Online Information 2009

I summarised my thoughts of the Online Information 2009 conference in a tweet:

Back home after gr8t #online09 Thoughts: #semanticweb was the highlight & relevant for early mainstream; #socialweb now embedded.

This resonated with Andrew Spong who responded:

Best review u’ll c: RT @briankelly: #online09 Thoughts: #semanticweb was highlight & relevant for early mainstream; #socialweb now embedded.

On reflection, however, if I hadn’t been so tired when writing that tweet last night my summary would have been:

Thoughts: #semanticweb was the highlight & relevant for early mainstream; #socialweb now accepted.

Semantic Web: Time for the Early Mainstream Adopters to Engage

The buzz at the conference clearly focussed on the Semantic Web. The conference’s opening keynote was delivered by Dame Wendy Hall and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, both highly regarded researchers at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton whose long standing and influential involvement which dates back to the early days of the Web continues to the present, as can be seen from the recent meeting of Professor Nigel Shadbolt  and Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Gordon Brown, in which “Mr Berners-Lee and Mr Shadbolt presented an update to Cabinet on their work advising the Government on how to make data more accessible to the public“.

The opening plenary provided a high level context to the relevance of the Semantic Web to information professionals. Over the 3 days of the conference the main auditorium featured a series of further talks  focussed on a variety of aspects of the Semantic Web, including thoughts on how the potential of the Semantic Web may be realised, its use in Government, case studies of uses of Semantic Web applications in commerce and the public sector and discussions of standards and metadata.

I’ll not attempt to summarise any of the talks but if you do want to find out more details of the talks and people’s thoughts on the talks I suggest you visit the Online Information 2009 Conference Web site or search for the event’s hashtag: #online09 (note the tweets have also been archived on Twapperkeeper). I’d also welcome links to relevant blog posts to be added as a comment to this post.

Social Web: Now Accepted by the Mainstream

I gave a talk on “Building on Use of Personal Web 2.0 Technologies” at the conference and also chaired the session on “Evaluating, recommending and justifying 2.0 tools“. As I said when I introduced the session, the fact that the Social Web sessions are not being held in the main auditorium is indicative that the Social Web is no longer the exciting new concept which it was a few years ago. But it has also turned out not be be the ‘fad’ which the sceptics predicted; rather it is now widely (but not universally) accepted by many public sector and commercial organisations. The “Social Web: Transforming The Workplace” sessions which, as with the “Semantic Web Coming of Age” sessions ran throughout the conference provided additional advocacy work illustrating how Social Web tools , such as blogs and Twitter, are being incorporated into mainstream working practices and are being shown to provide tangible benefits. The maturity of the discussions about the Social Web could be seen by the willingness to acknowledge limitations (Twitter, for example, may avoid the information overload which email causes, but can bring new problems and concerns). In my talk I mentioned potential risks associated with use of the Social Web, this time focusing on the use of personal tools to support institutional activities – a subject I’ll revisit in another post.

Information Professionals Delivering and Demonstrating Value

The third conference theme was “Information Professionals Delivering and Demonstrating Value“. The title of Mary Ellen Bates’ talk provides a blunter summary of an additional undercurrent to the conference: “Living Large in Lean Times: Adding Value While Cutting Costs“. The question of “how do we engage in such innovation when public sector funding is likely to decline” underpinned the thinking of many delegates form public sector organisations, I suspect, whilst the views of those from the commercial sector was probably summarised by the tweet I spotted which said “How do we monetise the Semantic Web?“

Conclusions

I found this year’s conference really useful, with lots of value discussions and chats taking place. As well as gaining an awareness of the importance of how the three conference themes are being perceived by the information professions internationally an additional personal highlight for me was seeing Dr Hazel Hall’s look of astonishment and delight when it was announced that she was the Information Professional of the Year. I met Hazel, the director of the Centre for Social Informatics, Edinburgh Napier University and the executive secretary, Library and Information Science Coalition, on the train from London to Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago, after I tweeted that I was on the train and received a response saying “Me too, shall we meet”. We then had a great chat and the four hour journey to Edinburgh passed very quickly.  A great conference all around, I feel.

Background

On Saturday morning I received a number of Twitter messages informing me that my Twitter account had been hacked, with a number of spam messages being sent from my account. The message (which I deleted as soon as I spotted it) read:

see if your iq is higher than mine. take the iq quiz here: {URL removed}

As can be seen from a Google search this spam message is to be found on many Twitter accounts.

Blog posts entitled “WARNING: New Twitter DM Spam Attack” and “IQ Quiz Mobile Scam Hits Twitter” provide further details about this spam attack.  I have followed the advice provided in these posts and have changed my Twitter password. This advice was also suggested in tweets from @karenblakeman and @joecar who notified me of the problem as soon as they spotted it.  But as I have previously suggested that it can be more effective to learn from problems rather than successes I feel I should explore the possible causes of the spam emanating from my Twitter account.

Using Third Party Twitter Services

The obvious suspect will be subscribing to a third party service using my Twitter username and password. “You shouldn’t divulge your Twitter username and password to other services” might be the obvious lesson to be learnt. And yet part of Twitter’s success is due to the way it has provided APIs which enable a thriving ecosystem to develop applications which enrich the core Twitter experience. Accessible Twitter, for example, provides an accessible Twitter client which is designed for use with assistive technologies. And to use the service you need to divulge your Twitter username and password to the service.

OAuth

Ideally such services would support OAuth which, as described in Wikipedia “is an open protocol that allows users to share their private resources (e.g. photos, videos, contact lists) stored on one site with another site without having to hand out their username and password“. I’ve noticed a number of tweets over the last couple of days which have been generated by the Tweetcloud service, which provides an example of a service which you authenticate to using OAuth.But what do you do if OAuth isn’t supported? Over time, as more services start to use OAuth, this probably won’t be an issue.  Until then, however, I think there is a need to acknowledge that people will use their Twitter credentials with other services and, as is likely to be the case with Accessible Twitter, users will benefit from their use of the service and the service will manage the third party’s username and password as it would its own. But when accessing such services there will be a need to consider the risks – your account could, potentially, be compromised and you could find yourself apparently spamming your followers.

It Was Phishing!

Chris Sexton was another victim of the Twitter spam. And as she described in a post entitled “Gone Phishing” the problems was actually due to “a very straightforward phishing scam“. It seems that we may have followed a link which took us to a spoof Twitter login page and this was how our password were stolen. Further details are given in a post on “How to prevent your Twitter account from being hacked!“.

Lessons

As Chris described: “I use tabs in my browser and have lots open at once, and sometime in the next few minutes went to one which looked like a Twitter log in screen – so I typed in my user name and password. Duh.” Indeed. And like Chris I have multiple tabs open and use multiple devices. We’ve both learnt a lesson of the dangers of too much multi-tasking!

