General: The broadest of mailing lists related to the international Dublin Core effort. Unlike other lists, which relate to the tasks of specific working groups or special interest areas, this list is for discussion of all issues relevant to the development, deployment, and use of Dublin Core metadata.	March 1996	5,659
DCMI Architecture Mailing List
Architecture: This list, which supersedes dc-datamodel, dc-schema, and dc-implementors, is intended for discussion of a technical architecture for the Dublin Core.	October 2000	3,027
DCMI Communities Mailing Lists
Accessibility: The DCMI Accessibility Community is a forum for individuals and organizations involved in implementing Dublin Core in a context of accessibility, with the objective to enhance interoperability of accessible resources through the use of Dublin Core metadata.	February 2002	589
Collection Description: This list is intended for discussion of issues related to the use of the Dublin Core (DC) for describing collections of resources.	February 2002	602
Education: Electronic discussion list to support the efforts of the international Dublin Core effort’s Educational metadata working group in exploring issues directly related to deployment of Dublin Core for the description of educational materials.	August 1999	689
Environment: This list supports discussion of deploying Dublin Core metadata in environmental applications.	February 2002	151
Government: This list is intended for discussion of the uses to which the Dublin Core Element Set might be put in describing government and public sector resources.	December 1999	501
Identifiers: A Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) forum to discuss identifiers	October 2007	32
Libraries: A mailing list for the DCMI Libraries group focussing on issues from the library sector.	December 1999	433
Kernel: A list to support the work of the DCMI Kernel Group	September 2003	60
Knowledge Management:A forum to support the work of the Dublin Core Knowledge Management Community	December 2007	48
Localization and Internationalization: This list supports the efforts of the DCMI Localization and Internationalization group exploring issues directly related to deployment of Dublin Core metadata in multiple languages.	January 1998	275
Preservation: The DCMI Preservation Community is a forum for individuals and organisations involved in implementing Dublin Core metadata in a context of long-term digital preservation, with the objective to promote the application of Dublin Core in that context.	December 2003	191
Registry: The DCMI Registry Community is a forum for service providers and developers of both metadata schema registries and controlled vocabulary registries to exchange information and experience.	December 1999	661
Science and Metadata: A forum for individuals and organisations to exchange information and knowledge about metadata describing scientific data	February 2009	103
Social Tagging: Dublin Core social tagging discussion list	October 2006	157
Standards: List to support discussion on issues related to standarization of DCMI specifications	February 1999	107
Tools: This list supports discussion of building and using software tools related to the Dublin Core.	April 2002	61
DCMI Task Groups Mailing Lists
Collection Description Application Profile Task Group: A list to support work on the Dublin Core Collection Description Application Profile	January 2007	74
Kernel Application Profile Task Group: A list for developing the Dublin Core Kernel Application Profile	November 2007	127
Metadata Provenance Task Group: The list will support the Dublin Core Task Group on Metadata Provenance	June 2010	26
DCMI/NKOS Task Group: Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Task Group developing a Dublin Core Application Profile for KOS (Knowledge Organization System) Resources	August 2010	3
DCMI/RDA Task Group: List to support discussion on Resource Description and Access (RDA)	December 2005	532
	TOTAL	26,692

Note that these statistics were collected on Friday 11 December 2010.

The Need For Trend Analysis

Such figures are pretty meaningless taken in isolation.  We might expect the general discussion lists to be more popular than more specialised lists, and well-established lists to have had more traffic than those which have only been set up recently.  Of more interest should be the trends showing usage of the lists.

As can be seen the number of posts to DCMI JISCMail lists peaked in 2002 and has dropped sharply since.  The number of lists has grown with sharp rises in 1999, 2002 and 2007. However the average number of posts to the lists has also seen a sharp decline.

The details for the individual lists are shown in the following chart.

I should also add that the data I collated in order to produce these charts is available as a Google Spreadsheet.

Discussion

Why the interest in metrics on usage of mailing lists?  In part such evidence can be used to identify whether technologies, in this case mailing lists, are still being actively used – as I described earlier this year in a post on The Decline in JISCMail Use Across the Web Management Community University Web managers seem to no longer be using mailing lists to the extent they did previously.

Mailing lists used to develop standards, as opposed to those used by practitioners to address routine queries, may be valuable for historical analyses, such as observing discussions on decisions taken.  The MarkMail service, for example, provides access to over 36,000 messages posted on the W3C’s www-html list.  But it seems that several lists, such as dc-identifiers and dc-knowledge-management, have failed to attract significant traffic, with only a total of 32 and 48 messages having been posted to these lists. Have the discussions taken place in other fora, I wonder?

It also seems to me that there is a need for popular services, such as JISCMail, to provide simple ways in which usage statistics along the lines I have illustrated in this post, can be produced.  I wonder whether this needs to be done by developments to the JISCMail Listserv software itself or could be layered on externally? Any thought?

Gap Analysis: They Tweeted At #online10 But Not At #scl10

Twitter Was Popular at #Online10

Last week I attended the Online Information 2010 conference, held at Olympia in London on 30 November – 2 December.  Unfortunately due to other commitments I could only attend on the first day.  But I was able to get a feel for the discussions on the next two days by watching the #online10 column in my Tweetdeck Twitter client – and I was able to do this during what would otherwise have been unproductive times such as standing on an overcrowded bus going to work.

At the time of writing Summarizr informs me that there have been 4,342 tweets from Twitter 1,022 users. This evidence suggests that Twitter had an important role to play at the conference, enabling those users to take part in discussions centred around the various talks presented at the conference as well as enabling conference delegates to cultivate and develop professional relationships. Without Twitter, for example, I wouldn’t have met @Ankix and, over a meal and a few pints in the Warwick Arms with longstanding Twitter colleagues @karenblakeman,  @hazelh and @akenyg and @stephanbuettner, another new contact, shared experiences of the implications of the cuts across the library sector in the UK, Sweden and Germany.

Little Use of Twitter at #SCL2010

On the same day that I gave a talk at Online Information I was also presenting a pre-recorded video at the Scholarly Communication Landscape: Opportunities and challenges symposium which was held at Manchester Conference Centre, Manchester. For this one-day conference Summarizr informs us that there had been only 38 tweets from 6 Twitter users, but only my colleague Stephanie Taylor (who was supporting my video presentation) and Kevin Ashley, DCC Director  and speaker at the symposium) tweeted more than once. So whilst the far fewer numbers of tweets for this symposium will be due in part to it being a smaller event, running for a single day, the lack of any participation from the audience is, I feel, interesting.

The page about the event informs us that the symposium aims to “investigate the opportunities and challenges presented by the technological, financial and social developments that are transforming scholarly communication” with the programme going to add that “Online social networks are playing an increasingly important role in scholarly communication. These virtual communities are bringing together geographically dispersed researchers to create an entirely new way of doing research and creating scholarly work.“

Quite.  But this one-day event, which was open to all staff and postgraduate research students at the University of Manchester, seems to have been unsuccessful in providing an opportunity for participants to try out for themselves Twitter,  an example of a popular online social network which is playing an increasingly important role in scholarly communication, as we saw from the evidence of its use at the Online Information 2010 conference. But rather than point out what the non-users of Twitter may have been missing (such as the active learning and the community engagement which I described above) it might be more interesting to reflect on the more general issues of how non-users of a service can be identified and how one might gain feedback from non-users of a service.

Gap Analysis

Getting feedback from users of a service can be easy – you know who they are and you will often have communications channel with them in which you can invite feedback. But getting feedback from non-users can be much more difficult – although such feedback can be immensely value in understanding reasons why a service isn’t being used and ensuring that enthusiast users don’t give a misleading impression of the benefits.

It might be useful to speculate why services aren’t being used.  Possible reasons for the  lack of Twitter use by the audience at the Scholarly Communication Landscape  symposium could be:

• Technology problems: lack of or problems with a WiFi network could be responsible for a lack of event-related tweets.
• Technology limitations: Potential Twitter users may feel that use of a Twitter client at an event is too complex.
• It’s trivial: Twitter might be regarded as a trivial activity.
• It’s rude: Use of Twitter at an event might be regarded as being rude and inconsiderate to other participants and to the speakers
• Personal/profession balance: Twitter users may use it for personal rather than professional purposes.
• Failure to see relevance: Participants may fail to see the benefits of use of Twitter at events.
• Relevance not applicable: Participants may appreciate potential benefits of use of Twitter at events but feel such benefits are not applicable for them.
• Style of working: Use of Twitter (or networked technologies) may not be relevant to personal styles of working.
• Organisational culture: managers or others in the organisation may frown on such usage.

These are some of my thoughts on why Twitter might not have been used at the symposium, and you may be able to provide additional suggestions.  But how do we find out the real reasons as opposed to our speculations?  And how do we apply approaches for gap analysis to other areas besides use of Twitter? For example, in light of the subject areas which may have been covered at the event, how could we gauge views on the areas such as openness and institutional repositories? How can we gather evidence in order to inform policies on, say, deployment and use of new services or approaches?

Increasingly I’m beginning to think that these type of events should be much more than dissemination channels and provide feedback mechanisms to provide responses, enable aggregated views to be analysed, etc. For an event aimed at staff and postgraduate research students at an institution, such as the Scholarly Communication Landscape symposium which was open to all staff and postgraduate research students at the University of Manchester it would seem that there was an ideal opportunity to gain feedback on the opportunities and challenges in the areas of scholarly communications. And those opportunities and challenges will be shared by many others in the higher education sector.

My concluding thoughts:  events can provide a valuable opportunity for gathering feedback and comments on the areas addressed at the event. There is an opportunity to gather such feedback  using simple technologies which may be very costly to gather in other ways. Open sharing of such feedback can be beneficial to the wider community.  So let’s do it.

Or to provide a more tangible example.  One could ask an audience from one’s host institution if they would be interested in using an communications tool such as Twitter or Yammer to support work activities. Or perhaps whether staff would be willing to make their professional outputs available under a Creative Commons licence.  An example of how this might be approached is given below.

Understanding Disruptive Innovations: Your Input Needed

In a recent blog post CETIS Director Adam Cooper  asks “Whither innovation in educational institutions in these times of dramatic cuts in public spending and radical change in the student fees and funding arrangements for teaching in universities?“. The post goes on to suggest that that innovation follows adversity and that “necessity is the mother of invention” and introduces the term “disruptive innovation” to describe the way well-run businesses can be disrupted by newcomers with good-enough offerings that focus on core customer needs (low end disruption).

