I was very pleased but also slightly embarrassed when Dave Pattern invited me to speak at the Mashed Library UK 2009 event (also known as ‘Mash Oop North‘). Pleased because this event, which is building on the success of the  first event which took place at Birkbeck College in November 2008, reflects the interests I have in this area and will provide an opportunity to learn from some of the people (such as Tony Hirst, Mike Ellis and Dave Pattern) who are actively engaged in significant development activities. But embarrassed because I’ve been asked to speak to an audience who would, I suspect, prefer to listen to and talk to the gurus of mashup developments!

Dave convinced me, however, that as there appear to be a significant number of participants at the event who don’t regard themselves as mainstream developers, but rather as ‘enthusiastic amateurs’ that there is a role to play in exploring how the learning which will take place at the event can be exploted.

So I will be giving a talk and inviting discussion on the topic of “Enthusiastic Amateurs and Overcoming Institutional Inertia“.  This session will take place on Tuesday 7 July 2009. My slides are embedded below (and are also available on Slideshare). If you have any thoughts on this subject, especially if you regard yourself as an ‘enthusiastic amateur’ yourself I’d welcome your comments. Of you may wish to particuipate in the Twitter back channel, using the hastag “#mashlib09″.

Wolfram|Alpha

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

Comparing Web Sites

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wolfram|Alpha’s Terms and Conditions

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

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

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

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

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

What Should We Do?

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

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

I’m pleased to publish a guest blog post by Mike Richwalsky, assistant director of public affairs at Allegheny College, a small, private liberal arts college in the United States. Mike provides a US perspective on a topic which often generates heated debate in the UK – the role of Facebook in higher educational institutions.

---

Facebook Usage by US Colleges and Universities

First, thank you to Brian for allowing me to use this space to talk about how we at US colleges and universities are using Facebook. I’ll be presenting a session at IWMW 2009 (on cloud computing, not social media), and I’m interested to learn more about how schools in the UK and Europe are using tools like Facebook and Twitter to communicate with different audiences. Here we go…

Several years ago, in its infancy, Facebook was all the rage among students on campuses large and small across the United States. At that time, many schools were panicked about what services like Facebook and MySpace allowed students to do, often with an eye towards potential liabilities the school may face due to photos being posted, thoughts being shared, disagreements and much more.

Fast forward to today, and a large majority of schools have changed their tune about Facebook. Yes, we still worry when students post photos of themselves drinking and the like, but now we in college administrations have adopted the site as an effective way to reach students, both prospective and those students already attending our schools.

I’d like to examine how schools in the US are using Facebook and share some thoughts and experiences I’ve had from managing my school’s presence there.

First, why are schools using Facebook? First, it’s where the students are. College students today in the US live and breathe Facebook all day long. For us, using it to reach them makes sense – after all it’s a medium they are comfortable in. Second, it’s free for our institutions to use. Finally, the tools that Facebook offers have developed to the point where it’s become a compelling communication platform for us to use to reach a large number of people very easily.

Now that we’re in the golden age of social media, many colleges are developing strategic plans on how to use Facebook. At Allegheny, our adoption of this medium and the successes we’ve had have been very organic. We didn’t jump right in with a set plan, instead we started small, just creating an official page before someone else did. As we got more comfortable with the tools, we added more and more and have grown to the presence we have today.

When Facebook launched its Groups tool, many schools, mine included, created a group for not only our institution but many offices across campus, such as career services, student life, libraries and more. The groups behaved much like they do today, we could post events, participate in discussions and more.

Eventually, Facebook created its Fan page platform, and many schools transitioned their main institutional presence from the Groups tool to the new Fan page format, which offered many similar functionality but added new tools like video, wall posts and most importantly, analytics.

At the time I write this, we have just north of 2,100 fans of our institution (http://facebook.com/alleghenycollege). Our largest number of fans are in the 25-34 age group, which includes graduates of the last several years, so it makes sense that number is high. The next largest group is the 18-24 group, with the 35-44 group a close third.

The smallest age group is 13-17, which is interesting since that’s an audience we actively market to since they are the college students of the near future. 2% of our college’s fans fall in that age group. It’s great that 45 or so people have indicated they are a fan of our institution, I wonder why that number isn’t larger. Perhaps people of that age don’t want to commit to a college in this way, or they are still into their college search research and planning.

This past academic year, we actually had a student working in our office 10 hours a week that posted events and news to our Facebook fan page. The student worked under close supervision, but it worked out well for us and gave our presence some authenticity and a voice that even someone in their early 30’s can’t provide.

As I mentioned, our college moved its institutional profile from a group to a fan page, but that doesn’t mean Facebook Groups are no longer used by offices on our campus.

Our most active group is a yearly “Class of” group – this year its the Class of 2013 group. For several years prior to this one, incoming students would create an unofficial group for their class and use it to start to get to know each other. The challenge for us as marketers and admissions folks was that we didn’t want our new students to think that group was sanctioned by the college or an official voice of the college, so in 2008, we created the official Class of 2013 group, with several people in different offices across campus serving as administrators. Now, it’s become a very useful tool for communicating quickly with that group of students. Our student orientation program leaders use it to answer questions, be a part of the conversation and post reminders and prod the students to complete tasks like completing necessary paperwork or registering for fall events.

We’ve also had great success in our career services group, who have used Facebook to promote employment fairs, recruiter visits and other employment-related activities on campus. They have seen program attendance increase over previous years, and Facebook has been a great way for them to reach an audience they otherwise may not have been able to be in contact with.

Hopefully, as Facebook grows they will continue to develop new technologies and ways for us to communicate. I think they’ve done a good job of it thus far, but it highlights one of the perils of social media in general – things in this area change very quickly and without warning. It can require a bit of work to keep track of all the new features, rules and more.

Four years ago we had no idea of how to use Facebook and two years ago we didn’t know how to use Twitter. There may be a new tool that’s being developed right now that may come along and change everything we’re doing and we’ll look back and say “wow, we didn’t even think about how to use X two years ago.”

Workshops on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

As described on the JISC Digitisation blog the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) are running a series of free workshops entitled “Improve your online presence“. The workshop series, which will be held in June and July in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, is being coordinated by Netskills. The workshops will “introduce simple and inexpensive search engine optimisation techniques to improve your online presence, web visibility and website traffic“. I will be contributing to the workshop content by running a session on the role of the Social Web in enhancing access to scholarly and cultural content.

