UCISA CISG Talk on “What If Web 2.0 Really Does Change Everything?”

About My Talk at the UCISA CISG Conference

On Friday 20 November I’m giving a talk on “What If Web 2.0 Really Does Change Everything?” at the UCISA CISG 2009 Conference.

I’ve written my slides and uploaded them to Slideshare (and embedded them at the bottom of this post.  But slides on their own don’t really convey the message and if I want the talk to be truly open providing a Creative Commons licence for the slides and giving permission for my talk to be recorded or videoed isn’t enough – I should summarise my talk and allow (indeed encourage) comments to be made.  This I will do in this blog post (which, incidentally, should also provide a more accessible alternative version to the talk and the slides).

The Talk

Background

I have spoken at previous UCISA Management conferences:

UCISA 2004 Management Conference: where I gave a plenary talk on “What Can Internet Technologies Offer?”. In this talk I introduced a set of technologies now known as Web 2.0.

UCISA 2006 Management Conference: where I gave a plenary talk on “IT Services: Help or Hindrance?”. In this talk I argued that IT Services needed to engage with Web 2.0 otherwise they might find themselves marginalised.

UCISA 2008 Management Conference: where I gave a pre-recorded video contribution to talk on “Digital Natives Run by Digital Immigrants: IT Services are Dead, Long Live IT Services 2.0!”. In this talk I argued that IT Services need to reinvent themselves.

My views have developed over time:

• IT Services need to understand Web 2.0 and not dismiss it as a ‘trendy marketing term’ [2004]
• IT Services need to engage with Web 2.0 services  (IT Services as visitors) [2006]
• IT Services need to embrace Web 2.0 services (IT Services as residents) [2008]

I now feel that institutions will need to embrace Web 2.0 & rethink their roles (HEIs as residents).

Political Drivers for Change

The political drivers to such changes have been articulated in “The Edgeless University” report and the “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” report. In addition the higher educational sector also needs to be able to respond to the recent Mandelson report as well as the current economic climate which underpins all of these reports.

Against this background of radical changes across the sector we have Web 2.0 and the Social Web which appear to promise many potential benefits to teaching and learning and research. But there are also many challenges.

The MIS Sector

How might MIS managers react to these changes? If we were to ask the user community for phrases which might characterise the sector we might find words such as “control”, “security” and “policies” appearing. We might expect “Prince2″ but not “Agile development” and “risk averse” but not “risk taking”.

But such characteristics are to be valued for those involved in providing many of the back-end services in our institutions – please, let’s not have an ‘always beta’ approach to salary systems or our pension schemes!

Such characteristics were identified at the UCISA CISG 2008 conference in which Alison Wildish and John Howell and “Can web services and CIS work together in harmony when it comes to the web?“. But rather than revisit that talk, which argued for greater collaboration across groups such as MIS and Marketing departments within the institution I want to explore how such departments need to change in its engagement with a Web 2.0 environment (such as ‘the network as the platform’) and a Social Web environment (in which members of the institution are openly sharing their resources and interests with others).

The Social Web

Some may feel that Social Networking services are only used by students and young people and have no relevance to those involved in this provision of services across the institution.  But we do find that senior managers and UCISA stalwarts, such as Chris Sexton and David Harrison are prolific users of Social Web tools such as blogs and Twitter. Chris Sexton’s Twitter id @cloggingchris reveals her hobby (clog dancing and related folk activities) – and it was via our shared interests in rapper word dancing that Chris and myself got to know each better both personally and professionally, through our discussions on our blogs and via Twitter.

So yes, the social dimension is important to enhance our professional activities – after all there is a conference dinner at the UCISA CISG 2009 conference which fulfills this role. Perhaps the main difference between the online and physical social activities are the lack of formality in the former (unlike the UCISA conference, a black tie or kilt are not expected in the Twitterverse!).

“Web 2.0 Changes Everything”

In May 2009 Andy Powell on the eFoundations blog argued that “if Web 2.0 changes everything, I see no reason why that doesn’t apply as much to professional bodies and universities as it does to high street bookshops“. David Harrison was in broad agreement:

“There is a little doubt in my mind that Web 2.0 will eventually change everything in respect of university education …  what makes the current situation different is the emergence of communication & collaboration tools that easily & transparently transcend the organisation. The Web 2.0 university will be one therefore that consumes, collaborates and communicates – some are better placed to build such a model, others not.“

What might be the drivers of such change, I asked recently. Some may feel that a combination of the economic crisis and global warming may force institutions to radically reappraise the well-established approaches to events across the sector, but that’s a topic for another post and another talk.

In this post and in my talk I will consider three aspects of the changing networked environment which I feel are significant drivers for change within the sector: Cloud Services, the Social Web and Openness.

Cloud Services

When I gave a talk on “IT Services: Help or Hindrance?” at the UCISA 2006 conference I used the potential of Web-based email services (such as Hotmail and GMail) as a threat to IT Service departments, arguing that IT Service departments needed to be more flexible and agile, otherwise the user community would abandon the centrally-provided services. But Michael Nowlan, who was Director of the Information Systems Services at Trinity College Dublin,  interpretted my talk differently – why don’t institutions simply buy into such services.  And that is what Trinity College Dublin did, followed by an increasing number of UK institutions, most notably Sheffield University.

On her blog, Chris Sexton has regularly kept colleagues and the wider community informed of her thoughts on institutional use of Google as an email provider. In April 2009 she  summarised institutional use of “Google for students” and earlier this month she suggested that it is “Now to sort out staff mail….“.

Chris also recently reported on a session at the Educause conference on “Cloud computing – Hope or Hype?“. Chris concluded:

“I went in firmly on the “hope ” side but tried to listen objectively, and I must say my mind wasn’t changed! The “hype” arguments came over as defensive and ill informed. She made a big thing of it just being a cost cutting exercise, but in the current financial climate I couldn’t see what was wrong with that!“.

I’d go along with that. Institutional engagement with Cloud Services is, for me, simply the latest approach to service provision which the sector is engaging with. I would hope that there is a community-wide involvement in negotiations, but this is no longer the radical solution it seemed back in 2004.

Services For The Individual

Like myself, Chris Sexton is using a blog service which is in The Cloud. Chris’s blog is hosted on Blogspot whereas mine is on WordPress. But rather than the hosting issues (bother services are well-established and mature)  for me the more challenging issue is the individual autonomy to provide a professional service. Yes, there are issues about trust, quality and sustainability of the content. But for me, this is similar to the trust which my organisation places on me when I give talks – and similarly UCISA will have expectations that I will act in a professional manner when I give my talk.  Both my talks and my blog posts will have personal idiosyncrasies – but in our sector we tend to prefer such approaches to the corporate droids!

As use of such externally hosted services continues to grow we will need to develop policies and share best practices, but, again, this is nothing new.

‘Core’ and ‘Chore’ Services

Whilst I have been exploring ways in which the Social Web can be exploited by professional in the sector, David Harrison and Joe Nichols at Cardiff University  have been developing an institutional model for understanding the relationships between in-house and externally-hosted services.  David has distinguished between chore and core services. This approach was presented at UKOLN’s IWMW 2009 event in a talk entitled “Servicing ‘Core’ and ‘Chore’: A framework for understanding a Modern IT Working Environment” and summarised in a blog post on the IWMW 2009 blog.

The Need for Openness

Moving on from the provision of the services we need to address the openness of the content. The initiatives within the sector to provide open access to research publications are well-known and we are now seeing initiatives to provide open access to research data and open educational resources (OER). But what about our institutional data? Is this still being held in institutional silos, making reuse difficult and costly and thus inhibiting development, innovation?

The JISC-funded MOSAIC competition provided an opportunity for developers to demonstrate innovative approaches to making use of library circulation data provided by the University of Huddersfield. And yes, privacy is something that needs to be considered – and in this case the data was anonymised before being made available and the APIs published.

This is surely an area in which our sector should be actively engaging with – perhaps regarding data as something that should be made open unless there are valid reasons not to do so, unlike the current position in which institutions keep data closed unless required to.

A move towards greater openness may result from the government responding to public pressure for greater openness. We have seen public pressure to provide transparency for MP’s expenses. And Tony Hirst, a lecturer at the Open University has provided a wide range of examples of how such data, once published, can be reused. Should not the higher education sector, as publicly-funded organisations with expectations of liberal values and transparency  as well as a well-established tradition of innovation in IT, be seen to be leading this drive towards greater openness.  And shouldn’t UCISA and groups such as UCISA CISG, be taking the initiative in their role as the custodians of such institutional data?

A Risks and Opportunities Framework

Yes, there are risks. But there will be no opportunities for innovation and change without an element of risk-taking.  JISC infoNet has developed a Risk Management infoKit and, as described in papers on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” and “Time To Stop Doing and Start Thinking: A Framework For Exploiting Web 2.0 Services” UKOLN is developing a risks and opportunities framework to support decision-making processes in the selection and use of Social Web services.

Conclusions

My talk is entitled “What If Web 2.0 Really Does Change Everything?”.  And yet, reflecting on my slides, I feel I’m simply suggesting a more open approach to use of IT within the sector – with a risk-management approach being taken to use of third party services and a willingness to make institutional data open for reuse by others.  I hope this is not felt to be threatening – rather I feel it is a reaffirmation of the IT Services  long-standing tradition of embracing IT developments and the higher education sector’s even-longer standing tradition of embracing social change.

What do you think?

“Web 2.0 Will Change Everything!” But How?

Back in May I wrote a blog post entitled “Not Your Father’s IT Innovation!“. My post referred to Andy Powell’s thoughts on “The role of universities in a Web 2.0 world?” in which he suggested that “if Web 2.0 changes everything, I see no reason why that doesn’t apply as much to professional bodies and universities as it does to high street bookshops“. These posts were written a few days after the “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” Report [was] Published“.

I had intended to write a follow-up post to Andy’s closing comment in his post asking “If Web 2.0 will change everything, then how?” but got diverted. Six months later (and doesn’t six months go quickly as you get older!)  I want to revisit the question – my motivation for doing this is that I have been invited to speak at the UCISA CISG conference later this month and the title of my talk is “What if Web 2.0 Really Does Change Everything?“.

But how might Web 2.0 change everything – as opposed to being another IT innovation which, over the years, the sector will successfully embrace as has happened in the past  (e.g. the move away from mainframe computers to minis, workstations, standalone PCs and networked PCs; the move from IT to support research activities to supporting all aspects of  University businesses; etc.)?