In order to better understand the potentially disruptive innovations (or opportunities to weather the storm) posed by the combination on technological developments and the changing economic and political climate, UKOLN and CETIS (JISC Innovation Support Centres which help to support and further the work of the JISC Innovation group)  are  using an feedback tool to gather and allow ranking of such innovations. The tool asks the question:

“Which ICT-based innovations are potentially disruptive to current models of higher education (forms of teaching, assessment, course structure, estate, research and research management, student management, etc…)?”

This feedback tool will be available until 10 December. We invite your participation – and feel free to disseminate the URL (http://tinyurl.com/disruption2010) to others.

IWR Information Professional of the Year: Dave Pattern

I’m delighted to report that Dave Pattern has been announced as the Information Professional of the Year in the annual Information World Review awards which took place at the Online Information 2010 conference.

As a former winner of the award I was on the judging panel. As I know (and like and admire) Dave I felt that when I took part in the judging process I should document the reasons why I felt Dave would be a worthy winner of this award.

I felt that the award should be given to someone who not only demonstrated their value within their hist institution (there are a great many librarians and ‘shambrarians’ for whom that would be true) but also could be shown to have had an impact across the wider community.

Dave has demonstrated his impact within the wider community in two areas.  Dave has been active in supporting the Mashed Libraries series of one day events  whoch have aimed to to “bring together interested people and doing interesting stuff with libraries and technology“. The original idea was conceived by Owen Stephens in a blog post on “Mashed Libraries? Would you be interested?” on 1 July 2008. The second response was from Dave, who showed his enthusiasm together with an example of his normal self-deprecating humour: “I’ve love to see a library unconference in the UK… I’m just too lazy to try and organise one myself! Count me in and, if nothing else, I can guarentee there’ll be two of use sitting in a room with our laptops!“.

Dave certainly wasn’t lazy in his support for the events as two of the six events have been held at Dave’s host institution, the University of Huddersfield: Mash Oop North on 7 July 2009 and Chips and Mash, on 30 July 2010.

Before Dave got involved with Mashed Libraries he was demonstrating the value which can be gained from mashing up library data. As you might expect from someone who is committed to sharing best practices across a wide community Dave has a blog (which was launched way back in May 2005) . On the blog you can read his posts on usage data, which includes a post entitled ”2008 — The Year of Making Your Data Work Harder” in which Dave described his “code primarily designed for our new Student Portal — course specific new book list RSS feeds“. Dave was just giving talks about ways of exploiting data, he was writing code and implementing services which demonstrated the value of the approaches he was encouraging the library community to adopt.

The benefits of openness of library data are now much more widely accepted than when Dave began his work at the University of Huddersfield Library – and it was good to see the profile of his institutional work getting a higher profile through his work on JISC-funded projects.

It is clear that Dave has been a real asset to the University of Huddersfield.   It is pleasing that his value to the wider library community is now being appreciated through the award of the Information Professional of the year.

I’m sure that those who know Dave will join in with me in expressing congratulations on a richly deserved recognition on both the value of the work Dave has done for the sector and the warmth and esteem which many of us feel for Dave.

“We are a country in crisis. A country at war.”

Nick Poole didn’t mince his words in a blog post which summarised his keynote talk at yesterday’s UK Museums on the Web 2010 conference: “We are a country in crisis. A country at war.“

The opening paragraph went on to give the political context to his views “We have a Coalition that does not fundamentally believe that culture should be funded by the taxpayer“.  This is not the type of comment you’d normally expect from the CEO of a public sector body, Collections Trust!

Having opened with this gloomy summary of the current environment Nick went to outline how the museum sector should resp0nd:

we have to use every tool in our armoury, and use them with the wisdom we have acquired in the past decade.

•    Fund imaginatively
•    Collaborate Creatively
•    Aggregate smartly
•    Build Openly

Imaginitive, creative, smart, open. These are the themes of our conference today. These are the qualities we must bring to designing this new future of ours.

Nick feels that technology is now embedded across the sector.  But this perceived maturity, rather than highlighting the importance  of IT innovation, is being used to marginalise  it and, it seems, focus simply on mainstream service delivery:

The place of technology is no longer at the margins of the museum. Our role as technologists is no longer to explore, to investigate, to discover. Our role, from today, from now is to deliver.

Is this a desirable approach? And are such views relevant for the higher education sector?

In many respects Nick is correct.  Following the initial use of the Web as a publishing medium the Web 2.0 revolution has provided a platform for much richer, interactive and user-focussed services, and the use of Social Web services makes it easier to deliver such services in a cost-effective ways.  I should add that UKOLN has been involved in support museums, libraries and archives in exploiting the potential of the Social Web through the series of workshops and presentations we have delivered across the cultural heritage sector for a number of years.

Job done? All that’s left is to persuade the risk averse local authorities to liberalise the policies regarding access to Social Web services (and the reductions to local authority funding will help that).

I think not.  Indeed as Nick said “We are a country in crisis. A country at war. We have a Coalition that does not fundamentally believe that culture should be funded by the taxpayer“. To which I might add “a Coalition that does not fundamentally believe that higher education should be funded by the taxpayer“.

Is this really a time when higher education (to position the discussion in our sector) when there is no longer a need “to explore, to investigate, to discover“?

Back is 1989 essay Francis Fukuyama published an essay “The End of History?” which was interpretted by some as an argument that a time of radical change is over and we had reached a plateau of political stability. Following 9/11 such views were widely debunked.

Are we at a time when we can predict “The End of IT’s History?“. The technology wars are over: Microsoft vs a whole range of software vendors over the years, the PC vs the Mac, the cathedral vs the bazaar, open source vs closed source, open vs closed. We now simply need to make use of commodity IT services in order to deliver our core mission, with the economic crisis providing the opportunity to recognise the need to accept this new reality?

In some areas this is true.  Running one’s own institutional email service is no longer regarded as something institutions need to do, as Chris Sexton, IT Services director at the University of Sheffield has pointed out on her blog and at high profile talks on several occasions.

But the commodification of IT in some areas does not mean that this is true in all areas. Similarly the mainstreaming of a set of technologies today does not necessarily mean that significant  changes  won’t happen again in the future.

Adam Cooper touches on such issues in a post on “Whither Innovation?“.  Adam asks a similar question to Nick’s:

Whither innovation in educational institutions in these times of dramatic cuts in public spending and radical change in the student fees and funding arrangements for teaching in universities?

but reaches a different conclusion:

It seems to me that innovation always follows adversity, that “necessity is the mother of invention”.

Adam describes how the innovation theorist Clayton M Christensen coined the term “disruptive innovation” to describe ways “apparently well-run businesses could be disrupted by newcomers with cheaper but good-enough offerings that focus on core customer needs (low end disruption) or with initial offerings into new markets that expanded into existing markets.” Adam goes on to argue that “Disruptive innovation threatens incumbents with strategy process that fails to identify and adopt viable low-end or new-market innovation. In our current context of disruption by government policy, this challenge to institutional (university) strategy is acute.“

We are at a stage in which a high profile CEO of a public sector body will use the emotional language of “We are a country in crisis. A country at war.” to stimulate discussion and debate – and I very much welcome the way in which Nick has stimulated this debate (you just have to look at the evidence of the way in which Nick’s blog post was discussed on twitter earlier today to see that his post and the imagery he used stuck a chord with many).

For me the higher education sector, too, needs to be “imaginitive, creative, smart and open“.  But, unlike Nick, I feel that there is a need for technologists (developers) with our institutions to explore, to investigate and to discover – approaches which were recognised in yesterday’s news that “Bristol University ChemLabS celebrated by JISC Times Higher Education Award“.  Sarah Porter, JISC’s head of innovation and one of the judges for the awards pointed out that “By focusing on innovative approaches to using technology to improve learning, the project has had measurable, demonstrable impact on the attainment of students of chemistry at the University of Bristol“.

If we lose the experiences possessed across the sector and the culture of experimentation and creativity which is fundamental to the higher education sector we will surely condemn ourselves to a sausage-factory mentality, processing students and researchers using the centralised learning and research environments.

But perhaps the differences between Nick’s comments and  my views are more to do with the different sectors in which we work rather than any significant divergences of opinions.  Replace ‘museums’ with ‘higher education’ in Nick’s  conclusion of the way forward and I’d be in agreement:

The reality is that if we are really going to deliver a Digital offer for museums that is globally competitive, we must pool our resources, collaborate creatively, aggregate smartly, build openly. Individually, we will not do what needs to be done. Together, we can achieve anything.

So let’s be “imaginitive, creative, smart and open” and identify the areas for commodification and recognise the battles which were fought and lost – and the areas in which diversity and innovation are needed.

Dazed and Confused After #CETIS10

“Never Waste A Good Crisis”

On Monday and Tuesday I attended the #CETIS10 conference on “Never Waste a Good Crisis – Innovation & Technology in Institutions“. I’ve always enjoyed the CETIS conferences I’ve attended and found that they have provided a valuable way of keeping up with developments in the elearning environment as well as the equally important task of cultivating professional relationships and making new contacts.

But how might I summarise my feelings after two days at the National College for School Leadership, Nottingham, this year’s venue for the conference? If I where to look for a film title to describe how I felt on my journey home if would be “Dazed and Confused”.  But not, I should hasten to add, due to any problems with the conference organisation (the venue – which was new to me, was great; the evening meal, this year, had no quirky servings and the organisation was up to its normal high standard).

Rather it was my recollections of the enthusiasm for change which I can recall from many participants and speakers at the first CETIS conferences I attended and the reality of the changes the sector is now facing – changes which were highlighted in three occurrences which took place during the conference – the opening keynote talk; a webinar on “When The Ax Man Cometh” which I heard about shortly before the conference started and the Daily Telegraph’s article on “Universities spending millions on websites which students rate as inadequate“ which was published on the second day of the conference.

“Will Universities Still Exist in 2030?”

I recall Oleg Lieber, the recently retired CETIS Director giving an opening talk at a CETIS conference in which he asked the audience to consider whether higher educational institutions as we know them will still exist by 2030. The audience, which consisted of those involved in innovative approaches to elearning, was encouraged to feel they were playing an important role in instigating significant changes within the sector, with an implicit assumption that such changes were for the good and that those who were at the leading edge who we well-positioned to exploit the new opportunities provided in a changed educational landscape.

