eFoundations

Twitter for idiots

I'm just back from giving a 30 minute "Twitter for idiots" tutorial for one of our senior management team here at Eduserv.  Note that the title isn't intended to be offensive - in fact, he chose it - but it certainly sums up the level of what I had to say.  It reminds me that yesterday I tweeted rather negatively about the fact that CILIP are offering a Twitter for Librarians training course:

good grief... do #cilip really run a twitter course? - http://tinyurl.com/mxabo3 - speaks volumes methinks

Phil Bradley, who is running the course, quite rightly came back at me with a challenge to explain what, and who, it "speaks volumes" about.

So... two things. Firstly, it was an off the cuff remark - essentially a joke - but like all such things I guess there is a serious point behind it. The idea of running a half-day course to teach people how to tweet just struck me as funny! It's an anachronysm. In that sense, it says something about both the library community and CILIP I guess. Paying to sit in a room in order to find out how to create a "a good, rounded and effective Twitter profile", for example, smacks of a '1980s-style mainframe user-support application training programme' mentality that just doesn't sit comfortably with the way the Web works today. IMHO.

That doesn't mean that there aren't learning needs and opportunities around our use of Twitter by the way, I think there probably are, but I also think that people have to get Twitter before even thinking about such things and I'm not totally sure that you can teach people to get Twitter? People get Twitter by using it.

Secondly (and very much related to the last point), there is a visitors vs. residents issue here (to borrow David White's categorisation of online users). Twitter is a tool for residents. It's about people being immersed. It's about people "living a percentage of their life online". When visitors get hold of Twitter they see it as a tool to get a job done when the need arises - to push out an occassional marketing message for example. This is when things have the potential to go badly wrong (as seen recently with Habitat's use of Twitter). Again, the real issue here is whether you can teach/train visitors to become residents.

Note that I am not using the resident vs visitor divide in a judgemental way here. I'm happy to accept that the world is split into two types of people (no, not those who divide the world into two types of people and those who don't!) and I'm happy to accept that both approaches to the world are perfectly valid. But they are different approaches and I don't know how often people cross from one to the other, nor whether such changes come as the result of attending a course or workshop?

Influence, connections and outputs

Martin Weller wrote an interesting blog post on Friday, Connections versus Outputs - interesting in the sense that I strongly disagreed with it - that discussed a system for assessing an individual's "prominence in the online community of their particular topic" by measuring their influence, betweenness and hubness (essentially their 'connectedness' to others in that community). Martin had used the system to assess the prominence of people and organisations working in the area of 'distance learning', suggesting that it might form a useful basis for further work looking at metrics for the new forms of scholarly communication that are enabled by the social Web. The algorithm adopted by the system was not available for discussion so one was left reacting to the results it generated.

I reacted somewhat negatively, largely on the basis that the system ranked Brian Kelly's UK Web Focus blog 6th most influential in that particular subject area. This is not a criticism of Brian (who is clearly influential in other areas), but the fact remains that Brian's blog contains only three posts where the phrase 'distance learning' appears, two of which are in comments left by other people and one of which is in a guest post - hardly indicative of someone who is highly influential in that particular subject area?

In passing, I note that Brian has now also commented on this and Martin has written a follow-up post.

Why does Brian's blog appear in the list? Probably because he is very well connected to people who do write about distance learning. Unfortunately, that connectedness is not sufficient, on its own, to draw conclusions about his level of influence on that particular topic, so the whole process breaks down very quickly.

My concern is that if we present these kinds of rather poor metrics in any way seriously in counterpoint to more traditional (though still flawed) metrics like the REF we will ultimately do harm in trying to move forward any discussion around the assessment of scholarly communication in the age of the social Web.

To cut a long story short (you can see my fuller comments on the original post) I ended by suggesting that if we really want to develop "some sensible measure of scholarly impact on the social Web" then we have to step back and consider three questions:

• what do we want to measure?
• what can we measure?
• how can bring these two things close enough together to create something useful?

To try and answer my own questions I'll start with the first. I suggest that we want to try and measure two aspects of 'impact':

• the credibility of what an individual has to say on a topic,
• and the engagement of an individual within their 'subject' community and their ability to expose their work to particular audiences.

These two are clearly related, at least in the sense that someone's level of engagement in a community (their connectedness if you like) clearly increases the exposure of their work but is also indicative of the credibility they have within that community.

Having said that, my gut feeling is that credibility, at least for the purposes of scholarly communication, can only really be measured by some kind of a peer-review (i.e. human) process. Of course, on the Web, we are now very used to infering credibility based on the weighted number of inbound links that a resource receives, not least in the form of Google's PageRank algorithm. This works well enough for mainstream Web searching but I wouldn't want it used, at least not at any trivial level, to assess scholarly credibility or impact. Why not? Well a couple of things immediately spring to mind...

Firstly, a link is typically just a link at the moment, whether it's a hyperlink between two resources or the link between people in a social network. The link carries no additional semantics. If paper A critiques paper B then we don't want to link between them to result in paper B being measured as having more credibility/impact than it otherwise would have done had the critique not been written.  (This is also true of traditional citations between journal articles of course, except that peer review mechanisms stop (most of) the real dross from ever seeing the light of day.  On the Web, everything is there to be cited.)

Secondly, if we just consider blogging for a moment, the way a blog is written will have a big impact on how people react to it and that, in turn, might affect how we measure it. Blogs written in a more 'tabloid' style for example might well result in more commenting or inbound links than those written in a more academic style. We presumably don't want to end up measuring scholarly impact as though we were measuring newspaper circulation?

Thirdly, any metrics that we choose to use in the future will ultimately influence the way that scholarly communication happens. Take blog comments for example. A comment is typically not a first class Web object - comments don't have URIs for example. One can therefore make the argument that writing a comment on someone else's blog post is less easily measurable than writing a new blog post that cites the original. One might therefore expect to see less commenting and more blog-post writing (under a given set of metrics). While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it seems to me that our behaviour should be driven by what works best for 'scholarly communication' not by what can be most easily 'measured'.