And before seeking to predict how such changes might affect University businesses there is a need to explore which aspects of Web 2.0 might act as the key drivers to radical changes with the sector. Some thoughts on aspects of Web 2.0 which could “change everything” :

• Network as the platform: The importance of services in ‘the Cloud’ may be felt to be of great significance to some.  But does the location and governance of a service really matter to the institution (as opposed to existing service providers within the institution)?  Perhaps if  networked services which provide mission-critical functions were to fail this could result in significant negative changes for the sector. But isn’t that  an issue of monitoring the viability of one’s service providers and ensuring migration strategies are in place  – after all we are familiar with take-overs and companies failing.
• Social networks: Perhaps the importance social networking will be the key driver for  Web 2.0 changing everything. This is an area which is, in some respects,  new to the sector and encompasses ‘network as the platform’.  Some may feel that a negative aspect of social networks could be the time wasted in developing and maintaining social networks and relationships. But others, including myself, feel that such social networking activities can help to strengthen professional links and engage in activities not previously felt possible.
• Out-sourced digital identity: A topic frequently discussed on the JISC Access Management Team blog is digital identity management. The institution has traditionally managed the digital identity and access rights for staff and students (and guests) within the institution. But now students are arriving at the institution with their own email accounts and accounts on social networking services, perhaps with well-established communities. And staff, especially at a time in which long-term contracts can no longer be expected, may wish to avoid making use of an institutional digital identity which will disappear if they leave the institution. But does ownership of my digital identity, whether by my institution or a third party service (or, perhaps, by the Government), really change everything from an institutional perspective?
• New modes of learning: Might we find that the Social Web provides new and more effective ways of learning? This, to me, could be significant as if the evidence suggests that this is the case there would be pressures on the institution to change its approaches to leaning and teaching. But in this area I am speculating. Are people suggesting that this may be the case? Is there evidence to suggest that a Web 2.0 approach to learning could result in a radical transformation in approaches to learning and teaching?
• New modes of research: The use of Web 2.0 approaches, such as the Social Web, to support research, perhaps to facilitate inter-disciplinary work and enhance professional relationships is an area in which  I feel Web 2.0 can provide significant benefits.  A recent post by Frak Norman entitled ”Social networks – are they useful or pointless?” cited a  blog post on the Scholarly Kitchen blog that points up the failure of social networking websites to gain many converts in the scientific community. Although, in response to the blog post, Frank admitted to be a ‘true believer’ we do need to ask whether significant takeup of social networks by the research community would really ‘change everything’. Hasn’t the research community often been willing to explore the potential of new technologies (often causing tensions with IT service department who may nowadays prioritise delivering stable mature services to mass audiences).
• Reluctance to travel: We are all very aware of the need to address environmental issues. Institutions will be exploring ways of reducing their carbon footprint and the JISC’s Greening ICT programme aims to support work in this area.   One approach to supporting such initiatives might be to make use of the collaborative and communications features of Web 2.0 services in order to minimise the amount of  travel needed across the sector.  We are already seeing increasing numbers of ‘amplified events’ being provided within the sector, which can both help maximise the impact of and benefits of engaging with such events and reducing the carbon footprint for those who participate remotely.  The delivery of online-only events provides another example of how Web 2.0 technologies can potentially deliver environmental benefits. If in ten years time the amount of travel taken by members of the community were to drop significantly, to be replaced by online activities, this might be regarded as ‘changing everything’.
• Lack of  funding: In light of expected cutbacks in government funding perhaps there will be a cutback in investment in development work in the sector and a greater take-up of externally-hosted Web 2.0 services. Is this case the driver is the lack of funding and use of Web 2.0 may provide a response.
• Always beta:  Could the ongoing development of services typified by the ‘always beta’ slogan have a significant   role to play in significant changes? I don’t think so – after all  early adopters in the sector have often helped to drive changes, as was seen in the early 1990s when the Web started to appear in many of our institutions  through the initiatives of the early adopters, perhaps circumventing institutional policies on Campus Wide Information Systems.
• Culture of openness: Might the Web 2.0’s culture of openness be responsible or significant changes? Moves to open access and open data have been encouraged by the ease of access to resources provided by the Web and we are now seeing initiatives to provide access of Open Educational Resources (OER).  A possibility, although whether people will make use of OER resources to any significant extent is still unproven.
• Generational changes or other binary divides: Marc Prensky’s view of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants has been questioned with Dave White suggesting the need to consider “Not ‘Natives’ & ‘Immigrants’ but ‘Visitors’ & ‘Residents’”.  Could, I wonder, the  expectations that Web 2.0 will change everything be hindered by differing perspectives  and priorities being placed by those who have expectations of working and learning in a social networked environment and those who regard this environment as a tool to be used in clearly defined circumstances?   And might the environment be affected not by Web 2.0 per se but by Web 2.0 as a battleground? After all if we are talking about radical changes across the sector we should expect to encounter resistance and disagreements.
• Blogs, wikis, social sharing, …: Might the core Web 2.0 technologies (blogs, wikis and social bookmarking and other social sharing services) be instrumental in radical changes? I think not – I think we now understand how such technologies can be used within the sector.
• Syndication technologies: I also think the ways in which content can be syndicated and reused across differing environments and devices is now understood and will simply be more widely deployed as existing technologies are upgraded to provide further support for such syndication technologies.
• Mobile access and always connected: Perhaps the expectation is that much greater use of mobile technologies, so that users can always be connected, will be responsible for the higher education sector being transformed in the way that Amazon is felt to have transformed the book selling market place.

I suspect that the radical changes, which have been acknowledged in the “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” and “The Edgeless University” reports will be a result of a complex interplay between these (and other) factors. (Of course we haven’t  identified whether the radical changes which these  reports suggested the sector needs to respond to will be for the better or worse – Tara Brabazon, for example, has argued that “The Revolution Will Not Be Downloaded: Dissent in the digital age“).

But returning to the question I have raised – if we feel that  ”Web 2.0 will change everything” how will such radical changes take place? And was the comment made at one of the meetings organised by the authors of the  ”Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World”  report that “This seminar feels a bit like sitting with a group of record industry executives in 1999” valid?

Paper on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” Published in Program

A paper on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” has recently been published in the Program journal (Program Electronic Library and Information Systems, 2009, 43 (3), pp. 311-327). This paper is accessible from the University of Bath Opus institutional repository service.

This paper was originally presented at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference held at the National Library of Singapore in October 2008. I am the lead author of the paper and the other contributors are Paul Bevan (National Library of Wales), Richard Akerman (National Research Council Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, Ottawa, Canada), Jo Alcock (University of Wolverhampton) and Josie Fraser (consultant).

The process of depositing the paper into the institutional repository was much easier than my previous experience – now that I know which option to select when a DOI for the paper is available. However since depositing my various papers in our institutional repository it has struck me that although my papers should now have a stable URI and will have associated metadata designed to make the papers easier to discover the institutional repository does not provide a forum for interested readers to discuss the paper openly. So, as I did with another recent paper, I am writing this blog post which will allow comments to be made. And after this post has been published I should updated the details in the repository to link to this blog post.

Hmm – shouldn’t all papers have a mechanisms whereby readers can ask questions about the ideas which have been exposed to a peer-reviewing process?

Are University Web Teams Too Large?

Mike Richwalski was very busy at IWMW 2009 (and beyond). Mike, Assistant Director of Public Affairs at Allegheny College,  submitted a proposal to run a workshop session on “Using Amazon Web Services (AWS)” which we were happy to accept. In subsequent discussions with Mike I discovered that he was not only a techie who knew about managing Amazon services but had recently presented a webinar on Facebook & Twitter Recruitment Tools to Engage Prospective Students.

This was a topic which was directly related to a series of workshops I was involved with on behalf of the SCA (Strategic Content Alliance). When I discovered that Mike was arriving in London on the day of the workshop in London (they day before the start of IWMW 2009) I tentatively asked if he’d like to give a brief talk at the SCA workshop (I have to admit that I was particularly interested in any cultural differences between educational institutions in the US and the UK  in a willingness to make use of Social Web environments such as Facebook and Twitter). Mike not only agree to take part, he was also able to participate in the workshop in Cardiff, as he was returning to the US from Cardiff airport. And Mike also gave a bar camp at IWMW 2009 in which he summarised the ways in which Allegney College is using Social Web services.

In the IWMW 2009 bar camp Mike described his college’s use of Facebook, Twitter (for general use, admissions, student orientation and sports) and YouTube. Amazon Web Services (AWS) also powers many areas of their Web site, such as their multimedia fund-raising activities.

Following Mike’s overviews of these services, I asked others in the bar camp whether UK higher educational institutions were taking similar approaches in exploiting such Web 2.0 services. The answer, it seems, is not yet.

But why, I wonder? What are the barriers? Is it because we are seeking perfection? Do we hide behind phrases such as ‘creepy tree-houses’ and ‘walled gardens’ when the evidence seems to suggest that institutions feel that they gain benefits from use of such services? And, secretly, are members of Web teams feeling threatened? Is there a view that if we don’t develop the services in-house, we’re not doing our jobs properly? And is it significant that members of UK institutional Web management teams  are leaning from the approaches taken by a small US college with 1 Web team, of  1.5 FTEs?

I recently suggested that The Recession Has Still To Hit the Public Sector! And I’ve heard rumours of layoffs and early retirements in University Web teams.  So it strikes me that it is now very timely to make use of the global infrastructure which various Web 2.0 services can provide to support our institutional activities. I was therefore pleased that Barry Cornelius, for example, ran a workshop session at IWMW 2009 on “Time for iTunes U“.

But will this provide an opportunity for the bean-counters in the institutions to ‘right-size’ the Web team?  Possibly, but I also feel there is so much more that could be done to make in exploiting the potential of the Web to support our institutional objectives. Why waste effort in attempting to replicate in-house what is already working on a global scale?

A World Where No-One Visits Our Web Sites

In a blog post entitled Pushing MRD out from under the geek rock Mike Ellis provides access to the slides he used in a session on “Digging into data: text and data mining” at the recent JISC Digital Content Conference.

Mike’s blog post goes on to explain his views which he helpfully summarises “I think that MRD (That’s Machine Readable Data – I couldn’t seem to find a better term..) is probably about as important as it gets“. Mike goes on to ask us to:

… be prepared for a world in which no-one visits our websites any more, instead picking, choosing and mixing our content from externally syndicated channels.

This world in which people don’t visit Web sites to read content as the content appears in their preferred environment is one in which I live. The content I have an interest in reading appears on my iPod Touch ready for me to read on the bus travelling to work in the morning. I seldom visit Mike’s Electronic Museum blog site or the other blogs (such as the eFoundations, OUseful, The Ed Techie,  and From a Distance blogs which are on my must-read list) – these appear automatically in my RSS reader.

Of course I still visit Web sites – and increasingly I am finding that the new Web sites I visit are those I am alerted to by the people I follow on Twitter. But the more traditional marketing campaigns for new Web sites or redesigned Web sites tends to have little impact on my browsing habits.  Unless the content can be accessed without having to visit the Web site I am unlike to be a regular visitor, no matter how useful the content may be.

Now we still do need Web sites – the content needs to be held somewhere. And not everyone makes use of an RSS reader. But we are finding that Web sites are sucking in content held elsewhere, perhaps using RSS. And of course the growth in popularity of mobile devices is likely to see a renewed interest in ways in which content can be accessed without having to visit Web sites and navigate the Web sites on small screens.

Mike Ellis suggests we need to rethink our approach to Web site development: “Don’t Think Websites, think data” he argues. His slides are available on Slideshare and are embedded below. Well worth reading.

Thoughts About Dopplr and the Environment

I’ve been using Dopplr for a couple of years now, and have used it to keep a record of my substantial work trips over the last three years.

Wikipedia describes the service as “a free social networking service, launched in 2007 that allows users to create itineraries of their travel plans and spot correlations with their contacts’ travel plans in order to arrange meetings at any point on their journey“.