The Potential of Twitter

The potential of Twitter was recently discussed in a post entitled How much is it worth to be one of Twitter’s suggested users? which was published in the Guardian’s Technology blog. As described in this post, being included in Twitter’s Suggested Users List can boost one’s numbers of followers, and thus traffic to links included in the tweets being published.

Coincidentally on Friday 5^th June 2009, whilst accessing this blog’s administrators interface in order to delete one or two spam comments which had failed to be detected by the Akisimet spam filter, I noticed that the top three referrers for the day were from the Twitter Web site (from Twitter.com, twitter.com/home and twitter.com/Twitter_tops). On further investigation I discovered that a page on the Twitter Web site which provides links to resources about use of Twitter had included the following link to a post on this blog:

What is Twitter? It’s An Interactive Business Card: http://cli.gs/YL6R4D –Share this article: http://bit.ly/180g9w

Now although this link resulted in driving the most traffic to the blog in over 3 weeks, this was disappointing to me. I had been after evidence that Twitter can provide successful in driving traffic to arbitrary resources, rather than just traffic to an article about the Twitter service.

However a better example was provided by the blog statistics for UKOLN’s Cultural Heritage blog. As illustrated the statistics for May 2009 showed that, after Google, the second most popular Web site for driving traffic to the blog was Twitter.

In this particular example the most popular post in the month was one on Explaining the Risks and Opportunities Framework- a blog post which was announced on Twitter at 08.55 on 21^st May:

Blog post explaining the Risks & Opportunities Framework published at http://tinyurl.com/p72kld

Evidence, it would seem, that Twitter can enhance the visibility of one’s Web content and therefore provide an example I can use in the workshop. But what of the dangers of using Twitter in this way? Might not Twitter followers resent being used as fodder for marking materials? Isn’t there a danger of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs?

Twitter Optimisation

Although some people regard Twitter as being essentially an informal communications channel and a tool for community building we can now observe that it is being used for a much wider variety of purposes. But what are the emerging best practices which one should adopt in order to optimise Twitter’s potential to maximise access to ’stuff’ out there, as opposed to engaging with one’s Twitter community?

Keep it short: Perhaps the best advice is to keep your tweets short to allow other to retweet (RT) the message, perhaps including their own comments.

Acknowledge the limitations: If you do intend to use Twitter as a one -way publishing mechanism (as, for example, the MLA does) then you need to recognise that you should not expect to gain the benefits which fans of Twitter, as described in a post entitled “The person is the point” by Mike Ellis, feel they gain from its use as an individual.

Consider publishing a policy: You may also wish to consider having a policy covering your use of Twitter, as described in a recent post on “Emerging Best Practices For Institutional Use of Twitter“.

Think about your followers: If you are using Twitter as an individual but also wish to promote areas of your work you will need to consider the balance between engagement (chatting with your mates), support (helping your mates), requests (asking your mates for held) and dissemination (telling your mates what you’ve being doing and what you’re proud of). This was an area I addressed in a post on “Twitter Can Pimp Up Your Stuff – But Should It?“.

And if you’re still sceptical that Twitter has any significant role in delivering traffic to a Web site I’d suggest you read the TechCrunch article “For TechCrunch, Twitter = Traffic (A Statistical Breakdown)“.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IWMW 2009 Fully Subscribed

Bookings are now closed for this year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2009), with the event again fully subscribed with 190 participants (the limit imposed by the numbers of bedrooms available and the size of the venue for the reception).

Amplification of IWMW 2009

If you haven’t booked a place but do have an interest in the range of plenary talks which will be given, don’t worry – the event will be ‘amplified’.

This reflects our commitment to openness which I argued the higher educational community should embrace more fully in a recent post on Respect Copyright (and Subvert It!).  In that post I also suggested that we need to be more open about the risks and the approaches taken to managing the risks. So here is a summary of the various approaches we are taken to encouraging openness for the event.

Maximising the Impact of the Plenary Talks

The plenary talks at IWMW 2007 and IWMW 2008 were streamed live and we will be doing the same again this year.

We hope to have an official ‘live-blogger’ who will take responsibility for providing a live summary of the plenary talks. This will be available using the event hashtag #iwmw2009 and may also be aggregated in another environment (such as Coveritlive, use of which has described in a Review of Web2.0 amplification at CILIPS Conference) to allow people to contribute to the discussions if they don’t have a Twitter account.

Due to logistical reasons (only one screen display in the lecture theatre)  we will not be providing a live display of tweets during the talks (which means we aren’t addressing the issue of whether a live display would be valuable or distracting). However we intend to make use of a live Twitter display (a ‘Twitterwall’) during the opening of the event and at other times in order to allow participants to say hello to each other if they are not sat in adjacent seats, an approach I felt worked well at the Museums and the Web 2009 conference.

We will also try to ensure that the speaker’s slides are available on Slideshare so that the remote audience is able to view the slides and the talk simultaneously. We know that speakers sometimes change the slides at the last moment – we’ll try and keep the versions in synch, but can’t guarantee this.

Note we’ll need speaker’s permissions for this – and will respect their (e.g. if their organisation doesn’t allow this; they want the freedom to be more open; etc.).

The Risks

I’ve described what we are planning on doing. But what about the risks of embracing openness more fully at an event?

We will be seeking permission from the speakers for the live streaming of their talks. And we do appreciate that there may be reasons why such permission may not be given (the speaker wishes to be able to speak freely or the speaker’s organisation may not allow this). We also intend to have a Creative Commons notice on the lectern (as we did last year) so that a rights  statement will be embedded in the video. We will allow the speaker to change their mind about making a recording of the talk available after the event (we will clarify this immediately after the talk, so that we do not have to write off time which may be spend on post-processing the video).

We will be providing a ‘quiet zone’ in the lecture theatre for participants who wish to avoid possible distractions caused by live-blogging and who do not wish to be photographed or videoed.  We will also ask other participants to respect the guidelines for this area.

We will, of course, be evaluating the event, including the innovative aspects as well as the mainstream aspects.  As we would like to share the user feedback more widely the evaluation form will state that anonymised comments may be published openly.

We appreciate that amplified conferences are still in their infancy, and there may be a diverse range of expectations from the audience, both local and remote. We are interested in learning from related events, such as Dev8D,  Mashed Library UK 2009 ‘Mash Oop North’, Amplifiedat Nlab 09 day and the Eduserv Symposium.