As I said in my first comment on Martin's post, "connectedness is cheap". On that basis, we have to be very careful before using any metrics that are wholly or largely based on measures of connectedness. The point is that the things we can measure easily (to return to the second part of my question above) are likely to be highly spammable (i.e. they can be gamed, either intentionally or by accident). Yes, OK... all measures are spammable, but some are more spammable than others! If we want to start assessing academics in terms of their engagement and output as part of the social Web then I think we need to start by answering my questions above rather than by showcasing rather poor examples of what can be automated now, except as a way of saying, "look, this is hard"!

JISCMail and social bookmarking

JISCMail have announced that they will offer support for social bookmarking services from June 9th:

From Tuesday 9th June, every list homepage (https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/yourlistname) and every posting stored on the JISCMail online archives will include a bookmark/share button which will have links to a selection of social bookmarking/sharing sites.

Social Bookmarking allows you to share, store, organise, search, tag and manage webpages you would like to be able to revisit in the future, or share with others. For example if a posting is made to a JISCMail list that you know will be of interest to someone else you can email a link to that person using our button. Alternatively you can choose one of the social networking sites you are registered with, e.g. Twitter or Facebook, to share the link with a group of people. You might use the sharing button to bookmark a link to your list homepage or a particular posting on a list that you can revisit at a later date on a site such as Delicious.

I suppose this is progress, though one might argue that it is about 2 or 3 years too late (I had to go back and double-check that I wasn't reading an old announcement from a few years ago)? But, hey, with this new realisation that people might actually want to more easily share, cite and re-use JISCMail discussions on the Web, perhaps they'll offer half-decent 'cool' URIs and allow Google in to index the contents of individual messages?

Or perhaps we've all forgotten about mailing lists as a forum for discussion anyway and it's completely irrelevant what JISCMail does?

Symposium live-streaming and social media

We are providing a live video stream from our symposium again this year, giving people who have not registered to attend in person a chance to watch all the talks and discussion and to contribute their own thoughts and questions via Twitter and a live chat facility (this year based on ScribbleLive).

Our streaming partner for this year is Switch New Media and we are looking forward to working with them on the day.  Some of you will probably be familiar with them because they provided streaming from this year's JISC Conference and the JISC Libraries of the Future event in Oxford.

If you plan on watching all or part of the stream, please sign up for the event’s social network so that we (and others) know who you are.  The social network has an option to indicate whether you are attending the symposium in person or remotely.

Also, for anyone tweeting, blogging or sharing other material about the event, remember that the event tag is ‘esym09’ (‘#esym09’ on Twitter).  If you want to follow the event on Twitter, you can do so using the Twitter search facility.

The role of universities in a Web 2.0 world?

Brian Kelly, writing about the Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World report, ends by referring to the recommendation to "explore issues and practice in the development of new business models that exploit Web 2.0 technologies" (Area 3: Infrastructure), suggesting that it has to do with "best practices for institutional engagement (or not) with Web 2.0". I don't know what the report intended by this statement but, to me at least, it seems like business models are a pretty fundamental issue... potentially much more fundamental than Brian's interpretation.

I noted a similar issue in the CILIP2 discussions of a few weeks ago. Asking "how should CILIP use Web 2.0 to engage with its members?" ignores the more fundamental question, "what is the role of an organisation like CILIP in a Web 2.0 world?". It's a bit like asking an independent high-street bookshop to think about how it uses Web 2.0 to engage with its customers, ignoring that fact that Amazon might well have just trashed its business model entirely!

Luckily for universities there isn't (yet?) the equivalent of an Amazon in the HE sector so I accept that the situation isn't quite the same. Indeed, there are strong hints in the report that aspects of the traditional university, face to face tutor time for example, are well liked by their customers (I know many people hate the term 'customers' but it strikes me that is increasingly what the modern HE student has become). Nonetheless, I think that particular recommendation would be better interpretted as having more to do with "what is the role for universities in a Web 2.0 world?" than with "how do universities best use Web 2.0 to enhance their current practice?"?

Or, to put it a different way, if Web 2.0 changes everything, I see no reason why that doesn't apply as much to professional bodies and universities as it does to high street bookshops.

Identity in a Web 2.0 world?

In the flurry of Twitter comments about the Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World report yesterday I noticed the following tweet from Nicole Harris at the JISC:

#clex09 disappointed by lack of attention to identity issues in the report-despite it being included in the definition IDM hardly mentioned

I have to say that I share Nicole's disappointment.  Having now read thru the whole report I can find little reference to identity or identity management.  Identity doesn't appear in the index, nor in the list of critical issues.

This seems very odd to me.  The management of identity (in both a technology sense and a political/social sense) is one of the key aspects of the way that the social Web has evolved, witness the growth of OpenID, OAuth, Google OpenSocial and Friend Connent, Facebook Connect and the rest.  If the social Web is destined to have a growing influence on teaching and learning (and research) in HE then we have to understand what impact that has in terms of identity management.

There are two aspects to this.  I touched on the first yesterday, which is that understanding identity forms a critical part of digital literacy.  It therefore worries me that the report seems to focus more heavily on information literacy, a significantly narrower topic.  The second has to do with technology.

Let me give you a starter for 10... identity in a Web 2.0 world is not institution-centric, as manifest in the current UK Federation, nor is it based on the currently deployed education-specific identity and access management technologies.  Identity in a Web 2.0 world is user-centric - that means the user is in control.

Now... I should note two things.  Firstly, that Nicole and I might well have parted company in terms of our thinking at this point but I won't try to speak on her behalf and I don't know what lay behind her tweet yesterday.  Secondly, that user-centric might mean OpenID, but it might mean something else.  The important point is that learners (and staff) will come into institutions with an existing identity, they will increasingly expect to use that identity while they are there (particularly in their use of services 'outside' the institution) and that they will continue using it after they have left.  As a community, we therefore have to understand what impact that has on our provision of services and the way we support learning and research.  It's a shame that the report seems to have missed this point.

HE in a Web 2.0 world?

The Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World report, which is being launched in London this evening, crossed my horizon this morning and I ended up twittering about it on and off for most of the day.

Firstly, I should confess that I've only had a chance to read the report summary, not the full thing, so if my comments below are out of line, I apologise in advance.

