Sites Which ‘Rip Off’ Marketing Videos

A few months ago there was an email message sent to a national list from a member of a UK University institutional Web management team who complained that “We’ve come across an outfit calling themselves Unitour who have ripped one of our marketing videos“. The message went on to add that the institution had request that the video was removed from the site - and it seems that this has been done. The Web site in question is Unitour and they do indeed have a video tour guide of UK Universities - from which it does seem possible to opt out of.

But how should an institution go about ensuring that its marketing videos aren’t ripped off’? Well my suggestion may be regarded as rather radical in some circles - I’d suggest that you provide a Creative Commons licence for such videos and encourage people to reuse it. After all, we are talking about marketing materials. And if you are concerned that organisations may be ‘ripping off’ your bandwidth, why not make the video available from YouTube or Google Video - so that your institution doesn’t even have to provide additional bandwidth when potential students view the video.

Is this really a radical proposal, I wonder? Shouldn’t this be an approach which all universities use as part of their institutional marketing?

How Rude! Use Of WiFi Networks At Conferences

The Debate

A blog post on “Making Connections 2.0” by Martin Weller alerted me to the discussions which have been taken place following a recent conference at the annual internal Open University conference. As Martin describes on his Ed Techie blog one of his colleagues, Doug Clow, who was live-blogging the conference “was told by three different people in separate sessions to stop as his typing was offputting“. The pros and cons of use of a WIFi network during a conference have been further discussed by Doug Clow himself and by Niall Sclater.

A Framework For Use Of Networked Technologies

I have to say that I don’t find such debates surprising - indeed I wrote about this in a paper on “Using Networked Technologies To Support Conferences” (I wish I had Lorcan Dempsey’s skills in coining snappy names - nowadays we would refer to ‘amplified events’) which I gave at the EUNIS 2005 conference way back in June 2005. The paper described some early experiments in exploitation of iFi networks, including my first experiment at a one-day joint UKOLN/UCISA event on “Beyond Email - Strategies For Collaborative Working In The 21st Century” in November 2004. But as the paper describes, rather than just providing access to the WIFi network and leaving the delegates to make use of it as they see fit, an Acceptable Use Policy was produced which was based on the general principle that “Use of mobile device and networked technologies to support the aims of the workshop with be encouraged” but which alerted the participants to their responsibilities: “The use of mobile device and networked technologies should not be disruptive to other delegates, infringe rights of privacy or breach copyright or cause degradation to the network which would aversely affect others“.

The paper went on to suggest that, rather than imposing a single-minded approach to policies regarding use of WiFi networks at events, there was a need for a framework for the development of an Acceptable Use Policy which would reflect the expectations of the users and take into account the potential diversity of views. The paper suggested the need for such a framework to address policy, technical, legal, social and organisational issues.

Implementing This Approach

This approach was implemented the following year at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2005 (IWMW 2005) held at the University of Manchester on 6-8^th July 2005. An AUP was produced, together with details of networked applications which users might find useful during the event and an optional talk was held shortly before the opening of the event which provided details of how to connect to the WiFi network and use the applications.

But perhaps the most important approach taken was the evaluation of the technologies by the event participants. The evaluation form asked three questions: “I found use of the networked applications enriched the event“, “I found use of the networked applications distracting or disruptive to the event” and “I would encourage use of networked applications at future events“. A summary of the responses is given below.

Q1: I found use of the networked applications enriched the event

Strongly Agree	Agree	Neutral	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
6	14	11	3	1

Q2: I found use of the networked applications distracting or disruptive to the event

Strongly Agree	Agree	Neutral	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
2	8	16	5	4

Q3: I would encourage use of networked applications at future events

Strongly Agree	Agree	Neutral	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
10	16	5	2	1

In addition the following comments were made:

Use of the technologies:

• People need to follow the guidelines and TURN OFF laptop sounds
• Need to be more inclusive - can you find a sponsor next year who
  will give us/lend us a wireless PDA or laptop?
• Firewalls made it difficult
• Tables for laptops and be better equipped rooms with more
  powerpoints
• It seemed a little ‘gimmicky’ and I am not sure their use added
  real value/benefit to the workshop. Also the noise of people tapping
  their keyboard can be irritating!

General issues:

• Please give bigger headlines about this in joining instructions
• There’s a risk of it becoming too distracting
• Some people may have been distracted by the availability of WiFi, but it’s up to each person to discipline themselves
• IRC fun & thought provoking - allowing comment without disruption - could even reduce whispering!
• I was sitting in ‘geek’ corner so it was disruptive, the clicking & beeping was a but much at times - but a very useful evil .. .and I could have moved so it can’t have been that bad!
• Made it too easy to ignore presentations but makes it even more important for presenters to be interesting!
• Non-users may feel under-privileged
• Useful for sharing info but can be used negatively for ‘bitching’ about speakers
• Very distracting in seminars
• A negative effect if people abuse it e.g. surf the Web. Beneficial if people take notes.
• Lots of people spent the session surfing the Web or checking their email - I found this distractive. Facilitators did not often refer to the Wiki.

Discussion

It is interesting to note that although some of the problems and potential problems of use of networked technologies had been commented on by the participants, a majority (of 26 to 3) felt that use of networked technologies should be encouraged at future events. This indicates, I feel, that there is an awareness that potential problems can be addressed.

Subsequent IWMW have made further use of networked technologies, and the numbers of participants with laptops has been growing steadily, will, I think, now over 50% of the audience bringing along and using their laptops.

We’ve explored (and will continue to explore) various ways of addressing the dangers. When I run workshop sessions, for example, I make it clear that laptops should only be used for purposes relevant to the session (e.g. keeping notes, discussions with others, checking relevant resources, etc.) and I try and joke about other uses (”I must be boring if your email is more interesting nthan this session”).

I’d also like to explore ways of making use of space at events - perhaps the geeks could go to other side of the lecture theatre (when the power sockets are to be found) leaving the other side to those who prefer pen and paper.

Simply suggesting that it’s rude to make use of laptops at conferences - with the implied suggestion that such use should be banned - is, I feel, inappropriate. Why, after all, are WiFi networks being installed in lecture theatres? But to raise concerns is appropriate - and we do need to explore ways in which we can seek to satisfy both the twitterers, live bloggers and Web surfers and those who don’t partake. In part this is being helped by the posts from Martin Weller, Doug Clow and others who are explaining why they do this and the benefits this can provide. But in addition event organisers, event chairs, facilitators, etc. need to explore ways of developing best practices for maximising the benefits of the technologies nut just for the early adopters and enthusiasts but for, if not all, then for many.