We’d welcome feedback and suggestions. But, please no suggestions that will take too much time and effort – there’s not much time left!

Metrics For Measuring Impact in the Social Web

Martin Weller has published a blog post on Connections versus Outputs which discusses a report produced by the Open University Online Services team in collaboration with external consultants (MarketSentinel). The aim of the work was to examine “the broader influence of various web sites and looking at sentiment mining. The idea from an official communications perspective being you can see how well regarded your institution is in different sectors, and maybe influence that perception“.

Their findings? Well it seems this UK Web Focus blog is:

• In 4^th 6^th place in a list of the Open University’s top 100 influencers in ‘distance learning’;
• 4^th in a ‘betweenness‘ category of “Stakeholders who are “stations” where information (on the issue in focus) is passed via in order to reach the constituency of said stakeholder”;
• 8^th in a ‘hubness‘ table which “is a characteristic of disproportionately linking to those who are authoritative on a given topic”.

Andy Powell responded to this post in a comment saying “Sorry… not meaning to pick on Brian here but the appearance of his blog, given this particular choice of topic [distance learning], stuck out a little“. Andy was correct in mentioning this strange result. I will have a better awareness of the topics I have covered in my 580 posts and I know this isn’t a topic I write about – and a search for the term confirms this (although there may have been a couple of occurrences of the term in comments).

Andy’s comment also touched on the sensitivity of discussing an individual, and this concern was shared by others on Twitter. Let me make it clear that I think it is appropriate to explore both the reasons  for my inclusion in this list and the relevance of such an approach. As Martin Weller commented, this is very appropriate academic debate.

Interpreting The Findings

Let’s begin by trying to explore the reasons why I’m listed so highly (Martin Weller and Tony Hirst are also featured highly in the tables, but this can probably be explained by the fact that they work at the Open University).

Collusion: Perhaps Martin Weller, Tony Hirst and myself collude in linking to each other, in order to boost our rankings. After all we know each other and follow each other on Twitter. That could be a possibility – but we don’t.

Echoing: It may be, as was suggested on a second post on Martin Weller’s blog, that we are echoing each others views and the metrics simply reflect that. There may be some truth in that. As you can see from Martin Weller’s post on Web 2.0 – even if we’re wrong, we’re right following a talk I gave on What If We’re Wrong? and my follow-up posts on “Even If We’re Wrong, We’re Right” and What If We’re Right? we can see this in action. Now this reflecting on other’’s views and adding new insights is, for me, part of the learning process. And although we’ve created something new in this process (we’re thinkers and not just linkers, as the saying goes) I appreciate that the metrics may give (undue?) weight to this.

Complementing: It may also be that the reason this blog is ranked so highly is that it complements the topics covered by Martin, Tony and others. This blog tends to reflect my background in working in IT Services and my interests in, say, Web accessibility – areas which tend not to be addressed in Martin or Tony’s blogs so much. So perhaps my ‘influence’ reflects this?

Being an early adopter: Although I wasn’t an early adopter of blogging (I started in November 2006) it may be that my high profile in the Open University reports simply reflects my presence in various the Social Web technologies (Twitter, Friendfeed, etc.)  This could mean that the survey is picking up on the technologies I’ve been using, rather than the content I publish on this blog.

Blog is outside the institution: This blog, as is the case for the blogs published by others mentioned in the report, is hosted outside my institution. Perhaps the high ranking is a manifestation of the hosting arrangements? Or perhaps the fact that we have chosen an external hosting body indicates early adoption of blogging (before our host institution provided a blogging service) and the survey is skewed by the presence of the early adopters? Or perhaps a willingness to use a third party service, when this may have been discouraged (it’s not open source; what about sustainability of the service? …) , reflects a level of independence and willingness to take risks which the survey picks up on?

Social Web presence builds on peer-reviewed publications:  I don’t just publish on Social Web services, such as blogs, Twitter, Slideshare., etc. I also write papers for peer-reviewed journals and conferences and invited papers for conferences. I then reference the papers on the social Web on my blog and make slides (and sometimes video recording) of the accompanying presentations available on services such as Slideshare, Vimeo and Google Video. Perhaps the amplification of peer-reviewed ideas and approaches via the Social Web helps to enhance the impact I have, which is being detected in the survey?

Writing style, linking style, etc.:  I may be that my writing style, the ways I try to cite relevant posts, Web resources and even tweets contribute to the high ranking.

Relevant, Useful and Interesting Content: In an attempt to document the range of possibilities for this blog being identified as a significant influencer and hub for ideas related to ‘distance learning’ I should include the possibility that the content of the blog are felt to be relevant, timely, useful and interesting!

These are some thoughts which occur to me for my high ranking in the survey. But surely we simply need to find out what algorithms are being used. And, as Peter Murray-Rust has pointed out in a bog post on “Open Source increases the quality of science” if we have access to the source code we will be better placed to spot any flaws in the code itself.

This argument reminds me of the time I attended a WWW conference and heard a research er describe how his team had reverse engineered the algorithms used by a number of the global search engines. In the subsequent questions an engineer from Google said he wished the paper hadn’t been published, as Google would have to change the algorithms in order to prevent spammers from exploiting this knowledge. I suspect that we’d find institutions looking at ways to game Social Web metrics,especially if this became competitive. And as we know how one’s position in the University league tables are to institutions, I suspect this would happen.

Is This A Useful Starting Point?

If we have to accept that there are likely to be various metrics covering use of the Social Web, the question may be whether the approach which is being taken at the Open University provides a useful starting point.

Andy Powell agrees with Martin that metrics on how the Social Web can impact scholarly activities are needed:  “I think we want to get to the same place (some sensible measure of scholarly impact on the social Web)” but goes on to add “ I disagree with you that this is a helpful basis on which to build.“

Is this glass, as Martin feels, half full or would you agree with Andy that it’s half empty? I’ll add a third alternative – I’ll finish off what’s in the glass while the rest of you are arguing!  Or to put it another way, while the academics go off in pursuit of the perfect metric the marketing departments will make use of a variety of impact measurements in any case. I suspect we’ll find people in marketing departments asking “How can we use the Social Web to market our institutions, attract new students and new funding?” and then asking “How can we measure the impact – or ROI – of our presence in the Social Web?“. I’ll conclude by echoing Martin’s conclusions:

We’ve got to start somewhere – my take on this is that the output may have problems, but it’s a start. We could potentially develop a system focused on higher education, which is more nuanced and sophisticated than this. By analysing existing methodologies and determing problems with them (such as the three I’ve listed above) we could develop a better approach. I hold out hope that we can get interesting results from data analysis that reveals something about online scholarly activity.