Although there is a social aspect for the service (I can share my trips with others) the aspect which is of particular interest to me is the way it can be used to the carbon costs of one’s trips.

Could we envisage a future in which institutions are required to account for the carbon emissions associated with travel by members of staff, with targets for reducing the amounts? And possibly the contracts for JISC-funded projects could require projects to report on the carbon costs of the travel associated with project-funded activities.

If this did happen I hope that rather than developing an application for aggregating such data from scratch, the potential of existing services, such as Dopplr, was explored. And this is something we can be doing now. Now although I know I can share this information with others, I wonder if I can export the carbon data (which is created by the AMEE service) for use by other applications?  And what about the traveller’s individual sensitivities? We can appreciate why one might not wish information about futiure trips to be made publicly available (so opportunistic burglars can’t find out when your home might be empty) but what about the carbon costs? Is this something we should be more open about (as the general public expect MPs to be with their expenses claim)? And if so, who will be the first?

Wolfram|Alpha’s Terms and Conditions

Wolfram|Alpha

Wolfram|Alpha is described in Wikipedia as “an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data“.

Comparing Web Sites

When I discovered that Wolfram|Alpha could be used to compare Web sites I thought it would be interested to compare the Web sites for Oxford and Cambridge Universities. From this I found that the www.ox.ac.uk Web site has 960,000 daily pages views and 230,000 daily visitors and the site is ranked 6,289^th, whereas the figures for www.cam.ac.uk are 760,0000,d 260,000 and 6,269 respectively.

Table comparing three blog Web sites (from Wolfram|Alpha)

Closer to home I thoughts I’d compare the figures for this blog with those for the eFoundations blog provided by Andy Powell and Pete Johnston and Martin Weller’s EdTechie blog – of some interest in light of recent discussions about impact metrics for Social Web services. Here I find the amazing statistics that my blog has 150 million daily page views and 53 million daily visitors and is ranked 15^th of all Web sites. The eFoundations blog has 16 million daily page views and 7.3 million daily visitors and is ranked 195^th with the Ed Techie trailed way behind with 61,000 daily page views and 47,000 daily visitors and is ranked 53,872^th.

Unbelievable, isn’t it? And, of course, wrong! The figures provided by Wolfram|Alpha, which they got from the Alexa.com service, seem to be based on the figures for the wordpress.com and typepad.com domains, with Martin Weller’s blog trailing as it is hosted on the typepad.co.uk domain.

So further analysis has given us a better understanding of how WolframAlpha uses the statistics provided by Alexa.com.  And the comparisons for Oxford and Cambridge Universities Web sites may be skewed bv the number of Web services in their domains.

And maybe other services which make use of such figures can be similarly skewed. Does this, I wonder, have any relevance to the metrics to measure online digital reputation described recently by Martin Weller? Perhaps my unexpectedly high ranking in a list of influencers in ‘distance learning’ is due to the service which hosts my blog?

Wolfram|Alpha’s Terms and Conditions

Interesting questions which we need to ask if we are to build up a better understanding of the digital world we’re living in, the tools that can help us in our tasks and the strengths and weaknesses of such tools.

But of interest – and perhaps concern – are the terms of use for the Wolfram!Alpha service .  It short it seems that, as my colleague Emma Tonkin recently pointed out to me there are “no guarantees, no under 18s, no organised repeated access, no mashups (don’t think about accessing this service in your software). Use must be personal, ad hoc (no organised groups of users please, so don’t think about teaching or training with it) and not for a professional reason unless you buy a licence for an unspecified price (curious amateurs only please). They reserve the right to assert IP rights over anything given as input to their site if they can think of any reason for doing so. Whilst they got much of their data for free by spidering sites, they will be deeply upset if you do the same.”

In addition is the requirement that “the results you get from Wolfram|Alpha are correctly attributed to Wolfram|Alpha itself“. The terms of use go on to say:

If you make results from Wolfram|Alpha available to anyone else, or incorporate those results into your own documents or presentations, you must include attribution indicating that the results and/or the presentation of the results came from Wolfram|Alpha. Some Wolfram|Alpha results include copyright statements or attributions linking the results to us or to third-party data providers, and you may not remove or obscure those attributions or copyright statements. Whenever possible, such attribution should take the form of a link to Wolfram|Alpha, either to the front page of the website or, better yet, to the specific query that generated the results you used.

So  if I ask Wolfram|Alpha what 1+1 is, if I published the result ‘2′ I must provide a link back to Wolfram|Alpha.  And if I ask “What were the dates of the second World War?” I need to provide a similar link before using the answer “1 September 1939 to 2 September 1945″.

What Should We Do?

What should we make of this? As students are encouraged to cite their sources, perhaps educational institutions should welcome the support they are getting from a commercial company? And maybe we should work with the manufacturers of calculators and require that any numerical calculations include details of the make of the calculator used. There might be sponsorship possibilities in doing this, as well as allowing the teachers to spot flaws in the answers which might be due to errors on the chips on the calculators (after all, we don’t have open source calculators  so, according to Peter Murray-Rust, we probably shouldn’t be using them to carry out open science.

I’m joking! But what should we do? Should we block access to Wolfram|Alpha from our firewalls? Should we simply ignore the terms, as we know that few people will bother reading them (although this story has been picked up on the  Grocklaw blog, Slashdot, CNet and The Register)? Or should we actively break them? After all Peter Murray-Rust recently argued that “We must reform the practice of copyright. We may be getting close to civil disobedience. Because unless we do we shall not control our future but be controlled by others.“.

“Is It Really A Good Time To Be Asking For More IT Money?”

Michael Cross in the Technology Guardian asked back in April “Is It Really A Good Time To Be Asking For More IT Money?” Michael poked fun at the notion that “as the chancellor announces the largest peacetime deficit in history, the IT industry is lining up to say what the government really needs to do is spend more taxpayers’ money on computers“. His blunt response: “Dream on“.

He is, of course, correct to remind us that public sector funding is in decline and this is likely to impact grandiose plans for large-scale IT developments. Indeed, as I pointed out recently, we have already seen the recent demise of the Hero gateway to UK higher educational institutions.

Michael Cross’s suggestion is to “freeze budgets at just those needed to keep existing big systems …  ticking over“. He goes on to propose that “Any new programmes would have to be achieved with Gmail, Flickr, and whatever other free stuff can be found on the web. Preferably running on public employees’ own laptops and mobile phones” and points out that “the market research firm Gartner is peddling a similar line, under the heading ‘The future of government is no government‘”.

A ridiculous notion? Maybe, but consider the alternatives which might include a lack of services and innovation or a move towards centralised solutions. And let’s be honest about the dangers of the centralised solutions. I’ve heard people talk about ideas floating in government circles that the Open University should be the provided of e-learning resources for the high education sector – a suggestion which Open University e-learning staff I know are happy to debunk.

And what of he wider public sector service? A tweet from Joss Win pointed out that it cost:

£168,000 to out-source the Treasury’s website last year?! (only 4 visits/minute) http://bit.ly/zndCW Surely this deserves full disclosure?

which led to suggestions from other Twitters that they would be happy to deliver Web pages on a memory stick transported on a Rolls-Royce if funding of that scale was available :-) And the response given in Hansard went on to add that “Staff costs are not included as they could only be established at disproportionate cost“.

Now I’m not suggesting that we should necessarily or in all cases  require that “new programmes would have to be achieved with Gmail, Flickr, and whatever other free stuff can be found on the web” (or, as Tony Hirst describes this “Appropriating Technology“).  But these are possibilities which should be treated on par with in-house development work, just as open source software solutions should be evaluated along side proprietary solutions for public sector procurement exercises. And yes, the risks of such out-sourcing to such Web 2.0 companies should be included in any procurement exercises.

But let’s also ensure that development work outsourced in more conventional ways is also open to public scrutiny. Otherwise we may find that figures such as £168,000 of the public’s  money to outsource hosting or development to companies which have close links with public sector bodies is being wasted. As Joss suggests, this deserves full disclosure! (Oh, and if you don’t think that public sector should be reliant on commerical services, remember that the U.S. Government Ask[ed] Twitter to Stay Up for #IranElection Crisis) .

Launch of ‘The Edgeless University’: a new Demos report

A report entitled “The Edgeless University: why Higher Education Must Embrace Technology” was launched earlier today. As described on the JISC Web site:

The Edgeless University argues that technology in higher education is not just about virtual learning environments, but is increasingly central to the way institutions provide learning and facilitate research. Technology is making research and learning possible in new places, often outside of institutions. Far from undermining them, this is creating exciting opportunities for universities to demonstrate and capitalise on their value so will take strategic leadership from inside institutions, new connections with a growing world of informal learning, and a commitment to openness and collaboration. This is the radical role of The Edgeless University.

I haven’t yet had a chance to fully absorb this 90 page report but there were a number of aspects to the report which reflect my areas of interest. I should first disclose, however, that I contributed to the report (Peter Bradwell, author of this DEMOS report, was aware of my work in this area and invited me to give my views).

The need for fundamental changes in the higher educational sector:  The report describes the comment made by one participant at a roundtable meeting who described the current predicament of the higher education sector: ‘This seminar feels a bit like sitting with a group of record industry executives in 1999’. The report went on to say “It is no use lamenting the golden age of universities (or record companies). The goals of the two ‘industries’ remain the same, but they must refocus on how to achieve them. Society’s aspirations for the sector remain the same. The challenge for institutions is to find the way to do it.“

The need to understand changing student expectations:  The report quoted an interviewee who said “Technology is part of people’s daily life in a university, I would say everywhere except in the classroom” in order to illustrate the need for institutions to “get better at understanding exactly what it is these students need” .

New tools to support teaching:  It was interesting to note that the report, in a section on how social media tools can support  collaborative teaching described Michael Wesch’s work at the University of Kansas in the US in using using online tools for collaborative and team-based student coursework including tools such as  sites such as Netvibes, Yahoo Pipes  and Diigo. Although I’m pleased to see Web 2.0 tools being highlighted in the report, it was somewhat strange to see a US-based example of use of these fairly mainstream tools. Aren’t there similar examples to be found in UK HEIs?

“A renewed commitment to openness“:  The report includes a section with this title. The opening quotation for the section “Science is as much about conversations in corridors as it is about papers in journals” strikes me as summarising the benefits which the Social Web can provide for the research community. However this section seems to focus more on the ease of access provided by tools such as Scribd and iTunesU rather than the issues of open access and open data.

“Experimentation and investment“:  I was particularly pleased to see that JISC Developer Happy Days’ (Dev8D) being mentioned as an  “event brought together communities of coders and users from educational software and beyond” with the aim of  “mix[ing] people interested in civic society with those who have the skills to develop tools to encourage social change“. Dave Flanders (now of JISC) will be pleased to see that his work in bringing together a set of developers has been appreciated in this report.

A few weeks ago the “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” report was published. And today we see another report which provides a similar top-down view on the importance of Web 2.0 in higher education.  If you encounter resistance to change from senior managers in your institution I’d suggest you beat them over the head with these two report until they realise that Web 2.0 is changing the higher educational environment.