“Even If We’re Wrong, We’re Right”

It can be a real thrill when you see someone give a fresh insight into your thinking, and that happened to me recently. The background was a talk on “What If We’re Wrong? Developing A Sustainable Approach to the Use of Web 2.0” which I gave at an online JISC Emerge event recently. I tweeted that I was giving the talk and Martin Weller,  Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University, responded expressing an interest in my talk. As it wasn’t possible for Martin to attend that online event, a few days later I pointed Martin in the direction of a Slidecast of a talk on “Exploiting The Social Aspects Of Web 2.0 In HE Institutions” which I gave the following day, and subsequently synched the slides with the audio of the talk.

The gist of my talk was the need for fans of Web 2.0 approaches to listen to concerns which may be raised and to seek ways of addressing such concerns. And in the talk I explored some of the legitimate concerns and suggested some possible solutions. But when Martin sent me a Twitter message saying that “even if we’re wrong we’ll still be better placed to understand what comes next than non-engagers” I felt he’d got the wrong end of the stick.

However in a post on Web 2.0 - even if we’re wrong, we’re right Martin explained his thinking:

Which brings me on to my even if we’re wrong, we’re right argument. Sure things won’t be the utopian vision of free services, open education and democratisation that some talk of, but whatever comes after the current trends will build on top of them. Just as web 2.0 built on what had happened in the first wave of web development. And the people who got it, the founders and the visionaries weren’t people who had dismissed the web and insisted it would go away. They were people who engaged with it, and could see how to take it forward. So, whatever comes after web 2.0 (don’t say web 3.0), the people best placed to understand it and adapt to it will be those who have immersed themselves in the current technological climate, and not those who have sat waiting for it to fail so they can say ‘told you so.’

These views were reiterated on the Scott O’Raw blog in a post entitled Will It Never End? who made the point that:

It doesn’t really matter that individual technologies will live, die, evolve, or be stunning success stories. I wholly expect that the version of WordPress I am using to write this post (or even WordPress itself) will be considered an anathema in the years to come. The key is to embrace not only the technology itself but the process of changing technology with a view to how it can help us all learn more and share in that learning.

My approach had been to seek to minimise risks and perhaps to be rather cautious. Martin and Scott are suggesting that we are now in a position to acknowledge that although there may be risks, in many cases we have already gained positive benefits over those who aren’t willing to engage. And I think there is a lot of truth in this. If, for example, Twitter were to fold (and I can’t see how it has a sustainable business model) or the recent performance problems which have affected Slideshare were to make the service unusable, I would still feel that I have gained tangible benefits during the time I’ve been used the services.  After all, that IBM mainframe technology wasn’t sustainable in the long term, and neither was MS Windows 3.0 - but we did use them when they were around, and in using them we gained a better understanding of how IT could be used in our organisations.  Does anyone seriously think that if one or two current Web 2.0 services fail that we will go back to a world of CMSs systems managing static information content for reading by a passive user community? Now who’s not being realistic?

Is Accessibility 2.0 Becoming Mainstream?

In May 2007 I presented a paper entitled “Accessibility 2.0: People, Policies and Processes” at the W4A 2007 conference. This paper reflected discussions which took place at a professional forum on “Accessibility 2.0: A Holistic And User-Centred Approach To Web Accessibility” which took place at the Museums and the Web 2007 conference.

Yesterday Frankie Roberto, a Web developer at the Science Museum, emailed me with details of a recent conference entitled “Accessibility 2.0: a million flowers bloom“.  Now the use of the 2.0 meme to refer to a renewed and user-focussed approach is nothing new, so we shouldn’t be surprised at seeing the ‘Accessibility 2.0′ term being coined by independent bodies. But what was pleased was to see that the ideas andf approaches which Lawrie Phipps and myself first described in a paper on “Developing A Holistic Approach For E-Learning Accessibility” back in 2004 being reflected by those more directly involved in accessibily support and advocacy.

The Accessibility 2.0 conference was described as “the first ever conference focussing on web accessibility in a Web 2.0 world. By Web 2.0 we mean rich web applications which allow users to create content by writing blogs, uploading videos or commenting on other user’ content and creating networks.“.  The conference Web site went on to say that “The title of the conference was inspired by T.V. Raman, a Google Research Scientist, to describe the current wave of creativity and innovation brought about by the development of web applications“.

The introduction to the conference was given by Robin Christopherson of AbilityNet. I’ve met Robin on a number of occasions and Robin participated at the Accessibility Summit II hosted by the JISC TechDis service for which I was one of the event co-facilitators and speakers. A report on the meeting was published in the E-Government Bulletin. The participants at the meeting “call[ed] for change in the way web accessibility is advocated particularly in local and central government, education and the museum and cultural sectors.“ Although we have not managed to organise a follow-up meeting, I feel the “Accessibility 2.0: a million flowers bloom” conference has reflected the views and approaches expressed at the summit and brought those ideas out to a wider community.

The blog post about the conference which Frankie referred me to was entitled “Open Data“. In the blog post, written by Jeremy Keith, a Web developer living and working in Brighton, England, Jeremy expands on the talk he gave at the conference.  Jeremy drew parallels with approaches which can address long term access to resources. He commented “Open formats are better than closed formats” whilst acknowledging that the ”terms “open” and “closed” are fairly nebulous“. Jeremy went even further by admitting that “Standardization doesn’t necessarily lead to qualitatively better formats. Quite the opposite in fact. The standardization process, by its very nature, involves compromise“. He goes on to support the simplicity of HTML, but, in response to the diversity provided by a Web 2.0 environment “instead of battling against the anarchic nature of the Web, go with it” and “embrace flexibility in your attitude towards accessibility“.

Jeremy argues that in today’s Web 2.0 world, users are now making use of publishing services (he himself mentions Flickr, Twitter, Pownce and Magnolia). In a world in which users may read and write in equal measures “accessibility guidelines that deal with Web content just don’t cut it any more“.

I very much welcome this contribution to the debate and, indeed, the image of Accessibility 2.0 reflecting a renewed approach to accessibility in which we encourage ‘a million flowers to bloom’.  And it’s great to see this approach being advocated by those actively involved in the accessibility arena, such as organisations like Abilitynet, which hosted the conference. But how, I wonder, should we address the conservatism we’re likely to face within the institutions which have adopted an approach to Web accessibility which is based on simple conformance with checklists which simply cover the Web content? And what about the Web developers and content creators who, possibly for a period of almost 10 years, have prided themselves on implementing such guidelines? How should we change this culture?

Reflecting On Openness and the Semantic Web

The printed copy of the proceedings of the Museums and the Web 2008 conference divides the papers into four sections: Institutions, User Participation, Web Space and Reflecting. The concluding section, on Reflecting, contains only two papers: one on Semantic Dissonance: Do We Need (And Do We Understand) The Semantics Web? by Ross Parry (University of Leicester), Nick Poole (The Collections Trust) and Jon Pratty (Culture 24) and my paper on What Does Openness Mean To The Museum Community?, co-authored by Mike Ellis (Eduserv) and Ross Gardler (JISC OSS Watch), which I’ve posted about recently.