It strikes me that the report has a rather unhelpful title because it doesn't seem to me to be about "higher education" per se.  Rather, it is about teaching and learning in HE. For example, there's nothing in it about research practice as far as I can tell. Nor is it really about "Web 2.0" (whatever that means!).  It is about the social Web and the impact that social software might have on the way learning happens in HE.

The trouble with using the phrase "Web 2.0" in the title is that it is confusing, as evidenced by the Guardian's coverage of the report which talks, in part, about universities outsourcing email to Google.  Hello... email is about as old skool as it gets in terms of social software and completely orthogonal to the main thrust of the report itself.

And, while I'm at it, I have another beef with the Guardian's coverage.  Why, oh why, does the mainstream media insist on making stupid blanket statements about the youth of today and their use of social media?  Here are two examples from the start of the article:

The "Google generation" of today's students has grown up in a digital world. Most are completely au fait with the microblogging site Twitter...

Modern students are happy to share...

I don't actually believe either statement and would like to see some evidence backing them up.  Students might well be happy to share their music?  They might well be happy to share their photos on Facebook?  Does that make them happy to share their coursework?  In some cases, possibly...  but in the main? I doubt it.

I'm nervous about this kind of thing only because it reminds me of the early days of HE's interest in Second Life, where people were justifying their in-world activities with arguments like, "we need to be in SL because that's where the kids are", a statement that wasn't true then, and isn't true now :-(

Anyway, I digress... despite the naff title, I found the report's recommendations to be reasonably sensible. I have a nagging doubt that the main focus is on social software as a means to engender greater student/tutor engagement and/or as a pedagogic tool whereas I would prefer to see more emphasis on the institution as platform, enabling student to student collaboration and then dealing with the consequences.  In short, I want the focus to be on learning rather than teaching I suppose.  However, perhaps that is my mis-reading of the summary.

I also note that the report doesn't seem to use the words "digital literacy" (at least, not in the summary), instead using "information literacy" and "web awareness" separately. I think this is a missed opportunity to help focus some thinking and effort on digital literacy. I'm not arguing that information literacy is not important... but I also think that digital literacy skills, understanding the issues around online identity and the long term consequences of material in social networks for example, are also very important and I'm not sure that comes out of this report clearly enough.

Anyway, enough for now... the report (or at least the summary) seems to me to be well worth reading.

OKCon 2009

While I probably do spend longer than is healthy in front of a PC on a typical weekend, I have to admit to a fairly high level of resistance to attending "work-related" events at weekends, especially if travel is involved. My Saturdays are for friends, footy, films, & music, possibly accompanied by beer, ideally in some combination.

But (in the absence of any proper football) I temporarily suspended the SafFFFM rule the weekend before last and attended the Open Knowledge Conference, held at UCL. The programme was a mix of themed presentation sessions and an "Open Spaces" session based on contributions from attendees.

The morning session featured three presentations from people working in the development/aid sector. Mark Charmer talked about AKVO, and its mission to the facilitate connections between funders and projects in the area of water and sanitation, and to streamline reporting by projects (through support for submissions of updates by SMS). Vinay Gupta described the use of wiki technology to build Appropedia, a collection of articles on "appropriate technology" and related aid/development issues, including project histories and detailed "how-to"-style information. The third session was a collaboration between Karin Christiansen, on the Publish What You Fund campaign to promote greater access to information about aid, and Simon Parrish on the work of Aidinfo to develop standards for the sharing of such information.

One recurring theme in these presentations was that of valuable information - from records of practical project experience "on the ground" to records of funding by global agencies - being "locked away" from, or at least only partially accessible to, the parties who would most benefit from it. The other fascinating (to me, at least) element was the emphasis on the growing ubiquity of mobile technology: while I'm accustomed to this in the UK, I was still quite taken aback by the claim (I think, by Mark) that in the near future there will be large sections of the world's population who have access to a mobile phone, but not to a toilet.

The main part of the day was dedicated to the "Open Spaces" session of short presentations. Initially, IIRC, these had been programmed as two parallel sessions in which the speakers were allocated 10 minutes each. On the day, the decision was taken to merge them into a single session with (nearly 20, I think?) speakers delivering very short "lightning" talks. We were offered the opportunity to vote on this, I hasten to add, and at the time avoiding missing out on contributions had seemed like a Good Idea, if time permitted. But with hindsight, I'm not sure it was the right choice: it led to a situation in which speakers had to deliver their content in less time than they had anticipated (and some adjusted better than others), there was little time for discussion, and the pace and diversity of the contributions, some slightly technical, but mostly focusing more on social/cultural aspects, did make it rather difficult for me to identify common threads.

The next slot was dedicated to the relationship between Open Data and Linked Data and the Semantic Web, with short, largely non-technical, presentations by Tom Scott of the BBC, Jeni Tennison, and Leigh Dodds of Talis. Maybe it was just because I was familiar with the topic, but it felt to me that this part of the day worked well, and the cohesive theme enabled speakers to build on each other's contributions.

I thought Tom's presentation of the BBC's work on linked data was one of the best I've seen on that topic: he managed to cover a range of technical topics in very accessible terms, all in fifteen minutes. (I see Tom has posted his slides and notes on his weblog.) Jeni described her work with RDFa on the London Gazette. Leigh pursued an aquatic metaphor for RDF - triple as recombinant molecule - and semantic web applications, and also announced the launch of a Talis data hosting scheme which they are calling the Talis Connected Commons, under which public domain datasets of up to 50 million triples can be hosted for free on the Talis Platform. (I noticed this also got an enthusiastic write-up on Read Write Web).

Although I quite enjoyed the linked data talks, it's probably true to say that - Leigh's announcement aside - they didn't really introduce me to anything I didn't know already - but there again, I probably wasn't the primary target audience.

The day ended with a presentation by David Bollier, author of Viral Spiral, on the "sharing economy". Unfortunately, things were over-running slightly at that point, and I only caught the first few minutes before I had to leave for my train home - which was a pity as I think that session probably did consolidate some of the issues related to business models which had been touched on in some of the short talks.