Which Will Last Longer: Hero.ac.uk or Facebook?

A Hero For Our Sector

One of the real strengths of the UK higher education sector is the way in which we can work together as a sector, meaning that the whole is geater than the sum of the individual parts. This is undoubtedly true of JISC (which is envied in the higher education and research sectors around the world) but also applies elsewhere. One example of this is Hero:  “the official gateway to universities, colleges and research organisations in the UK“:  a gateway funded by the various funding bodies (HEFCE, SHEFC, HEFCW and DENI) and supported by other higher educational agencies and by the high educational institutions themselves (and note that I was involved in the technical advisory group for the “HE Mall” as it was originally called.

Indeed will a service such as Hero, why would higher educational institutions wish to use other channels for online marketing, particularly social networking service such as Facebook which, despite its popularity are, in some circles, regarded with suspicion in not hostility?

Our Hero Is Dead …

Alas for those who believe that the sector should own its marketing channels, the Hero.ac.uk service was closed on 4^th June 2009 (and the image shown above was taken from Hero’s most recent entry in the Internet Archive, from 10^th February 2008) I should disclose that last year I was interviewed by a consultant who had been appointed in order to identify future directions for the service, including whether the service was viable. I pointed out the flaws in the Hero service: it did not have the community aspects which potential new students might expect and it was a ‘walled garden’ – information could be uploaded to the service but there were no easy ways of getting the data out again. “Make ‘Hero 2.0′ a trusted service which could host structured institutional data“, I suggested “and provide APIs to allow developers elsewhere to add value to the service“. But this did not happen.

… Long Live a New Hero?

If the managed service to promote UK higher educational institutions is too costly to provide,  why don’t we appropriate popular social networking services to fulfil this role? This is an idea inspired by a Tony Hirst’s post on “Appropriating technology” which he described as “appropriating technologies that might have been designed for other purposes in order to use them in an educational context” but I would replace ‘educational context‘ by ‘marketing context‘.

And, if we’re honest, isn’t Facebook the new Hero? It can provide the popular service for hosting institutional marketing materials. And it can provide the community aspects which Hero failed to provide. Admittedly it may be a ‘walled garden’ – but then so was Hero, so nothing is being lost.

But if we wish to use Facebook in this way, don’t we as a sector need to  identify the best practices for making use of Facebook, including minimising the risks associated with the service? And shouldn’t we be exploring the benefits which might be gained by working collaboratively?

Some initial thoughts on  this:

Institutional URL: As mentioned in my recent post on “Have You Claimed Your Personal And Institutional Facebook Vanity URL?” we are seeing Facebook URLs being minted as a single string (edgehilluniversity) and words separated  by dots (aberystwyth.university). We might wish to consider whether there are advantages in seeking agreement on the form of the name – perhaps even using an institutional domain name in the URL (e.g. www.facebook.com/www.bath.ac.uk). However it is probably too late to do anything about this (which arguably demonstrates the failure in having not had such discussions previously).

Trademark disputes: We’ll want to avoid the possibility of trademark disputes. Might we see one between Leeds Metropolitan University and say, Loyola Marymount University over www.facebook.com/lmu?

Ownership of Facebook resource: Who has access to the institutional Facebook account in your institution? And what if they’ve left or you can’t find the owner? The information should be regarded as a valuable institutional resource and ownership should be managed appropriately.

Workflow processes: There’s a need to establish effective workflow processes for information provide on the institutional Facebook page. Ideally information would be hosted elsewhere and automatically updated in Facebook though use of, for example, an  RSS application in your Facebook page.

Will Facebook pages enhance or diminish Google Juice: Might not institutional content which is replicated on Facebook pages diminish institutional ‘Google juice’ as my colleague Paul Walk has suggested? Or, alternatively, might content held in popular services such as Facebook and Wikipedia (and previously, to a lesser extent, Hero) held to increase traffic to the institutional Web site? Indeed if such replication of content is felt to be counter-productive, shouldn’t institutions try to prevent Web sites having links to their content rather than seeking to maximise such links?

Facebook Terms and Conditions: It would be useful to gain a better understanding of the Faceboom terms and conditions and the implications for an organisation’s pages in order to inform appropriate risk management approach. If the concern is that Facebook will claim ownership of marking material provides, is that really of concern?

Explore Possibilities for Facebook Applications: Might there be benefits in developing Facebook applications to make the UK HEI pages more appealling?

But have we, in the UK, missed the boat? Looking at the timetable for the forthcoming Eduweb 2009 conference I notice sessions on topics such as “Facebook — a case study of building virtual relationships“, “Cheap, Fast, & Out of Control: Brand management & recruitment..” and “Recruiting and Marketing in the Web 2.0 World“.  We’ve nothing along these lines planned for IWMW 2009 – but as the bar camp sessions can be submitted at the workshop itself, perhaps there’s an opportunity to build on these ideas?

Oh, and if you think it is inappro[oriate for an organisation to make use of a social network in this way, look at what companies such as Starbucks and McDonalds are doing on Facebook.

There Is No Institutional Blueprint for Web 2.0 – So Let’s Develop One

Last week I gave a talk on “The ‘Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World’ Report: Implications For IT Service Departments” to staff in BUCS (the Bath University Computer Services Department.

The following day, as she described in a blog post, Chris Sexton, IT Services Director at the University of Sheffield and UCISA chair, facilitated a similar session on “IT Service 2.0“.

Chris concluded that “There was a general acceptance of the conclusions of the report which was that Universities need to change, and that change will be driven by students and what they will demand“. Such comments could also apply to the discussions at the BUCS seminar. And the reservations which Chris described:

“However, there was some opinion expressed that the report was an exaggeration of the change that web 2.0/social web will make in students. There was also a concern that we could be in the situation of using technology to cut costs – to deliver more with less – to the detriment of what a University education means“.

also reflected some concerns which were aired here at Bath.

Both of these events were  based on the recent report on the recent “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” CLEX report.

One of the points made in the report was the lack of a clear institutional blueprint for action:

Decisions on whether or not to implement Web 2.0 technologies are, however, the responsibility of each institution individually having regard to its particular ethos and circumstances. Here, experience can be shared, but there is no blueprint for action and, indeed, it may not be possible to develop a blueprint in an area that is so highly context specific.

Senior managers in IT Services at the Universities of Bath and Sheffield have started the discussions regarding such an institutional blueprint. I’m also aware of a forthcoming Web Community event at the University of Bradford which will address how the Web can be used to support the University’s mission and objectives.

Is there scope, I wonder, for an event for the community on exploiting the potential of Web 2.0 which could help in the process of developing an institutional blueprint? In November 2006 UKOLN organised an event on “Exploiting the Potential of Wikis” followed a year later by a similar one-day event on “Exploiting the Potential of Blogs and Social Networks“.

Both of these events, which were fully subscribed, provided an opportunity to explore some of the policy issues associated with provision of or access to wikis, blogs and social networks.

I think we are now in a situation in which we need to address the institutional issues associated with use of services in ‘The Cloud’ (e.g. sustainability, reliability, and legal issues) , the relationships between the bottom-up and personal use of networked services and the institutional provision of such services and the relevance of ‘Social Web’ technologies to support teaching and leaning and research activities within our institutions.

I’ll start exploring the possibilities of organising such an event. I’d welcome suggestions on the topics which should be addressed at such an event and possible speakers.

I’ll conclude by sharing the resources for the talk I gave at Bath. The slides are available on Slideshare (and embedded below) and a video of my talk is available on Vimeo.  In addition local-hosted copies of the resources are also available on the UKOLN Web site.

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Please note that this post originally had a link to an incorrect version of the slides (a version which had been uploaded to a guest account). The post has been updated with a link to and an embedded versionof the managed resource. However the original version of the slides has not been deleted.

Google Wave, HTML 5 and Browser Policies

Over the past few days the Twitterverse seems tobe full with of discussions regarding Google’s announcement of Wave. The Techcrunch article on “Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web” is worth reading. But I was also interested to read a couple of blog posts on how Google Wave might be used to support teahcing and learning and research activities within higher educational instituions.

In a post entitled”Google Wave and teaching & learning” Wilber Kraan, who works for JISC CETIS, described how a technology like Google Wave has the potential to support a social constructivist’s model based on  group collaboration activities, especially those that can be constructed, annotated or modified collaboratively. And whilst Wilbert feels that Google is “evil” he feels that “a technology like Google Wave has the potential to impact this area significantly” and as  Social Networking  isn’t a market in which Google dominates, Google “needs to play nice and open“.

Meanwhile over on the Science in the Open blog Cameron Neylon feels that “OMG! This changes EVERYTHING! – or – Yet Another Wave of Adulation“. Cameron, a research scientist who is an unapologetic evangelist for open science, describes how, up till now “Those of us interested in web-based and electronic recording and communication of science have spent a lot of the last few years trying to describe how we need to glue the existing tools together, mailing lists, wikis, blogs, documents, databases, papers“. But Google Waves seems to have fundamentally changed things (if the service lives up to the hype): The lack of a framework to glue various communications and collaboration tools together “as far as I can see has now ceased to exist. The challenge now is in building the right plugins and making sure the architecture is compatible with existing tools. But fundamentally the framework seems to be there. It seems like it’s time to build“.

An exciting future, if Google Wave lives up to the hype, for the learning and research communities, it would seem. And therefore Google Wave could be of particular important to the higher education community.   There will be lots of issue that will have to be addressed, not least the dangers of a monopoly provider and concerns over privacy. But, less emotive, perhaps, but  of particular importance to IT Service departments is the question of the browser environment which will be needed to access Google Wave. It appears that Google Wave is an HTML 5 application – and HTML 5 is supported, in part, by all modern Web browsers, with the exception of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer – which dominstates he marketplace.

Isn’t it time for IT Services  department to acknowledge that Internet Explorer is a major barrier to innovation in higher education? Would it be too much to expect a search and destroy operation to be carried out during the summer vacation to the desktop environment across the sector? Or, as a Google member of staff was quoted as saying that Google aim to get it working for all browsers: “People will not have to upgrade their browser to use Wave” maybe not? Perhaps if we find the innovators and early adopters grow to like Google Wave and wish to see it used more widely within or institutions, we’ll also find that it will eventually be made to work in the latest version of Internet Explorer. So maybe the summer’s search and destroy operation could be a less radical search and update operation.

The Social Web and the Belbin Model

I have previously suggested that although I feel that the Social Web has much to offer that doesn’t mean that I would want everyone to have a blog, to Twitter, to record talks and make them freely available on video sharing services. Rather I feel that these approaches should be available to people who wish to exploit their potential, whether in teaching and learning, research or enriching access to scholarly and cultural resources. But who are the people who may be best suited to using Social Web services in this fashion?

A couple of decades ago I took part in a team building workshop during which I was introduced to the Belbin model. On completing the questionnaire on my personal preferences I discovered that I was a plant and a resource investigator. According to Wikipedia these are defined as:

Plants are creative, unorthodox and a generator of ideas. If an innovative solution to a problem is needed, a Plant is a good person to ask. A good plant will be bright and free-thinking. Plants can tend to ignore incidentals and refrain from getting bogged down in detail. The Plant bears a strong resemblance to the popular caricature of the absentminded professor-inventor, and often has a hard time communicating ideas to others.