But Let’s Not Forget Other Risks

This episode may have proved helpful in providing a reminder of the dangers of phishing sites – and I hope this post proves helpful to other Twitter users. But there are additional risks to be aware of. For example your Twitter account could be compromised if you lose you mobile phone, or leave it unattended. And, as we have seen with email spam, potentially posts could be spoofed so they appear to have been sent from your account.  So there’s also a need for one’s followers to be aware that Twitter posts may not have been sent by the owner of the account.

I’ve received a number of emails recently from people who wish to make use of Twitter to support an event.  Rather than sending an individual reply I thought I’d publish my suggestions here and then send a link to this post.  This open approach will allow others to give additional thoughts or comment on my suggestions.

My suggestions:

Agree an event hashtag and publicise it:
As described in a blog post entitled Twitter Event Hashtagging Strategies you should first agree on a tag (known in Twitter as a hashtag as the tag is prefixed with a ‘#’) for the event. This should ideally be short (Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters) and memorable. For an annual event the year (either 2009 or 09) is often appended to a short code for the event (such as readeast09 or  iwmw2009). Note that it is advisable to avoid non-alpha-numeric characters if hashtags.

Note that you should agree on the hashtag well in advance of the event and promote it widely. This will ensure that alternative hashtags aren’t used and will allow the hashtag to be used in Twitter posts in advance of the event (e.g. when event organisers announce a call for papers or when attendees share with others their intention to attend the event).

Have an event Twitter account:
Although not essential, event organisers may wish to create a Twitter account to support the event.  UKOLN’s IWMW (Institutional Web Management Workshop) event has made use of the ‘iwmw’ Twitter account for the past two years. We use this as an official channel for information about the event: announcements of calls for talks, opening of bookings, etc. It can also be used to provide announcement of changes or unexpected events (for example, last year we used Twitter to report that a set of keys had been found).  Use of Twitter provides benefits over email, as users can choose to opt-in to Twitter and Twitter is more easily integrated with mobile phones.  Note that it might also be helpful to provide a brief summary of the intended use of Twitter, such as the guidelines and policy developed for the IWMW event.

Have an event liveblog account:
Again although not essential you may chose to have a Twitter account dedicated to summarising the talks.  This may be particularly useful if you are providing a live video stream of talks at the event, as it will ensure there is an official channel for supporting the video stream. The iwmwlive Twitter account was used for this purpose at the IWMW 2009 event (the live suffix is gaining some popularity for use in live blogging at events).

Archive the event tweets:
You may find it useful to keep a record of the Twitter posts (tweets) associated with an event. A blog post entitled  I Wonder What They Thought About My Session? describes how this can help to provide feedback on the speaker’s talks or a more general analysis of the Twitter stream for an event might provide valuable feedback. Example of tools which can be used to keep an archive of an event’s Twitter stream is described in a summary of the IWMW 2009 event.

Consider use of a Twitter wall:
You may wish to consider use of a “Twitter wall”: a live public display of Twitter posts for an event. A blog post entitled “(TwitterFall) You’re My Wonder Wall” summarises use of the TwitterFall software at the Museums and the Web 2009 conference and a post on “The Back Channels for the Science Online 2009 Conference” provides statistical evidence on use of a conference back channel. However Danah Boyd’s experience at the Web 2.0 expo illustrates potential dangers in a public display of twitter posts at a conference. In my experience a Twitter wall has been useful at the start and end of events, as it can provide a means for participants to introduce themselves and share their thoughts on the event in a public forum. However I would be inclined to avoid forcing a public display of tweets without getting the agreement of the speakers and without considering the implications of how it might be misused.

As an example of how the forthcoming DCC (Digital Curation Centre) conference is advertising its event amplification you can read the blog post on “DCC 2009 Amplified!“. Do others, with experiences of use af Twitter at events, have any comments on my suggestions or any additional suggestions to make?

This morning, as normal, I switched on my iPod Touch just after getting out of bed and downloaded tweets posted overnight. And via a tweet from Jonathan O’Donnell I discovered that during the night I had given the opening keynote talk of the day at the OZeWAI at OZCHI 2009 conference. Yes, I had given a talk at a conference held in Australia before breakfast!

As I pointed out after spotting this: “A few hours ago I gave a keynote talk at the OzeWAI conf in Australia. I was asleep at the time! #a11y http://bit.ly/6Z8AN1“. Of course this provided the opportunity for the response “so were the audience! :-)“

Later on in the day, after returning from a meeting in Birmingham I came across a tweet from Joss Winn: “42% of US data centres expect to run out of electricity by 2012. 39% will exceed cooling capacity within that period http://j.mp/8UMPXS” which highlighted a comment from a newly-published report on “Low carbon computing: a view to 2050 and beyond” by Paul Anderson, Gaynor Backhouse, Daniel Curtis, Simon Redding, David Wallom which is available from the JISC Web site.

At the recent CETIS 2009 conference Joss told me of his interests in environmental issues and his heartfelt concerns of the needs to reduce energy usage. On his blog Joss recently asked “What will Higher Education look like in a 2050 -80% +2c 450ppm world?“.

I wonder if sometime in the near future travelling to another country to deliver a talk at a conference will be regarded in the same way that lighting a cigarette in the lecture theatre would be – something that is just not done.

And as well as recycling paper will we recycle our talks? The talk which was used at today’s OzeWAI conference was a slidecast (PowerPoint slides with audio hosted on Slideshare) of a rehearsal of a talk entitled “From Web Accessibility To Web Adaptability” which I presented recently at the RNIB’s Techshare conference (and is embedded below).

Is this approach likely to become more prevalent, I wonder? And if so, what are the best practices which should be adopted – and what are the mistakes to be avoided?

A the recent CETIS 2009 conference I attended a session on “Universities and Colleges in the Giant Global Graph” facilitated by Adam Cooper. There was a feeling that the initial discussions had perhaps focussed too much on detailed technical aspects about Linked Data, and had failed to address the interests of the senior managers present, who were more interested in what Linked Data could do, rather than whether, for example, RDF should be a mandatory requirement of a Linked Data service.

After the coffee break there was a discussion of ways in which Linked Data could be used in an educational context. One suggestion I made was that as DBpedia (an RDF representation of the content of Wikipedia) provides access to a large amount of Linked Data we should be exploring ways in which we can make use of DBpedia to provide examples of what Linked Data can provide. After all if the data is available shouldn’t we be using it to support advocacy work rather than trying to seek funding to create Linked Data resources?

I was told that DBpedia provides access to structured text boxes in Wikipedia entries, such as the factual entries for Universities (as illustrated).

Could, I wonder, this information be used to demonstrate how such Web pages can be processed as entries in a database rather than just text to be displayed for reading?

So I started experimenting with the DBpedia Faceted Browser.

In the search box I typed “University” and found there were 9,490 entries. After selecting this search option I was then presented with a number of pre-programmed searches such as Country (193 entries for the UK) and City (60 entries for London), I could also search for universities which were established in a particular year (or range).

Searching for universities founded in 1966 I found there were 107 results, including the University of Bath, as shown below.