Overall, I suppose I came away feeling the event might have benefited from a slightly tighter focus, maybe building around the content of the two themed sessions. Having said that, I recognise that the call for contributions had been explicitly very "open", and the event did attract a very mixed audience, many probably with quite different expectations from my own! :-)

W3C launches Social Web Incubator Group

The W3C has launched a Social Web Incubator Group, chaired jointly by Dan Appelquist (Vodafone), Dan Brickley (Vrije Universiteit) and Harry Halpin (W3C Fellow from the University of Edinburgh) and I'm very pleased to note that Harry Halpin's contribution to this activity is supported by Eduserv through the Assisting the W3C in opening social networking data project funding that we made available late last year.

The group's mission is to "understand the systems and technologies that permit the description and identification of people, groups, organizations, and user-generated content in extensible and privacy-respecting ways".

Unlocking Audio

I spent the first couple of days this week at the British Library in London, attending the Unlocking Audio 2 conference.  I was there primarily to give an invited talk on the second day.

You might notice that I didn't have a great deal to say about audio, other than to note that what strikes me as interesting about the newer ways in which I listen to music online (specifically Blip.fm and Spotify) is that they are both highly social (almost playful) in their approach and that they are very much of the Web (as opposed to just being 'on' the Web).

What do I mean by that last phrase?  Essentially, it's about an attitude.  It's about seeing being mashed as a virtue.  It's about an expectation that your content, URLs and APIs will be picked up by other people and re-used in ways you could never have foreseen.  Or, as Charles Leadbeater put it on the first day of the conference, it's about "being an ingredient".

I went on to talk about the JISC Information Environment (which is surprisingly(?) not that far off its 10th birthday if you count from the initiation of the DNER), using it as an example of digital library thinking more generally and suggesting where I think we have parted company with the mainstream Web (in a generally "not good" way).  I noted that while digital library folks can discuss identifiers forever (if you let them!) we generally don't think a great deal about identity.  And even where we do think about it, the approach is primarily one of, "who are you and what are you allowed to access?", whereas on the social Web identity is at least as much about, "this is me, this is who I know, and this is what I have contributed". 

I think that is a very significant difference - it's a fundamentally different world-view - and it underpins one critical aspect of the difference between, say, Shibboleth and OpenID.  In digital libraries we haven't tended to focus on the social activity that needs to grow around our content and (as I've said in the past) our institutional approach to repositories is a classic example of how this causes 'social networking' issues with our solutions.

I stole a lot of the ideas for this talk, not least Lorcan Dempsey's use of concentration and diffusion.  As an aside... on the first day of the conference, Charles Leadbeater introduced a beach analogy for the 'media' industries, suggesting that in the past the beach was full of a small number of large boulders and that everything had to happen through those.  What the social Web has done is to make the beach into a place where we can all throw our pebbles.  I quite like this analogy.  My one concern is that many of us do our pebble throwing in the context of large, highly concentrated services like Flickr, YouTube, Google and so on.  There are still boulders - just different ones?  Anyway... I ended with Dave White's notions of visitors vs. residents, suggesting that in the cultural heritage sector we have traditionally focused on building services for visitors but that we need to focus more on residents from now on.  I admit that I don't quite know what this means in practice... but it certainly feels to me like the right direction of travel.

I concluded by offering my thoughts on how I would approach something like the JISC IE if I was asked to do so again now.  My gut feeling is that I would try to stay much more mainstream and focus firmly on the basics, by which I mean adopting the principles of linked data (about which there is now a TED talk by Tim Berners-Lee), cool URIs and REST and focusing much more firmly on the social aspects of the environment (OpenID, OAuth, and so on).

Prior to giving my talk I attended a session about iTunesU and how it is being implemented at the University of Oxford.  I confess a strong dislike of iTunes (and iTunesU by implication) and it worries me that so many UK universities are seeing it as an appropriate way forward.  Yes, it has a lot of concentration (and the benefits that come from that) but its diffusion capabilities are very limited (i.e. it's a very closed system), resulting in the need to build parallel Web interfaces to the same content.  That feels very messy to me.  That said, it was an interesting session with more potential for debate than time allowed.  If nothing else, the adoption of systems about which people can get religious serves to get people talking/arguing.

Overall then, I thought it was an interesting conference.  I suspect that my contribution wasn't liked by everyone there - but I hope it added usefully to the debate.  My live-blogging notes from the two days are here and here.

Mapping Me

Last Thursday I attended the workshop on digital identity co-ordinated by members of the three new projects funded by Foundation research grants this year (Rhizome, This is Me, and Assisting the W3C in opening social networking data).

Ahead of the event, moved partly by thinking about the day (and by Andy's earlier post) and partly by a post by Botgirl Questi I happened across the other day, I thought it might be interesting to try to sketch out a "mind map" of the principal digital sources where I create (or created) content which contributes in some way to the representation of my "digital identity".

(To be honest, I did this mostly for my own purposes, just so that I could visualise what that landscape looked like, but as my posts here have been somewhat thin on the ground (mainly because I don't feel I've had much of interest to say of late, to be honest - I did half-draft a post on that topic, but it was getting too depressing!), I thought I'd share it here.)

I've included only those sources where I've identified myself by my birth name or a nickname/userid that I frequently associate with it (usually "PeteJ" or "PeteJo" or something similar) - my "work-related" identity, if you like - even if the content isn't always directly related to my work activity, it is associated with the identity under which I perform that activity. In at least some of those sources, I've actually posted very little content, so there may be little more than a minimal "profile" page, but I guess even the presence of that minimal page "says" something about work-me in that it indicates that at some point I had sufficient interest to register for a service. On some other services, my main input has been comments on, or ratings of, or maybe just subscriptions to, the contributions of others, rather than any new "primary content" of my own.

The resulting "map" probably looks fairly complex, but I was mildly surprised that it was relatively limited in extent. And kinda pleased too, because over recent months I have been making some efforts to "prune" back some of the content which I've put "out there" over the years which has left me slightly uncomfortable about just how much information about myself I have disclosed, and to "take firmer control" of other bits. I've deleted a few accounts (Orkut, LinkedIn) which I wasn't making any real use of but which nevertheless disclosed a fair amount of information, and I've restricted access to content on others (notably by switching to "protected" status on Twitter). (Though, yes, I know, caches like Google's probably have some of it.)