It now seems that large-scale changes to higher education will arrive well in advance of 2030, but the changes will not be driven primarily by technological development becoming embedded across institutions; rather the changes will come about by changes in funding caused by reductions in funding and increases in student fees. These are the significant changes (which will be implemented in a short period of time), with the changes which technological innovation can provide now having to be contextualised within a radically changed funding environment and corresponding changes in user expectations, with students, for example, looking for the value provided for their fees they have mortgaged their future for.

“DIY University Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education”

My dazed and confused feelings began during the opening plenary talk given by Anya Kamanetz which was based on her recent book on “DIY University Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education“. As summarised by Christina Smart on the JISC E-Learning Focus blog :

Recent years have seen a drive towards higher participation rates in both the UK and US … but above 40% participation rates problems occur. Issues around massification, cost shifting (where governments push the costs onto students), and student loans are all at play. There is also the influence of Baumol’s disease, where disciplines like the performing arts, are unable to make efficiency savings by reducing teacher to student ratios.

Anya argued that the combination of cost, access and quality made a compelling “case for radical innovation” in higher education. Shifting towards open content, socialisation and accreditation could result in that radical innovation, and Anya expanded on the benefits of Open Educational Resources, Personal Learning Networks and open accreditation approaches. Citing developments like Mozilla drumbeat’s P2PU – School of Webcraft, Anya described how “professional networks can bypass the need for diplomas”. She concluded with the prediction that new business models for HE would emerge, as mp3 players and digital music had transformed the business model of the music industry.

But what is a “case for radical innovation”? How about:

• We have too many students studying at higher education.
• Self-motivated students can learn without the need of a formal educational infrastructure.
• The benefits of technology in enhancing learning are unproven – with Baumol’s cost disease being used “to describe the lack of growth in productivity in public services such as public hospitals and state colleges“.

I met Anya before the start of the conference and, over dinner, Anya mentioned how she has been described as a socialist in the US.  But these views are often used from a right-wing perspective – and this caused my initial feelings of discomfort and unease.  I should add that I’m not saying that I’m necessarily disagreeing with such views, which are worthy of further discussion and unpicking. I suspect that, in part,  my unease may reflect personal experiences (first in the family, from the working class town of Bootle, to go to University, which provided me with new opportunities) ;  political disagreements with the notion that what may be good for self-motivated students (such as those who have benefitted from attendance at fee-paying public schools) will be forced on those who will benefit from learning provided by traditional institutions (whether such learning is mediated by technology or not) and professional concerns regarding the questioning of the benefits of technology (again, I’m not saying that such questions shouldn’t be asked).

In the question time after Anya’s talk I tried to articulate my concerns, but found it difficult to do so.  Perhaps I might summarise my feeling by saying “There may be some merits in the issues you have raised and there is a need to gain evidence, in particular to understand the particular circumstances in which such approaches may be beneficial and those in which it can be harmful. But let’s not not take the political decision to radically change higher education based on these types of arguments across the entire sector“.  Anya wasn’t of course, suggesting this – but her talk came at a time in which higher education (an, indeed, the broader public sector, is being  subjected to large-scale experimentation.

“When The Ax Man Cometh”

Coincidentally after having dinner with Anya and together early arrivals at the CETIS conference on the Sunday night I came across a tweet which informed my that Mark Greenfield, director of web services at University of Buffalo was about to give a live webinar on “When The Ax Man Cometh“.  I came across Mark following my post on “When the Axe Man Cometh – The Future of Institutional Web Teams” which discussed the implications of outsourcing of institutional Web teams.   Mark used the Ax(e) Man metaphor in his webinar and accompanying blog post – and I should give acknowledgements to Deborah Fearne who described how ”The Axe Man Came” and took her job in Web development earlier this year.

The 40  minute video of the webinar is worth watching particularly by those working in institutional Web management teams and those who may have an interest in discussions around out-sourcing.

Some of the notes I write whilst listening to the video:

The topic being addressed: Where will higher ed be in a decade? Will our jobs and departments even exist? And if that axe is coming, how can we survive the cuts? [Note the interview itself starts 6 minutes in].

For-profits can adapt more quickly than HEIs [Is that true? Is that necessarily true? Isn't the implication that HEIs need to be more adaptable rather than we need to our-source?]

The reality of HE today is that the axe man is coming, especially in IT sector.  There are systemic problems in high education (e.g. costs of  tuition fees for students and related issues which Anya raised in her talk).  The view that ‘It will be OK when economy recovers’ is wrong.

The axe-man has already started working with examples being given including academic programmes being cut by 30%; outsourcing (in Australia) entire IT departments to India; etc.

The cuts may also be manifested in large-scale increase in services using existing numbers of staff e.g. online learning in one US University is planned to grow by 10 fold, but without any new staff – the work will be outsourced to commercial sector.”

Many courses are the same as they were 100 years ago – but there are new models which can be used: e.g. courses which can be taken anywhere and are no longer constrained to an individual institution

Open learning environment provided by OER resources will help the development of the DIY-University [Hmm, so the JISC OER programme could be used by those with vested interests to undermine the mainstream approaches to the provision of higher education service.]

There’s a need to ask what the core mission of a University is. We can unbundle various University functions. HE is ripe for unbundling. [Note these ideas are taken from A University for the 21st Century by James Duderstadt, President Emeritus at the University of Michigan. In his blog post Mark summarised key points from the book:

• • Higher education is an industry ripe for the unbundling of activities. Universities will have to come to terms with what their true strengths are and how those strengths support their strategies – and then be willing to outsource needed capabilities in areas where they do not have a unique advantage.
  • Universities are under increasing pressure to spin off or sell or close down parts of their traditional operations in the face of new competition. They may well find it necessary to unbundle their many functions, ranging from admissions to counseling to instruction and certification.

Universities aren't primarily in the IT / Web business- so these functions can be unbundled / out-sourced.  You need to justify why it exists at all.

Mark suggested the need for Universities to get "back to basics" [Note this phrase has right-wing connotations in the UK].

Those involved in the provision on institutional Web service need to defend what you do:  ”You need to be able to justify your existence”.

You should quantify why what you do matters. Decisions may be made just on salary costs of $60,000 pa – average salary cost in US Web team at Buffalo University (but overheads adds to this). Be proactive and not reactive. – e.g. identify costs of bad Web user experiences. Articulate success stories and efficiency gains – e.g. it has been many years since we printed class schedules. Think about the ROI of Web projects. and identify the potential value of a Web project before Web project starts.

Recession has fulled rethinking – but has been bubbling away for 10 years or so. The tipping point will arrive in 4-5 years time: from 2013 college parents will be Generation X and start to question the ROI of sending children to University?  Aren’t there better ways of learning cf use of open courseware.

There is a need to follow what’s going on and learn from changes in other sectors- e.g. newspapers which failed to spot the implications of Craiglist on income froclassified adverts.

But such changes can also provide new opportunities, if you accept and embrace change and look for those opportunities.

I feel the issues Mark raised in his webinar (and accompanying blog post). I have made similar points over the years – back in 2006 I gave a talk on “IT Services: Help Or Hindrance?” at the UCISA Management Conference in which I suggested that one possible future for IT Services departments would be “to surrender to the changing environment and leave departments to make use of Web services such as GMail and Yahoo to provide institutional email and groupware facilities“. But back then I was using this as an argument for IT Services department to be more agile and user-focussed rather than making a serious proposal for large-scale out-sourcing – and in any case subsequent arguments that institutions should be exploiting Social Web services have been based on the out-sourcing of the IT components, freeing staff to provide additional services to their users.  Loss of an IT infrastructure would, I feel, leave institutions vulnerable, and unable to exploit opportunities which IT can provide to support local requirements.  The danger is that today’s cool GMail service (which, admit it, many users prefer to institutional email offerings) will quickly become the slow-moving enterprise service which is frequently criticised today.

I would also add that Mark’s comment that “Those involved in the provision on institutional Web service need to defend what you do: ‘You need to be able to justify your existence’” relate directly to a workshop I ran in Glasgow last Friday on “Institutional Web Services: Evidence for Their Value“.  So yes, this is a valid point, which the UK HE sector is addressing.

“Universities spending millions on websites which students rate as inadequate”

Whilst the video of Mark Greenfield’s webinar is worth watching and sis useful in stimulating debate, in contrast the Daily Telegraph’s article on “Universities spending millions on websites which students rate as inadequate“ was a poorly argued polemic based on flawed use of statistics. I spent 15 minutes over lunch at the CETIS conference pointing out that, yes it’s true “University Web Sites Cost Money!“. I added that the average annual spending on the maintenance of a University Web site is £60,375 (per annum)cited on the article seems very cheap  when you consider the wide range of services provided across institutional Web sites “ranging from the important promotional and marketing aspects which are designed to attract new students and research income, disseminate information on the value of the work carried out within institutions to the public as well as support collaborative and communications activities within the institution and will partners across the UK and beyond“.

Other people have made similar comments, with Piero Tintori giving the following response to the Telegraph article:

No one University is spending millions on web development. The average investment is actually very low in comparison with other industries / sectors.

As the web is the number one way of recruiting students and research you could say that the investment is too low. What this article really highlights is that Universities aren’t investing enough on their web presence.

In a blog post Ranjit Sidhu described why he considers the Telegraph article on University website costs and value as unbalanced:

The article in the Telegraph takes one data set;  expenditure on website development and places it as a cost on a single value proposition; student experience, without considering to monitise the other important purposes of the university website. We consider this to be unbalanced …

The post went on to provide an objective critique of the underlying methodology used in the Telegraph article.

Reflections

I don’t normally write such long posts.  But I’ve realised that writing this post has helped me to have a better awareness of  what I believe and my concerns. I should also add that I am very aware of the political aspects of my comments. I also feel there are differing perspectives between North American and UK views on ownership of IT infrastructure and political considerations. I suspect there will also be generational differences in the UK between those who remember Thatcherite cuts are those whop were too young.  And as a number of us discussed in the pub when we were in Nottingham, unlike today’s Government, Margaret Thatcher was lower-middle class and initially had a cabinet of Tory wets.

I also tend not to write such political posts.  But this is where I am concerned that the opportunities for new approaches to learning identified by Anya Kamanetz won’t be regarded as ways of providing richer and more diverse ways of supporting learning experiences – rather the ideas of the DIY University will be used as a means of further reducing funding for the sector and disadvantaging those from working class backgrounds.  And the arguments surrounding out-sourcing  made by Mark Greenfield will similarly be used as a blunt instrument, rather than in exploring optimal ways in which higher educational institutions can adapt to a changing environment, whilst retaining the expertise needed to exploit local opportunities an requirements.