It is pleasing that the two papers which reflect on the challenges and opportunities posed by recent Web developments have been written by a combination of researchers and practitioners based in the UK.

Ross Parry’s paper is based on a series of workshops funded by the AHRC which were held at various locations in the UK during 2006 and 2007. The paper describes discussions which have taken place recently in the UK in which it has been suggested that “museum data with good URIs, consistent metadata and simple tagging are seen to provide a vitally stable infrastructure on which to build“.

To this list I would add the importance of providing data which is free from restrictive licence conditions and which is exposed for reuse by other applications which can exploit the rich semantic data.

But stable URIs, consistent metadata, simple tagging, open data and machine interfaces - isn’t this what Web 2.0 is about? From one perspective, people may regard Web 2.0 as shorthand for referring to blog, wiki and RSS applications. But Tim O’Reilly’s original Web 2.0 diagram makes it clear that Web 2.0 is broader than this.

In a chapter entitled ‘‘If it quacks like a duck…’ - developments in search technologies‘ in a recent Becta Research Report on Emerging Technologies for Learning Volume 3 (2008) (PDF version of chapter) my colleague Emma Tonkin argues that:

By “semantic”, Berners-Lee means nothing more than “machine processable”. The choice of nomenclature is a primary cause of confusion on both sides of the debate. It is unfortunate that the effort was not named “the machine processable web” instead.

I think Emma is right: the term Semantic Web has caused much confusion. But if the Semantic Web is really a machine processable Web in which clean URIs can help to provide programatic access to structured data, then isn’t this very close to what Web 2.0 may be considered to be about?

And can you claim to be in favour of the Semantic Web if you are critical of the architectural aspects of Web 2.0? Or, to put it another way, isn’t engagement with Web 2.0 a needed stepping stone towards the Semantic Web? And won’t we find that those who come out with reasons for not engaging with Web 2.0, will come out with a similar set of reasons for not engaging with the Semantic Web?

IWR Information Professional of The Year 2007 Article in Panlibus

I’m pleased to report that a two-page feature article which describes my work activities on best practices for exploiting Web 2.0 has been published in Talis’s Panlibus Newsletter (Issue 8, Spring 2008). Many thanks to the editorial team, Ceri McCall and Harpeet Kaur Dhillon, for their support - and I’m particularly pleased with the layout of the article, which includes a photograph of myself receiving the IWR award and the cartoon which was drawn the following day.

I must admit that I am a fan of the Talis newsletter (I should probably disclose that I know both of Talis’s Technology Evangelists: Paul Miller, who used to work at UKOLN, and Ian Davis). Although it is perhaps surprising that there doesn’t appear to be an online version of the newsletter available. Correction a PDF version is available. The article is on pages 6-7.

The current issue (which runs to 26 pages) includes feature articles from Chris Banks, the Librarian at the University of Aberdeen (on the future of the library) and Christopher West, Director of Library and Information Services at Swansea. As always, Paul Miller has written an excellent article entitled “Unlock the power of shared data” - and for those with an interest in open data I’d recommend subscribing to his Panlibus and Nodalities blog.

But the article I found of most interest was written by Dame Lynne Brindley. In her article in developments in The British Library Lynne reporting that her organisation is “adapting to the ‘wiki’ view and the ‘beta’ mindset of the digital world and engaging more with the needs of the ‘Millenials’. … We are encouraging a more participative approach through co-created experiences, user-created content, remixing services and social networking spaces. We have established Facebook groups, posted relevant videos on YouTube and are experimenting with he possibilities offered by Second Life and MySpace“.

UKOLN is hosting its 30^th anniversary event at the British Library next week, with Dame Lynne Brindley as one of the guest speakers. I’m very pleased that the work of myself and my colleagues at UKOLN is so closely aligned with the thinking at The British Library. My only regret is that I won’t be able to attend the event as I’ll be participating at the Museums and the Web 2008 conference next week.

PLE 1.0 and PLE 2.0

The Debates

Martin Weller has recently commented on his Ed Techie blog that there has been a lot of discussion about PLEs (Personal Learning Environments) recently, and the relationships between PLEs, VLEs, TLEs (Teacher Learner Environment) and DPLEs (Default PLEs). Andy Powell has also discussed PLEs and PREs (Personal Research Environment) is a recent post on P vs. P in a user-centric world: the first of three posts he has written prior to our joint UCISA presentation.

PLE 1.0

This made me think about what I understand by the term PLE. And I realised that my first experience of a PLE was in primary school in the 1960s - back then a PLE was a Pen Learning Environment!  And I was around at the time of several technological innovations as well as different ways in which the Pen Learning Environment (which in this post I’ll refer to as PLE 1.0) was used to support my learning.  When I started at school I have vague recollections of using a ’scratch pen’ which we dipped in the ink well on our desk.  However this was soon made obsolescent by the ‘biro’ technology.  But when I passed my 11-plus and went to grammar school I remember one teacher who didn’t approve of ‘biro; technology and insisted that all of his homework had to be submitted using a fountain pen.  But such technological luddism wasn’t sustainable, and I think that only happened in my first year.  By the time I was a teenager I was free to use a biro.

The initial focus of control was clearly on the technology itself.  But I have only recently realised the different pedagogical approaches which accompanying PLE 1.0. In some classes the PLE was used to write down what the teacher had written on the blackboard. However other teachers (or did this reflect other disciplines) the inefficiencies of the teacher having to write on the blackboard were removed, and we had to copy directly from our text books.

It was only later on the the teachers seemed to lose interest in controlling the technologies used and allowed me, the learner, the flexibility to make notes as I preferred.

PLE 2.0

What can PLE 2.0, the Personal Learning Environment, learn from my experiences in the 1960s and 70s? I think our institutions are still focusing too much on the technologies themselves and ways in which the technologies should be used - scratch pens, biros and fountain pen debates revisited. And there seems to be a tendency to be seek the best solution and make that the norm for all students - a Parker pen for all!  But what we learnt from our writing instruments was the advantages to be gained when the technology became invisible, and we were free to make our own choices. (but when, I wonder, did personalised pens become prevalent?)

The ideal PLE (to drop the versioning I introduced in this post) should surely follow the pen in becoming technologically invisible, and just something that the learner uses to support their tasks? And, perhaps more importantly, the institution’s response should be to provide the flexibility needed to support this approach.

Final Score: 250 to 3 Victory for IT Services 2.0!