The Resource Investigator gives a team a rush of enthusiasm at the start of the project by vigorously pursuing contacts and opportunities. He or she is focused outside the team, and has a finger firmly on the pulse of the outside world. Where a Plant creates new ideas, a Resource Investigator will quite happily steal them from other companies or people. A good Resource Investigator is a maker of possibilities and an excellent networker, but has a tendency to lose momentum towards the end of a project and to forget small details.

Are these characteristics still true, I wonder? And do they reflect the way I use Social Web tools, such as this blog? As I defined the role of this blog as an environment to provide  “an opportunity for me to ‘think out loud“: i.e. describe speculative ideas, thoughts which may occur to me, etc. which may be of interest to others or for which I would welcome feedback” I think I have been using the blog to support my preferences as a plant.

I most definitely use the blog to pursue  contacts and opportunities beyond my host institution. And as well as sometimes creating new ideas (such as the holistic approach to Web accessibility) I will also “quite happily steal them from other companies or people” (though I do always try to provide links back to the original ideas, whether in blog posts or even tweets).

Is the Belbin model useful in identifying the characteristics of those who enjoy blogging and micro-blogging, I wonder?

How Do New Ideas Start? How Do New Contacts Develop?

The Question

How do you ideas start? How can a informal conversation lead to an exploration of new ideas? How do such conversations start? And how does one participate in such conversations, especially with new people?

These were a series of questions which occurred to me a few days ago, following some early morning light-hearted banter on Twitter. I thought I’d share the dialogue and invite comments on the more general issues.

The Twitter Discussions

At 7 am on Friday 15^th May 2009 I got up and downloaded the new tweets on my iPod Touch.  I noticed that James Clay had spotted that the “Latest upgrade to TwitterFon on the iPhone now includes Ads. There will be a paid for Pro version which doesn’t“. As I was using Twitterfon to view the tweet I had an interest in alternative Twitter clients, in case the ads on the new version were to intrusive. In response to my query on alternatives Joss Winn responded by suggesting that “if you’re going to pay, Tweetie is worth every penny“. Now I’ve not met Joss (as far as I know) but, a few months ago started following him on Twitter and subscribe to his blog.

In order to put his suggestion into context, I visited his blog and spotted his (then current) post on “The user is in control“. This post was written in response to Andy Powell’s post about Identity in a Web 2.0 World and contained some comments which reflected my view of how Web 2.0 is requiring higher education to challenge some of the assumptions we have previously taken for granted (in particular that higher educational institutions should regard themselves as automatically the main provider of a student’s digital identity).  As I appreciated Joss’s work in this area, I tipped my hat in his direction with a tweet posted at 07:23 saying “Ta for suggesting Tweetie app. BTW have just looked at your blog & will cite your post on “The user is in control” l8tr today“. I’d made links with a new contact before 07.30 am.

When I arrived at work forthy minutes later Joss had responded with a jocal tweet:
responded shortly afterwards saying “excellent :-) A citation from Brian Kelly surely counts towards the REF!“. And in a similar vein I made fun on the notion that citing tweets would have any relevance to REF (the Research Exercise Framework alternative to the RAE for identifying the merits of research publications:

“A citation from Brian Kelly surely counts towards the REF!” True – so if I cite u, will u cite me? (hmm should have DMed that!)”.

Martin Weller observed this dialogue and joined in by suggesting that “semi-seriously we should work up our own set of metrics of reputation etc so we can compare when REF is done“. Following a few further tweets between Martin, Joss and myself a few hours later Martin published a blog post on “What would ALT-REF look like?“. The blog post included an image (shown below) which captured the discussions:

Discussion

Martin Weller’s suggestion was that an alternative to REF would “take in the sort of distributed identity we have online, so measures activity in blogging, delicious, slideshare, YouTube, twitter, etc. It would need to measure not just activity but influence, impact, etc in some data driven manner“. Whether this idea has any merits might be worth exploring on Martin’s blog. My more specific interest is how the people who may be working together across the “blogging, delicious, slideshare, YouTube, twitter, etc” services might find each and share ideas which, at some later point, might provide significant benefits.

Martin and myself  have already benefitted from the discussions we’ve had on Twitter and from reading and commenting on each other’s blog posts, with the shared understanding we’ve gained having led to a submission for a workshop session at the ALT-C conference which we’ll be faciliting at the conference in September. I have also received contributions to a number of peer-reviewed papers from contacts I’ve met on Twitter.

Thinking about this in more detail, I realise that typically I might start following someone on Twitter if I feel I might gain something from this, such as new insights into digital library developments, use of Web 2.0, digital preservation, etc. If I do find myself following links embedded in tweets or enjoying contributions to a twitter discussion I might look at the Twitterer’s blog (if, as is often the case, they have one) and subscribe to it so I can read their ideas in more depth on their blog. And this might then lead to further sharing of ideas and possibly joint work.

But if you don’t tweet or don’t blog then you are likely to be invisible to me.  This, I’m sure, won’t be of concern to many people! But, more generally, won’t a failure to have a presence in the blogosphere, on Twitter and in other social media which are being increasingly used in certain sectors of the research community result in a failure to have one’s ideas being known about and opportunities to engage with others being missed? Speculation on my part, I’ll admit. And there will be a need to gather evidence. So I’ve provided my anecdote.  Anyone had similar experiences?

Not Your Father’s IT Innovation!

Yesterday a leader column in The Guardian suggested that the current global economic crisis is “Not your father’s recession“. Rather than being simply the latest downturn  in a economic cycle which has been with us since 1945 the leader writer feels that this recession is very different from those we (and our parents) have experienced in the past.

On the same day Andy Powell on the eFoundation’s blog invites us to consider The role of universities in a Web 2.0 world? Andy feels that the Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Learner Experience (CLEX)’s report on “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” should have sought to address the question”what is the role for universities in a Web 2.0 world?” rather than “how do universities best use Web 2.0 to enhance their current practice?“

Similarly Andy feels the the recent CILIP2 Open Session missed an opportunity to address the fundamental issue of”What is the role of an organisation like CILIP in a Web 2.0 world?” instead discussing the much safer question of “how should CILIP use Web 2.0 to engage with its members?“.

Andy’s post concludes by suggesting that “if Web 2.0 changes everything, [he] see[s] no reason why that doesn’t apply as much to professional bodies and universities as it does to high street bookshops“. Or to put it another way, it’s not just about sometimes slow-moving institutions eventually accepting the importance of the IT innovations which the early adopters have been talking about – and using – for some time now. Rather we don’t just have to develop the “best practices for institutional engagement (or not) with Web 2.0” which I suggest. This needs to be done (and I’ve very pleased that the CLEX report and the CILIP community seem to have accepted this) – but we also need to look closely at the roles which our institutions have traditionally played and the services they have provided and questions whether these are still needed.

On one level support services in our institutions need to question their traditional roles.  Is there a need for IT Service departments, for example, to continue to provide and host mainstream services such as email. In her blog Chris Sexton, Director of Corporate Information and Computing Services at the University of Sheffield and UCISA chair has described proposals to move its email service for students to Google – and the comments from the users on her blog seems very positive. And how should academic libraries respond to the wide range of information sources of available ‘out there’ . The traditional approach has been to ensure that information literacy provision allows users to be able to differentiate between quality controlled sources of information, such as academic journals, and widely used services such as Wikipedia which don’t provide such managed approaches to quality. But as we have recently discovered that publishers of research journals such as Elsevier publish fake academic publications, it would seem that such traditional notions are already questionable.

Put as well as the provision of services such as email we also need to question whether it is desirable for  institutions to provide email addresses for  staff and students. Since email is used to authenticate registration and subsequent changes for many Web 2.0 services, what will happen when people leave the institution and thus can no longer use their email address? Wouldn’t it be sensible for institutions to advice students on short course and staff on short-term contracts to use an email account which can still be used when they leave if they wish to use Web 2.0 services, whether for social or academic purposes? And if so, how short is a short course? A  diploma, lasting a few months? A 1 year MSc? Or a 3 year undergraduate course?

This is part of a wider discussion about identify in a Web 2.0 world, and the focus of another post on the eFoundations blog. “Identity in a Web 2.0 world is not institution-centric” argues Andy, a view strongly supported by Paul Miller. Joss Winn explores these issues in more depth in a  blog post entitled “The user is in control” in which he describes a blueprint outline which recognises that “University students are at least 18 years old and have spent many years unconsciously accumulating or deliberately developing a digital identity” and will increasingly question and resist the idea that the institution will impose a new digital identity.

What, then, “is the role for universities in a Web 2.0 world?” to revisit Andy’s question? And will a combination of the continuing economic recession, possible implications of global warming and the availability of  Open Educational Resources does the traditional higher education institution have a future?  And if you point out the failure of the UK eUniversity (see The Real Story Behind the Failure of U.K. eUniversity – PDF) to argue for a continuation of the status quo I’ll suggest that that provides a valuable learning experience, illustrating some of the ways approaches  to radical transformation of the sector which we now know to avoid.

Web 2.0 is not just the latest in a series of IT developments (ranging from mainframes, mini-computers, workstations, standalone PCs, PCs on a LAN, PCs with Internet and Web access to today’s mobile devices) which institutions have successfully absorbed and integrated into the mainstream, I feel. It’s not your father’s IT innovations – it’s something much more radical. And if you deny this aren’t you behaving in a similar fashion to the music industry,  which refused to acknowledge that developments such as the Internet, mobile music players  and P2P networks  fundamentally changed how the industry needed to operate?

Or is this a tongue-in-cheek post, which I’ll be happy to distance myself from in a few year’s time? To be honest, I don’t know.  What do you think?

The Launch of the CLEX09 Report

Yesterday morning I wrote a blog post about the report on “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” published by the Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Learner Experience (CLEX).  In the afternoon I went to the Barbican Centre London in order to attend the official launch of this report.  It was good to meet up with Sir David Melville, who chaired the Committee of Inquiry, and Ewan McIntosh, both of whom spoke at the launch event. The two speakers had also spoken at UKOLN’s Institutional Web Management Workshops, incidentally, Sir David in 2003 and Ewan McIntosh at last year’s event. 

I think it is fair to say that the “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” report does not provide any new insights for those who have been actively involved in the Web 2.0 world over the past few years.  What it does provide, however, is senior management endorsement for the work of those of us who have been involved in promoting and exploiting the potential of Web 2.0 and the Social Web within higher education. And the list of recommendations should be closely looked at by policy makers and senior managers as well as those of us who, like me, will be welcoming this report.

I brought along a digital camera (which could also take video recordings) to the meeting and, with permission of the two speakers, recorded their two talks (I also recorded the third speaker, Wes Streeting, President of the NUS but haven’t been able to upload it).

The videos of Sir David Melville (13 mins long) and Ewan McIntosh (16 mins long) have been uploaded to the Vimeo service. It is not possible (I understand) to embed the Vimeo video player in this blog. However clicking on the images below will take you to the Vimeo Web site.

What do you think of their views of the future for Higher Education in a Web 2.0 world?

“Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” Report Published

The CLEX Final Report

The final report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Learner Experience (CLEX) entitled” Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” has just been published.

The report built on work which began last year included a “Report of the review of current and developing international practice in the use of social networking (Web 2.0) in higher education” (available in PDF Format) to which I contributed the section which provided a history of use of Web 2.0 in the UK.

Article In Today’s Education Guardian

The official launch of the CLEX report has been accompanied by an article entitled  ”Time to get with the program” published in today’s Education Guardian. As I mentioned in a blog post on How Is HE Embracing Web 2.0? How Is Web 2.0 Changing HE?” published yesterday I had been interviewed by the author of the article, Anthea Lipsett, last week.

The article in the Guardian begins with a description of a student experience which is at ease with the social web:

The “Google generation” of today’s students has grown up in a digital world. Most are completely au fait with the microblogging site Twitter; they organise their social lives through Facebook and MySpace; 75% of students have a profile on at least one social networking site. And they spend up to four hours a day online.

The article cites the CLEX report ’s conclusions that although UK Universities are doing “pretty well” there are “major issues to address if universities and colleges are to keep up with these changes in student practice and attitude” since “use of Web 2.0 … is far from systematic in universities” and is “driven by enthusiastic individuals who have embraced the opportunities it offers” .

Discussion

The CLEX report is very positive in its views on the potential of Web 2.0 in higher education. The report provides a series of recommendation including, for example, the recommendation that that “JISC continues to develop a research and support programme into the use of Web 2.0 for all aspects of university business“.  

Should this be regarded by higher educational institutions as encouragement to make more systematic use of the Wocial Social Web? After all, today’s Guardian includes, as well as the Education supplement, a University Guide  supplement which contains on the front page an article on “Tweet and lowdown” which describes how “most univerities are so desperate to come across as cool that they’ve joined Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, and are happy to meet you online” and how “a lot of institutions offer free podcasts of lectures and tutorial recordings via their individual websites or Apple’s portal iTunesU“.

Evidence that Universities are successfully embracing Web 2.0 technologies (despite the snide remark about ‘desparation’)?  Or should we be concerned regarding the way in which social networking technologies are being institutionalised to support marketing purposes?

In our contribution to the “Time to get with the program?” article myself and Professor Martin Weller both warned of the dangers of institutions “infiltrating Facebook”. Martin described how “If you ask students: do you want the university to come on Facebook, the answer is no. They don’t want their professor as a friend” and I questioned whether “universities [need] to get involved in … informal learning” which can be supported by social networking environments.

But what if Martin and myself are wrong? After all the CLEX report concluded with a quotation from a student:

I think it’s great to have tutors/university staff on Facebook. After all, it is supposed to be a social community network and I think they [deserve] the right to have their own community or form a network with students (if the students are willing).

The answer to this dilemma should be addressed by another of the recommendations of the CLEX final report: “JISC works with the HE funding bodies and Universities UK to explore issues and practice in the development of new business models that exploit Web 2.0 technologies“.  We haven’t yet identified the best practices for institutional engagement (or not) with Web 2.0. But the report makes it quite clear that we need to be asking these questions.

How Is HE Embracing Web 2.0? How Is Web 2.0 Changing HE?

On Thursday I received a message followed by a subsequent email asking me to contact a journalist at the Guardian newspaper who was writing an article about institutional use of Web 2.0 in higher education. In her email Anthea Lipsett told me that she was writing an article for the Education Guardian about a report on ‘HE in a Web 2.0 World’ due to be published on Tuesday, 12 May 2009. Anthea wanted some background information on whether HE had embraced Web 2.0 technology, how Web 2.0 is changing HE and whether universities keeping pace with the changes and had been given my name as someone to talk to.

A challenge for me, then, to give my thoughts on these questions! My initial response was to post a tweet inviting suggestions from my Twitter followers. I then drafted some notes which on some of the key points which I felt might be useful to raise in the interview. Although I didn’t have an opportunity to mentioned all of these points in the brief interview I felt it might be worth expanding on my notes and sharing them on the blog so that others can see how I feel the higher education sector is responding to and engaging with Web 2.0.

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What is Web 2.0?

If you are writing an article about how Web 2.0 is changing higher education and how higher education is responding to Web 2.0 you first need to clarify what you mean by the term ‘Web 2.0′.

‘Network as a Platform’

Web 2.0 could refer to the concept of ‘network as a platform’. In the past I feel that institutional IT service providers have felt threatened by this notion which, in the UK, seems to imply Thatcherite out-sourcing and privatisation. This doesn’t go down well with the Guardian and Independent readers  you will typically find in the university sector! However back in 2006 at the UCISA management Conference I gave a talk on “IT Services: Help Or Hindrance?” in which I argued there was a need to embrace the mixed economy of in-house and external providers of IT services. I was pleased (and slightly surprised) to discover a willingness to accept such changes – this was a very different response to my “A Controversial Proposal”  talk which I gave to an audience of institutional Web managers back in 2000 which, in retrospect, made similar arguments but at a time in which the underlying technical infrastructure and business models had not been established.

I think now, however, IT services departments are much more comfortable with embracing ’services in the Cloud’. As an example, see the recent blog post on “Google for students” by Chris Sexton, IT Services Director at the University of Sheffield and UCISA Chair in which she described how a “project group agreed to recommend that we outsource our service to Google and implement Google mail and calendar in the first instance – possibly moving to more of the apps later such as Google docs” and then went on to add “first major service we’ve outsourced, but I suspect that over the next few years it won’t be the last“.

Culture of Openness

Web 2.0 also embraces a culture of openness. And this is an area in which the higher education community has taken a high profile in for several years. The research community has been pro-active in promoting open access to research publication, with advocates such as Professor Stevan Harnard playing a prominent role in promoting alternative business models which can enable research publications to be freely available for use by others whilst maintaining editorial and peer reviewing processes which are essential for maintaining the quality of research outputs.

This culture of openness is increasingly being applied in other areas of higher education, such as open educational resources, with the JISC funding an  Open Educational Resources Programme) to expand on the amount of educational content which is available. Similar initiatives are being taken to open access to scientific data as can be seen from the blog posts of open science advocates such as Professor Peter Murray-Rust and Cameron Neylon.

Blogs, Wikis, …

But rather than the more philosophical aspects of Web 2.0, perhaps the issues concern the provision of Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and wikis. The University of Warwick was the first UK university to provide a blog service for its staff and students. And after some initial concerns about how an institution should go about managing the content I suspect we are now finding that IT Services are starting to regard blogs and wikis as fairly mainstream  the higher education sector – that the impression I had after the UKOLN workshop on Exploiting the Potential of Wikis held back in November 2006 and Exploiting the Potential of Blogs and Social Networks held a year later.

Social Networks

I suspect, however, that the main area of interest may be how universities are engaging with the Social Web and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The first example of institutional engagement with such social networking services I was aware of was Edge Hill University, which Alison Wildish (who is now manager of the Web Services team here at the University of Bath) described in a plenary talk on “Let the Students do the Talking…” at the IWMW 2007 event (and note that a video of her talk is available).   I suspect that nowadays institutional marketing departments and alumni offices will be familiar with the potential of social networking services and many will have established a presence in popular service such as Facebook. In addition institutions have also started to make use of Twitter as another channel for engaging with their communities.

Social Networks Beyond Marketing

Of more interest, I feel, is the question of how universities are using social networks to support their teaching and learning activities. And this is probably an area in which there it is more speculative as to is happening beyond the early adopters . I suspect there is also more diversity of opinions on the question of what institutions are seeking to achieve through use of social networks and how institutional policies and decisions should be developed to support such nebulous aims.

If we regard social networks as supporting informal learning it may be questionable as to whether institutions need any formal policies beyond not banning their use.  After all informal learning has always taken place in universities, in bars, coffee rooms, students kitchens, etc. but we haven’t sought to manage the discussions and interactions. Should we seek to do so in online social spaces? And if we try do, isn’t there a danger that student will simply move to other online spaces?

Some Concluding Thoughts

I feel it is important that universities should be pro-active in developing and implementing new media literacy strategies for members of their institutions, including members of staff (academic, senior policy makers, …) as well as students. This should not only cover assessment of information found on the Web but also issues related to creation of content and engagement with communities.

There will be a need to gather evidence as to the effectiveness of informal learning and the effectiveness of use of social networks in more formal contexts. I suspect there will be a need to understand how the effectiveness of social networks differs across different disciplines and also across different groups of users.

And as well as gaining a better understanding of how social networks can support student learning, there is also a need to understand how social networks can enhance the effectiveness of teaching and research staff within our institutions, through, for example, support for communities of practice. This is an area of particular interest to me, with my interests in engaging with and learning from a number of communities related to my professional areas of interest and activities, including standards development, Web accessibility and the broad area of digital library development activities.

That’s my summary of how I feel the higher education sector is embracing Web 2.0. I’d welcome your thoughts, comments and observations.

Lessons Learnt from the Amplification of the CILIP2 Event

Reasons for This Post

At last week’s CILIP2 Open Session both Phil Bradley and myself argued that there was a need for the Library community to actively engage with Web 2.0 tools and even be prepared to make mistakes. Without making mistakes, it will not be possible to innovate, we argued. We also felt that we should be open about our mistakes, in order to learn from them and to help others in the sector from repeating such mistakes.

Such views echo the sentiment expressed by Mia Ridge who, in a blog post about the recent Museums and the Web 2009 conference entitled  “Oh noes, a FAIL! Notes from the unconference session on ‘failure’ at MW2009 ” explained her “motivation in suggesting the ['Failure' unconference] session – intelligent, constructive failure is important. Finding ways to create a space for that conversation isn’t something we do well at the moment“.

This post is my attempt at explaining aspects of the ‘amplification’ of the CILIP2 open session which failed or could have been improved, and to identify ways in which the next attempt at amplifying a physical event to a wider remote audience can be improved. (Note the term amplified conference was coined by Lorcan Demsey Dempsey and a summary is provided on Wikipedia).

Things Which Worked

Before describing areas for improvement it is worth summarising the things that worked!

I was pleased that the pre-event publicity of use of Twitter at the event succeeded in attracting large numbers of participants, with some, I think, being willing to subscribe to Twitter and possibly even install a Twitter client in order to participate on the day itself.

The event organisers played their in supporting the amplification of the event. Caroline Moss-Gibbon, who chaired the event, described the live-blogging at the event and asked the participants physically present at the meeting at CILIP Headquarters to regard any comments they made or questions they asked as being in the public domain. The evnt organisers had also arranged for two official bloggers, who would act as public note-keepers at the event, using both a Twitter channel and a CILIP blog post as a means of keeping the remote audience up-to-date with the talks and discussions.

The Twitterfall client which was suggested as a way in which remote participant could keep up-to-date with Twitter posts containing the ‘cilip2′ tag also seemed to prove popular judging from subsequent comments I read of various blog posts. And the goodwill of software developers – in particular Dave Patten – was appreciated by the CILIP community for his transcript of the tweets and his Wordle visualisation of the content of the tweets.

I was also pleased to have recorded a slidecast of a rehearsal of my talk prior to the event. A couple of people commented that they had listened to my talk prior to the event which enabled them to have a feel for the issues I would be raising in my talk.