And returning to the CETIS conference and the suggestion that you should “Never Waste a Good Crisis” – I also feel that you should also never waste an opportunity to discuss whether Universities are wasting millions on their Web sites, whether we should be outsourcing our Web and IT infrastructure and whether HEIs can be replaced by the DIY-U.  But remember that for some, the answer to these questions will be “Yes” – and not even a “Yes, but no, but yer, but” :-(

OMG! I Didn’t Intend Everyone To Read That!

A Context To Archiving of Digital Content

We’ve probably all had the experience  of creating digital content and, in retrospect, wishing we hadn’t said what we’d said, had rephrased our words or could delete all copies of the embarrassing content from hard drives around the world – and, if it were only possible, from people’s brain cells too!  I still cringe at the memories of the time I sent a message to a former colleague of mine complaining about a third party – and getting a phone call 2 minutes later asking if I was aware that the messages had been cced to the third party. Since then even if I don’t always spell check my messages I do try and check the distribution list before pressing the Send key.

User Management of Archiving of Tweets

Although these issues are nothing new: they include messaging systems such as Usenet New, instant messaging and email as well as publishing systems such as the Web.  In all of these environment digital content can easily be copied, forwarded to others and archived. But these concerns are being highlighted once again in the context of Twitter.  Although the creator of a tweet can delete the tweet, once it has left the Twitter environment it can be difficult to retain management of the content.

It is possible to delete tweets, but once they have left the Twitter environment it becomes difficult to manage them   The announcement in April 2010 that the Library of Congress will be archiving tweets caused the concerns over ownership of tweets to be revisited.  According to the Law and Disorder blog:

After “long discussions with Twitter over this,” Anderson and other LoC officials agreed to take on the data with a few conditions: it would not be released as a single public file or exposed through a search engine, but offered as a set only to approved researchers.

It is not obvious what an “approved researcher” is but it seems clear that this service won’t be able to be used for general use, such as embedding hashtagged event tweets on a video (as the iTitle tool does) or for providing statistics on usage of particular hashtags (as Summarizr does).

Whilst following the #ipres2010 tweets from the iPres 2010 conference, where my colleague Marieke Guy presented our joint paper on “Twitter Archiving Using Twapper Keeper: Technical And Policy Challenges“,  I became aware of the #NoLoC service which will prevent tweets from being archived by the Library of Congress. If you register with this service using your Twitter account any of your tweets which contain the #noloc, #noindex or #n hashtag will be automatically deleted from Twitter after a period of 23 weeks – one week before they are archived by the Library of Congress.

The Difficulties

This isn’t an approach which will help with those embarrassing tweets which have been posted – if you are alert enough to add the tag you will probably be thinking about what you are saying. It is also interesting to observe that the service appears to have been set up to prevent the government (should the Library of Congress be regarded as the US Government?) from keeping an archive of tweets: “Every single Twitter tweet will be archived forever by the US government” – it says nothing about Google having access to such tweets.

In addition I think it’s likely that users who use a #noloc tag on their tweets  will draw attention to themselves and their attempts to stop the government from archiving their tweets – I wonder if the government is already archiving #noloc tweets to say nothing of the tabloid newspaper which will have an interest in publishing embarrassing tweets from celebrities.  It will be interesting to see if any politicians or civil servants, for example, use this approach in order to protect politically embarrassing comments which the public should have a right to know about.

What Is To Be Done?

This discussion does make me wonder if there is a need to engage in discussions with Twitter over ways in which privacy concerns can be addressed. Would it, for example, be possible to develop a no-index protocol along the lines of the robots exclusion protocol developed in 1993 which provided a mechanism for Web site administrators to specify areas of their Web sites which conformant search engine crawlers should not index. Might Twitter developments, such as Twitter annotations, provide an opportunity to develop a technical solution to address the privacy concerns?

Of course once an archive of tweets is exported to, say, an Excel spreadsheet, there will be nothing which can be done to restrict its usage. So just like use of Usenet News, chat rooms and mailing lists perhaps the simplest advice is to “think before you tweet” – or, as the Romans may have put it, “Caveat twitteror“.

“You are a natural with a face for radio”

An Interview on Radio 4

After a recent tweet in which I revealed the nervousness I had whilst waiting to take part in a Radio 4 programme Paul Hollins (@PaulHollins) put me at ease with his comment “you are a natural with a face for radio“. I have to admit that Paul’s comment succeeded in making me smile. But although I informed the various organisations –  Hartlepool Museum, Brighton Museum and Gallery and Leeds University (and my mum) – I mentioned in the interview for the programme on Making History I personally still felt too embarrassed to listen to the programme when it was broadcast on 6 July  -  I felt I would come across as very nervous and geeky. But after receiving a number of emails, Facebook messages and Twitter @s and DMs from people who heard me (including an ex-girlfriend I hadn’t heard from in several years) and some positive comments from colleagues at UKOLN I decided to listen to the programme on the BBC iPlayer.  And it wasn’t too bad :-)

Sharing My Experiences

I firmly believe that those of us working in higher education have a responsibility to communicate with the general public and this was the reason why I responded positively to the email request I received a few days before the interview took place. I also believe that we should be open with out peers and we willing to share best practices (and concerns) in order that we can all gain the benefits.  So here is my summary of my experience. I feel that documenting my reflections on the experiences will ensure that I do better if I have another opportunity to engage with the mass media. I’d also welcome feedback from those who are more experienced than me in this area.

It is important to know what you intend to say or, perhaps more importantly, the points you wish to get across. The day before the interview I started to prepare my notes summarising the key points which were:

• There’s not a binary divide between real world visits to museums and access museum resources online.
• Online resources can provide many benefits such as engaging with young people and thus helping to widen participation, and provide access to resources without necessarily needing to travel, thus perhaps addressing green issues as well as enhancing access to those who might find it difficult to travel.
• Various benefits of encouraging the general public to engage with cultural resources has already been demonstrated so such approaches should be relevant to the Government’s Big Society rhetoric.

I had prepared notes for a talk in which I would make these points. However I was not able to give a prepared speech (which I suspect would have sounded too stilted) and instead had to respond to other pre-recorded interviews and the questions which the interviewer raised.  I was aware that specific examples would sound better than general points so I had prepared a number of examples which I used in my responses.  I was particularly pleased when the interviewer asked whether innovative use of technology was something that was only happening in the national museums based in London (to paraphrase her question slightly).  This provided me with the ideal opportunity to describe Hartlepool Museum’s use of Twitter – the sub-text of this example was ‘yes there is innovation taking place up north’!

Once the interview was over I wrote a brief news item which was published on theUKOLN news feed and featured on the University of Bath home page.  I also sent the BBC a list of the links I mentioned in my talk which have been included in a page about the programme. They seem to have included my text in full, which included:

An example of the technical innovation which is happening in regional museums is illustrated by the @yuffyMOH Twitter account provided by the Harlepool Museums and Heritage service. This is described in a book on Twitter for Museums: Strategy and Tactics for Success.

The Twitter account is available at: http://twitter.com/yuffymoh

Twitter for Museums

I was pleased to have have been able to promote the work which has taken place at Harlepool Museums, Brighton Museum and Gallery and Leeds University. I was even more pleased when I saw that the BBC had referred to me as Dr Brian Kelly. I emailed them to say I was a Doctor but the page hasn’t been updated. Perhaps the BBC have the power to award honory degrees :-)

The Big Society and Web Professionals

On Monday 19 July David Cameron announced the launch of Tories Big Society plan.  As described on the BBC Web site the aim is to give “individuals and communities more control over their destinies“.

The following day on the website-info-mgt JISCMail list Mike Nolan, head of Web Services at Edge Hill University, announced that he was Looking for a higher ed web expert!. Mike described how he was inspired by a talk given by Paul Boag on “No Money, No Matter” at IWMW 2010 and was  “interested in doing exactly that so I’m looking for someone to come to Edge Hill and do some free consultancy! In return they’ll get as much coffee as they can drink, a sandwich from the SCR and – if they want – I’ll return the favour and “consult” for their HEI.” Mike added that he had given further thoughts on the Edge Hill Web team blog.

It strikes we that the approaches suggested by Paul Boag and picked up by Mike Nolan are very appropriate for today’s political and economic climate.  I also feel that the application of ‘Big Society’ approaches in a Web context shouldn’t be disregarded by those who feel antipathy towards the approaches being taken by the government towards those working in the public sector – after all we have sought to work together as a community even when Margaret Thatcher was telling us that there was ‘no such thing as society’.

So when I recently suggested that if Web teams regularly blogged about their recent activities or their plans for new work and made this content openly available, using a simple search technology such as Google Custom Search Engine  would enable this to be regarded as a shared resource for the community. And when speakers and facilitators are sharing their experiences (and pain, judging by the talks on Content Management Systems in the final day on IWMW 2010!) this again reflects the culture of sharing which is so strong within our sector.

So let’s give the “individuals [in Web teams] and communities more control over their destinies” by giving each other the free consultancy which Mike suggests. But remember that there will be many different ways in which we can support each other in these ‘turbulent times’.

The Decline in JISCMail Use Across the Web Management Community

Decline in Usage of JISCMail Lists for the Web Management Community

Earlier this year I published a blog post entitled “My Significant Drop in Use of JISCMail Lists” which described how the numbers of messages I have published to the web-support JISCMail list has dropped from a peak on 53 in 2001 to only two messages in 2009.

I speculated that such a steep decline was true more generally in many of the JISCMail lists I subscribe to – but was unable to easily provide evidence due to the resource effort in having to manually count the numbers of posts to the lists.

Following the recent upgrade to the JISCMail Web site searches across JISCMail archives now include the total numbers of matching search queries. So carrying out a search of JISCMail archives for author’s addresses which contain ‘@’ for each year should enable trends to be observed.

The results for the numbers of posts to the web-support and website-info-mgt JISCMail list between 1999 and 2009 are shown.

The peak for the web-support list was 2002 when 2,540 messages were posted. The website-info-mgt list had a peak of 568 messages posted in 2001.

The decline of both of these lists now appears to have stabilised at just over 200 messages posted per year (less than 5 messages per week).  Many of these messages will related to announcements of events, job vacancies, etc. rather than the discussions which took place in the early days of these lists.