On Wednesday night Martin Weller and I were simultanaously sharing (via Twitter) the joy of a fightback, the tensions of extra time and the final failure of both our teams in the penalty shoot-out.

On Thursday morning, however,  whil I travelled to London for a meeting Andy Powell spoke at the UCISA 2008 Management Conference, Following my video presentation Andy gave his contribution to the talk on “Digital Natives Run by Digital Immigrants: IT Services are Dead, Long Live IT Services 2.0!“. How slides are available on Slidshare:

And as Andy described to a live Twitter audience (which I only caught up with later that day)  there was a debate at the conference on “this house belives (sic) that University IT services should block access to social networking sites“.

Andy reflected on the debate:

odd debate here… some people taking the motion very seriously… others treating it as a joke - hard to judge if people are seriously … … 

it’s a serious motion - though obviously positioned intentionally to stir up debate - but yes, basically it is daft

sanity prevails… only 3 out of about 250 IT Services directors voted in favour of blocking student use of social networks

Good news then :-) It seems IT Service managers overwhelmingly recognise that they can’t stop users accessing social networking services. But how was our talke received? Michael Webb has been blogging from the conference. He gave his views on my video presentation:

Anyway, morning themes were about Web 2.0/Social networking, starting with Brian Kelly from UKOLN and Andy Powell from EduServ – talking about IT Services 2.0. Brian wasn’t actually their though, and instead had pre-recorded his presentation. I find this pretty fascinating – I’ve had loads of discussions with people about why we don’t do this more often (we do actually do this for our IT induction), but it’s the first time I’ve experienced it as an audience member. So did it work? Somewhat against my expectations (Brian is a very engaging presenter in person) it worked fine (even with the low production values and a phone ringing half way through!).

And then went on to briefly summarise the content of my talk:

What about the content? Essentially the premise was that IT Services have evolved before, and can do so again, into IT Services 2.0 where we embrace, support, and educate users about the possibilities of externally hosted Web 20 services. 

Michael’s thoughts on the views expressed by myself and Andy:

So where does that leave us? The common theme between Brian and Andrew’s talks were they were both saying we need to understand risks. Some of the risks, in my opinion (and, I think, Brian’s) aren’t that great – service reliability for example – how often is Google or Facebook down? Privacy of data across national borders though is a really challenging issue, and perhaps one of the most obvious stumbling blocks to wholeheartedly embracing some externally hosted technologies on an institutional level.

There’s another significant issue though – we don’t really have any control of this do we? Our work and home life and identities are becoming increasingly blurred – we can’t ban people from using Facebook to support learning. So how much user education are we actually responsible for, both from a moral and legal perspective? It’s something we all need to give more thought to.

Later on at the conference there were “two supplier presentations – one from Google, and one from Microsoft, both promoting their free, web based email/productivity/web 2.0 suites.” Michael made an interesting comment on the tensions between the views of Myself and Andy that IT Services should move towards playing an enabling role rather than the provider of IT Services and encouraging Microsoft or Google to provide core IT services:

Second issue, and I need to reflect on this a little more, is that doesn’t this go against the IT Services 2.0 philosophy? We’d still be imposing a single tool set on our students (albeit an outsourced one) rather than educating our users to pick the best tools for any given activity. Maybe that’s an impractical aim - remember back to Sir Alan Langlands plea to keep things simple for academics? Don’t know – my instinct is that this sort of approach is still a very IT Services 1.0 things. Sure, Google Apps (say) may be a great tool set for a certain group of users for a given activity, but maybe another group or activity would work better with Elgg or WetPaint? I think this gets right to the heart of the IT Services 2.0 dilemma – how much technical diversity can our user base sustain? Or am I missing the point?

Now I don’t feel that making use of Google Apps should prevent ue of Elgg or WetPaint - unless your institution has foolishly agreed to a contract which requires the institution to only allow a single provider  of a service on campus (and I’ve heard this has happened with VoIP, which means institutions are contractually obliged to ban Skype from the campus :-()

But how use of Google and Microsoft externally-provided services relate to a vision of small pieces loosely connected vision is an interesting question!

Top of the Pods, Podpickers

Which UK University has the most popular podcast? This question occurred to me recently after visiting a page on the JISC Web site in order to subscribe to JISC podcasts. Following the link launched iTunes and allowed me to subscribe to the podcast, so that new podcasts are downloaded automatically.

I noticed the search option in iTunes and thought I’d search for University podcasts. The most popular podcasts came from Vanderbilt University but in third place was Oxford University. And listening to the start of the current podcast I discovered the title was “Podcasts from Medieval English lectures”. So much for the dumbing down of the iTunes generation! Who’d have thought that all of those young students with their white ear pieces were catching up on Chaucer - perhaps “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”!”

In second and third places for UK universities were the universities of Edinburgh and, I’m pleased to say, Bath. The University of Bath not only has the kudos of a top three place in iTunes popularity, the public lecture podcasts at my host institution recently won a European award for its podcast series. As the press release announced “its podcasts had from November 2006 to September 2007 been seen (sic) 188,000 times“. The press release went on to say that “Our podcasts are popular enough to get us featured in the top 50 podcast originator on i-Tunes in the “Science and Medicine” section, ahead of any other university in the world.“

I think this is a great example of an institution successfully engaging with a popular Web 2.0 services (ITunes) in order to maximise its impact. My congratulations to the Audio Visual and Web Services teams at the University of Bath.

But apart from Oxford, Edinburgh and Bath, where are the other UK universities? There don’t appear to be any in the top 50 places in iTunes, although I did spot Aberdeen in about the 68^th position followed by a cluster of the universities of Swansea, Westminster and Cambridge. Are UK Universities missing out, I wonder?

Workshop On Risk Management

The JISC OSS Watch service are running a workshop on “Risk Management in Open Source Procurement” which Ross Gardler describes in a blog post on the OSS Watch Team blog.

The background to this event, which will be held in Oxford on 18 March 2008, is described in an article on open source in HE and FE published in the October 2007 edition of JISC Inform in which Ross suggested that:

There is often a lack of understanding about how best to consider OSS as part of institutional IT procurement and development activities. Ross Gardler, manager of the HE and FE advisory service for open source software, believes such issues can be explained by difficulties surrounding evaluation techniques.

‘There often isn’t an established marketing department that will take you out for lunch and smooth talk you about the potential benefits, like there is with a commercial provider,’ he says.

I can recall that about 10 years ago there seemed to be a feeling that having source code available under an open source software licence was sufficient to guarantee sustainability of software. But you just have to look at example such as the ROADS software which drove a number of what are now know as the Intute hubs. Looking at the graveyard of many open source software projects which fail to be sustainable in the long term, you’ll find an area for ROADS. We do need to do the risk analysis and risk management.