And we should be analysing the existing methodologies in an open fashion. I hope my observations have contributed to this analysis.

On Friday I was alerted by one of the people I follow on Twitter to a poll which asked “Should the NHS allow gipsies to jump the queue?“.

I responded by voting Yes, and send a tweet  which said

I’ve just been to the Daily Mail Web site for the first time ever. And so should you – http://bit.ly/w4b6Q

My tweet was then echoed (’retweeted’) around the Twitterverse by a number of people including lucy3point0 and ccsnjf with others picking up on my posts and adding their own commentary (as shown). Other communities picked up on this for, as you can see, there were over 90% of people voting on the Daily Mail Web site that the NHS should allow gipsies to jump the queue!

I was intriguing to see what the final total was (it reached 96% at one point and I grabbed the  screen image shown above – to use in a forthcoming talk – with the total of 94%). But on Saturday I found that allow the question was included in a list of Daily Mail polls, clicking on the link took me to another page on the Daily Mail Web site, and not to the results of the poll. (Ironically another discussion which took place on Twitter on Friday discussed URL shorteners and the possible dangers of  a lack of long-term persistency of URL shortening services – in this case the short URL for the Daily Mail poll is still available – http://bit.ly/w4b6Q – but the page it points to – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/index.html?pollId=1011506 – is not the gipsies poll.

The reason I captured the screen was to make use of this example in a forthcoming workshop session I am facilitating on “Using the Social Web to Maximise Access to your Resources“. I’ll make the point that Twitter can be used to engage a community through a viral campaign for (or against) a particular idea. I’ve an interest, therefore, in how this poll went viral, and also in the ethics of commenting on the poll and attempting to influence the votes.

This story has been picked up on blogs.journalism.co.uk with an article on Twitterers claim victory over loaded Daily Mail gypsy poll. Here I find that :

Brighton-based senior lecturer in experimental psychology Dr Sam Hutton contacted Journalism.co.uk today to reveal that there was also an email campaign among UK-based psychologists who, as part of their jobs, take questionnaire neutrality seriously.

Was this the start of the viral campaign? Or did a number of people become aware of the poll and mention it on Twitter  independently of each other?  And why did this become viral whereas, for example, a poll on Should immigrants be forced to respect British culture? has failed to attract a similar level of interest, despite covering a similar topic which is liable to inflame liberals?  Do successful viral campaigns need to attract the attention of ‘hubs’ to use a concept from Gladwell’s Tipping Point, which Martin Weller mentions in a post, also published on Friday, on “Connections-versus outputs“.

And what of the ethical aspects from those of us who are engaged in  observing, commenting on and analysing the way in which the Social Web is shaping our society?

You should note that my initial tweet did not suggest how people should vote:

I’ve just been to the Daily Mail Web site for the first time ever. And so should you – http://bit.ly/w4b6Q

The wording I used was also intended to intrigue people; anyone who knows me or has read my tweets or blog posts over time will know that I am not in sympathy with the Daily Mail’s views. The tweet was also brief, and so allowed other to easily retweet it i.e. append “RT @briankelly” to the front and add heir own commentary, such as lucy3point0’s “Laugh or cry?“.

However I should disclose that I voted three times in the poll. Despite responding to a suggestion that “If you disable cookies you and refresh the page and vote gain to your heart’s content” by saying that we should keep the high moral ground over the Daily Mail I did vote on two additional occasions (using the Flock and Opera browsers) – as I wanted to see if I could get the error message which a couple of people had encountered. In retrospect I should have ensured that these two votes cancelled each other out.

And finally I’m also linking to, citing and including a screen image of a number of people who have engaged in the debate. Should this be done? Am I infringing copyright (indeed, am I infringing the Daily Mail’s copyright in including a screen image taken from their Web site)?

I am taking a risk management approach to this. Rather than seeking written permission (which may be time-consuming) I have made a judgement as to whether the people I have mentioned are likely to be concerned. I suspect not.  And inclusion of the poll from the Daily Mail Web site? This may be a risk, although I might claim fair use. But won’t it be a greater risk for the Daily Mail if they ask me to remove?  If I do get a letter from their solictors I don’t intend to fight them. But everyone will know they have done this.

The Digital Britain Report

The Digital Britain report was published a few days ago and as is stretches to over 230 pages we’ve needed that time to digest the report or, perhaps more likely, allow others to read the report and publish their summaries! My specific area of interest in the report is what it says about copyright.

The report describes how “Already today around 7.5% of total UK music album purchases are digital and a smaller but rapidly increasing percentage of film and television consumption is streamed online or downloaded” and that although “User-generated and social content will be very significant” it will not be “the main or only content“.

The report goes on to argue the case for the ‘creative industries’ and repeats their claims that they “have indicated they suffer considerable losses from unlawful peer-to-peer file-sharing” – and fails to acknowledge the criticism of these figures described by Ben Goldacre’s “Illegal downloads and dodgy figures” article in the Guardian’s Bad Science column.

Section 18 of the report puts the recommendations bluntly:

This is unacceptable. The Government considers online piracy to be a serious offence. Unlawful downloading or uploading, whether via peer-to-peer sites or other means, is effectively a civil form of theft. This is not something that we can condone, or to which we can fail to respond. We are therefore setting out in this report a clear path to addressing this problem which we believe needs to result in a reduction of the order of 70-80% in the incidence of unlawful filesharing.

My fears are that equating use of networked technologies with large scale copyright infringement will lead to organisations’ being conservative in their approaches and being unwilling to take any risks that they might be seen to condone the  ’serious offence of online piracy’.

So let’s look at other views on copyright, beyond the teenage kids who seem to stand accused of downloading music and videos and ruining the country’s economy (I’ve tried to avoid the temptation to say the bankers have done that, but have failed!)