Clear evidence, it would appear, of the decline in importance of mailing lists over the past 5 years, replaced, we would imagine, by use of a variety of Social Web tools. The Web Management community is now, perhaps, a blogging, twittering and social bookmarking community.

Comparisons with Usage of a Popular JISCMail List for the Library Community

But how have other popular JISCMail lists used by other communities changed over the past 10 years?

In the case of the lis-link JISCMail list it seems that the Library community still makes intensive use of mailing lists.

Over the same time span this list was mostly widely used at the start of the period, with 3,651 posts in 1999. The decline since then has, however, been relatively slight with 2,226 posts in 2008 (and a rise t0 2,401 posts in 2009).

Whilst the institutional Web management community has moved away from JISCMail, those working in the library sector are still making intensive use of the service, receiving, on average, 46 messages per week on this list. And since there are a number of more specialist JISCMail lists aimed at the Library community (including LIS-CIGS, LIS-E-BOOKS, LIS-E-RESOURCES, LIS-ILL and LIS-Web2) it is quite clear that mailing lists still provide an important service for this community.

Accessing This Data

Unfortunately the JISCMail search facility does not provide a RESTful interface so I can’t provide a link to the data used to produce the graphs shown above.  However Google Spreadsheets was used to produce the graphs and this has been made publicly available.

Discussion

“Email Must Die!” was the deliberately provocative  title of a talk I gave at the ILI conference back in 2005 (and having noticed that the iPres 2010 call for proposals requests that “Panels should be lively, controversial and provoke discussion” I am unapologetic in being prepared to occasionally use somewhat controversial titles for my talks).  A report on the talk (available in PDF format) described how I introduced a “whole plethora of alternative methods of communicating information that enable collaboration or that provide information to the gadgets or programs that people use in real life, such as RSS feeds from blogs, instant messaging, wikis, podcasts, and so on” and argued that “it won’t be too long before our users will expect libraries to be able to communicate using these channels, so we’d be well advised to explore them now!“.

This prediction seems to have come true amongst Web managers, with the main mailing lists used by the community seemingly being used for  one-way announcements rather than discussions and debates.  But in other communities this hasn’t happened. Why is this, I wonder?

My initial suspicion was simply the lag in the adoption of new technologies, with the early adopters having embraced various Web 2.0 communications technologies a number of years ago to be followed by mainstream users. In this spectrum we might expect those primarily involved in Web support and development work to be part of the early adopter community, with those who have a prime focus on other areas (teaching and learning and research, for example) to be somewhat behind in making use of new technologies.

But does such a technological deterministic really reflect reality?  There will be additional factors such as ease of access to networked computers and access to Web 2.0 services themselves – and many of the librarians on the LIS- lists who work in FE colleges, public libraries and, indeed, the commercial sector,  may not have the ready access to the services which many of us working in HE have now come to expect.

There is also the question of whether users need to migrate to new technologies if well-established approaches, such as email lists, fulfill their purposes.

On the other hand, revisiting my post on “Decommissioning / Mothballing Mailing Lists” the trends showing the numbers of messages posted to lists seem to clearly indicate the majority of lists no longer have any traffic and those with over 100 messages posted per year (such as the LIS-LINK) are very much in a minority.

Does this evidence (taken from the JISC Monitoring Unit Web site) suggest that the library sector are out of synch with the rest of the community??

OMG! Is That Me On The Screen?

Yesterday a tweet from @josiefraser alerted me to the fact that “There’s a giant @briankelly on the screen!“. Josie went on to inform me (and her other followers) that my image was being used by “Kirsty McGill on remote audiences #transliteracy“. A few minutes later Josie tweeted “@briankelly now with added @briankelly http://u.nu/9dy25 #transliteracy“. There it was, amongst a set of Josie’s photographs taken at yesterday’s Transliteracy Conference held in Leicester, a photograph of me taken at last year’s IWMW 2009 conference together with a photograph of the photograph being displayed during a talk by Kirsty McGill at the conference. Very meta!

After viewing the photo I wondered “what was the learning point for use of that image?” and went on to speculate that perhaps at a transliteracy conference such an image might be used to raise issues such as privacy and permissions. I asked “how many rights-holders need to sign waiver for public use of this photo http://bit.ly/aHkNUV :-)” – with the smiley face in the tweet indicating that I didn’t have a problem with such reuse of the photograph.

The photograph was used in a talk given by Kirsty McGill – and Kirsty herself took the photograph at UKOLN’s IWMW 2009 event last summer in her role as the official event blogger. The photograph was used in a blog post which summarised the various activities which took place at the workshop dinner – which included a caricaturist who, on hearing that one of my interests was rapper sword dancing, added a sword in his drawing of me.

Kirsty used the photograph in her talk on “Remote Audiences” in which she “provide[d] a brief introduction to creating a complete online experience of a conference for a remote audience by creating tools and providing content so they can actively engage and interact with the live event“. It was good to see how the amplification of IWMW 2009 was used in Kirsty’s talk.  As Kirsty’s abstract went on to describe “integrating [use of various technologies and resources] with a live event raises a number of challenges related to transliteracy: the remote audience may wish to access the event content from a variety of different platforms; representing the event appropriately within the literacies of each platform may require some adaptation of the content; and members of the remote audience may have different levels of ability to navigate and use the resources to full effect“.

In addition to the various technologies (e.g. Slideshare, the Twitter back channel, the video stream, etc.) there are also various softer issues to be considered.  For example there were several discussions on this blog (and elsewhere) last year related to archiving and citing tweets published at events.  In addition there is the issue regarding taking photographs (or videos or audio recordings) at such events and subsequent publication of such photographs.

A typical response  to the potential concerns regarding privacy which may be raised would be to require that permission is obtained before reusing such photographs. However my view is that this is likely to be too time-consuming to do.  Going back to my original question as to the various rights-holders associated with the photograph shown above, we might identify myself (the main person in the photo), David Harrison (also easily identified in the photograph – but who, unlike me, was probably not aware that the photograph was being taken), the photographer (Kirsty, herself, I believe), UKOLN, who commissioned Kirsty to take photos on our behalf, the people in the background and the caricaturist who drew thew picture. In addition the photograph included above is a photograph of the photograph taken at IWMW 2009 – the (former) photograph was taken by Josie Fraser, and it includes Kirsty McGill. There could also be additional rights associated with the venue the two photos were taken in.

In this particular example the main stakeholders (myself, Kirsty, Josie and David) know each and are unlikely to be unduly concerned about reuse of such photographs and the two events (IWMW 2009 and the Transliteracy Conference) are both supportive of use of such technologies to enhance the events and support community-building.  But what may be appropriate for these events is not necessarily the case more widely.

For me I feel there is a need to take a risk management approach, which will assess the likelihood of concerns being raised and seek to take measures to minimise such risks (for example we provided a ‘quiet area’ in the main auditorium at the IWMW 2009 event for those who did not wish to be photographed or distracted by participants using their laptops during the talks).

Such a risk management approach was described in a paper entitled “A Risks and Opportunities Framework for Exploiting the Social Web” which I presented before Christmas at the Cultural Heritage Online 2009 Conference. In the paper, which was co-authored by Charles Oppenheim, we described a risk assessment formula for legal infringements. As an aid to identifying the risk of copyright infringement  the following formula was proposed:

R = A x B x C xD

where R is the financial risk; A is the chances that what has been done is infringement; B is the chances that the copyright owner becomes aware of such infringement; C is the chances that having become aware, the owner sues and D is the financial cost (damages, legal fees, opportunity costs in defending the action, plus loss of reputation) for such a legal action. Each one of these other than D ranges from 0 (no risk at all) to 1 (100% certain). D is potentially a high number. It is not easy to calculate the cost of loss of reputation.

This example was provided  for gaining an understanding of the financial risks of copyright infringement. But the risks aren’t just financial. In the example provided in this post we might modify the formula so that:

R is the general risk; A is the chances that what has been done is infringement; B is the chances that the rights holder becomes aware of such infringement; C is the chances that having become aware, the owner takes some action and D is the social cost (e.g. loss of reputation).

Although such an approach is subject to misuse by, say, the paparazzi, it may be a useful mechanism for those who wish to reuse images whilst avoiding upsetting others.

What’s The Score? And Whose Score Is It, Anyway?

What’s the Score?

What was the score in yesterday’s Chelsea versus Sunderland game? The final score was 7-2 – and according to the BBC Web site the score at one stage was simultaneously 5-0, 5-1 and 6-1!

Screen image showing three different football scores (taken from BBC Web site)

I managed to capture a screen image showing this inconsistency. This was slightly cumbersome to do as for my first attempt the page updated so that the scores were consistent before I completed the screen capture – and I failed to notice this before I published a tweet. I was somewhat surprised, but pleased, to find that I could launch another browser (Opera) and replicate the inconsistencies – at which point I quickly disconnected from the Internet prior to capturing the screen image before the display was updated.

As well as being an incident that Chelsea fans may appreciate, I thought it was also interesting example of issues such as assumptions of trust (“it’s on the BBC Web site – it must be correct”), technical complexities (the individual scores were correct at one stage – the inconsistencies were possibly due to caching problems with data coming from multiple sources), the possible dangers of scraping HTML pages, etc.

Whose Score Is It, Anyway?

Since my blog posts are published with a Creative Commons licence if anyone else wishes to reuse this example, perhaps in the content of new media literacy, you will be free to do so. Except, of course, the screen image is taken from the BBC Web site – and the scores and details of the fixture seem to be the copyright of Football Dataco Limited, a company which has a very long and detailed Rights Information page. However as is often the case Wikipedia provides a useful summary of the company:

Football DataCo is a British company in the football (soccer) industry that grants licences to third parties (such as newspapers) allowing them to reproduce certain intellectual property (such as fixture lists and statistics) owned by the UK’s four professional football leagues: the Premier League, The Football League, the Scottish Premier League and the Scottish Football League.

The article goes on to describe the controversy surrounding Football Dataco’s ownership claims for the fixture list:

The company has been racked by controversy in the UK media, after a 2004 European Court of Justice ruling that the Premier League and Football League cannot use the European Database Directive to demand payment from media and pools companies for the publication of fixture lists. Football DataCo refute the ruling, arguing that a legal precedent was set in the UK back in 1959, when the Football League won a landmark copyright victory against Littlewoods, claiming income from the pools company for their use of the fixtures list.