Areas For Improvement

There are a number of areas in which I felt improvements could have been made. Most of these will not have been apparent to others and so I could feel safe in keeping them to myself. However sharing the experiences with others will remind me to do better next time and will allow others to make additional suggestions.

Reporting:
After the event it was pointed out to me that the description of ‘official’ Twitterers and bloggers at the event could have been interpretted as a way of ensuring that an official party line was documented which censored any criticisms of CILIP.  As Caroline Moss-Gibbons, chair of the CILIP Council, described in her brief report on the session the reporters ”had full editorial freedom of course, no ‘party line’ to follow“. Although Caroline made this point in her introduction to the session, the remote audience would not necessarily have picked up on this.
Lesson: next time I feel it would be helpful to provide a Web page about the amplification of the event which explictly clarifies the autonomy of the reporters.

Lack of audio/video recordings:
I recorded a video of Phil Bradley’s talk at the event using my Nokia N95 mobile phone – but despite having deleted old videos from the memory card the previous day, the phone ran out of memory after only two minutes.  I subsequently discovered that the phone was storing the video on its built-in memory rather than using the 2 Gb memory card.
Lesson: check configuration options on mobile phone to ensure recordings are being made to correct storage device.

I also brought along a digital camera which could take video recordings (and isn’t limited to the 10 minutes of video footage which my personal camera has). I also brought along a tripod to avoid camera shakes. As my intention was to record my own talk I needed a helper to start the recording. Unfortunately no recording was made, possibly because the camera had switched itself off.
Lesson: I need to remember that people who I ask to use my digital devices are unlikely to be familiar with them and there will be a need to provide some training.

Lack of streaming audio/video:
I brought along my Asus EE PC and intended to try out Skype in order to its potential for allowing a remote user to listen in to the two opening talks (and also possibly record the talks). I also brought along a Polycom Communciator device and tested that it worked correctly as a microphone and speaker. Unfortunately although the devices worked correctly I couldn’t connect to the two new Skype contacts who had expressed interest in listening to the talks.  This may have been due to user interface problems on my Linux-based Asus EEE.
Lesson: I need to authenticate remote users in advance, on user interfaces which I am more familiar with.

How Else Could the Event Amplification Have Been Improved?

What else could have been done to enhance the amplification of the event to the remote audience and to people who may have wished to hear the talks and discussions but did not have networked access at the time of the event?

I am aware that James Clay, e-learning resource manager at Gloucestershire College, has been using Qik at various conferences for some time. I did wonder whether a streaming video service such as Qik might have been used by members of the CILIP2 audience with a suitable mobile phoneand a contract which allowed for data to be transmitted within incurring significant charges.  However I suspect that this service is still being used by the early adopters, such as James, and hasn’t yet caught the attention of the early mainstream user community. Perhaps there’s an opportunity for its use at a forthcoming CILIP event?

But if members of the audience did not have a device and contarct which could be use for video streaming, I suspect many of them did have mobile phones which culd be used for sound recordings. SHould we have encouraged the audience to record the talks, I wonder?  Rather than a single centralised approach, which has a single point of failure (as I’ve described above!) possibly we should be adopting a LORKSS approach (Lots of Recording Keep Safe and Secure). Should we be encouraging others to take recording in order to minimise the risks of failures?

CILIP: More Popular Than Swine Flu!

Background

When Bob McKee, CEO of CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) wrote his blog post on “All of a Twitter” we can safely predict that he  wouldn’t have expect to CILIP to be featured as one of the top topics of discussion on Twitter, at one stage, according to one Twitter trending tools, seemingly being more widely discussed than swine flu.

Bob’s post, which was published back in February, looked at the question of CILIP’s involvement with Twitter. Should a professional organisation such as CILIP make use of Twitter? Bob view, which went beyond discussions of Twitter and addressed the wider use of social networking services hosted outside the institution, was unequivocal: “The simple answer, of course, is no. In terms of “official” activity, cyber life is just like real like – if it happens in a CILIP-sanctioned space, it’s official; if it happens down the pub or in someone else’s space, it isn’t.“

Phil Bradley responded with a blog post with an unequivocal title “CILIP – Epic FAIL“  although the tone of the post was measured

I like Bob – he’s a nice chap and very personable, but I can’t articulate enough how wrong he is on this issue, though I’ll try. He says ‘There’s some twittering at present about whether CILIP has (or should have) any “official” presence on various lists or micro blog sites. Sorry Bob, but we were discussing this on Twitter two weeks ago. The boat has long since left on this one and we’ve moved onto other things related to CILIP now.

and invited CILIP to engage in a wider and more open discussion about how an organisation such as CILIP should be engaging with a Web 2.0 world.

CILIP2 Open Meeting

Phil was pleased that the CILIP Council responded to his post by arranging an open session on how CILIP could make use of Web 2.0 which was held yesterday afternoon (29 April 2009) after the morning’s Council meeting. I too was invited to speak at the meeting and, like Phil, was delighted to see how the Council had embracing a willingness to make use of Web 2.0 by encouraging live Twittering at the event and publicising it to a wider community who were invited to follow the #cilip2 tag on software such as Twitterfall.

The Twitter Channel

It was particularly pleasing to see the extent to which the wider CILIP community and other interested parties who couldn’t attend the meeting engaged with use of Twitter to get a feel for the talks and discussions at the Council meeting and also to raise a much wider set of issues about the role of CILIP. The popularity of the #cilip2 discussions became apparent as the Twitterfall display (which was displayed following the two presentations by myself and Phil) began to include posts from a number of Twitter-trending services – and the inclusion of a number of Twitter spam posts. Incidentally for me the spam provides an indication of how Twitter is now mainstream – and if you feel a service shouldn’t be used if it can attract spam, I assume you’re not using email!

Incidentally if you wish to see examples of the popularity of the Twitter discussions you can view the trends shown on the hashtags and Twitscoop services – although as the event is now over we have probably lost a record of the popularity of the tag.

The Discussions

Dave Pattern, Library systems manager at the University of Huddersfield Library provided a good example of rapid software development when he wrote software to harvest tweets containing the the #cilip2 tag. And not only is a record of the discussions, annotated with the time of posting, now available, a Wordle cloud is also available (and shown below) which provides a visual summary of the topics which were discussed on Twitter.

There have already been a couple of blog posts published about the event which I’ll briefly summarise.

Alison Williams (a remote participant) felt that the Twitter channel was “excellent in that it was discussing how librarians and specifically CILIP (1) could make use of web 2.0 tools, and it was doing it by…. making use of web 2.o tools! What a good idea!” She also joined in the discussions by “suggest[ing] that CILIP might look to the ALA (American Library Association) as a role model“.

Amelia Luzzi appreciated the Twitter channel in her post “Twitter – better than a conference“. She found it useful to be “able to follow the talks at CILIP 2.0, without an expensive trip down to London“. I also found her observation that ” in case you were wondering why video/audio isn’t a better solution – I can discuss what is said with other participants, also in real time: if an interesting comment comes up, the discussion can start amongst us virtual participants in a way that it simply can’t amongst real-life ones. I’ve heard it said, often, that the best bit of a conference is the bit where you end up talking to other participants in the hallway. Following #cilip2 on Twitter has had the feel of that“. That’s an interesting point – live audio and video simply amplifies the one-dimensional publishing aspect of conference whereas successful conferences often provide an environment for two-way(or rather multiple-way) discussions. She concluded “Today, I think I’ve expanded my professional network by about 25%. And, granted, the ties aren’t all that binding – but I now have a way of keeping an eye on what they’re talking about, and engaging them when I feel I have something to add. It’s a great starting point for building a more solid professional relationship“.

Neil Ford on the Random Letters blog also felt that “it was fascinating for me to attend an event like this on Twitter”. In answer to the question as to whether any concrete decisions were made on the day Neil  felt the he “didn’t pick up on any hard action or proposals. I can’t see that any actual decisions were made by the CILIP top brass“. But rather than this being regarded as a criticism Neil realised that the event “was more about CILIP Council *listening* to it’s members. This is something I’ve never heard of before and I really think CILIP Council deserve a big hats-off for hosting the event”.

Carl on the Sinto blog felt that CILIP  ”does appear to have been slow to develop a coherent approach to some of the emerging technologies” but felt there was a need for “the more considered responses that will soon appear in blogs and printed articles“. Carl is concerned that although there are “Web 2 savvy professionals who are part of this debate“  we may find that “there is a larger group of web-sceptics who are excluded“.

Revisiting The Main Themes of the Day

Returning from the remote participants’ views on the day to some of the issues which I (who am not a CILIP members of librarian) picked one on.

CILIP As An Enabler

A view was expressed at the meetingthat , rather than providing a variety of Web 2.0 services on the CILIP Web site, CILIP shouldact as an enabler, perhaps sharing best practices and patterns of usage, aggragating content provided by members (as CILIP already do with CILIP memebr blogs) and providing directories of CILIP member users of various services which can help members to find like-minded collagues more easily on the various social networking services.

Exclusion

The dangers that sections of the CILIP membership ould be marginalised though an ainability to access social networkingservices down to organisational poplicies and firewalls, which Carl referred to, was discussed at the meeting. In my talk I suggested that CILIP should have a role to play in gaining a better understanding of such barriers and to explore ways in which organisational concerns, across the various sectors represented within CILIP, can be addressed. I also pointed out the dangers that CILIP members might feel pressured into using social networking tools in areas which are not appropriate and which do not reflect individual styles of working.

CILIP and Twitter

But what of the question which led to the CILIP2 meeting – should CILIP make use of Twitter? In all of the wider discussions about the role of CILIP we lost sight of that question during the meeting itself. However in the pub afterwards myself, Phil Bradley, Caroline Moss-Gibbon (leader of the CILIP Council) and a few others revisited that question. In my talk I described the risks and opportunities framework which I presented at the recent Museums and the Web 2009 conference. The framework described the need to clarify the purpose of a tool rather than developing policies for the tool itself. I illustrated this point by speculating on whether professional organisations in times gone by debated whether they should use new technologies such as the telephone, with the early adopters pointing out the benefits to the organisations whilst others pointed out the dangers that the technology could be used for social purposes and that employees may use the technology to bring the organisation into disrepute in ways that wouldn’t be possible when the established forms of communications (business letters) has editorial and work flow processes in place to minimise such risks.

My suggestion? CILIP Council should welcome initiatives from CILIP, CILIP branches and CILIP working groups in making use of social networking services such as Twitter in ways in which support their business aims. And rather than developing a policy (it’s too soon, for that, I feel) they should observe patterns of usage which work and share emerging best practices – but also monitor usage patterns which aren’t feel to be working and learn from such experiences.

What Can Web-Based Presentation Tools Offer?

Back at IWMW 2007 Helen Sargan ran a workshop session entitled “Just say No to Powerpoint: Web Alternatives for Slides and Presentations“. As someone who has used PowerPoint extensively since I’ve been at UKOLN and also have an interest in what Web-based alternative can provide I thought I would explore such alternatives.