“Copyright Warriors”

Earlier this year Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University wrote a blog post on “Universities as copyright warriors“, this being a follow-up post to one which asked “Should universities break copyright law?“. In the former post Martin described how he:

“wasn’t arguing that universities should ignore copyright because they think they’re special, or that they should advocate wholesale piracy. Rather it was that universities are in a privileged position. They can fight on behalf of the general populace.“

Professor Stephan Harnad, University of Southampton, has been fighting for the research community for several years. You just have to visit the Open Access Archivangelism blog to see evidence of the work being done by Stevan and many fellow open access researchers not only here in the UK but around the world. “Ensure your research publications are published in an open archive” is their cry “and make publicly-funded research openly available“. And such simple requests are supported by significant examples of technical solutions, business models,  institutional services and growing international pressures to build on this work.

Professor Peter Murray-Rust, Reader in Molecular Informatics at the University of Cambridge (who, incidentally, has his own entry in Wikipedia), has been making a similar plea to open up scientific data. Peter recently argued that “Copyright in Scientific Theses is holding us back; Ignore it“.  Peter’s opening comments are worth noting:

I feel the dread hand of copyright hanging Mordor-like over the whole area of scholarly publishing. I heard to my horror in PennState that one University had embargoed all its theses in case they violated copyright. So I tested this in my talk and asked “are there repositories that embargo all their content for fear of copyright?” and got a few nodding heads. So I am taking this as fact, and asking:

Why is no-one except me angry about the way that copyright (or exaggerated fear of it) is stifling electronic innovation in academia?

Pete goes on to make the plea “let’s abandon copyright in science. What does it gain us? Almost nothing, unless you author a successful textbook. Nowhere else is copyright the slightest use to a scientist and its stands in their way at every step.” And note that Peter is not arguing for the abolition of copyright; he makes it clear that “if you are working in creative arts you may wish to protect your work“. Peter’s views are focussed on science. And he repeats this message loudly “SO AS A FIRST STEP LET’S JUST PUBLISH ALL OUR **SCIENCE** THESES OPENLY AND ALLOW UNRESTRICTED DOWNLOADING AND RE-USE?”.

Beyond The Professors

If you read Martin Weller’s,  Stephan’s Harnad’s and Peter Murray-Rust’s blogs you will find much more in-depth discussions on the benefits of openness in teaching and learning and research. But the danger is that such views will be dismissed as the ramblings of professors who are secure in their own position. How can others engage in maximising the openness of resources? How should young researchers and academics respond? And what approaches can the service departments – libraries and IT Services, for example – take?

A Personal Approach

Back in 2005 I gave a paper on “Let’s Free IT Support Materials!“ which concluded “IT Service departments are well-positioned to encourage a culture of sharing by encouraging an open access approach to IT support materials through use of Creative Commons licences“.

In January 2006 I made a commitment  that the resources used in my public presentations would be available with a Creative Commons licence – and since giving a talk on “Web Futures: Implications For HE” at King’s College London on 27^th January 2006 the title slide of my presentations has contained a Creative Commons licence. That talk was also the first time (I think) in which I recorded my talk and made the talk available also under a Creative Commons licence.

But what of the risks in making one’s own resource available under a Creative Commons licence?  What if the slides contains resources owned by others (e.g. the JISC and MLA logos on the title slide; a screen shot of the BBC Web site; etc.)? What if I make defamatory comments in my talk?

Rather than ensuring that no copyrighted material are used in my presentations I take a risk assessment approach. I weigh the risks that if I use the JISC logo on my title slide that JISC will sue me for copyright infringement – pretty unlikely!  I also try to ensure that a provide hypertext links to third party resources so that the original site can be easily found. And the Creative Commons logo has a caveat which links to a statement that points out that the slides may contain copyrighted resources. The onus is then on anyone who wishes to reuse my resources to undertaken their own risk assessment.

Professor Charles Oppenheim helped me to understand a risk management approach at a seminar he gave at UKOLN on the copyright implications of institutional repositories. In response to my question as to whether the complex copyright questions (”Podcasting lectures? What about performance rights?” ) meant that institutional repositories were unlikely to take off, Charles suggested a simple formula which could be used to gauge the risks. The Oppenheim formula is simply:

R=AxBxCxD

where R is the risk factor of your decision; A is the probability that you are infringing copyright; B is likelihood the the copyright owner finds out; C is the likelihood that they will care enough to take any action and D is the compensation they are likely to seek.

A simple formula which (when I asked permission to publish it) Charles told me is intended as rhetorical device rather than aiming to provide any significant deep insight. But this has been an approach I have found useful.

What Next?

What can we do if we are supportive of the views which Professors Weller, Harnad and Murray-Rust, but feel constrained by our perceptions of the risks and barriers? My suggestions:

Free your materials: Make use of Creative Commons for the materials that you create.

Take a risk management approach: Change does not occur without taking risks. So we prepared to take risks, but asses the risks and make an informed decision.

Be open about the risks: Share the approaches your have taken with others. Help them to assess the risks they may face in reusing your content.

And remember that there will be people and organisations within our sector who will have vested interests in maintaining the status quo. If, for example, you are involved in negotiating copyright deals, you may be concerned that your empire would be threatened by the widespread available of open content. Or maybe you simply don’t want to rock the boat.   But change is needed!

Opera, the browser vendor, have released a new version of their browser, Opera Unite. And they launched their browser will the slogan “Today, we reinvent the Web“. So what’s behind this rather grandiose claim?

Well:

Opera Unite allows you to easily share your data: photos, music, notes and other files. You can even run chat rooms and host entire Web sites with Opera Unite. It puts the power of a Web server in your browser, giving you greater privacy and flexibility than other online services.

In addition:

What if you use Opera at home, and a different Web browser at work? Opera Unite services can be accessed from any modern browser, including mobile browsers! At home, just select what you want to share, and you can view it later using your work Web browser without any problems.

A post on Mashable.com sums this up nicely “Opera Unite: Web Browser Becomes the Web Server“. But do we need another Web server environment? Do we need the ability of every networked PC to be able to share files? What are the networking implications? What are the security implications? How will we find the stuff?

I suspect this may the the reaction of members of institutional Web teams. But, on the other hand, mightn’t this free us from a reliance of the commercial sector and the concerns we have over companies such as Facebook? And might not the innovative e-learning developers welcome the opportunity to explore how the sharing of learning resources and the use of collaborative technologies can be provided without having to rely on the local Web services team whilst avoiding the need to deal with companies such as Google and Facebook. Opera, it might appear, are unlikely to have a desire to take over the networked world as Google, Facebook and Microsoft want to do.