Staunch opponents of Football DataCo argue that the ruling is long out of date, and needs to be brought more inline with the advances in information collection and delivery that we are seeing with the world wide web.

When I started looking at the ownership of football information I remembered that I used to follow a Twitter account which provided updates on Premier League football scores, but that service was shut down after the developer (@ollieparsley) received a Cease-and-Desist letter from Football DataCo. Ollie has written a blog post entitled “The FootyTweets ‘Cease and Desist’ Story” about this.

Back To Ownership

This post began when I thought it would be useful to capture the surprising screen image from the BBC Web site. I thought that this would make an interesting example to use in one of my talks about trust. But the post seemed to go in a new direction when I started to explore the copyright issues. Perhaps, as I suggested in a post on “How I Use Creative Commons For My Presentations” there’s a need to take a risk management approach to making use of such football scores. But isn’t that approach condoning the rights of large companies to take ownership of what should be public information?

PS I’ve just noticed that this is post number 666. I’ll say more.

“Cuts will bring us to our knees”

May 1997 was an exciting time for many – the Labour party back in power after many years in opposition – and one of the key mantras back then was “Education, education, education”. And despite the many failings of the New Labour experiment we did see significant investments in education with even the Daily Telegraph acknowledging that “Education spending increased from £36 billion in 1996/97 to £56.9 billion in 2006” and giving the (qualified) conclusion of “Good“.

And during my time at UKOLN (which began shortly before the Labour party came to power) I have noticed how the public sector investment in JISC has been the envy of many of those working in higher education in other counties, such as the US, Canada, Australia and mainland Europe.

But yesterday a feature article in The Guardian had the headline “Universities tell Gordon Brown: cuts will bring us to our knees“:

Top universities accuse Gordon Brown of jeopardising 800 years of higher education, warning that they could quickly be “brought to their knees” by the government’s spending cuts of up to £2.5bn, thereby damaging Britain’s ability to recover from recession.

Back in August 2008 I wrote my first post which warned that economic difficulties were likely to have a significant impact on the higher education sector: “In his talk [John Selby, HEFCE] praised the work of the JISC and the JISC Services, but went on to warn of troubled financial times ahead for the educational sector. The glory days of the past 10 years are over, he predicted.“Subsequent posts on “Who Is Suffering In The Economic Downturn?“, “Britain Faces Worst Year Since 1930s” and “Is It Really A Good Time To Be Asking For More IT Money?” touched on the implications of the recession on use of IT across higher education.

It’s quite clear – we can’t ignore the implications of how the recession will affect the IT environment. Will we see a move towards consolidation? Or is there a need for innovation? Will we see a great move towards use of Cloud Services to replace or complement services traditionally carried out in-house? Or our such Cloud Services themselves at risks? Will be see significant losses of staff within the sector and how would such changes affect IT development activities? And what of digital preservation – even more important at a time when services are likely to close, or a luxury which can only be considered during a time of growth?

I don’t think there are easy answers – but I will try and explore such issues in future posts. And I would be interested in your views on how cuts to the higher education sector’s budget are likely to affect IT development work.

It WAS a GREEAT Proposal!

UKOLN’s GREEAT Proposal

Before Christmas my colleague Marieke Guy and myself submitted a proposal to the JISC’s Greening ICT Programme. Our proposal was entitled GREEAT (GReening Events through Event Amplification Technologies). Unfortunately although the evaluators felt that the bid had many strengths, it was not funded.  A summary of the bid is given below.

The Strengths of the Proposal

In the feedback provided by JISC we were informed that the evaluator’s agreed with our view that the “question of amplified events and their role in reducing travel and those carbon emissions for the sector was acknowledged to be important“. In addition “the panel felt that [UKOLN] made the case well for (and obviously have immense experience in) the approaches you wanted to explore“.

We were also very pleased to have received 12 letters of support from a range of institutions, regional, national and international organisations with whom we have worked with over recent years and who appreciated the strength of our proposal and the benefits to those organisations and the higher education community in general.

We felt the bid would provide value for money for the JISC community since all universities are involved in delivering events and so could benefit from the outcomes of the project. 

The Weaknesses

However the evaluators were less impressed with the “amount of ‘greenness’ in the proposal“, and felt that the proposal “is not within the scope of this programme“. They also felt that there was “not enough attention being paid to the human factors“.

We were aware of the risk that our proposal, which addressed the greening of events through use of ICT rather than greening ICT per se, might have been regarded as out of scope for the call. However we were disappointed with the comments that the proposal that we did not intend to address the human factors associated with the provision of amplified events in sufficient detail, as this is an area which we do recognise as very important and have addressed in the past (for example we first began providing an Acceptable Use Policy covering use of networked technologies at events at IWMW 2005 and also ensured that we evaluated use of the networked technologies at the event).  In retrospect, though, we should have included more details of why this is important and how we would address the issues.  

A Summary of the Proposal

Our proposal was based on our involvement in the ‘amplification’ of events, making use of a variety of networked technologies (such as video streaming and Twitter back channels) to enhance the impact and maximise the outreach of events. Our work in this area dates back to use of an IRC back channel at UKOLN’s IWMW 2005 event. Since that event (when news of the London bombing first became known to the users of the back channel) we have been pro-active in the amplification of our annual Institutional Web Management Workshop series of events. 

In addition the proposal built on Marieke Guy’s experiences as a remote worker, which she describes in her Rambings of a Remote Worker blog (and the Remote Worker Award she announced back in September). 

The bid described how the project would:

• Develop a methodology for establishing the carbon footprint for events.
• Survey remote participants of amplified events in order to gather evidence of perceptions of the benefits of remote participation, limitations and suggestions on ways in which remote participation can be made more effective.
• Support the provision and evaluation for amplified events at a number of institutional, regional, national and international events.
• Support the provision and evaluation for a number of online events.
• Develop guidelines for best practices for amplified and online events for the relevant stakeholders.
• Provide advice on business models for the provision of amplified events.
• Provide advice on risks associated with the provision of amplified events.
• Provide advice on the human aspects associated with the provision of amplified events.

What Next?

Although the bid was not successful we will be continuing to make use of amplification technologies to support various UKOLN events, including IWMW 2010. As always we will try to share our experiences with the wider community, including the publication of further briefing documents of Networked Technologies at Events (which have been developed to support the cultural heritage sector).

And we’d welcome further discussions and comments on this topic.

Unlucky in Lucca? I Think Not!

About This Post

In this rather long post I describe some personal stories of benefits I have gained from my social networking communities. And rather than the focus on the professional benefits of such services which I have described in previous posts in my final post before Christmas I suggest that the main benefits of the Social Web can be gained from its use in a personal context.

A Mini-Adventure In Lucca

After travelling to Florence to present a paper on “Empowering Users and Institutions: A Risks and Opportunities Framework for Exploiting the Social Web” at the Cultural Heritage Online 2009 conference I felt this provided an ideal opportunity for a well-deserved and belated holiday.

So I’m spending a week travelling around the well-known tourist highlights of Tuscancy including Lucca, Siena and Pisa.

My holiday began, however, with a visit to Danny Ayers, who lives in the Tuscan Hills, about an hour from Lucca I met Danny at the WWW 2007 conference in Banff, although I’d come across his name prior to that and was aware of his interests in the Semantic Web. After getting to know Danny better over a few drinks in Banff, and knowing from his Twitter profile that he lived near Lucca I tweeted Danny asking if he fancied meeting up. In response Danny invited me so stay over at his, an invitation I was happy to accept.

Unfortunately I hadn’t realised that Danny lived with two large (but friendly) dogs and two cats. And as I have been free from asthma attacks for a few years I had failed to bring along my inhaler. So although I enjoyed my visit to Garfagnana and eating and drinking in Danny’s local bar, as I felt slightly short of breath, I left the next day, to travel to Lucca.

The trip to my B&B in Lucca as uneventful – apart from the difficulty I had crossing the town walls – the path down was covered in ice and despite holding on to the rail I slipped trying to walk down and again trying to stand up (and I was carrying a rucksack and bag containing my netbook at the time). I eventually found some ice-free steps and made it to my accommodation or the next two days.

That first night, however, was difficult. My breathing had unexpectedly got worse – I had thought that the mild asthma attack I had when the dogs were licking me would be as bad as it would get. This was not the case. And when I found that I had ifficulty walking downstairs the next morning and was breathless speakeing to the receptionist I knew I needed to see a doctor.

Within 15 minutes the paramedics arrived and shortly after that an ambulance arrived which took me to the local hospital. Over the next few hours blood samples were taken, my chest was xrayed and I was discharged with a prescription (for the Ventolin I should have taken with me). I was also given a CD containing a copy of my Xray (is that normal practice thse days?)

After getting back to my B&B I sent a tweet containing a brief summary of my adventures:

Ambulance took me to Lucca Hospital, after suffering from asthma attack. Still haven’t seen much of town :-(

And in response I received a number of supportive tweets, some from people I know and others from people I’ve never met. And this made me reflect on the benefits of the personal online network.

My Personal Online Network

I had given some thoughts to the possible benefits of a personal online network over a year ago, during a holiday in Malaysia and Thailand. I used Twitter to provide an update of my travels, as a high-tech version of the postcard. But the interactive aspect provided benefits not possible with the postcard – and Frank Norman’s suggestion of a temple to visit when I announced my arrival in Penang took me to an impressive temple which I might have missed otherwise (this story only slightly spoilt by Frank responding to my Facebook status update rather than my tweet!)

But it was when I arrived in Bangkok when I started to think about the possible benefits which Twitter can provide to one’s personal safety. This was another reason for my tweets – to provide a public audit trail of my travels, so if anything untoward happened there would be public awareness of my whereabouts. Incidentally I also kept a record of places I stayed at and had booked on Tripit and gave read access to the account to some trusted friends for similar reasons.

But it was on my penultimate day of my holiday that I became aware of possible personal risks. I vaguely wondered why the traffic down a previously busy main road had disappeared and hen I took the opportunity to cross the road I was told to stop walking and remain still, Moments later a motorcade passed by with police outriders and a large limousine – but none of the locals would respond when I asked who the dignitary was. The following day, while waiting for a taxi to the airport the same thing happened. This time I was prepared, and had my camera ready to take a surreptitious photograph – and noticed the concerned reaction from those nearby. Yes a week befoe “Thai Protesters Force Airport Closure, Bomb Injures 4” I was possibly taking a photograph of the Thai prime minister.