Can we do more, I wonder, with the RDF data which is already available in DBpedia?

• Can we use this example to demonstrate the importance of data as opposed to a HTML representation of data designed for viewing?
• Can we develop of queries which people may find useful?
• Can we think of data about institutions which could be stored in Wikipedia to allow further queries to be answered?

I also wonder whether it would be possible to go beyond running queries based on the content of the University entries in Wikipedia and explore related pages.

An opportunity for experimentation, perhaps?

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was via a referrer link on a post on the Open Culture blog that I came across the Topsy service (isn’t serendipity wonderful). This service describes itself as “A search engine powered by tweets“.

Here’s an illustration of the service, using a search for ‘JISC’.

Of course the first thing you are often tempted to do when you see a search box is to type in something of interest to yourself and, if the service seems of interest, you might also search for information about one’s peers. So here’s a summary of my findings.

I believe the information is based on the search string, either as text or as part of a URL in a link (following expansion of a shortened link).  Note, by the way, that as the first set of results for ‘EDINA’ refer to a place in the US rather than the JISC-funded service, the findings for EDINA have been discounted.

This time using the MIMAS service as an example I have explored what additional information  the service can provide. A screen shot of information on tweets which provide a link to the MIMAS home page is illustrated.

It seems that the relaunched MIMAS Web site was mentioned on Twitter, not only by MIMAS staff but also by ‘influential’ Twitterers such as @branwenhide .

The W4A 2010 conference has announced its call for papers. The theme for next year’s event, which will be held in Raleigh, USA on 26-27 May, is “Developing Regions: Common Goals, Common Problems?“.

The context to the conference is described by the organisers:

However, this expansion [the revolution in the information society]  faces unprecedented accessibility challenges. Even the word “accessibility” needs a new definition for people in the developing regions. How can someone who is illiterate or barely literate access the Web? In some cases, a language may not even have a written form. The affordability of the technology is also a challenge, while access is constrained by low computational power, limited bandwidth, compact keyboards, tiny screens, and even by the lack of electric power. All of these constraints compound the problems of access and inclusion.

How will the research community respond to the theme: Developing Regions: Common Goals, Common Problems? My fear is that we will see papers which describe either a failure of WCAG guidelines to be implemented to any significant approach (with a call for greater advocacy) or research-based solutions which are unlikely to have any significant impact. I’m basing these speculations on my involvement in previous W4A conferences – indeed I can recall asking one presenter who described  an assistive technology solution which had been developed for the FireFox browser whether he felt the tool was likely to be used to any significant extent.   Afterwards I was approached by two participants who worked for public sector organisation in New Zealand who felt that I raised a very pertinent question – especially as access to their service (I think it was the tax office) by FireFox users was close to zero.

Now it may be felt that deployment issues aren’t relevant for a research conference. But if the topic is “Developing Regions: Common Goals, Common Problems?” then surely it is imperative that achievable solutions to the (possibly) common problems are addressed.

I would also hope that the WAI model is not unquestionably accepted as a solution to what problems are being identified.  As I’ve described in several papers (and discussed in several blog posts)  although the WAI approach based on guidelines for Web Content. Authoring Tools and User Agents may provide a useful managerial tool for organising WAI work activities, this approach does not necessarily provide a suitable solution for the deployment of richly accessible services in many use cases.  Previously myself and my co-authors have described approaches for enhancing accessibility in areas such as accessing to e-learning and cultural resources and addressing accessibility when limited budgets are available (the WAI guidelines seem to provide no advice on how to approach this challenge which is likely to affect many organisations – with the default approach being taken in public sector organisations being one should not provide a Web-based service if it can’t be made accessible to everyone).

What new challenges will be faced  by people in developing countries, I wonder? As well as the expected resourcing issues I suspect there will be differing priorities given as well as differing definitions of disabilities.   Will the Web adaptability framework we described in our most recent paper provide the flexible needed to encompass the needs of developing countries? I don’t know – but I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has an interest in this area who might be willing to contribute to a paper for W4A 2010.

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?

How long might it take to influence a national service?And what approaches would you take if you wished to do this?  Well let me give an example of how Twitter can be used.

On Thursday 5 November 2009 Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) asked Joy Palmer a question about the RSS feeds provided by the COPAC service:

@joypalmer while you’re there ;-), any idea why copac rss results list only a fraction of the html results?

Joy, manager of the JISC-funded COPAC service, responded:

@psychemedia had to check on that one! rss only displays new items for that search (2 weeks).http://copac.ac.uk/faq/#rss

to which Tony asked for the reasons for the policy:

@joypalmer What is reason for that policy? is there a way of getting all books in the feed, other than by scraping?

Joy asked for examples of what was needed:

@psychemedia curious to know why wld you want all of them? i.e. what use case are you thinking? tis something we cld address if strong case

I spotted this discussion and contributed with an example of why I feel that RSS should be used for much more than just news alerts:

@joypalmer For me RSS is useful as a generic syndication format & not just for alerting. e.g. see http://bit.ly/XhWaw

Success:

@psychemedia @briankelly Sold. we’re moving to new hardware right now. Will add to the to-do list for Jan.

A nice example providing evidence of  how Twitter can provide benefits in the workplace.  But as well as ensuring that a richer set of feeds will be developed for reuse by third party developers I thought this example was also interesting in showing that despite the advocacy for service to provide RSS, there’s still not a widespread understanding of the reasons why a comprehensive set of RSS feeds are needed.  Is this, I wonder, due to the fans of RSS simply pushing for deployment of RSS but failing to make the case for how RSS should be used?

It was while I was waiting for the bus home last night and skimming though the afternoon’s tweets that I noticed here had been a lot of activity around Lord Mandelson’s announcement of a major modernisation of England’s degree system. Alan Cann’s tweet, in particular, caught my eye:

RT @1994group Not all unis are the same – UK cannot sustain 140 unis & expect them all to succeed at the same level in the same tasks.

What? Was this an official announcement that  140 Universities aren’t sustainable?  Will mine be one to go?  Following links through to the 1994 Group statement which “welcomes Government’s Higher Education Framework” I discovered that this wasn’t a sensationalist headline or a result of a truncated Twitter summary. No, as  the statement said:

“Not all universities are the same – the UK cannot sustain 140 full service universities and expect them all to succeed at the same level in the same tasks. Diversity and differentiation of task and mission underpins the excellence of the UK HE system.”

Conditioned as I am to reading gloomy predictions of the future in the public sector  I misinterpreted the clause “the UK cannot sustain 140 full service universities“. The statement would probably have been less open to misinterpretation if it had simply said “the UK cannot expect all 140 universities to succeed at the same level in the same tasks. Diversity and differentiation of task and mission underpins the excellence of the UK HE system.”  I would endorse this view.