Have Opera really reinvented the Web? And is this announcement good news or bad? Or perhaps it is irrelevant – this is file sharing for home users and need not concern those of us who work in a networked environment?

A Hero For Our Sector

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

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

Our Hero Is Dead …

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

… Long Live a New Hero?

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

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

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

Some initial thoughts on  this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Short URLs for Personal Facebook Accounts

The Facebook vanity URL landrush began at 9 PM PST (5 am in the UK). I woke up early and claimed my personal short URL for my Facebook page at about 06.30 (actually I wasn’t awake early enough as the obvious short form had already been claimed). Now I won’t divulge this short form of my Facebook ID as I don’t necessarily want you trying to befriend me just because you read this blog. But I now have a much easier way of sharing my Facebook details with people I may wish to befriend in Facebook – previous they had to search through the large numbers of ‘Brian Kellys’ or I had to give them my email address. The short form is much more convenient.

Short URLs for Organisational Facebook Accounts

You can also claim short Facebook URLs for an organisational Facebook page – provided you had more than 1,000 fans before the cut-off date. Again if you are in this position this strikes me as a no-brainer – as described in a TechCrunch article you should go to facebook.com/username and log into Facebook. And then enter your preferred name. That’s it.

Earlier this morning I discovered that some of my Twitter contacts had already got a short name for their institution. Mike Nolan announced first thing that his institution has claimed edgehilluniversity and slightly later Matthew Cock took the opportunity to promote a group on the britishmuseum’s Facebook account. Both Matthew and Mike had already made there plans for claiming a short form for their organisational Facebook account. Keele University had  also made their plans, pre-registering their institutional name as a trademarked name – but then subsequently encountering difficulties in using this name.

“Somehow Feel Dirty After Minting Fb URL”

Despite the ease of getting such short URLs, a number of my Twitter contacts seems very discomforted with the notion. Now I understand why people may not approve of Facebook, but if they, or their institution, do have Facebook accounts  then surely it’s only sensible to make access to the Facebook pages easier?

And in the case of institutional pages which are used to market the institution, then surely we should be expected the marketing departments to have spend 10 seconds or so on a Saturday morning to claim the short name which can, if so desired, be used in marketing materials. And I would hope that rather more time would have been spend in selecting the short name – poppletonuniversity, poppleton-universityor university-of-poppleton, for example.  Or perhaps there’s even a case for www.facebook.com/www.poppleton.ac.uk?

Discussion

So tell me, what is the logic in having a personal or institutional Facebook account and keeping the long form for its address? Or are the tweets I’ve been seeing simply a minority view from the  ideological purists (the 21^st century equivalent of the Tooting Popular Front?)

Of course, it may be that your institution hasn’t claimed the short name as it doesn’t know who owns the acount! But that’s another matter. Institutional ownership of services in the Social Web is worthy of a post in itself.

Recently the FireFox browser has been crashing on me.  But because FireFox is a Good Thing ^TM I’ve tending to gloss over the problems (we do this for our loved ones, don’t we). But when the browser started to crash consistently when embedded images in this blog I decided enough was enough. I’ve moaned a bit on Twitter about FireFox over the past few days and was interested to see that other people had had similar experiences. So I thought I’d try and find out how widespread this problem might be.

In order to minimise the time and effort in analysing responses  I sent the tweet:

Firefox is crashing frequently. Is this true for others? Respond with #firefoxcrashes or #firefoxisfine. Please RT.

I then used the search capabilities in Tweetdeck to search for tweets containing #firefoxcrashes or #firefoxisfine (bearing in mind that retweets would contain both strings. The response are illustrated in the screen shot (or you can see the live search results for #firefoxcrashes and #firefoxisfine).

There seems to be growing evidence that FireFox is not as reliable as we might have expected. And as I know a number of the people who responded I am confident that these responses aren’t coming from people who think that open source software is some form of communism, but from people who prefer the FireFox browser to Internet Explorer.

The next question might be “what is the cause of the problem?” A couple of people suggested it might be FireFox plugin bloat or maybe problems with specific FireFox plugins.

The final question is “what do I do next?” Tolerating the problem was no longer acceptable, so I wondered whether I should use Google Chrome (which is installed on my PC) as my main browser. But I also wondered whether it would be timely to try out a new browser, But rather than installing Apple’s Safari browser, which a couple of people suggested, I decided to try out Flock.

However during the installation of Flock I also restarted my PC, which had been put in hiberation at the end of the working day for a while. And as there were various plugins I was missing I decided to restart FireFox – which I’m now finding is working fine. So I think I’ll stick with FireFox unless the problems re-occur.

But to me the ease of getting a rapid and semi-structured response from Twitter was the most interesting part of the exercise.  A couple of people responded asking for details of my operating system I was running, FireFox version number, installed plugins, etc. Now I could have set up a SurveyMonkey form to gather such information – but I know that not many would have responded. I feel that the important thing was that the survey was available from within the recipient’s environment – they could immediately respond from whichever Twitter client they were using.

What, though, of the others for whom #firefoxcrashes? What do you intend to do? Opera, Chrome, Safari, Flock – or even the other browser?

The JISC is funding a landscape study on the UK HE sector use of content, communication and social networking services developed by commercial companies (or, perhaps more accurately, outside of the JISC sector).

As we know although JISC has developed a number of services specifically for use within the UK higher and further education sector (e.g. Jorum, JISCmail, etc.) people within the sector are increasingly using services developed outside the sector, either in addition to – or in some cases instead of – JISC-provided services.

Since evidence of this usage is fragmented and often anecdotal, the JISC SIS Landscape study aims to provide a snapshot of the current situation in the UK.

My colleagues Ann Chapman and Rosemary Russell are leading this work and have set up the JISC SIS Landscape Study blog to facilitate their work. We welcome  contributions to this blog in order to collate evidence on how such services are being used within the sector. Please note that JISC are primarily interested in use of such services within the UK higher and further education sectors. If you are outside this sector, feel free to contribute but please make it clear in  your comments the sector you work or study in.

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

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

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

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

also reflected some concerns which were aired here at Bath.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Friday I gave a talk on Benefits of the Social Web at the Association of Independent Museum’s (AIM) annual conference. In the subsequent workshop sessions the issue of the sustainability of the services provided by companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr was raised. In response I asked “Which do you think is likely to be more sustainable – Gordon Brown or Google?” And that was a question I asked before I heard Friday’s announcement that DIUS (Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills) was no more, being replaced by DBIS (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills).