I keep thinking of things I've missed: I've got some accounts with other virtual worlds which I used only once or twice; I've certainly registered on dozens of other "Web 2.0" services, played around for 15 minutes, and forgotten about them by the following day....

The future of social networking?

I note that the position papers for the W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking are now available. There are 73 in all so there's a lot of new year reading to be done if you are interested.  In the meantime, here is a quick Wordle of the aggregated text (the creation of which wasn't helped by the lack of an RSS feed for the papers and the fact that most have been submitted as PDF... boo!).

Two of the papers have been written by people we are currently funding, one by Shirley Williams, Pat Parslow and Karsten Oster Lundqvist on behalf of the University of Reading and one by Harry Halpin entitled Ten theses on the Future of Social Networking.  Good stuff.

The @ crowd

Writing at life under electronic conditions, Benedikt Koehler discusses Networks that matter on Twitter: the @-Crowd, suggesting that there are three kinds of networks at play: your direct network of followers/followees, a wider indirect network of their followers/followees, and your so called '@-crowd', the people you are actively in conversation with using the @andypowe11 mechanism of directed tweets.  He cites a very interesting paper by Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu called, Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope which provides some analysis of this last network and suggests that:

the driver of [Twitter] usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the "declared" set of friends and followers.

The paper ends with:

In conclusion, even when using a very weak definition of “friend” (i.e. anyone who a user has directed a post to at least twice) we find that Twitter users have a very small number of friends compared to the number of followers and followees they declare. This implies the existence of two different networks: a very dense one made up of followers and followees, and a sparser and simpler network of actual friends. The latter proves to be a more influential network in driving Twitter usage since users with many actual friends tend to post more updates than users with few actual friends. On the other hand, users with many followers or followees post updates more infrequently than those with few followers or followees.

I sense an (unwritten) assumption in the paper that the use of this sparser network somehow has more impact than the wider one. Perhaps I'm being unfair? Speaking personally, I would hesitate before suggesting that people who have more "friends" (using the definition from the paper above) are somehow getting more impact out of their use of Twitter than those with fewer. It's not hard to think of cases where lots of directed posts are used to share complete drivel between people - equally where a one-way feed of undirected tweets can be powerful alerting mechanism. Nonetheless, it's very interesting to see this kind of analysis taking place.

Other than that, I have two very minor gripes with the paper. Firstly, it defines "friend" in a very particular way (see above) whereas that term has traditionally been used by Twitter to mean 'a person that you follow'.  The paper introduces 'followee' for this which I quite like. (Note: although 'friend' is no longer used in that way in the Twitter Web interface, the word 'friend' still appears in the URL for the list of people that you follow). Secondly, the paper doesn't acknowledge that Twitter can also be used to send private 'direct messages' (DMs), the use of which surely forms part of this sparser network. Clearly, such usage is difficult to measure in an automated way, since it is private and not exposed through the Twitter API.

If you are interested in playing with this stuff, Benedikt Koehler's TwitterFriends application let's you see how your network of "friends" (as defined in the paper) shapes up.

What do you call a device you can use on the run with one hand?

I installed Ocarina by Smule on my iPhone the other day. Nothing stunning about that I suppose... well, apart from the fact that it's the first time I've ever turned my mobile phone into a social musical instrument! 

But that's the weird thing about the iPhone - it isn't really a phone at all. It's a ... a ... - see, the trouble is, as Stefan Fountain noted at FOWA in London, we haven't got a word for what the iPhone is.

Via @ajcann I note that 100,000 applications have been added to the iPhone App Store in the last 142 days.  That's impressive isn't it? Mine is continually in use (if not by me then by my kids, who love all the games that can be installed) yet in the 3 months or so that I've owned it, I've only used about 6 hours call time - that's about 4 minutes a day (on average). Have I been getting my money's worth? Of course. The real value comes from all the other things I can do with it - not from the fact that it is notionally a 'phone'.

Apple haven't got everything right of course. The choice of O2 as the only UK network provider isn't great (IMHO). The fact that my kids seem to ignore the mute button, turning the volume right down instead, thus causing me to not hear the ring tone every so often (a usability issue?). The somewhat closed nature of the Apple iTunes App Store (meaning that 'jailbreaking' is required for some uses). But on balance, the iPhone gets a lot more right than it gets wrong and I, for one, could never go back.

So, what's the definition of a mobile phone? In the FOWA presentation above, the following definition is suggested:

a device you can use on the run with one hand

I think that definition is slightly broken, since it appears to include the iPod Touch, which doesn't fall into my mental model of a 'phone' (despite the fact that it presumably supports VoIP over wireless). But, to be honest, I can't think of a simple definition of 'mobile phone' that doesn't rule too much out or too much in so maybe the one above is good enough. And perhaps that's the point - convergence is about the blurring of things that used to be separate and as a result, the clear-cut names we used to use no longer apply cleanly.

Well... better get used to it I guess since the situation is almost bound to get worse rather than better - or do I mean better rather than worse!?

Facebook in HE

A quickie... and one that I meant to write a while back actually, in response to a short debate I watched happening on one of the Higher Education Academy mailing lists about the use of Facebook in UK universities.  Unfortunately, as with many of my potential blog posts, it got forgotten at the time.  Then, more recently, I noticed that Brian Kelly had posted on the subject, What is the Evidence Suggesting About Facebook?, leading to several comments and a response by Paul Walk, Why I suppose I ought to become a Daily Mail reader.

The problem with Facebook in HE is that we tend (not always I'll admit, but often enough to be worth noting) to approach it with questions like, "how can we use Facebook in universities to allow us to engage with them?" - where 'us' is the lecturers and 'them' is the students. And this approach tends to degenerate into the kind of, "oh, but Facebook is their space not our space" or, "is it OK for me to have a student as a Facebook 'friend'?" debates that we see so regularly.

If, instead, we approached it with questions like, "how can we use Facebook in universities to facilitate students/prospective students/alumni talking to other students/prospective students/alumni?" - as, for example, Ruth Page does in Facebook Fresher's group: Success story - I think we'd be on firmer ground.