But if universities aren’t expected to carry out the same range of tasks, what commonalities should there be? After all, if the institutions have little in common, what is the point of sectoral agencies such as HEFCE and JISC? Clearly there are many areas in which the sector benefits from sector-wide funding and policies, many of which are outside the scope of this blog. But I was particularly stuck by the comment that

“The 1994 Group has consistently called for more transparent and accurate information around the student experience to be provided. There is a need across the sector for a wider availability of data and information to better inform the decisions of applicants at all levels, and to help HEIs identify problem areas and work to enhance aspects of the student experience“.

Ah! Is this open data we are talking about? Is this about allowing others to access, reuse and interpret our data?  This is an area in the research community, with passionate advocates such as Professor Murray-Rust, have been arguing for opening up our research data. We have also recently seen the benefits to be gained by providing access to library circulation data, encouraged by JISC funding of the MOSAIC project (Making our shared activity information count). And of course we will all be aware of the significant work being carried out across the JISC community in the areas of open access and open educational resources.

And yet, despite such high profile activities in exploiting the benefits of openness we still see arguments being made which appear to stifle further initiatives in this area. Back in 2004 I encouraged IT Services to set a leading role in embracing openness: “Let’s Free IT Support Materials!” – but in revisiting that suggestion recently I see responses such as there is “no culture in UK HE of sharing material like this” and “concern[s] over … ownership“.

But if IT support staff seem reluctant to engage in sharing support materials (and I should add that I am also unaware of similar initiatives in the Library sector) perhaps the drive should come from those working in MIS departments.  After all they will manage the large databases  which could be opened up. And the MOSAIC project has experiences in how data can be anonymised to avoid the understandable concerns regarding privacy and data protection.

Are any institutions opening up access to such data? Although I appreciate that the 1994 Group’s statement that “There is a need across the sector for a wider availability of data and information to better inform the decisions of applicants at all levels” could just be a call for more funding or for better access to data from government agencies (OS maps, perhaps?).  But if you work at one of the 1994 Group institutions (University of Bath, Birkbeck University of London, Durham University, University of East Anglia, University of Essex, University of Exeter, Goldsmiths University of London, Institute of Education University of London, Royal Holloway University of London, Lancaster University, University of Leicester, Loughborough University, Queen Mary University of London, University of Reading, University of St Andrews, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of Surrey, University of Sussex or the University of York) mightn’t this provide an opportunity to initiate discussions about opening up institutional data?

I have been invited by the JISC-funded Edspace project, based at the University of Southampton to give a talk at an event on “Traditional educational repositories v. Web 2.0 resource sharing” to be held on Wednesday 4 November 2009. I have been asked speak on “the future for educational resources and services on the Web” – a rather grandiose topic, I think! I’ve entitled the talk “The Future for Educational Resource Repositories and Services in a Web 2.0 World” as its the Web 2.0 aspect I feel is important (and reflects my area of expertise – I don’t claim to have anything particularly significant to say on the repository side of things).

I’ll be saying that many of the technical aspects of Web 2.0 are now mainstream – and indeed the Edspace’s Edshare service provides RSS feeds, tag clouds, embed functionality and ‘cool URIs’.

But the term Web 2.0 also  covers the network as the platform and a culture of openness. The issue of openness of educational resources is being addressed in, for example, the JISC OER programme and although I personally seek to ensure that my content (such as blog posts, slides and papers) are available under a Creative Commons licence I know that there are added complexities in the area of educational resources – so I’ll not focus on the openness issue.

Instead I’ll raise the question of the network as the platform in the context of the futures for educational resource repositories.  I’ll suggest that as experts predict further cuts in the public sector, including higher education, wouldn’t it be appropriate for our repository services to be hosted in the cloud?  And the concerns which tend to be raised (sustainability, reliability, legal issues, etc.) are implementation details which do need to be addressed – but these aren’t the important policy issues.

The slides I’ll be using are available on Slideshare (in the Cloud(!) although a master copy is also held locally) and is embedded below.

Over the weekend we’ve been hearing about the squabbles between the Government and the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Professor David Nutt, chairman of the Advisory Council, argued that cannabis was less harmful than alcohol and tobacco and that it was upgraded by the Government to Class B against the council’s advice – for political reasons. In response, as described on the BCC News, the Home Secretary “Johnson defends drugs row sacking“  saying that Professor David Nutt went against a long established principle by straying into politics.

An example of a political expediency taking precedence over evidence, surely? After all, we can predict the headlines in papers such as the Daily Mail if the Advisory Council’s recommendations had been accepted by the government. 

But if we feel that evidence and the need to acknowledge the accompanying complexities should outweigh an approach based on simple slogans would such an approach also be used in the context of IT development work? 

This thought came to me earlier today after reading a tweet from Wilbert Kraan which stated

“RT @PeterMcAllister: EU wants to get rid of open standards: http://is.gd/4KMUi (via @brenno) Leaked draft: http://bit.ly/2tTN7X #EUopenS“

The accompanying blog post , headlined “EC wil af van open standaarden“ begins

“De Europese Commissie schrapt in stilte open standaarden voor interoperabiliteit. Het draait nog slechts om ‘open specificaties’, waarbij patenten en betaalde licenties geen taboe meer zijn.”

Friends on Twitter have responded to my request for a translation and suggest that the post on”The European Commission silently scraps interoperability standards” begins with the view that:

“The EU has quietly changed its view on open standards and no longer sees patents and paid licensing as taboos”

The EU has changed its mind on open standards?  That sound intriguing! So I’ve skimmed though the ”European Interoperability Framework for European Public Services (version 2.0)“  document (PDF file) – which, I should add, is clearly labelled as a work in progress.

This report is of interest to me as I recently gave a talk at the ILI 2009 conference entitled “Standards Are Like Sausages: Exploiting the Potential of Open Standards“.  In the talk I described how my early work in promoting open standards (which date back to my contributions to the eLib Standards document back in 1995) can, in retrospect, be seen to be naive. Over the years I have found myself recommending open standards, especially those developed by the W3C, which have failed to gain significant acceptance in the market place. And, just as, the Daily Mail knows it is safe to promote a zero tolerance approach to drugs to its core audience, I was also aware that promoting open standards is a safe thing to do in a public sector IT development context.  But over the years I have begun to realise that such recommendations need to be informed by evidence – and if the evidence is lacking there may be a need for a more refined approach, rather than a continuation of the “One final push” approach. 

These views also apply in the context of Web accessibility. I have argued for several years that an approach based solely on technical conformance with a set of accessibility standards, which fails to acknowledge the diversity of use cases, definitions of accessibility, limitations of relevant tools available in the market place and the resource implications of conforming with such flawed approaches, is the wrong approach to take.

In light of this I was very interested in what the EU’s draft document on the European Interoperability Framework for European Public Services had to say.

What did I find in this document about the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) which aims to promote and support the delivery:

1.5.1 The Political and Historical Context of Interoperability in the EU:: I welcome the section which acknowledges that political and historical issues have a significant role to play in enhancing the delivery of interoperable services.  