So I’m pleased to see that OSS Watch are running a workshop which will cover the risks associated with procurement of open source software. In his blog post Ross goes on to describe how the OSS Watch service “provide[s] one-to-one consultancy services to help people understand how to evaluate open source and open source providers using frameworks such as the Business Readiness Rating and the Open Source Maturity Model.” The workshop will provide an opportunity for OSS Watch to share their expertise with a wider community.

Of course, there’s not risks risks aren’t only associated with open source software - there are risks associated with use of proprietary software. And also, it needs to be said, use of externally-hosted Web 2.0 services - as we saw recently with the recent downtime of the Amazon S3 service which affected other services including Twitter.

This doesn’t mean, however, that we shouldn’t use externally hosted Web 2.0 service - or, indeed, open source software. Similarly the recent crash of the Northern Rock Bank doesn’t mean that we should withdraw our savings and stuff the cash under our mattresses!

I suspect that a workshop on “Risk Management and Web 2.0″ would be popular. I’ve posted previously on Your Views On Externally-Hosted Web 2.0 Services back in September 2007. But, apart from the risk assessment document which have been produced at the universities of Oxford and Edinburgh, have any other institutions published anything in this area?

IT Services Are Dead – Long Live IT Services 2.0!

Back in March 2004 I was pleased to be invited to give a talk at the UCISA Mangament Conference on “What Can Internet Technologies Offer?“ in which I introduced a raft of collaborative and communications technologies which are now referred to as Web 2.0 to about 350 senior managers in IT Service departments. Two years later I was invited back and I gave a talk on “IT Services: Help Or Hindrance? ” in which I argued that IT Services needed to actively engage in providing access to services such as blogs and wikis, otherwise there would be a danger that central services would be marginalised.

I’m pleased to say that IT Service directors seem to like my talks as I’ve been invited back again this year to speak at the UCISA 2008 Management Conference. The title of this year’s talk is Digital Natives Run by Digital Immigrants: IT Services are Dead, Long Live IT Services 2.0!” and the talk will be given on 13 March 2008. Unfortunately I have another meeting already arranged  for that date - but rather than this being a problem I regard it as a useful opportunity to make use of another set of technologies and approaches to presenting. So I have prepared the initial draft of my slides, and have made it available as a Slidecast (i.e. with an accompanying audio track) on Slideshare.

This 15 minute presentation only provides a high-level view of my thoughts on why IT Service departments need to engage with use of third party services. But I’m pleased to say that Andy Powell will be a co-presenter and will be attending in person. Andy will be giving his views on the implications of Web 2.0 on IT Service departments,  and will be able to respond to questions form the audience.

But rather than my talk simply being presented on the day, in the spirit of openness which I write about recently in the context of open science, I would like to invite comments on my talk in advance of the conference, which Andy may be able to integrate in his presentation. And, as an article on Technology Populism: Risks & Rewards points out, there can be risks to the organisation when users circumvent IT Service departments.

 

Doodle Is Simplicity Itself

Paul Walk’s blog post on Get off of my cloud acknowledged that even clever techies sometimes value simplicity over the complexity often found in richly functional and distributed systems., In Paul’s case he was praising the ease of use and convenience of an iPhone over, say, the additional functions provided by a Nokia N95 or the inconvenience of carrying multiple devices.

I feel that this is a valid position in many cases. And, coincidentally I have just discovered a very simple Web-based tool for organising meetings.

With Doodle (address www.doodle.ch, incidentally) you simply select dates and times and email the people you wish to invite. The service will then send an email with the URI of a page containing the available dates. And, as can be seen in the image, once the data has been entered you can see the preferred slots.

OK, there’s no authentication, updating dates can’t be done and security is through obscurity. In addition the data can’t be output in formats such as RSS or iCal. But sometimes we need to remember that we don’t always need such richness. And yes, who knows whether this service is sustainable. And, perhaps, like Facebook (according to some), is is a front for an extreme right wing organisation. But, for arranging a date for a practice and a rapper dancing crawl prior to the national rapper sword dancing competition, I am willing to take a risk and avoid the confusions of arranging such events on email or, even worse, via text messages. Why not give it a try?

Is Southampton Setting A New Standard For Institutional Web Sites?

Is the University of Southampton setting a new challenge for other institutions with their new iSoton service, I wonder? Or is this merely an attempt to be stylish by bolting on a variety of Web 2.0 features? What will the users make of it, I wonder?  And what about accessibility, interoperability, compliance with standards and the other issues which the providers of Web services tend to emphasise?  

I came across iSoton via an RSS alert from Lorcan Dempsey blog.  In his post Lorcan expressed a particular interest in the four (out of six) panels which provided content from Web 2.0 services:

The other four are more interesting. One displays the University’s wikipedia entry. One displays photos from Flickr (I am not sure how they are being selected: is it more than the ‘university of southampton’ tag?). One displays videos from Youtube (again, I am not sure if these are any videos which show up on a ‘university of southampton’ search or if some other selection criteria apply).

I would agree with Lorcan’s comment that “this seems like a sketch for what one might do, rather than the fully worked through presence. For example, why not display the full del.icio.us tag cloud which gives richer access to the Southampton pages?“. 

However I suspect that “The site is designed by Precedent, ’specialists in strategic thinking, digital communications and brand communications’” will be regarded with concern be some of the more traditional Web developers who have been sceptical of Web 2.0 style interfaces. And it’s true that the page does contain HTML errors - but these seem to be minor problems, such as unescaped  ampersands, which could easily be fixed. And, shock, horror, passing the page through the WAVE automated accessibility testing tool reveals that “WAVE has detected no accessibility errors“.

I’ve criticised reliance on automated accessibility tools previously - and here’s a good example which demonstrates the need for user testing on the accessibility and usability of the page.   

Is this, then, setting new directions for University Web sites? I don’t know, and I’m sure that further examination of the site is likely to reveal some problems - but it is good to see something new happening in the design and functionality of University Web sites.  And it would be good to get some feedback from those involved in commissioning and developing this Web site, and, even more importantly, feedback from users of the Web site. A potentially interesting talk at this year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop, perhaps?

TwitPic, Twitterwhere, Twitterfoo

On Sunday 10^th February 2008 infobunny twittered “TwitPic: TwitPic lets you easily add photos to your Tweets. Upload to TwitPic, add you.. http://tinyurl.com/2wrbr8“.

Twitpic was new to me so I Googled it and discovered that the killerstartups blog gave a somewhat politically incorrect description of how a photographic microblogging extension to Twitter might be used:

Yes, Twitter is unstoppable. And it’s currently amassing an army of Twitter related apps that’ll ensure its reign for a good amount of time. The latest recruit is TwitPic, an application that allows you to post photos and images to your Twitter stream. Now daily ramblings can have an added visual element instead of just the usual plain stream of text. Say you’ve just had the worst blind date ever, but you managed snap a pic of the twit. Now you can go home and post your grievances along with a visual aid to demonstrate your dating woes. TwitPic works from your PC. All you have to do is log in to your Twitter and upload the image or photo you want, then post it. TwitPic is absolutely free.