Basically, it's about using Facebook (or any other social network for that matter) to facilitate conversations in spaces that 'we' are not necessarily part of.

SWORD Facebook application & "social deposit"

Last week, Stuart Lewis of Aberystwyth University announced the availability of his Facebook repository deposit application, which makes use of the SWORD AtomPub profile. Stuart's post appeared just a day before a post by Les Carr in which he includes a presentation on "leveraging" the value of items once they are in a repository, by providing "feeds" of various flavours and/or supporting the embedding of deposited items in other externally-created items.

Stuart describes the SWORD Facebook application as enabling what he calls "social deposit":

Being able to deposit from within a site such as Facebook would enable what I’m going to call the Social Deposit. What does a social deposit look like? Well, it has the following characteristics:

• It takes place within a social networking type site such as Facebook.
• The deposit is performed by the author of a work, not a third party.
• Once the deposit has taken place, messages and updates are provided stating that the user has performed the deposit.
• Friends and colleagues of the depositor will see that a deposit has taken place, and can read what has been deposited if they want to.
• Friends and colleagues of the depositor can comment on the deposit.

So the social deposit takes place within the online social surroundings of a depositor, rather than from within a repository. By doing so, the depositor can leverage the power of their social networks so that their friends and colleagues can be informed about the deposit.

It occurred to me it would be interesting to compare the approach Stuart has taken in the SWORD Facebook app with the approach taken in "deposit" tools typically used with - highly "social" - "repositories" like Flickr (e.g. the Flickr Uploadr client) or the approach sometimes used with weblogs (e.g. blogging clients like Windows Live Writer).

The actions of posting images to my Flickr collection or posting entries to my weblog are both "deposit" actions to my "repositories". As a result of that "deposit", the availability of my newly deposited resources - my images, my weblog posts - is "notified" - either through some mechanism internal to the target system, or (as Les's presentation illustrates) through approaches based on feeds "out of" the repository - to members of my various "social network(s)":

• my "internal-to-Flickr" network of Flickr contacts;
• the network of people who aren't my Flickr contact but subscribe to my personal Flickr feed, or to tag-based or group-based Flickr feeds I add to;
• the network of people who subscribe to my weblog feed, or to one of my pull-my-stuff-together aggregation feeds.

And so on....

The point I wanted to highlight here is - as Stuart notes above - that the "social" aspect isn't directly associated with the "deposit" action: the Flickr uploader (AFAIK) doesn't interact with my Flickr contact list to ping my contacts; Windows Live Writer doesn't know anything about who out there in the blogosphere has subscribed to my weblog. Using these tools, deposit itself is an "individual" rather than a "social" action, if you like. Rather, the social aspect is supported from the "output"/"publication" features of the repository.

In contrast, if I understand Stuart's description of the Facebook deposit app correctly, the "social" dimension here is based on the context of the "deposit" action. Here, the "deposit" tool - Stuart's Fb app - is "socially aware", in the sense that it, rather than the target repository, is responsible for creating notifications in a feed - and the readership of that feed is shaped by the context of the deposit action rather than by the context of "publication": it's my network of Fb friends who see the notifications, not my network of Flickr contacts.

Though of course it may be that the repository I target using the Fb deposit app also enables all the sort of personal-/tag-/group-based output feed functionality I describe above for the Flickr/weblog cases. And I may well take my personal repository feed and "pipe it in to" a social network service - if I still bothered with Facebook (I don't, but that's another story!), I might be using a Flickr Fb app or a weblog app to add notifications to my Fb news feed! So these scenarios aren't exclusive, by any means.

I'm not sure I have any real conclusions here, tbh, and just to be clear, I certainly don't mean to sound negative about the development. Quite the contrary, it provides a very vivid example of how the different aspects of repository use can straddle different application contexts and how the SWORD protocol can be deployed within those different contexts. I think it also provides an illustration of Paul Walk's point about separating out some of our repository concerns (though I note that Paul's model does see the "source repository" as a provider of feeds).

It's certainly worth exploring the different dimensions of the "sociality" of the two approaches.I guess I'm arguing that (to me) "social deposit" isn't a substitute for the socialness that comes with the sort of "output" features Les describes - but it may well turn out to be a useful complement.

Some (more) thoughts on repositories

I attended a meeting of the JISC Repositories and Preservation Advisory Group (RPAG) in London a couple of weeks ago.  Part of my reason for attending was to respond (semi-formally) to the proposals being put forward by Rachel Heery in her update to the original Repositories Roadmap that we jointly authored back in April 2006.

It would be unfair (and inappropriate) for me to share any of the detail in my comments since the update isn't yet public (and I suppose may never be made so).  So other than saying that I think that, generally speaking, the update is a step in the right direction, what I want to do here is rehearse the points I made which are applicable to the repositories landscape as I see it more generally.  To be honest, I only had 5 minutes in which to make my comments in the meeting, so there wasn't a lot of room for detail in any case!

Broadly speaking, I think three points are worth making.  (With the exception of the first, these will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog.)

Metrics

There may well be some disagreement about this but it seems to me that the collection of material we are trying to put into institutional repositories of scholarly research publications is a reasonably well understood and measurable corpus.  It strikes me as odd therefore that the metrics we tend to use to measure progress in this space are very general and uninformative.  Numbers of institutions with a repository for example - or numbers of papers with full text.  We set targets for ourselves like, "a high percentage of newly published UK scholarly output [will be] made available on an open access basis" (a direct quote from the original roadmap).  We don't set targets like, "80% of newly published UK peer-reviewed research papers will be made available on an open access basis" - a more useful and concrete objective.

As a result, we have little or no real way of knowing if are actually making significant progress towards our goals.  We get a vague feel for what is happening but it is difficult to determine if we are really succeeding.

Clearly, I am ignoring learning object repositories and repositories of research data here because those areas are significantly harder, probably impossible, to measure in percentage terms.  In passing, I suggest that the issues around learning object repositories, certainly the softer issues like what motivates people to deposit, are so totally different from those around research repositories that it makes no sense to consider them in the same space anyway.