2.2 Underlying Principle 1: Subsidiarity and Proportionality. This section goes on to add that “The subsidiarity principle implies that EU decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen. In other words, the Union does not take action unless EU action is more effective than action taken at national, regional or local level“. It the context of IT services, I see this as endorsing a user-focussed approach to development work, rather than the centralised imposition of solutions. Section 2.3 Underlying Principle 2: User Centricity reinforces this approach.

2.4 Underlying Principle 3: Inclusion and Accessibility. This section goes on to add that “Inclusion aims to take full advantage of opportunities offered by new technologies to overcome social and economic disadvantages and exclusion. Accessibility aims at ensuring people with disabilities and the elderly access to public services so they can experience the same service levels as all other citizens.“

We then read that “Inclusion and accessibility usually encompass multichannel delivery. Traditional service delivery channels may need to co-exist with new channels established using technology, giving citizens a choice of access.” Hurray – we’re moving away from the WAI perspective that suggests that all Web resources must be universally accessible to all, to an inclusive approach which endorses a diversity of delivery channels!

2.10 Underlying Principle 9: Openness. This section goes on to add that “openness is the willingness of persons, organisations or other members of a community of interest to share knowledge and to stimulate debate within that community of interest, having as ultimate goal the advancement of knowledge and the use thereof to solve relevant problems. In that sense, openness leads to considerable gains in efficiency.” I’m pleased to see this emphasis on the benefits of openness of content and engagement endorsed in the document.

This section than states that:

Interoperability involves the sharing of information and knowledge between organisations, hence implies a certain degree of openness. There are varying degrees of openness.

Specifications, software and software development methods that promote collaboration and the results of which can freely be accessed, reused and shared are considered open and lie at one end of the spectrum while non-documented, proprietary specifications, proprietary software and the reluctance or resistance to reuse solutions, i.e. the “not invented here” syndrome, lie at the other end.

The spectrum of approaches that lies between these two extremes can be called the openness continuum.

We are seeing an appreciation of complexities and a “spectrum of approaches [to openness]” rather than a binary division which is promoted by hardliners.

2.12 Underlying Principle 11: Technological Neutrality and Adaptability. This principle leads to “Recommendation 7. Public administration should not impose any specific technological solution on citizens, businesses and other administrations wh n establishing European Public Services.” Having acknowledged the needs to be user-centric and to encourage openness, whilst recognised that there may be a spectrum of approaches which need to be taken, the document spells out the implications that specific technical solutions should not be imposed.

Chapter 4 of the document introduces four Interoperability Levels, as illustrated.

Although not depicted in the diagram for me this indicates the team for the technical discussions and decisions about interoperability need to be formed within the context of political, legal, organisation, and semantic considerations. Surely self-evident when stated like this, but not when we hear mantras such as “interoperability through open standards” being promoted at a policy level which can lead to discussions taking place in which other considerations can become marginalised.

Has the  ”EU quietly changed its view on open standards and no longer sees patents and paid licensing as taboos“. Or might we suggest that the “The EU is now taking a pragmatic approach to the relevance of standards in ICT development. It now feels that the technical considerations need to be placed in a wider context“?

The UK Web Focus blog was launched on 1^st November 2006.  A year ago I summarised how the blog had developed in its first two years. In this anniversary post I will document some statistics (so I have a record of the current status) and  briefly reflect on the content of the blog and how the way I use the blog has developed over time.

Since the blog was launched I have published 630 posts, an average of  210 per year (4  per week). There have been 2,814 comments published (and a very large number of spam comments blocked by Akismet – currently reported as 146,475 spam comments but as I reported in June 2008 that there were  A Quarter of a Million [spam comments] and Counting these figures are misleading (for some reason Akismet reset the count to zero at some point).

As I did last year, I have created a PDF file of the posts in order to provide an indication of the total number of pages I’ve written.  To date it seems I’ve written 620 pages (although note that this includes images which are displayed at full size in the PDF – with the images displayed at the correct size the PDF file comes to 450 pages)  and over 328,000 words. A typical blog post is therefore about 2/3rd of a page long or about  500 words.  Note that access to the PDF resource is available on Slideshare and is embedded at the bottom of this post.

When I  set up the blog I did wonder whether it would be sustainable, how I would find the time to write and what I would write about. I also thought about the issues of publishing without any the support of any editorial processes to advise on both the quality and writing style and the appropriateness of the content.

I discovered that I have writing blog posts enjoyable, useful and need not take too much time to write.  How useful the posts are for readers is something I’ll not address in this post!

Over the three years I have found that I am using this blog as my open notebook, as a means of writing down ideas and thoughts which otherwise I may forget about. These ideas may be incorporated in my other work activities such as my presentations, publications and papers.

Over the past year of so I have also contributed to a number of additional blogs which provide more focussed  dissemination channels including the JISC PoWR blog, the IWMW 2009 blog and UKOLN’s Cultural Heritage blog.

I am now finding that, with over 600 posts published on the UK Web Focus blog, I can’t recall all of the things I have written about! As the built-in search engine for the blog isn’t great  I am wondering whether I should be making use of some additional tool in order to find content on my blog.  I guess my problem isn’t ‘discovery to delivery’ but discovery of content which is already available at a known location.  Any suggestions?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Might this have an element of truth?

WordPress, in a post somewhat confusing entitled “The Hero Is In Your Pocket“,  have recently announced that they have “launch[ed] a couple of mobile themes that will automatically be displayed when your blog is accessed with a compatible mobile phone“.

The new theme is now enabled by default on blogs, such as this one, which are hosted by WordPress.com. And yes it does make blog posts much easier to read as the mobile interface has a less cluttered interface which, although unlikely to provide significant usability problems on a typical desktop computer, can be irritating on a mobile device, such as a iPhone or iPod Touch (which was used to capture the image of the blog which is illustrated).

Best of all is that this enhanced interface has been provided without the need for me to do anything – no software to be upgraded or new themes to install.

I’m now back from a few day’s at Aberystwyth University, where I had been invited to speak at the launch of the HEFCW-funded Gwella project and to give a seminar on “The ‘Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World’ Report: Implications For IT Service Departments“.

As this involved a long train journey I also sought to maximise my time in Aberystwyth by participating in a regional meeting for Welsh Web managers. During the brief summaries of areas of work which the members of institutional Web management teams had been involved in I noticed that a number of the institutions were involved in the delivery of training in use of Terminal 4’s Content Management System. But why, I wonder, are institutions still developing their own training resources? As the meeting took place at the start of the first international Open Access Week I did wonder whether an institutional move towards (or commitment to) open access for research publications and research data shouldn’t be complemented by an institutional commitment to providing Creative Commons licence for institutional training resources. And shouldn’t Information Services departments and Libraries be taking a leading role in this area? After all it is staff in the IT Services departments who will be well-placed to develop the technical infrastructure to provide access to such resources and Library staff who can advise on access mechanisms, use of metadata, etc.