Via Techcrunch I found that the service was launched in November 2007 but the service seems to only now becoming discussed on the blogosphere and in Twitterland. Worth further investigation, I felt, so I created my fist twitpic. And I quickly received a response from Noah Everett, the TwitPic developer who directed me to a page which described why he had developed the service: “TwitPic was born out of my need to be able to share & comment on photos easily with twitter. I developed it over a weekend, from concept to working site. As always I’m open to feature suggestions“.

Blogowogo, however, points out that:

An obvious disadvantage to Twitpic is that you have to be in front of your computer to post your images. Contrast this with other services such as VisualTwitter and MobyPicture, which allow you to upload an image from your mobile device. Seeing as Twitter really shines as an on-the-go social network, this limitation might be devastating.

Hmm - so there are other services available which build on Twitter which I wasn’t aware of. Indeed the day before discovering Twitpic Brian Suda mentioned the Twitterwhere service which is described on readwriteweb.com as “a service that makes tracking Tweets from any location“.

Rather than discussing how such services might be used (a topic I raised recently) I would make the observation that the development of these services is based on lightweight services and open APIs. The approach isn’t one of developing a richly sophisticated service or use of data standards which will cover every contingency. Is this approach one we should be adopting more generally, I wonder? And I’ll leave it to others to suggest how Twitpic, Twitterwhere, Twitterfoo and Twitterbar (too late, that’s already gone) might be used to deliver real benefits.

Thoughts on Goowy

Yes, there’s another integrated Web-based environment for providing access to email. calendar, instant messaging, etc, as well as having a widget environment which provides extensibility. The service is called Goowy.

I have just been notified of this service via a tweet from Techcrunch which has just announced that “AOL Acquires Goowy http://tinyurl.com/2n9dhb” (in this case I find that Twitter does provide a useful alerting service, which has similarities to RSS alerts).

The news here was the acquisition of the service by AOL. The Techcrunch article went on to say “On Monday AOL will announce the acquisition of San Diego-based Goowy, a startup founded in late 2004 and which launched, incidentally, in my living room in late 2006“.

I’d not heard of Goowy, but via a quick look at the online demonstration and reading a Techcrunch article from 2005 I find that Goowy provides a Flash-based interface to popular communication technologies (email and instant mesaging), file store management (1 Gb filestore available for free), games and, well that’s about it. I had to stifle a yawn - and not just because it’s 5 am and, following a recent long-haul flight I am both wide awake and feeling tired.

But is there anything which can be learnt from Goowy? From my point of view I found it interesting that Goowy’s instant messaging capabilities are based on providing an interface to MS Messenger and AOL Messenger. It’s good, I feel, that they haven’t released yet another instant messaging service. But about 4 years ago I must admit that I felt that by now an open solution to instant messaging, based on the Jabber open environment, would be widely deployed. But no, it seems that Jabber is still finding it difficult to break out of its niche ghetto and interoperability is based on companies supporting the major players rather than interoperability through open standards.

And from Googling for information about Goowy I found a Techcrunch company profile which reviewed the company in 2005 and a more recent Crunchbase profile of the company. But the most intriguing company profile was provided by the Web2.0list service. This provides a mashup of user statistics data provided by Alexa.com and compete.com with both graphs showing a decline in numbers from the start of the recording period.

Goowy is not for me, I’ve decided. But the information provided by Crunchbase and Web2.0list can, I feel, be useful in helping to inform decisions on making use of Web 2.0 services.

Facebook Is So Last Year

The Guardian’s Predictions For 2008

Facebook is so last year. It’s official - it was in the Guardian. It was back in May (2007) when John Kirriemuir picked up on the buzz which Facebook was generating, with his post Facebook: Social Networking grows up? describing how

“there is now a social networking site that: (1) is based around people and their real social networks’ (2) looks quite good’ (3) isn’t full of inane people spouting inane conversation’ (4) is very easy to use and configure’ (5) has a growing number of add-ons, some with potential educational uses and (6) is expanding in terms of who is using it“.

Well with the possible exception of (3) I feel John’s predictions for Facebook were true. But Facebook is now suffering from over-exposure - there are now tutorials on use of Facebook in a library context, which illustrates how mainstream Facebook has become. The cool guys are becoming excited by a number of emerging technologies. But what are they?

The Cool New Services For 2008

The Guardian suggests Twitter will be big in 2008. I recently echoed this sentiment and I’ve also noticed that JISC are making use of Twitter and intend to use it to support the JISC 2008 conference (but note that other micro-blogging tools such as Jaiku have their fans).

Dopplr, which is also mentioned in the Guardian article, is another service I’ve been using for some time, to record details of my trips and to share this information with my contacts.

Excluding Web sites aimed at kids, the other service mentioned in the Guardian article is Seesmic.com. I’ve not yet got an account for this service, but a Techcrunch article describes how this video-like Twitter service service: “Users can upload video directly from their webcam and post it to a personal page like with Twitter. They can also grab content from other sites such as YouTube by copying a video’s url and placing it in their stream. Additionally, videos that users create can be automatically linked to in twitter (potentially other platforms) and uploaded to YouTube.“

Whither Facebook?

So there are several new services to excite the early adopters. But what does this mean for Facebook? Will it face a gradual, or even sudden, demise? I would suggest that this will not be the case. Rather, like Microsoft’s operating system, office suite and Web browser, it will be a part of the infrastructure, widely used by many and having a significant role to play within organisations. But it will not be sexy. And, just like Microsoft products, it will have flaws (the annoying email messages which some Facebook apps send out seems to have parallels with Microsoft’s little-lamented dancing paper clip)  - such flaws do not necessarily lead to a downturn in a product’s usage.

So the early adopters will be excited by the new generation of micro-blogging and multi-media blogging tools. But when people start to question Twitter’s financial viability and the mass media start to speculate on how it can be misused (being used by paedophiles, perhaps) or the services which make it easy to share travel information are  used by burglars to target their house-breaking activities, it will be time for the early adopters to move on to the next generation of tools.

Or to put it another way, when the early adopters begin to distance themselves from a tool, this may be when it has progressed on the Gartner curve from the early adopters to mainstream usage.   And, for me, the mainstream usage of services is something to be welcome.