Even if the total number of published UK peer-reviewed research papers is indeed hard to determine, it seems to me that we ought to be able to reach some kind of suitable agreement about how we would estimate it for the purposes of repository metrics.  Or we could base our measurements on some agreed sub-set of all scholarly output - the peer-reviewed research papers submitted to the current RAE (or forthcoming REF) for example.

A glass half empty view of the world says that by giving ourselves concrete objectives we are setting ourselves up for failure.  Maybe... though I prefer the glass half full view that we are setting ourselves up for success.  Whatever... failure isn't really failure - it's just a convenient way of partitioning off those activities that aren't worth pursuing (for whatever reason) so that other things can be focused on more fully.  Without concrete metrics it is much harder to make those kinds of decisions.

The other issue around metrics is that if the goal is open access (which I think it is), as opposed to full repositories (which are just a means to an end) then our metrics should be couched in terms of that goal.  (Note that, for me at least, open access implies both good management and long-term preservation and that repositories are only one way of achieving that).

The bottom-line question is, "what does success in the repository space actually look like?".  My worry is that we are scared of the answers.  Perhaps the real problem here is that 'failure' isn't an option?

Executive summary: our success metrics around research publications should be based on a percentage of the newly published peer-reviewed literature (or some suitable subset thereof) being made available on an open access basis (irrespective of how that is achieved).

Emphasis on individuals

Across the board we are seeing a growing emphasis on the individual, on user-centricity and on personalisation (in its widest sense).  Personal Learning Environments, Personal Research Environments and the suite of 'open stack' standards around OpenID are good examples of this trend.  Yet in the repository space we still tend to focus most on institutional wants and needs.  I've characterised this in the past in terms of us needing to acknowledge and play to the real-world social networks adopted by researchers.  As long as our emphasis remains on the institution we are unlikely to bring much change to individual research practice.

Executive summary: we need to put the needs of individuals before the needs of institutions in terms of how we think about reaching open access nirvana.

Fit with the Web

I written and spoken a lot about this in the past and don't want to simply rehash old arguments.  That said, I think three things are worth emphasising:

Concentration

Global discipline-based repositories are more successful at attracting content than institutional repositories.  I can say that with only minimal fear of contradiction because our metrics are so poor - see above :-).  This is no surprise.  It's exactly what I'd expect to see.  Successful services on the Web tend to be globally concentrated (as that term is defined by Lorcan Dempsey) because social networks tend not to follow regional or organisational boundaries any more.

Executive summary: we need to work out how to take advantage of global concentration more fully in the repository space.

Web architecture

Take three guiding documents - the Web Architecture itself, REST, and the principles of linked data.  Apply liberally to the content you have at hand - repository content in our case.  Sit back and relax. 

Executive summary: we need to treat repositories more like Web sites and less like repositories.

Resource discovery

On the Web, the discovery of textual material is based on full-text indexing and link analysis.  In repositories, it is based on metadata and pre-Web forms of citation.  One approach works, the other doesn't.  (Hint: I no longer believe in metadata as it is currently used in repositories).  Why the difference?  Because repositories of research publications are library-centric and the library world is paper-centric - oh, and there's the minor issue of a few hundred years of inertia to overcome.  That's the only explanation I can give anyway.  (And yes, since you ask... I was part of the recent movement that got us into this mess!). 

Executive summary: we need to 1) make sure that repository content is exposed to mainstream Web search engines in Web-friendly formats and 2) make academic citation more Web-friendly so that people can discovery repository content using everyday tools like Google.

Simple huh?!  No, thought not...

I realise that most of what I say above has been written (by me) on previous occasions in this blog.  I also strongly suspect that variants of this blog entry will continue to appear here for some time to come.

Web Development Conference 2008 sponsorship

I'm very pleased to announce that we are sponsoring, and will hopefully be attending, the Web Development Conference being held at the Watershed in Bristol next week:

The Web Developers Conference is an event designed for students of the Web Design degree course at the University of West England.

The BSc (Hons) in Web Design is a course intended to give students all the skills they need to build applications on the web. It has everything from building databases to designing user interfaces, from back end programming to carrying out usability testing. The teaching team intend for students leaving the course to be able to join in the Web 2.0 world as anything they want, from designer through to developer.

The conference is the chance for new and current students to meet people from the Industry. Stories are told, tricks shared and maybe even the chance for students to get those all important industry placements.

We agreed to the sponsorship a while back but it kind of got forgotten about (my fault, not their's) so there's been a bit of a frantic last minute exchange of cheques and so on.  We are sponsoring primarily because it looks like an interesting event run by a local university but obviously, if any students happen to read this and are interested in working for a local educational charity, particularly in the area of Web development, we'd be more than happy to talk to you.

Note that the conference is sold out, so if you haven't got a place, you've missed your chance. Sorry about that!

2008 grants - social networking and online identity

We have been very slow in bring you news of our grant funding for 2008.  Sorry about that.  The delay is basically down to getting all of the projects fully signed off by all parties.  Anyway, enough of the excuses...

...we are very pleased to be supporting three projects this year, representing, in total, over £200,000 of project funding.  The projects, conducted by University of Edinburgh, King's College London, and University of Reading, all focus on issues associated with social networking and digital identity.

Assisting the W3C in opening social networking data

This two-year project, undertaken by Harry Halpin at the University of Edinburgh, aims to explore the power and utility of royalty-free standards for extensible open social data. This project will help investigate and generate work proposals for opening social data at the Web's foremost standards body, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Rhizome: exploring strands of online identity in learning, teaching and research

A fourteen month project, led by Dr Steven Warburton of King's College London. The project will use narrative inquiry and scenario mapping to explore the key technical and social elements that impact on the construction of online identities. The work will build a framework for understanding the tools, literacies, and practices needed to create and manage individuals' digital self-representations.

This is me

An eight month project, led by Shirley Williams of the School of Systems Engineering at the University of Reading, will investigate how individuals can be made more aware of their digital identity and how such identities can be developed and enhanced. The project will produce a set of Web-based resources designed to be of use both within the University of Reading and by the wider UK HE community.