This suggestion is not new – back in 2005 I presented a paper on “Let’s Free IT Support Materials!“ at the EUNIS 2005 conference. But it is probably timely to revisit this subject, not only due to links with the Open Access Week but also the related interests in open access for learning resources, as described recently in an article entitled “Get it out in the open” published in The Times Higher.

Now I’m not saying that the availability of open training resources, which might include podcasts and screencasts as well as more conventional training resources, will necessarily always be used – perhaps trainers and user support staff will continue to prefer to use resources they have developed themselves. But if that is the case, then what is the point of services such as JORUM and funding initiatives such as JISC’s Open Educational Resources programme? Wouldn’t it be beneficial to the community in general if more people were involved in such debates?

RSS Usage On Welsh University Home Pages

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

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

The Findings

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

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

Revisiting Community Surveys

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

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

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

Top Technology Trends for Libraries and Information Professionals

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

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

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

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

Today’s Networked Environment

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking Forward to the 1990s

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postscript

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

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

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

Background

In a recent post on the eFoundation’s blog Andy Powell wrote about “Flocking behaviour – why Twitter is for starlings, not buzzards“. Based on the statistics I had provided for use of  Twitter at the recent ALT C 2009 conference Andy picked up on the use of two tags (#altc2009 and #altc09) and pointed out that “if you don’t tweet using the generally agreed tag you are effectively invisible to much of the conference audience“.

I agree – so there’s probably a need to agree on  hashtagging strategies for events, which I’ll explore in this post. And I’ll use this as an opportunity to consider what hashtag UKOLN should be using for next year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2010).

Issues To Consider

What are the issues to consider when selecting a hashtag for use at an event?

Being brief

The initial requirement is that as tweets are limited to 140 characters,  hashtags should be brief in order to maximise the amount of content that can be containing in a tweet about an event.

Avoiding problems with non-alpha-numeric characters

It may be felt desirable to avoid use of certain non-alphanumeric characters which may cause problems in some Twitter clients.  For example, the hashtag #clip2.0 was initially suggested for an event on the relevance of Web 2.0 technologies for the CILIP organisation and CILIP members. However Twitter clients seem to truncate hashtags containing a full stop, so the hashtag #cilip2 was used. Similar problems have been observed with use of a dash (-) as illustrated in the display of a tweet in the TweetDeck client. In addition there was a complaint that use of an underscore (_) in the #cilip_lams event caused usability problems, especially on mobile devices. The advice would seem to be stick with alphanumeric characters in hashtags.

Avoid numbers at the start of hashtags

Hashtags which begin with a number (e.g. #2009foo ) are believed to cause hyperlinking problems in some clients.

Should you be consistent with other tagging services?

Although those who make intensive use of Twitter may feel that the first two points are all that need to be considered when formulating a hashtag for an event, there may be an argument for being consistent with recommendations for tags using in other environments such as other Flickr, YouTube, etc. These services do not suffer for the length constraints imposed by Twitter and so can provide more flexibility. There may be an argument for using a Twitter-safe hashtag in these other services, but what if these other services are the more widely-used services (e.g. events with an established use of Flickr)?

Should the year be included?

Many of the events I’ve attended or followed on Twitter have included the year in the hashtag (e.g. #iwmw2009, #altc2009 and #solo09) but some have not (#alpsp and #cilip_lams). Does the year have to be included, especially as the tweets will be readily accessible via the Twitter search APIs for only a short period?  But might a decision to save space by omitting the year cause problems if the Twitter API changes or other tools are used? And might this cause additional confusions with tags for which date encoding may be useful.

One hashtag or several?

If there are multiple events associated with a main event (e.g. pre-conference workshops or fringe events) you will need to consider whether to recommend use of the main event hashtag for these peripheral events or to suggest an alternative hashtag.

Branding issues

There may be pressure to ensure that an event hasthtag provides the correct branding for the organising bodies. The hashtag for the CILIP’s Umbrella 2009 conference, for example, was #cilipumbrella.

Multi-lingual issues

Welsh institutions  may need to consider use of bilingual tashtags. Note, for example, that for the CILIP Wales 2009 conference the conference hashtag was cilip-cymru09. I should add, however, that I haven’t any experience of the implications of use of non Latin characters (ironically, as Im (sic) typing this sentence on a Croatian keyboard and cant find the single quote character!)

Being memorable

Perhaps because I’m getting older I am finding it difficult to remember random strings of characters – so I wouldn’t appreciate a tag such as #xuj740n9 (having to re-authenticate a username and password with a similar pattern can also be irritating). I found the hashtags used for the recent Oxford Social Media Conference (#oxsmc09) and Science Online London (#solo09) events easy to remember  as the conference names themselves were memorable.

Being different

Having an event hashtag which could clashes with other hashtags is likely to lead to confusion.

Avoiding ambiguities in the characters

Many years ago I was an information officer and I was very aware of the need to avoid confusions between characters such as 1 and i and o and 0 (in some fonts these many be indistinguishable). Note that this may be very relevant for events held next year. The (fictitious) Input Output’s annual conference hashtag #io10 could be particularly confusing depending on the font used on your computer.

Being timely and promoting the hashtag effectively

As mentioned recently, it is important to finalise a hashtag in advance of the event and to ensure that participants and other interested parties are aware of the official hashtag for the event. In many cases participants are likely to tweet about an event prior to the event, perhaps when a call for paper has been published e.g. “Looking for partners to write a proposal for #altc2010 with“.

Obtaining buy-in from users of the tag

As it is not possible to mandate use of an official event hashtag you should seek to ensure that users of the tag will be inclined to use the hashtag. If the hashtag is too long the users may choose to use a shorter one.

Explaining the tag

As well as promoting the hashtag to the event participants you should also try to ensure that other interested parties, who perhaps might notice a stream of tweets with the tag, can easily discover more about the associated event.  One way of doing this might be to ensure that a Web page containing details of the hashtag and the event is published early so that it may be indexed by Google. In addition it may be useful to describe the event in Twitter aggregation services such as WThashtag (e.g. see the description for the IWMW 2009 event).

#iwmw2010, #iwmw10, #iwmw – or something else?

This post has described some of the issues which should be considered when choosing an event hashtag. But to put such discussions into context, I’d like to consider the hashtag UKOLN should be using for next year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2010) – the fourteenth in this series of annual events for members of institutional Web management teams.

I’ve recently attended four events which had a Twitter hashtag, each of which took a different approach: #altc2009, #techshare09, #alpsp and #cilip_lams.

As there aren’t pressures to brand our host institution, UKOLN, there’s no need for a ‘#ukoln_iwmw” style tag. The options, and arguments for and against, are therefore:

#iwmw2010
For:  Consistency with previous years and consistency with tags used in Flickr, YouTube, etc. Also consistency with URL used on UKOLN Web site.
Against: Uses 9 characters – this could be shorter.

#iwmw10
For: Saves two characters over #iwmw2010.
Against: Loses consistency with previous years and with other tag services. Possible confusion over the characters (could it be confused with #iwmwi0?)