A Call for a Web 2.0 Policy Debate

A brief interview with me has just been published on the JISC Web site with the title ‘Information Professional of the Year’ calls for Web 2.0 policy debate. The article reflects many of the discussions which have taken place on this blog during the year:

There are divergences in opinion within the sector over the most appropriate development and deployment strategies for Web 2.0,’ he claims. ‘Some argue that higher educational institutions should be installing Web 2.0 services locally whilst others would argue that externally-hosted services can be used to support institutional requirements, with this providing benefits of scale and acknowledges that such services will, in any case, be used by people in their social activities.’

My call for a policy debate on these issues is clearly very timely in light of the demise of the Eduspaces social networking environment, its subsequent rebirth and the lively discussions taking place about the migration of the Eduspaces environment and the sustainability of the community.

I will be revisiting these issues in the new year.  But until then I’d like to wish everyone a Happy Christmas  - with the exception of readers in the US, to whom I pass on my seasonal greetings :-)

When Two Tribes Go To War

Hostilities Commence

Niall Sclater, Director of the OU VLE Programme at the Open University recently pointed out that the Slideshare service was down, using this as an “attempt to inject some reality into the VLEs v Small Pieces debate“. His colleague at the Open University, Tony Hirst responded with a post entitled “An error has occurred whilst accessing this site” in which Tony, with “beautifully sweet irony“, alerted Niall to the fact that the OU’s Intranet was also down.

Similar differences of opinion are taking place at the University of Leeds. My former colleague Nigel Bruce send me a wall-to-wall post on Facebook some time ago in which he expressed the view that “Personally I don’t see the point in ISS (the IT Services department) running blogging servers unless we want to automatically create and populate groups based on modules. Why not just encourage people to sign up for an account with WordPress? It’s better than anything we could offer. Much better than Elgg. This area is moving so fast no Uni computing services can hope to compete or keep up.“

But Melissa Highton, a colleague of Nigel’s will give a talk on Monday at UKOLN’s “Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs And Social Networks” workshop on Leedsfeeds: a Blogging Service based on the Open Source Elgg Application in which she will describe the benefits of running a local open source blogging service (Elgg) to support the aims of the institution and members of the institution.

Two tribes with, it would appear, fundamentally differing perspectives - but not, I hope, about to go to war.

Two Tribes Meet At The CETIS Conference

Myself and my colleague Paul Walk had been invited by CETIS to facilitate a half-day session on Responding to Change and Institutional Challenges at the conference on Beyond Standards - Holistic Approaches to Educational Technology and Interoperability. In our planning for the session it struck me that the tensions between the views held by Tony Hirst and those of Niall Sclater would provide a useful way of exploring the institutional challenges of the Web 2.0 characteristics such as ‘the network as the platform and commercial providers of services.

I must admit, though, that I hadn’t expected both Tony and Niall to attend the session! This was an opportunity not to be missed, and so the session provided an opportunity to explore the tensions openly articulated by two of the participants.

Peace In Our Time?

Niall Sclater has already written about the session in a post entitled VLEs v Web 2.0: is consensus breaking out? As Niall summarises in his post:

I suspect Brian Kelly took great pleasure in attempting to pitch Tony Hirst against me in a session at the JISC CETIS Conference yesterday (photo: Mark Power). Brian had spotted that I had been promoting the benefits of institutional VLEs while Tony is pushing the boundaries in the use of Web 2.0 software for learning… After the session I caught up with Tony over a pint and we looked at whether there is any common ground in our thinking and, not surprisingly, there’s plenty (though Tony may now deny it!).

It was pleasing to see such mutual understanding being reaching - and Paul and myself can congratulate ourselves on the counselling work we carried out :-)

More seriously, though, participants at the session did actively engage in exploring the ‘gaps’ between the commercial and institutional provision of services (which I wrote about recently). And I have to admit that my previous thoughts that the gap needed to me addressing my policies, risk assessment, managing expectations, etc. have been modified as a result of the discussions at the session, and I now wonder whether it might be better to sometimes leave such gaps unfilled. For as ‘Webdunc’ recently commented “To oversimplify; I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a policy for what to do when you pass a peer/colleague/superior/lecturer/student in the street - why do we need one for online social behaviour?“.

Conclusions From The Session

Facilitators of the workshop session had been asked to summarise the conclusions in a single sentence. I must admit that I’m not convinced how useful this is - although I would acknowledge that it can provide a useful exercise for the participants in seeking consensus.

However when articulating the sentence it tends to appear bland. I feel this is the case with ours: “We need to think beyond the institution, beyond the sector, beyond the UK and beyond the short period spent in the institution - but we need to think carefully, widely and deeply.“

But although the conclusions may appear bland, I think they reflect the sentiments expressed by Oleg Liber, Director of JISC CETIS, and Sarah Porter, Head of Development, JISC, in the opening presentations at the conference.

And, finally it is possible, I feel, to enhance the impact of this sentence.

The Gaps Between The Owned And The Externally-Hosted Services

Scott Wilson (JISC CETIS) and Andy Powell (Eduserv Foundation) has recently published a couple of interesting posts on their blogs. which reflects my areas of interest.

Scott’s post on PLEs and the institution contains an image which depicts his thoughts on “the set of connections between what an institution offers and what individuals manage“.

I tend to agree with this vision which acknowledges that MySpace, Facebook, Slideshare, etc. will have a role to play in the services which are used to support institutional activities, but there will be a for the institution to “provide a coordination space“.

It’s the gaps in Scott’s diagram which particularly interest me. As well as the technical aspects of the coordination space (which could include automated dumps of data held elsewhere, bulk uploads of metadata, etc.) there are also the implied questions associated with this space: Do we trust the services? Can we compete with them? Do we compete on all fronts or select the appropriate areas? What are our institutional liabilities if things go wrong? What are the risks to the individuals and what responsibilities do we have to safeguard the interests of the individuals in our institutions?

Some of these issues were touched on by Andy Powell in his recent report on Eduserv’s OpenID event entitled OpenID - every student should have one. Andy argued that

“the management of our online identities is increasingly a user-centric and lifelong activity - it doesn’t start and stop at the system-induced transition points of our lives (going to school - leaving school, going to uni - leaving uni, getting a job - leaving a job, etc.). In consequence, there is a danger of us offering a poor fit to our user’s requirements if the approaches to identity management that we adopt are too rooted within particular sectors or phases of sectors.“

Andy identifies that there is a time dimension to the issue of the services institutions should be providing. Those of us who have been working in IT support or development within educational institution for some time with have been brought up with the view that it is an institutional responsibility to provide a quality, safe managed IT environment for members of the institution. But now we are starting to find that individuals will have their own digital identities when arriving at the institution, together with their own preferred applications (email, photo repositories, social networks, etc.) And this will not only apply to students arriving at our institutions, but also visitors, part time staff, staff on short term contracts, etc.

The spaces in Scott’s diagram is starting to look very interesting, I think.