Now the question of the sustainability of instiuional services is something I’ve raised previously, ever since the Guardian had a front page article on the Secret List of Universities Facing Collapse, which I described in a post entitled “Universities, Not Facebook, May Be Facing Collapse“.

But this news item (which the Guardian subsequently admitted was inacurate) was concerned with higher educational institutions which were in financial difficulties. The demise of DIUS made lead us to the situation in which well-regarded bodies and initiatives cease to be funded due to political manouvering in Westminster, Matt Jukes, whilst admitting that he is “no expert on the comings and goings in Westminster” goes on to add that “I really don’t see how this can be anything but bad news for FE and HE“. I would agree with this – as, it would seem, would many people I know on Twitter who sharing similar misgivings since the announcement on Friday. Indeed Andy Powell created a Wordle map of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skill press release which formed the basis of discussion on the lack of  any mention of learning and the emphasis on skills and the economy.

And such concerns shoudn’t be restricted to the higher education sector. I suspect we’ll see other significant changes which affect public sector organisations such as libraries, museums and archives, either before or after the election.

Shouldn’t we now be including the dangers that our funding bodies and government quangos won’t be around for very much longer in our risk assessments and scenario planning exercises?  And just as IBM has lived through the rise and fall of several generations of governments and government policies, might not Google provide a level of stability amid the current uncertainies in the government?

Last year we set up a Ning social network to support the IWMW 2008 event. Afterwards I forgot about the network until a few days ago I was alerted that a number of members had received spam messages. And on checking I discovered that Lucile Sawyer was sending messages asking others “Wanna chat with me on cam?, come see me here You’ll enjoy it. I promise!!!!” And on checking the membership details I discovered that Genvieve has a twin sister called Lucile Sawyer, as you can see.

I have now banned Lucile and Genvieve and changed the registration options for the site, so that any new members have to be approved. The lesson I’ve learnt – there’s a need to change the settings for social networks set up to support events after the event is over. I still prefer to make it easy to subscribe to such services, however, in order to avoid any delays caused by the need to accept new subscriptions manually.

Dave Flanders recently published a blog post which gave an Independent UK Hardware Review of HTC Magic (Vodaphone) vs HTC G1 (T-Mobile). The blog post (and embedded video clip)  made a case for the HTC Magic mobile phone (which uses Google’s Android open source operating system) in preference to Apple’s iPhone for several reasons and concluded with an ethical argument:

Ethical computing! <–! Last but certainly not least (IMHO)–> In an age of global financial crisis and corporate bastardising the technology we decide to spend our money on says a lot for how we want the world to turn out for the next generation.  In my opinion using an Open Source phone (like Android) says you want a world where we as a global community decide what we want, NOT one where a company decides how we want it.  Choice is yours, but this phone proves without a doubt that you can have both the ethical openness of Open Source while still having all the functionality and services of a proprietary company.  Truly, this could be the first time Open Source is the top of the stack and I can only hope it will stay this way (for a month or two anyways

Now a debate of the relative  merits of the iPhone and the Google Android device took place following my post on Google’s G1 Phone: “Innovation For Tech Heads” in September 2008 and a follow-up post on The Wow Factor, The Openness, The Developers Environment, … published the following month. That debate appeared to conclude with a concensus of the benefits of the usability of the iPhone, which outweighed the closed nature of the platform, the centralised Apple Store and the costs of the the iPhone.

Well I have now got myself a HTC Magic Android device. And have I selected this device based on the ethical considerations which Dave has raised? Of course not! I chose the HTC Magic phone as wanted a device which meant I could be always connected, and not tied to a WiFi network. And I was out of contract I was able to obtain the HTC Magic free-of-charge, with an increase of my monthly tariff from £15 to £20, which included the data rate.

And having had the device for a few days I’m enjoying it.  I’ve installed a variety of Android applications (all of them free) included an email client (K9), an RSS reader (NewsRob), a couple of GPS applications, a Twitter client (Twidroid), a barcode reader (to experiment with), Quikipedia (for cheating in pub quizzes), Skype, Shazam and Last.FM.

For me the deciding factors were the cost and usability – and the iPhone’s better usability isn’t enough to outweigh its costs. And although this might not be a fashionable comment to make in developers’ circles, the ethical issues which Dave has described have IMHO little to do with the selection of mobile phones. You just need to ask an iPhone user to see the truth of this.

Now where are the other HTC Magic users to chat to and discuss the cool apps to install?

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

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

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

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

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

Whilst reading the Guardian’s RSS feed on my iPod Touch on the bus yesterday I came across an article entitled “The internet – a threat to free speech?“. The opening sentence was intriguing “It’s probably not the best time to be seen defending an MP, but here goes“. In the article Padraig Reidy described how “Conservative MP Nadine Dorries has been pilloried for likening the Daily Telegraph’s handling of the MPs’ expenses story to “torture” – drip-feeding information and keeping MPs waiting nervously by the phone each morning, awaiting the dreaded call“. And this complaint, it seems,  was published on her blog, in which Nadine Dorries questioned the motives of the Telegraph and its owners, the ­Barclay brothers.

Now although I have little sympathy for Tory MPs, I am concerned with the news that “solicitors acting for the Telegraph and the Barclay brothers sent [a] complaint about  not just to Dorries, but to her internet service provider, TDMWeb” which resulted in Dorries’ blog being taken down by the ISP. And although the blog was later restored, it seems that the material the Telegraph and the Barclays found so offensive has been removed.

The Blog of Nadine Dorries MP was launched in August 2006. It has a blog policy on the home page stating:

“It’s simple. Be nice. If you try and misinterpret the position I have laid out in a blog; if you swear, are rude, abusive, aggressive or threatening, I will not publish. If you want to be any of the above, there are lots of other sites you can go to.

This blog is civil, respectful and will try always to be caring (except when in verbally, armed, political combat) I will not tolerate the harsh political, aggressive tones accepted on other blogs. Anyone who breaks these rules will be sent to the naughty step until they learn to behave. I have a very keen nose for Trolls, so beware.“

Although I’ve not read any of the posts on the blog I’m pleased that an MP has been blogging for that length of time. And I’m very concerned that a newspaper can insist that a critical blog post can be removed and that the ISP will cave in. A clear example of the dangers of flaws in the legal system which can cause an ISP to cave into such threats. And we should be pleased we won’t experience such problems in our sector.