Yes I know I was probably being foolish (I’ve read the story of the British train spotters who were imprisoned for pursuing their hobby in countries with harsh regimes). But I was also somewhat foolish in not taking my inhaler with me to Italy. So what I feel I need is a support network I can call on in case of difficulties -but which is also valuable at other times.

Real World Networks

Of course the value of networks is nothing new. But rather than an old school network or networks identified by protocols such as knowing which way to pass the port around the table or a secret handshake I’m interested in open and democratic networks. And I’m also interested in social networks which exploit the potential of online technologies.

Open and Online Social Networks

I don’t have a name for such networks. I’ve heard people use the term Personal Learning Network, Personal Learning Environment and Personal Research Environment. And although this may describe my professional use of tools such as Twitter I think such terms will be misleading for those who don’t work in the educational sector.

I also think such networks should be technologically neutral – alhough Twitter works for me, many or my non-professional contacts don’t use Twitter and are happy to make use of Facebook.

I should also add that I don;t think such networks need be trusted networks. As the networks are open, newcomers can join – and I need to make my own risk assessment in judging how I respond to their comments. After all I’m familiar with this in the context of email when friendly souls are willing to share millions of pounds they have unexpectedly been beneficiaries of :-)

There are also dangers in misunderstandings arising in such open social networks – as Paul Boag’s story of how his “Help” tweet was misinterpretted a year ago.

But although there can be risks in using such social networks, perhaps the risks of not having a thriving and sustainable social network may be greater. And perhaps traveling abroad without having such a network to provide support in case of problems will be regarded in the same light as travelling without insurance – although you could do this, it wouldn’t be regarded as a sensible decision.

Finally I’d like to wish everyone in my social network a happy Christmas and all the best for the New Year.

Signals from CETIS09

Last week I attended another enjoyable CETIS conference. The event, which this year had the theme Brave New World?, provides a valuable opportunity to catch up with old colleagues, but faces to names Ive come across online and make new connections.

The conference theme alluded to not only the dystopian view of the future described in the Aldous Huxley novel but also the optimism expressed in Shakespeare’s The Tempest:

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!

This was a very appropriate title for the event as the optimism surrounding a number of the technologies discussed at the conference (including linked data and APIs) was tempered by an awareness of gloomy economic predictions for the higher educational sector, global environmental concerns and expectations that we will face uncertainties after the next general election.

In light of such uncertainties over what the future may bring there was an awareness of the need to ensure that the development community engaged with the concerns of senior management and we made use of mechanisms to provide the flexibility needed in a time of uncertainties. Such approaches which were mentioned included scenario planning and monitoring of strong and weak signals.

What, then, were the signals I detected at the conference?

In the conference’s closing plenary talk will Bill Thompson was  optimistic about the future. In a review of technological developments Bill teased us with visions of electronic contact lenses, e-paper and other cool innovations.

I met Bill at the first WWW conference, held in CERN in 1994. Like Bill, I too was excited about the promise of the Web back then and still retain a similar sense of optimism and excitement.  And yet hearing similar views to mine being expressed I started to think about doubts and scepticisms. I have (fairly rapidly) gone through a period of excitement over my open source (Android) mobile phone (the camera application kept crashing on me a few days before the CETIS conference) and so felt Bill’s belief that the benefits of an open source environment would inevitably (within about 2 years, Bill suggested to me) deliver a better tool that the closed environment of today’s market leader, the iPhone.

Hearing Bill made me reflect on some of the other innovations  which I and other have felt would have significant impact over the years. About 10 years ago the exciting new technologies was VRML:  an open virtual reality environment which, it was promised, but build on the success of the Web, and even replace the 2D Web world with a much richer and more interactive distributed 3D environment.   And then, more recently, we had the excitement of Second Life: proprietary and centralised, but very exciting. Or at least exciting to some.  But not featured at the CETIS conference, unlike the more mundane but relevant learning competencies, eporfolios and learning objects (but this year they were open).  The lack of discussion about Second Life was not due to its ubiquity and universal embedding within institutions!

Yes, I think we can say that at this year’s CETIS conference the participants were aware of the need to ensure that the innovative aspects of elearning which were discussed could be embedded within an institutional context.   And it was pleasing that senior managers (from, for example the Universities of Oxford,  Stafford and Highlands and Islands) were present at the conference and engaged in the discussions.

In the two parallel sessions I attended (on University API and Universities and Colleges in the Giant Global Graph) we did have discussions on various barriers. In the former session I  gave a brief talk entitled “University API? WTF?” in which I warned of the dangers that we were simply peddling the latest technology fix, whilst the user community was still waiting for previous universal cures to materialise.  But, to be honest, I’m still searching for a mechanism for productively exploring such issues, which can avoid the predictable responses of “We need concrete user cases”, “We need to market the benefits more effectively”, “We need to get senior managers on user side”, …

And in the Universities and Colleges in the Giant Global Graph session the technical issues again were the main focus of the debate.   My colleague Paul Walk did help to decouple some of the topics we were discussing (open data, open linked data and the Semantic Web) and, most usefully, ensured that his thinking was not just trapped in the space and time of the session but published on his blog (with the benefit of subsequent discussions).

Did either of the sessions provide senior managers with an indication of not only tangible benefits of University APIs or Linked Data but confidence that making resources (staff time and money) would provide a satisfactory ROI? I think not.  But perhaps that may be because such approaches are not yet ready for large-scale service deployment. Which isn’t to say that testing of prototypes shouldn’t be encouraged. But in addition to such project funded or small-scale activities, there is a need to be able to convince the senior managers on the grounds of business efficiencies or new opportunities, and not just on the merits of the technologies themselves. And we need to remember the lessons of the past – after all, in the Universities and Colleges in the Giant Global Graph session we appeared to be reinventing X.500 directory services.

(Note: when initially published the final sentence of this blog post was corrupted. The final sentence has been rewritten.)

Forecasting Trends Backwards

“Forecasting for the Future” was the title of an article published in the recent issues of the JANET Newsletter (No. 9, September 2009 – PDF format). It won’t surprise people that the byline for the article was positive about the future:  “Outlook – sunny, with a good chance of videoconferencing“.

To be fair, the byline was a play on words of the topic of the article, which described use of the JANET Video Conference Service (JVCS) at the Met Office. The article concluded with a quotation from Tim Marshall, JANET CEO:

“The Met Office videoconference programmes are an excellent example of how the JANET Videoconference Service makes sense not only in terms of delivering excellent educational content and cost savings, but also through its real contribution in reducing our customers’ carbon footprint“.

Such optimistic views of the benefits which technologies promise to deliver are, however, being criticised. In a post entitled Postdigital: Escaping the Kingdom of the New? Dave White introduced the ‘postdigital’ concept, a topic he revisited after co-facilitating (with Rich Hall) a post-digital F-ALT session on the opening night of this year’s ALT-C conference. As Dave described in that post, in the session (which I attended) the participants were invited to debate a series of statements which were designed to provoke post-digital thoughts, including:

• Learning technologists are obsessed with technology more than learning, which is why elearning will never make the mainstream.
• We are purveyors of the worst kind of spin: ‘This new thing will solve all your problems’.

But how might we go about challenging such ‘technological determinism’ (which, of course, goes beyond the e-learning community)? Inspired by the F-ALT session and further brief discussions with Dave, an approach I took in a panel session on “Top Technology Trends for Libraries and Information Professionals” at the recent ILI 2009 conference was to take as the starting point the optimism felt towards various examples of today’s technologies and to travel backwards in time, and attempt to give plausible reasons why today’s exciting technologies will not be around in the past.

This was an idea I got from a BBC 4 programme back in 2007 which I described in a post on “The History Of The Web Backwards“.  And following the postdigital discussions it occurred to be that the approach might be worth revisiting.

The night prior to the panel session I described the idea to a number of fellow speakers including Tony Hirst and Peter Murray-Rust. Tony was full of enthusiasm for the idea and, as he often does, came up with new ways in which we could use this approach (e.g. looking at a variety of expected future trends and how we got there from the present). And a few days later Tony alerted me of a YouTube video which took a similar approach:

After I had given my brief presentation, which I had published shortly before the conference, Peter Murray-Rust did wonder whether such Radio 4 humour would be understood by an international audience.  And I did notice that some of the tweets about my talk had failed to pick up on the humourous intent of my presentation. To summarise what I said (or meant to say) with respect to the demise of Twitter:

Today many people are exploiting the potential of Twitter to help them find resources they are looking for. Indeed last night I tweeted that I was looking for a good pub to go to and my Twitter community helped me in my information searching task – and because they knew me, they knew to suggest a good real ale pub and not a trendy wine bar. An Ask-A-Librarian service wouldn’t be aware of my personal preferences.

But, as we travel through time backwards, we need to ask “Why did twitter die off in the early part of the century?”

The answer is obvious. Twitter doesn’t scale. As more and more people asked such questions, the Twitterverse became clogged. “It’s similar to email spam” people felt and started to cancel subscriptions to the service.

And of course although I can benefit, as an early adopter, from having large numbers of followers, many people will have only small Twitter communities, and so won’t gain the benefits which I have.  So Twitter is inherently undemocratic and professions such as Librarians, with their commitments to social inclusion, were amongst the first to move away from such undemocratic technologies.

The demise of Twitter was eventually accepted by all.  And in the new environment of the latter part of the twentieth century, people met in pubs with their real friends.  The term ‘virtual friends’ was felt to be on par with ‘imaginary friends’ – something you grow out of. And to mention the ‘followers’ you had would result in strange looks and suggestions that you should seek psychiatric help!

Funnily enough, although I am aware of reasons why people are sceptical about Twitter and why some Twitter fans feel that the service may eventually be replaced by an open source or distributed alternative service,  it wasn’t until I gave the talk that I used the “Twitter is inherently undemocratic” argument.  So using the device of seeking to give persuasive reasons why technologies disappeared as we travel backwards though time did give me some fresh insights.

Why then, did video-conferencing, which had such a bright future in 2009 die out?

Although popular at the high of the environmental concerns in the early years of the twenty-first century subsequent research by sociologists revealed that academic and librarians preferred face-to-face meetings. Further research revealed that most conference participants can’t remember the details of talks given at conferences, which made people question why one should use networked technologies to access talks which are quickly forgotten.  Rather than computer networking, people networking (including plotting, politicking and such skull-duggery – as well as opportunities for sexual relationships) were found to be the real reason why people travel to conferences, although for some strange reasons, such issues were not identified in the user needs gathering exercise.