And as I recently suggested an approach in which  “Critical Friends, Friendly Critics and Hostile Opponents” could either help or hinder a development or evaluation process I’d like to start off by describing the policies, environment, sensitivities and resources issues which I would regard as out-of-scope for such an evaluation, as the main area of interest are the specific issues related to the various Web-based presentations tool. A secondary agenda is to explore the limits of the model I described in my previous post.

But what of the policy issues which scope this evaluation work? I regard this exercise as looking at possible alternatives to PowerPoint as a desktop presentation tools to support mainstream teaching, learning and research activities. In my case this is for exploring ways in which over 10 year’s of PowerPointing can be made more interesting :-) whereas from an institutional perspective this might be to explore possible savings which could be made by replacing PowerPoint. And as my area of interest lies primarily in Web-based services I won’t be looking at desktop alternatives to MS PowerPoint, such as Open Office.

What are the environmental, sensitivities and resourcing issues which I have suggest could be disclosed in order to provide a context in which discussion and debate can be fruitful? Well, this work will be neutral about issues such as open source versus proprietary solutions.  It will also be neutral about the technologies used to provide access to Web-based solutions – so Flash-based solutions can be considered. And the discussions will be framed around a bottom-up approach for solutions which might be considered by the individual or small group or used within the context of an event which invites diversity in how speakers give their presentations. Similarly the issue of whether a presentational tool is an effective way of communicating ideas is out-of-scope.

But what type of tools should I be looking at? I think this should include office-based solutions available in the cloud and Web-based repositories of presentations, such as Slideshare and Slideboom.

Is this a useful approach? And any thoughts on what might be missing?

Sharing the Rehearsal of my Talk at the CILIP 2 Council Meeting

As I described a couple of day’s ago in a blog post on CILIP2.0 – Open Session on CILIP’s use of Web 2.0 myself and Phil Bradley will be giving brief talks about how we feel CILIP should respond to the opportunities and challenges of Web 2.0 at a CILIP Council meeting next Wednesday (29^th April 2009).

I have produced the first draft of my slides and I’ll be chatting to Phil how this may fit in with the approach he will be taking. I have also created a ’slidecast’ of the talk, by recording a rehearsal of the talk and synching the audio with a copy of the slide on Slideshare. This will help Phil to gain a better understanding of what I’ll be saying. But I also feel that their can be benefits to be gained by sharing this pre-release verion with a wider audience.  In suitably-configured browsers the slidecast will be embedded below:

I’m well of of some risks in doing this: I feel slightly self-conscious about listening to the sound of my own voice and towards the end of the talk I found myself forgetting what I was intending to say and start stuttering and repeating myself.  If I felt that as a professional all of my outputs mist be of high quality although I might write a script I would leave the reading of it to a trained actor. But this would undermine the key point in my presentation that information professionals (in particular) should be willing to make use of innovative approaches to one’s work, be prepared to make mistakes and learn from them and be prepared to be open with one’s user community in the early stages of development and not just when a service has been finalised.

Making this particular slidecast available can also provide some specific benefits:

• Users can comment on my talk.
• Users can suggest other relevant resources, either by commenting on this blog post on or Slideshare page or by bookmarking resources on del.icio.us using the same tag.
• Anyone who would like to attend the meeting but can’t make it will get a feel for my contribution.
• If I fail to attend the meeting (I’m ill or First Great Western fails to get my to London on time, for example) my slidecast can be used as a replacement.

But before you start listening to the slidecast (which lasts for about 20 minutes) I should say that the talk contains nothing that I haven’t written about in my blog previously. Indeed the talk is very similar to a talks on Time To Stop Doing and Start Thinking: A Framework For Exploiting Web 2.0 Services and A Risks and Opportunities Framework For Library 2.0 which I gave in the Indianapolis last week.

To summarise the key points.

The talk begins by reviewing examples of Library 2.0 approaches, add the University of Wolverhampton and the National Library of Wales.  A description of various barriers which have been identified at various UKOLN workshop for the cultural heritage sector is given. It is acknowledged that there are  legitimate concerns which need to be addressed such as sustainability, interoperability, staff development, cultural barriers, etc. The talk describes a variety of deployment strategies and outlines a risks and opportunities framework for the deployment of Library 2.0 services. The talk suggests how a ‘Critical Friends’ approach (which I will expand on next week) can be used in conjunction with this framework and help to identify possible problem areas. The need to balances such risks with the possible benefits to be gained and the risks of doing nothing – as well as the risks of doing something similar in-house which fails to meet user’s expectations.

The talk concludes by looking at what a professional organisation such as CILIP should be doing for a young librarian (using Jo Alcock as an example) and suggests that thinking about what might be provided in a ‘CILIP 2.0 Manifesto’ could be helpful in furthering the debate.

Your comments are welcomed!

CILIP2.0 – Open Session on CILIP’s use of Web 2.0

Phil Bradley and myself have been invited to take part in an open session on CILIP’s use of Web 2.0 (CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals is “the leading professional body for librarians, information specialists and knowledge managers“). This event, which is being referred to as CILIP2.0, will take place at CILIP offices, Ridgmount Street, London from 14.30-16.30 on 29^th April 2009.

The information about the event describes how Phil and myself (well-known ‘gurus’) will be “kicking off the Open Session with presentations about what has worked elsewhere, and the types of things CILIP could try out“. The aim of the session is to generate ideas about how the CILIP Council could be using Web 2.0 to engage better with the library and information community.  These ideas will be fed into CILIP’s Communications Framework which is due to be published in the summer.

The Open Forum was set up following a blog post entitled CILIP – Epic FAIL made by Phil Bradley in response to a post entitled All of a Twitter by Bob McKee, CILIP CEO. I’ll not revisit the different visions of the role of a professional organisation such as CILIP in today’s Web 2.0 environment, but will simply say how pleased I am that CILIP have invited Phil and myself to facilitate a discussion for an audience who will be physically present on the day and a remote audience who may follow the tweets and live blog.

Phil Bradley will probably provide his vision in which information professionals are comfortable in making use of a variety of networked tools and services which are available ‘out there’, and don’t restrict themselves to applications which may be managed in-house. And I intend to explore the risks of this way of working and suggest that, rather than seeking to develop a safe, risk-free environment, information professionals do need to engage with the networked environment that exists today and need to recognise that a failure to take risks can result in a failure to innovate.

I’d be interested in the views of reaers of this blog.  What are your views on how information professionals should engage with a Web 2.0 world and how CILIP should respond?

Slideshare? I’m Now Flirting With Slideboom!

You know what it’s like. You’ve been together for some time. And you get on well together. And then something goes wrong. So you start looking for something new. And you start to get excited about the new things on offer. And perhaps you then decide it’s time to move on. Well this is happening to me at the moment, after Slideshare’s April Fool gag caused me to explore alternatives to their service.

I signed up to Slideboom and uploaded my most recent presentation on “A Risks and Opportunities Framework For Archives 2.0“. I have embedded this in my Web page. And I have to say I’m impressed with the features it provides. However rather than describe these features (which are described on the Slideboom Web site) I thought it would be more effective to capture the screen display of my use of the service which is available on YouTube and embedded below:

Now although I like the functionality provided by Slideboom it is even more important than it used to be to consider the sustainability of remote services. And this is where Slideboom’s track record and financial stability is unknown to me.

But such considerations are also true of Slideshare. So I intend to continue to keep a master copy of my PowerPoint slides on the UKOLN file store, whilst using the richly functional and embeddable third party services to act as access points. And it will be useful to gain experiences of a competitor to the market leader in Web 2.0 slide repository services. After all, what would happen if Slideshare’s market lead went to their head and they started to treat their customers in a similar fashion to Microsoft?

Have Slideshare Avoided Their Ratner Moment?

Background

Gerald Ratner was responsible for one of the most famous gaffes in corporate history when “he joked that one of his firm’s products was “total crap”, and boasted that some of its ear rings were “cheaper than a prawn sandwich“.

Did Slideshare come close to a Ratner moment with yesterday’s April Fool gag, I wonder? Yesterday I described how Slideshare had sent out an email entitled “You’re a SlideShare RockStar” which contained spoof statistics on the popularity of uploaded presentations.

The Reactions

Phil Bradley spotted the so-called joke and gave his reasons why he felt this was a “huge mistake” by Slideshare:

1. I don’t appreciate anyone manipulating data on my content. That Slideshare are so relaxed about this, and feel they can do what they like is really sending entirely the wrong message about how they view users and content.
2. Using an April Fool prank to generate comment and visits is dubious at best. If they’d not used the hashtag suggestion I wouldn’t have worried about it, but it’s a deliberate attempt to get publicity.
3. This has lead to a huge spike in traffic to the site. This is the most annoying aspect because the whole POINT of the site is to allow people to get access to slideshows directly from the site. It’s slowed down to a point where it’s entirely unusable. I’m just grateful that I don’t have any need to use it professionally today.
4. There’s already a really big backlash against this prank on Twitter – people who are using the hashtag are looking stupid, which is making them angry. Clicking on a link privately and realising you’ve been caught is one thing – getting them to do it in public is another thing entirely.

Now rather than revisit yesterday’s discussion on Slideshare’s blog on whether the joke was funny or not  I’d like to explore the issue of reputation management. After all, those “po-faced and humourless” Slideshare users are at liberty to migrate to other services such as Slideboom, Authorstream, Sliderocket or 280Slides. And if they feel they have been made to look stupid they may respond in a similar fashion to custmomers who used to shop at Ratner’s.

Reputation Monitoring and Management

In Ratner’s case his speech was picked up by the media, wiped an estimated £500m from the value of the company. Could Slideshare, who Secured $3M for Embeddable Presentations in May 2008, suffer a similar backlash?

In this case, however, I have to admire how quickly staff at Slideshare spotted that, in certain quarters, their joke had misfired and their honesty in their apologies. Rashmi, Slideshare CEO & Cofounder, SlideShare, responded to Phil Bradley’s blog post by saying “My sincere, personal apologies. Its just an April Fool’s prank. I understand why you are upset, however, we did not mean to offend our users who we love. But I can see your perspective“. This comment was repeated on my blog. In addition Jonathon Boutelle, Slideshare co-founder added “Really sorry if we offended you. The prank was my idea, and I take full responsibility. There’s a lot of pressure to get April fools day right (sounds bizarre but is true), and it looks like we got it way wrong.” with an additional lengthy apology coming from Daniel in Slideshare’s marketing department.

In his blog post about this incident Phil Bradley commented that “I’m already seeing a lot of tweets from people saying that they’re annoyed and unhappy” and went on to provide a link to a list of 25 alternatives to Slideshare. Providing a well-read and well-respected blogger such as Phil with an opportunity to comment on rivals to Slideshare shows how inappropriate April Fool gags can go wrong.

Personally, though, I’m still a fan of Slideshare (although yesterday’s incident did cause me to sign up to Slideboom – and I’m impressed with my initial experience). And I admire the way they have responded. I’d go along with the comment from Steve Ellwood who said “kudos to the guys from slideshare for a clear explanation and what appears to be a genuine apology“.

And to be honest, this probably wasn’t a Ratner moment. It was just a bit of April fool’s fun, which only sad humourless people failed to get. Although, of course, Garland Ratner was also just having a bit of fun – although for Gerald Ratner  “It still hurts 16 years on“.