#iwmw
For: Saves four characters over #iwmw2010. No confusion with the ‘10′ characters.
Against: Loses consistency with previous years and with other tag services. Loss of the date may cause problems if data is to be used in content of other years (but not necessarily so as the tweets do have a machine-readable date)

What do you think we should go for? And are there other issues one should consider when choosing a hashtag for an event which I haven’t mentioned?

After a gap of 11 months the guest blog post returns with a post by Jenny Evans, Liaison Librarian: Maths and Physics at Imperial College. Jenny provides a background to two blogs (to support the Physics and Maths and Engineering departments) which were set up by liaison librarians in 2006 and answers many of the questions which librarians in a similar role may be asking: how did you get agreement from the management?; who contributes; what is the target audience; what do you write about; how long does it take to support; is it sustainable and, perhaps most importantly, can the blog service be regarded as a success?

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About Imperial

Imperial College London is a science-focussed institution with a reputation for excellence in teaching and research with approximately 12,000 full time students.  The Library comprises the Central Library and the Mathematics Department Library, located on our South Kensington campus, as well as campus libraries at Charing Cross Hospital, St Mary’s Hospital, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Brompton Hospital, Hammersmith Hospital and Silwood Park.

Background

Our first two blogs were created by liaison librarians, Ruth Harrison and myself, in March 2006. There were three main reasons we considered using a blog.

Firstly, we had tried sending out emails and newsletters to departments informing them of relevant developments.  Problems with this method included academics wanting different formats, or complaining about email overload.  From our perspective, as a newsletter tended to be produced only once a term, information we wanted to get out to them quickly was often out of date by the time it was sent.

There was the option of adding pages to the library website, however this relied on us getting information to another library staff member, and then waiting for them to put the page up.  Which if you needed to get information out to staff/students quickly was not the ideal solution.

Finally, the library Web site doesn’t provide detailed subject specific information pages, which academics had complained about to us, so we wanted to address this issue – the blogs were a way in which we could provide very specific information and only to those people who wanted it.

As such, we felt a blog would be an ideal way to be able to communicate quickly, effectively and directly with our respective departments about information that was relevant to them. Blogs would enable us to post content as we needed to, they would be easy to set up and maintain, and we could delegate responsibility to staff where appropriate.  It also meant academics could set up an RSS feed to the pages so they could control how they viewed the information.

WordPress software

We decided to start the blogs using the free blogging software from WordPress.  It was a fairly new option at the time, but it was getting good reviews, seemed to be flexible, offered some useful features and was free.

Getting agreement from management

Working on the assumption that it is much easier to sell an idea that you can demonstrate we created a working prototype and began posting content to the blogs before presenting them to our respective managers.  They then took them to the relevant management meetings.  Although there was some unease about the lack of branding, and the idea that at the time not all liaison librarians would have a blog, it was agreed that as this was a form of communication, specific to a liaison librarian and their department (not unlike email) that we could continue.

Over the past 3 1/2 years, other liaison librarians have seen the success of our blogs and have created their own.  We now have thirteen blogs covering a variety of subject areas.  There is currently no specific ‘library style’ for the blogs, although some look more ‘Imperial-like’ than others.

Blog authors

Our blog authors are a mix of library staff – though all work in Library’s Faculty Support Services for Teaching and Research Directorate – as the blogs are aimed staff and students in specific departments/subject areas.  As such, the relevant library liaison team are responsible for the blog.  This could be a single person or more than one member of the same team.  Our medicine blog is aimed at all medical staff and students and as such members of staff from all of the medical campuses contribute to this blog.

Target audience

Each of our blogs has a different target audience, depending on what is thought appropriate for that subject area.  This can include:

• Academic/research staff
• Postgraduate research students
• Postgraduate taught course students
• Undergraduate students

For example the maths and physics blog that I am responsible for (as I’m no longer responsible for chemistry) is aimed at academic and research staff, and research post-graduate students, although some content is relevant to post-graduate taught course students and I do make them aware of its existence.  It is not so relevant to the undergraduate students, however I do have a maths projects blog I have created to support the projects they work on in the first and second year of their course.

Content

This is also something that relies on the particular person or group of people responsible for each blog.

Examples of what people include in their blogs:

• New resources including new book purchases and journal subscriptions
• News
• Custom search engines
• Journal citation reports/bibliometrics information
• Help/advice pages
• Support for teaching sessions
• Identifying key resources such as e-books
• Highlighting relevant parts of the library website
• Highlighting the physical location of relevant collections
• Overview of relevant key database and referencing information

Generally, we would try not to duplicate information found on the library Web site, but do highlight relevant content.

How long we spend maintaining our blogs

As you can imagine, this differs depending on who is working on the blog.  I did a quick survey of fellow bloggers as to how often they post on their blogs and this ranges from a couple of times a week to once a month.  Personally, I must confess I don’t spend as much time on mine as I used to, though my team member Katie does most of the posting these days.

Publicity/Marketing

You can find a link to our blogs on our library homepage and there is also a link from the College blogs page.  I’ve also got links on the Physics department website and the Maths Library web page.

For my blog, I email department staff, PhD students and MSc students at least once a term, reminding them the blog is there and highlighting any current news. Some bloggers use Feedburner which enables them to give people the option to receive updates by email.

Our Life Sciences team introduce their blogs to students in induction sessions and point out useful features.

This is possibly something we could market better than we do so at the moment. Suggestions from fellow bloggers include giving them a higher profile, making them more visually appealing, perhaps giving them a similar style/layout.

Success?

As a whole our blogs have been very successful – they are all getting used.  They enable us to raise our profile as liaison librarians within the departments we work with, and provide our users with a resource that is specific to their areas of expertise.

In the words of one of our Life Sciences bloggers:

“Subject blogs are an ideal way to gather relevant subject specific material together in one place for your staff and students, they can be tailored and expanded to meet the need and are much more flexible than having to coordinate an official webpage update. We introduce our students to them in inductions and point out useful areas such as ‘Finding Books’ (which is a well-used page) and Academic Writing Skills (another well-used page which lists academic writing skills books in the library with links to the catalogue – this really picked up over the summer when Masters students were focussing on writing up).“

The statistics available via WordPress do enable you to see details about how many people are viewing your blog, who is referring to your blog, what the top posts and pages are, search terms people are using to find you, and what people are clicking on and incoming links.  However, this doesn’t include RSS feeds (unless you are using Feedburner).  And these statistics do demonstrate that our blogs are being used.

Personally, I didn’t expect loads of comments on my blog – I use it more as a means of getting relevant information out to my departments (maths and physics) – however I do encourage people to get in contact via the comments mechanism of the blog. I have installed a MeeboMe widget on my blog which hasn’t had a great deal of use (though the widget I installed on the blog I created for my maths undergraduate students has had a few enquiries). My humanities colleague has also tried MeeboMe with limited success.

Our Life Sciences team has noticed that the more time they have invested in “developing, populating and marketing (not to mention regularly updating) the blog has seen a continued growth in usage figures”.