Might this have an element of truth?

RSS Feeds For Welsh University Web Sites

RSS Usage On Welsh University Home Pages

Last year I published a blog post which provided a summary of usage of RSS feeds on Scottish University home pages. The survey was carried out in July 2008, shortly before the IWMW 2008 event was held in Aberdeen. The aim was to collate evidence on the extent to which best practices in institutional use of RSS were being implemented in Scotland and to facilitate discussions on reasons why best practices may not always be being implemented and ways of addressing such barriers.

As I will be visiting Wales shortly I thought it would be useful to carry out a similar survey of the 12 Welsh Universities.

The Findings

The findings, based on a manual survey carried out on 21 August 2009, are given in the following table.

	Institution	No. of RSS Feeds	Comments
1	Aberystwyth University	0
2	Bangor University	0
3	Cardiff University	0
4	Glamorgan University	0
5	Glyndŵr University	4	RSS feeds for news, sports news, Careers centre news and Student news.
6	Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama	0
7	Swansea University	0
8	Swansea Metropolitan University	1	RSS feed for news.
9	Trinity University College	0
10	University of Wales Institute, Cardiff	0
11	University of Wales, Lampeter	0
12	University of Wales, Newport	0

It appears that only two Welsh institutions are providing RSS feeds which can be found from the home page (16.67%).

Revisiting Community Surveys

Last year’s blog post on RSS usage on Scottish University home pages discussed possible reasons for the low levels of usage, and I don’t intend to revisit that discussion as I suspect the same reasons will be valid for both communities. I should also add that Tony Hirst has developed a tool for dynamic discovery of auto-detectable RSS feeds for all UK University home pages, which currently reports a total of 48 out of 133 institutions (36.1%).

So rather than discussing the specific example of RSS feeds across a sector, I’m more interested in ways in which a sector (or interested and motivated individuals within a sector) can provide similar (factual) surveys which can help to support discussions and, perhaps, inform policies.

Liz Azyan has compiled lists of UK Universities usage of YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and MySpace. But, as can be seen from the list for MySpace usage, it is not always easy to provide complete coverage and there are likely to be difficulties in ongoing maintenance of such resources. Would it be useful, I wonder, for the Welsh Web management community to set up a wiki to keep a record of trends within their own sector? This is something I will explore at a meeting of Welsh institutional Web managers at the University of Aberystwyth on Monday.

Top Technology Trends – For The Twentieth Century!

Top Technology Trends for Libraries and Information Professionals

Later this week I’m taking part in the Internet Librarian International (ILI) Conference in London. In addition to running a workshop and giving a talk on standards I’ll also be taking part in the closing panel session on Top Technology Trends for Libraries and Information Professionals.

What should I say, I wonder? Should I talk about the importance of social tools for resource discovery, using Twitter as an example of a tool whose success was unexpected. Or shall I try and quickly gain an understanding on Google Wave and talk about its potential relevance to information professionals.

But doesn’t this approach simply repeat the technological determinism which the postdigital advocates point out has continually failed to deliver on its promises.

Instead I’m intending to take today’s environment as the starting point and explore how technological developments promise to take us towards a better world – in the 1990s.

Today’s Networked Environment

How can we summarise today’s environment, which provides the starting point for a journey towards the past? Let’s mention a few examples.

Twitter: It might be appropriate for event aimed at the Library community to begin by talking about the success of Twitter, not only for providing community support but as a mechanism for resource sharing and resource discovery – yes, Twitter now seems to be a very effective tools for sharing links with one’s friends and colleagues.

Lightweight development: We now hear developers being critical of large-scale funding initiatives, preferring instead small amounts of funding to support rapid development work. The JISC’s recent Rapid Innovation Grants provided an example of a funding body recognising the benefits of such an approach.

Barcamps, Bathcamps, Hackfests, …: Proponents of light-weight development approaches also feel that meeting up with like-minded people, perhaps at weekends, can be a useful way of supporting one’s professional activities (and in the case of the recent Bathcamp, the weekend away also involved camping!)

Crowdsourcing: Examples such as the crowdsourcing of the digitisation of MP’s expenses claims, Galaxy Zoo, reCaptcha and other examples provide further illustrations of today’s networked environment, in which enthusiasts, who need not be developers, can achieve benefits which previously may not have been felt to be achievable without significant expenditure.

There is, of course, a political and social context to this technical environment – and, especially, for those working in the public sector, the context is the gloomy economic situation, an expectation that things will get even worse and a likely change of government in the near future.

Looking Forward to the 1990s

Let’s assume that, due to a malfunctioning (time) portal, we, like Benjamin Button, find ourselves being taken backwards in time, in our case towards the 1990s. How might the networked environment I have summarised above develop? Here are my predictions:

Twitter: The sceptics who argued that Twitter doesn’t have a sustainable business model will be proved correct. The Twitter service will die and, despite an attempt by Facebook to provide a simple type of service using its Status updates, the concept of ‘micro-blogging’ will disappear. The resulting productivity gains will be instrumental in helping the Twittering nations to move out of the global recession.

Lightweight development: The limitations of lightweight development approaches and simple (some say simplistic) formats such as RSS become apparent and, despite providing interesting exemplars, fail to provide an infrastructure for serious significant development work. ‘Enterprise development’ becomes the new ‘lightweight development’ and large-scale Content Management Systems become the popular with organisations facing pressures from their peers to deploy such technologies.

Barcamps, Bathcamps, Hackfests, …: The growth in large-scale enterprise development environment (accompanied by pressure from friends and families to achieve a more healthy work/life balance) brings to an end the culture of the amateur hacker and events such as barcamps, bathcamps and hackfests.

Crowdsourcing: The importance of the professional in the development of high quality networked services goes beyond the developer community. The failure of amateurs to provide the required levels of quality for digitisation, metadata standards, etc. results in an appreciation of the merits of the professional. Librarians and related information professionals become critical in the development of sustainable networked services.

Of course, as with many technological predictions, this vision of the 1990s is an optimistic one. Not only does the demise of social networks lead to an emphasis on real-world friends and relationships, but the political and economic environment will also see tremendous improvements – indeed I predict that in 10 years, or possibly 12 years time (say 1997), we will be very pleased with our political and economic situation and positive about the benefits that the future will bring.

Postscript

This post was influenced by the post-digital session which Dave White facilitated and Rich Hall as part of the fringe (#falt09) activities around the ALT-C 2009 conference. In a blog post about the session Dave White felt that “After the fringe session I was even more convinced that the post-digital was a useful concept but that we hadn’t found the right way of expressing it yet.“

John Maeda has described how “Recently I have had the sense that no matter what new digital territory may arise, we end up where we first began – back in an infinite loop. My instinctive response to this personal perception has been to proclaim a new effort to escape to the post digital . . . which I am certain lies in the past.”

Can we gain a better appreciation of our perhaps naive expectations of the benefits of technological developments by, as John suggests, looking back into the past?

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Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skype, Two Years After Its Nightmare Weekend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I agree.

25 years of PowerPoint. But What Next?

Happy Birthday

PowerPoint was born 25 years ago, on 14 August 1984. An article on the BBC News Magazine, entitled “The problem with PowerPoint” points out that “They’re often boring” and goes on to point out the problems with PowerPoint presentations which are too wordy, make excessive use of bullet points, etc.

The Need For Good Design and Visual Impact

Nothing surprising, you may think.  And I too have been bored with such presentations and have been impressed with more visually oriented presentations, in which the design creativity is apparent.

In particular I remember how impressed I was with Alison Wildish’s plenary talk at IWMW 2007 – a talk which was radical, at the time, in the summary of how a relatively new institution (Edge Hill University) was embracing Social Web services to engage with students and potential students.

The accompanying slides were also visually impressive, with each slide having its own visual identity and some of the slides challenging the assumptions that a speaker from a marketing background would invariably promote their own institution.

As someone who gives a lot of talks my slides should be more like Alison’s, I can remember thinking at the time. I should ditch the UKOLN template and make the individual slides distinctive, as Alison did. And I should reduce the amount of text on the slides, leaving it to my memory, or the accompanying speaker notes, to provide the details of what I will say in my talks.

An Alternative View

But whilst I’ll acknowledge the impact that good design and visual diversity can have on an audience I do wonder whether the points made in the BBC article start to become slightly less relevant in the environment I increasingly work in, in which ‘amplified conferences’ will be built around the speakers and their slides but the audience may not be physically present in the lecture theatre but viewing the talks on a video streaming service or accessing the slides after the event is over.

UKOLN’s recent IWMW 2009 event was one such amplified event.  And for this event we sought to treat the remote audience watching the video stream as first class participants, providing access to the plenary speaker’s slides using Slideshare, as well as using various social media services, such as Twitter to encourage discussions, etc. Liz Azyan, in a blog post entitled “Iwmw2009: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly…“, picked up on the importance of this approach:

“Let’s talk a bit about some of the stuff I liked about the conference…

There were alot of things that this conference did get right in terms of using social media to fully aggregate the workshops content effectively online. Check out how #iwmw2009 came alive online and created real-time conversations and feedback …

1. Slideshare of all presentation slides (Excellent!) – I always find myself needing to ask for these at events and often take a long time to become available. So, well done!“

In a follow-up post Liz, in a report on the opening session at the event, embedded the slides from the two opening talks, thus illustrating how such slides can now be decoupled from their use in the live presentation.

I personally am finding larger numbers of people seem to access to my slides on Slideshare than are present when I give the live presentation. Looking at the statistics I notice that a the slides for a talk on “Introduction To Facebook: Opportunities and Challenges For The Institution“, which was given to a small number (less than 20) of staff at Bath University has been viewed 10,900 times.

Who, then, is my main audience? Should I seek to treat the remote audience on par with the live audience? And if I do wish to do this, will it (should it) have any relevance to the design of the slides?  Perhaps for the remote audience, there should be a greater emphasis placed on the informational content, whereas for the live audience the emphasis may be on engaging with the audience?

And does a personal visual appearance for slides possibly make it difficult for the slides to be reused? For a number of years I have provided a Creative Commons licence for my slides, and have welcomed their reuse. But if they were less neutral in the appearance and contained less content, would this detract from their potential for reuse?

Or are these just excuses for my lack of design skills!?