Of could we? I recently looked at the “IT ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY” at the University of Bath, which covers us of blogs hosted at the University. This states that “You must not use University computing services to harass, defame, libel, slander, intimidate, impersonate or otherwise abuse another person“. It goes on to state that a breach of the AUP can include “Copyright infringement“. Hmm. A search reveals I’ve written several blogs posts containing the words ‘George Bush’ – and they were unlikely to have been complementary! And I’ve also embedded various images, YouTube videos, etc. which may infringe copyright. So if this blog was hosted on the University of Bath blog server there could be a risk that I could face pressure to moderate my posts. A very slight risks, I’ll admit, and I would be prepared to justify the content I’ve published. But if the IT Services department was as easily intimidated as the provider of Dorries’ blog, there might be a risk.

I’ve also recently come across consortia agreements which contained a clause that organisations would not publish content which critical of other signatories (this wasn’t the exact wording, please note).  So if, for example, JISC has signed up to such an agreement and I was posting on a JISC Involve blog, I might not be able to post anything critical of other partner organisations. Now I don’t think such possibilities are likely. But, in light of the Nadine Dorries incident I think we need to be careful.

I could imagine some academics or academic disciplines in which one could  envisage tensions between the individual and the institution. And the clause in the JISC Involve blog terms and conditions which states that JISC has the “right (though not the obligation) to, in JISC’s sole discretion (i) refuse or remove any content that, in JISC’s reasonable opinion, violates any JISC policy or is in any way harmful or objectionable” seems to set a particulurly worying precedent – content can be removed if someone in JISC deems it “in any way harmful or objectionable“. I wonder if this post, which expresses concerns over this clause, could be considered objectionable and subject to removal if my blog was hosted on the JISC Involve service?

In order to avoid such risks wouldn’t it be desirable to make use of an external blog provider will whom one has a disinterested relationship? And if the service provider in based overseas we might avoid the pressures which have occurred in the Dorries blog case. WordPress pr Blogger, anyone? And that includes MPs such as Nadine Dorries.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last week I gave a talk on “Virtual Space for All: The Opportunities and Challenges Provided By The Social Web 2.0” at the CILIP Wales, Welsh Libraries, Archives and Museums Conference 2009. The organisers, Mandy Powell in particular, were keen on building on the success of the amplification of the recent CILIP2 open meeting by encouraging exploitation of the conference’s WiFi network though use of Twitter with the conference tag ‘#cilip-cymru09‘. Although the numbers of twitterers were small I thought it was interesting to observe and reflect on the ways in which Twitter was being used and the possible benefits it can provide as usage grows.

Jane Stevenson of the Archives Hub, MIMAS, University of Manchester, was the main conference twitterer. As can be seen for the accompanying image, Jane provided a running commentary of the talks (in this case my talk) with, on a number of occasions, links provided to the resources being described, such as the link to the National Library of Wales community wiki at www.ourwales.org. What we have here is potentially an accessibility benefit, provided by the textual transcript of a talk.

In contrast a tweet by BeccaDavies, who chaired my session which asked “have we ritualised our reasons for not allowing access to web 2.0 – can we remember why? #cilip-cymru09” provided me with a new insight into my talk (a talk which I have given on a number of occasions recently). Have established a number of unthinking reasons for not engaging with the Social Web?  I’d not thought of it in those terms before.

Bob McKee, CEO of CILIP, in his introductory comments for the panel session, suggested that as well as the physical space provided by libraries and the virtual space which I described,  there is also an internal space, where the learning takes place. A tweet by MartinNHW commented on this remark: “#cilip-cymru09 Bob McKee – re Martyn Wade: space between our ears – echoes of JG Ballard’s inner space – as well as physical and virtual“. Afterwards I heard Bob remark that he hadn’t made the connection with JG Ballard’s ‘inner space’, but seemed to welcome this analogy. Again we are seeing how Twitter can provide differing perpectives on a talk, which can help enrich the learning for others.

We are starting to see a number of posts describing experiments in using Twitter in lectures, such as  Where for art thou Twitter? on the Classroom 2 blog, and The Twitter Experiment – Bringing Twitter to the Classroom at UT Dallas on the Kesmit-ing blog, Classroom idea: Twitter note-taking on Steve Outing’s blog, and Embracing the Twitter Classroom on the Huffington Post. We’ll be seeing much more of this, I suspect.

I recently commented how Twitter provides a means for not only finding out and discussing new ideas but also establishing and developing new professional relationships. And sometimes the contacts may take place initially in the blogosphere which can then be supported by discussions, or even just listening, on Twitter.

But how easy do we make it for others to establish new contacts and engage in discussions in this way?  I was thinking about this in the context of a comment made recently by Nicole Harris who described how “the fact that I am connected to JISC in my e-mail address is important…“. As I wanted to read Nicole’s blog to see what else she’d written on this topic I Googled “Nicole Harris JISC Blog” -  and found that her staff page on the JISC Web site was the first hit. This page provided contact details (including her JISC email address) and a brief summary of her areas of work – but no link to her blog. I had to scan through the Google results more carefully before finding her JISC Access Management Team blog – and, interestingly the link was to a post entitled “The opinions expressed on this blog are only the opinions of…?” which concluded with the questions:

- As a manager at JISC, should my blog posts reflect my personal opinions or that of the corporate body of JISC?

- How can senior managers within our organisations best understand the role of web2 platforms so we don’t get our wrists slapped for being vocal on such platforms?

- Should we be vocal on such plaforms?

- Should policies be governed by communication mode (i.e. blogging), platform (JISC Involve versus general WordPress) or job role (would this policy be different for me and mark, who now lives in JISC Collections but continues to blog with me)?

Now a discussion about the contents of a blog is worthy of another post. In this post my interest is in how one’s active participation in innovation can be surfaced for the wider community. Shouldn’t it be the address of the blog which is included in one’s profile in various social networking services (e.g. Link-in).  And shouldn’t a staff page on one’s organisational Web site link to the place where views and opinions are being surfaced and discussions take place?

Surely if you care about innovation (which I know Nicole does) then you’ll make it easy for your user community and your peers to find out what you think and help then to engage in the discussions and debate? And these days that is increasingly likely to take place on blogs and via Twitter. And the debate never took place on instituional Web sites, did it?

The Question

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

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

The Twitter Discussions

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

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

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

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

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

Discussion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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