Another unexpected outcome has been the interest from third parties such as Victor Hemming from Mendeley who had seen “posts we had put up about referencing and networking for researchers. This initial contact led to Mendeley coming to Imperial to give a personal introduction. It was good to know that our blog was attracting the attention of useful people and sending them in our direction”.

Sustainability

Our blogs have been running for 3 and half years now and show no signs of slowing down. The bloggers I have been in touch with all feel that it is worth the time they spend maintaining and updating them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On 6 September 2008 I published a post entitled 100,000 Views which documented the date of this blog having received 100,000 views according to the usage statistics provided on the WordPress.com site.  I described how:

“I’ve found it useful in the past to write about significant landmarks on this blog in order to provide some data which other bloggers may find useful in drawing parallels. And such factual data may also be useful in the various blog workshops which myself and colleagues have been running“.

Just over a year later, with the blog having yesterday received 200,000 views, this milestone provides another opportunity for some reflection. As can be seen from the graph, there has been a significant increase in the number of average monthly page views which began (coincidentally?) after the blog reached 100,00 views in  September 2008.

There was a peak (of 9,108 views) the following month (October 2008) followed by a plateau of over 7,000 views until June 2009, which saw a new peak of 9,300 views.  This peak coincided with work I had been involved in for a workshop on “Using the Social Web to Maximise Access to your Resources” – it would seem that the experiments (including gathering evidence of the influence of Twitter in generating traffic) were successful.  However there has been a significant decrease in traffic since that peak, although the figures are still higher than a year ago (the dip could be accounted for by the summer holidays and a decrease in the numbers of posts while I was away at conferences recently – but could also reflect a more general decrease in blogging activities which some commentators have speculated about recently).

Although I recognise that it is not possible to gain a picture of the state of the blogosphere based on usage figures for a single blog (to say nothing of the view that there may be Lies, Dammed Lies, Blog Statistics and Unexpected Spikes) I hope this snapshot is of interest to others. It would be particularly interesting to hear if others are experiencing a downwards trend in light of the supposed move away from blogs to use of Twitter.

The Need For Evidence

We know that technologies have the potential to provide many benefits, but this potential is not necessarily also realised. We therefore need to gather evidence in order to inform our policies – perhaps to help us recognise that what seemed to be a great idea has actually not been delivered in practice, perhaps to make us aware of a need for greater advocacy and user engagement or perhaps for refining the approaches we initially took.

Usage Statistics For Mobile Devices

Such issues came to mind following a recent discussion on the website-info-mgt JISCMail list. The discussion began by addressing the question of whether institutions should be developing iPhone applications providing, for example, resources of interest to new students.

Following a discussion as to whether we should be developing generic applications for mobile devices and whether this could fail to exploit device specific features, especially features which might be particularly valuable for students with disabilities, David Bailey (Bath Spa University) put the discussion into context by providing statistics on access to his institutional Web site from various platforms.

His statistics revealed that 80.55% of visits to the Web site in the past month came from an MS Windows platform, 17.84% from the Apple Macintosh and 0.66% from a Linux platform, The figures for mobile devices were iPhone (0.44%), iPod (0.11%) and Symbian (0.10%) with the figures for mobile devices such as the Palm, Blackberry and Android and gaming devices such as the Wii and Playstation being less than 0.1%.

In response to this sharing of evidence a number of follow-up posts provided additional statistics:

Heriot-Watt: MS Windows (93.51%), Apple Macintosh (5.05%), Linux (0.67%), iPhone (0.34%), Symbian (012%) and iPod (0.11%) (see email).

Sunderland: MS Windows (92.4%), Apple Macintosh (5.7%) and Linux (0.7%). The figures for other devices were all less than 0.1% (see email).

Imperial College: MS Windows (91.69%), Apple Macintosh (6.9%), Linux (0.87%), iPhone (0.3%), Symbian (012%). The figures for other devices were all less than 0.1% (see email).

University of Warwick: MS Windows (89.19%), Apple Macintosh (8.4%), Linux (1.85%) and iPhone (0.25%). The figures for other devices were all less than 0.1% (see email).

Before reflecting on the implications of this evidence we need to be aware of the limitations of these figures: it reflects the experiences of only four institutions; the data is not necessarily based on institutional data and may reflect usage for departmental Web servers and the data reflects usage in the summer vacation. But having acknowledged these caveats, what might the implications be if this evidence does prove to be indicative of the wider higher educational community?

Discussion

Ironically although the discussion on the website-info-mgt list began over access to institutional Web sites from mobile devices the data provides little evidence of significant usage by mobile devices. But the data does reveal patterns of desktop usage which are worthy of further consideration.

I suspect many of the Web and IT developers and support staff who have been critical of Microsoft over the years will be disappointed at the overwhelming popularity of the MS Windows platform for accessing the institutional Web sites described above. Should we now accept that MS Windows has won the battle for the desktop operating system environment? And at a time when, if the predictions are correct, we may see a reduction in staffing levels, do these figures suggest that the time and effort in testing Web sites on the Linux platform may not be justified? This isn’t to suggest that Web sites should be designed for the MS Windows platform, rather that the effort in testing and tweaking for little-used platforms may not be justified.

Of course an argument could be made that the figures suggest that there is no point in developing services for the mobile Web as the current levels of usage are very low. But the difference is that the desktop and laptop computer environment is now mature, whereas the mobile environment is new.

I think there is a debate to be had – and there is also, perhaps, the need to ask “Where did it go wrong? What happened to the diversity of operating systems? Where have the Mac users and Linux users gone?” Or perhaps they are still around, and simply aren’t visiting institutional Web sites. What do you think?

I was recently alerted to a blog post on TechCrunch entitled “Tweetboard Launches Twitter Client And URL Shortener“. The article described how this service “lets you create a Twitter-powered forum on any site“. In addition Tweetboard provides  “the ability to view discussions as a thread, similar to what you’d find on FriendFeed or Facebook“.

This sounded interesting so I signed up for a (free) Tweetboard account and created a page in which I added the HTML code to create the embedded interface.

An screenshot of my experiment is illustrated.

As can be seen the tool provides a threaded view of replies to tweets – something I’ve not seen before but a feature which does seem popular in FriendFeed.

However as has been pointed out, the service does seem slow (although I wonder if this might be due to the increased usage of the service which the TechCrunch article may have generated) and the tweet display  cannot be moved.

Now although many experienced Twitter users may be interested in the threaded replies feature I suspect that a typical response is likely to be “So what? There are lots of good twitter clients available – why should I be interested in this one?“. This may be true, but will this approach be a useful way of introducing new Twitter users to the service, in a specific context of use.  At an amplified event, might an event page with this embedded interface prove useful, I wonder? And if the HTML <script> fragment can be embedded in more mainstream applications environments – such as a VLE, for example – might this be a way of embedding Twitter functionality in the context of existing widely used services? Hmm, might there be life in the VLE yet?