Thoughts On Animoto

The Tool - Animoto

Andy Powell introduced me to Animoto, after he produced a video clip for UKOLN’s “Exploiting the Potential of Blogs and Social Networks” workshop. Shortly afterwards he wrote a blog post about the Web-based tool for easily creating multimedia video clips by simply uploading photographs and letting the software do the donkey work.

Andy had previously commented (in the context of providing a live video streaming for the workshop) that his aim was “to demonstrate the possibilities for video-streaming live meetings using cheap or free equipment and services.“

The Experiment

Andy’s interest reflects mine which, in brief, are to explore:

• Free or low-costs solutions for organisations with limited budgets or technical expertise (this is particularly relevant to many public libraries, museums and archives, which are an important part of the communities UKOLN serves).
• The appeal of successful Web 2.0 services.
• How the successes of such services can be applied to in-house development work.
• Whether such services can be used in a service environment.

Animoto, “a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos using patent-pending Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology and high-end motion design“, was therefore worthy of investigation, as 30-second video clips can be created for free and just $30 per year for an “All access unlimited pass”.

My initial experiment was to produce a video clip entitled “Memories Of IWMW 2007“, making use of photographs of UKOLN’s IWMW 2007 event (on Flickr with the ‘iwmw2007′ tag) held at the University of York in July 2007. Upload the photographs, select the backing music and publish. Simple!

My next experiment, based on Andy’s idea for the video preview of the Blogs workshop, was to make use of images contained in the speakers slides. Slightly more time-consuming, but nothing too difficult.

The third experiment was to create a video clip using some of the key slides prepared by the plenary speakers. The JPEG images were created by saving the slides as images from within PowerPoint.

And my final experiment was to take the key slides from my Introduction talk, and turn them into a 30 sector video clip.

As one might expect, the Animoto video clips can be embedded in Web pages, as illustrated.

What’s The Point?

The more cynical reader - or perhaps the reader who has actually viewed the video clips and listened to the cheesy background music - might be asking what the fuss is about! After all, ever since Microsoft released PowerPoint 1.0 it has been possible to easily create visual presentations, and the accompanying clip arts, clip music and wizards have often led to cliched presentations.

This is very true and, if Animoto takes off, I would expect such cheesy presentations to me the norm in the early days. However good presentations can be created using tools such as PowerPoint, Open Presents, etc, if you have the appropriate expertise and knowledge. And this takes experimentation.

So I’d encourage experimentation and the sharing of failures and successes. Two ideas which spring to mind:

• Video clips summarising the highlights of an event such as IWMW 2007, using photos from Flickr, the presentations and perhaps music created by the participants.
• Using the 30 second video clip to reduce a presentation to its bare essentials, for the ‘elevator pitch’. After all Michael Nolan on the Echge Hill University blog recently mentioned Pecha Kucha: “20 slides; 20 seconds per slide. You don’t have time to bore the audience.” Rather than wasting 6 minutes 40 seconds of your life, why not save over 6 minutes?

If such experimentation reveals that there’s nothing to be gained from such approaches, at least we’ve saved time being wasted in software development. Although it may be that limitations we encounter may be addressed in the commercial version of the service (perahps $30 per year might be worth the investment) or in new services which may be released in the future (the interface implies that a number of new features are due to be released).

OCLC report on ‘Sharing, Privacy and Trust In Our Networked World’

I recently received a copy of the OCLC report on “Sharing, Privacy and Trust In Our Networked World“. This is a report which I would recommend to everyone with an interest in the Web 2.0 world, in particular those who welcome evidence of the views of users of social networking services and discussions of the implications of such views.

The report is available on the OCLC Web site (in PDF format). I should point out that the report is very large (about 250 pages, I think) with many colour graphics. I should also add that I received a hard copy of the report as I contributed to the report, being one of only two UK contributors (the other being Andy Powell from the Eduserv Foundation) who gave their views on issues related to sharing, privacy and trust.

The report is based on a survey of 6,545 participants carried out between 7^th December 2006 and 7^th February 2007. The participants were from the US (a total of 1,801), Canada (921), UK (970), France (821), Germany (846) and Japan (804). An additional survey of 4,000 US library directors was also carried out, with 382 replies from library directors from academic, public, community college, school and special libraries being received. Interviews with selected information professionals (including myself and Andy) were also carried out. All in all, an impressive survey which helped to shape a fascinating report.

I will not attempt to repeat all of the issues raised in the report, you’ll be pleased to hear. Some particular issues of note are worth commenting upon, however. There seems to be a discrepancy between the views of library directors concerning privacy issues and the general user community: librarians have real concerns about privacy, and are less likely to make use of social networks for relationship buildings and for fun. Ironically general users “do not rate most library services as very private” even though “the majority do not read library privacy policies.” Most users do, however, “feel commercial sites keep their personal information secure” but only “about half think library Web sites keep their personal information secure“. The nature of trust of commercial social network services is also increasing with use.

These findings do surprise me. I had expected libraries to be the trusted organisations, with users having concerns regarding potential misuse of data held by commercial services. It seems that my views may perhaps reflect my personal prejudices, and that, as someone who is an information professional and who has spent his working life in the public sector, my views do not reflect those of the general public. Are public libraries (especially in the US) regarded as being too closely aligned with the government, with concerns over government snooping reflecting on the attitudes users have to making their personal data available in a library context? And do the reservations over use of personal data by academic libraries reflect concerns by staff and students over the relationships between the organisation and the individual?

Such issues informed the conclusions of the report. The section on “Open The Doors” felt that “the library brand must go from institutional to personal“. The authors felt that the views they held a few years ago, which “conceived a social library as a library of traditional services enhanced by a set of social tools - wikis, blogs, mashups, and podcasts” were mistaken, and their views “after living with the data, struggling with the findings, listening to the experts .. is [now] quite different“.
It would be a mistake, the report concludes, “to create a checklist of social tools for librarians to learn or to generate a ‘top ten’ list of services to implement on the current library Web site“. They argued that “The social Web is not being build by augmenting traditional Web sites with new tools.“

They now feel that institutions should “Open the library doors, invite mass participation and relax the rules“. The dangers were acknowledged (”It will be messy“) but the rewards where felt to be worth it: “mass participation and a little chaos often create exciting venues for collaboration, creativity, community building and transformation“.

The authors of the report invite feedback on the OCLC Web site. I too would welcome comments. In particular, how relevant is this vision within a UK context? And what are the implications for current plans for library development activities?

We’re The Young Generation

On Wednesday 10^th October 2007 I attended the “Inspiring the iGeneration Web 2.0, teenagers and libraries” event which was held at the Wolverhampton Science Park.

My Opening Talk

I gave the opening talk entitled ” W