Thoughts on FOWA

I spent Thursday and Friday last week at the Future of Web Apps Expo (FOWA) in London, a pretty good event overall in retrospect and certainly one that left me with a lot to think about.  I'm not going to write up any of the individual talks in any kind of detail - videos of all the talks are now available, as is my (lo-fat) live-blogging from the event - but I do want to touch on several thoughts that occurred to me while I was there.

Firstly, the somewhat mundane issue of wireless access at conferences...  I say mundane because one might expect that providing wireless access to conference delegates should have become pretty much routine by now - a bit like making sure that tea and coffee are available?  But that didn't seem to be the case at this event.  My (completely unscientific and non-exhaustive) experience was that everyone with a Mac in the venue had no trouble with the wifi network but that everyone with a PC seemed to have little or no connectivity.  (Actually, that's not quite true, I did find one person with a PC laptop who had no problem using the wifi).  Whatever... my poor little brand new EeePC didn't get on the network for any significant period of time at any point in the two days :-(

So, OK, we all know that Macs are better than PCs in every way but I was amazed at the stark difference that seemed to be in evidence during this particular event.

The lack of wifi connectivity was of particular annoyance to yours truly, since I was hoping to live-blog the whole event.  In the end, I used the mobile interface to Coveritlive via my iPhone over a 3G connection to cover some of the sessions - not an easy thing to do given the soft-keyboard but actually an interesting experiment in what is possible with mobile technology these days.  By day 2 of the conference my typing on the soft-keyboard was getting pretty good - though not always very accurate.

The conference had quite a young and entrepreneurial feel to it - I'm not saying that everyone there was under 30 but there were a lot of aspects to the style of the conference that were in stark contrast to the rather more... err... traditional feel of many 'academic' conferences.  I don't want to argue that age and attitude are necessarily linked (for obvious reasons) but the entrepreneurial thing is particularly interesting I think because it is something that has a non-obvious fit with how things happen in education.  Being an entrepreneur is about taking risks - risks with money more than anything I guess.  I don't quite know how this translates into the academic space but my gut feeling is that it would be worth thinking about.  Note that I'm not thinking about money here - I'm thinking about attitude.  What I suppose I mean is our ability to break out of a conservative approach to things - our ability to overcome the inertia associated with how things have been done in the past.

I realise that there are plenty of startups in the education space - Huddle springs to mind as a good current example of a company that seems to have the potential to cross the education/enterprise divide - my concern is more about what happens inside educational institutions.  A 24 year-old can run the world's biggest social network yet we don't see similar things happening in education... do we?  Calling all 24 year old directors of university computing services...

Is that something we should worry about?  Is it something we should applaud?  Does it matter?  Is it an inevitable consequence of the kinds of institutions we find in education?

Funding by JISC, Eduserv and the like should be about encouraging an entrepreneurial approach to the use of ICT in education but I'm not sure it fully succeeds in doing that.  Project funding is by its nature a largely low risk activity - except at the transition points between funding.  There are exceptions of course - there are people that I would say are definitely educational entrepreneurs (in the attitude sense) but they tend to be the exception rather than the rule overall and even where they exist I think it is very difficult for them to have a significant impact on wider practice.

The entrepreneurial theme came out strongly in several sessions. Tim Bray's keynote for example, my favorite talk of the conference, where he focused on what startups need to do to react to the current economic climate.  And in a somewhat contrived debate about 'work-life balance' where Jason Calacanis argued that "it's ok to be average but not in my company" - ever heard that in the education sector?  I'm not saying that his was the right attitude, and to a large extent he was playing devil's advocate anyway, but these are the kinds of issues that we tend to be pretty shy about even discussing in education.

Unfortunately, the whole entrepreneurial thing brings with it a less positive facet, in that there tends to be a "it's not what you know, but who you know" kind of attitude.  This comes out both face-to-face (people looking over your shoulder for a more interesting person to talk to - yes, I know I'm a boring git, thank you!) and in people's use of social networks.  The people I'd unfollow first on Twitter are those who spend the most time tweeting who they are meeting up with next. Yawn.

Much of FOWA was split into two parallel tracks - a developer track and a business track.  I spent most time in the former.  Overall I was slightly disappointed with this track and found the talks that I went to in the business track slightly better.  It's not that there weren't a lot of good talks in the developer track - just that they didn't seem like good developer talks.  My take was that many of them would have been more appropriate for managers who wanted to get up to speed on the latest technology-related issues and thinking.  It didn't seem to me that real developers (of which I'm not one) would have got much from many of those talks - they were too superficial or something.

Now, clearly, running a developer track aimed at 700-odd delegates is not an easy task - I certainly wouldn't be able to do any better - but more than anything you've got to try and inspire people to go away and learn about and deploy new technology, not try and teach it directly during the conference.  For whatever reason, it didn't feel like there was much really new technological stuff to get inspired about.  This is not the conference organiser's fault - just timing I guess.  The business track on the other hand had plenty to focus on, given the current economic climate.

As you'd expect, there was also a lot about the cloud over the two days.  Most of it positive... but interestingly (to me, since it was the first time I'd heard something like this) there was an impassioned plea from the floor (during the joint important bits of cloud computing slot by Jeff Barr and Tony Lucas) for consumers of cloud computing to band together in order to put pressure on suppliers for better terms and conditions, prices, and the like.

Overall then... FOWA was a different kind of event to those I normally attend and to be honest it was a very last-minute decision to go at all but I did so because there were some interesting looking speakers that I wanted to see.  It wasn't a total success (hey, what is!?) but on balance I'm really glad I went and I got a lot out of it.

Two final mini-thoughts...

Firstly, virtual economies came up a couple of times.  Once in the Techcrunch Pitch at the end of the first day, where one of the panel (sorry, I forget who) suggested that virtual economies would increasingly replace subscriptions as the way services are supported.  I think he was referring to services outside the virtual world space where these kinds of economies are regularly found - Second Life being the best known example of a virtual world economy - though I must confess that I don't really understand how it might work in other contexts.  Then again in Tim Bray's talk where he noted the sales of iPhone applications at very low unit costs (e.g. 59p a time) - a model that will become increasingly sustainable and profitable because of the growing size of the mobile market.  (I appreciate that these two aren't quite the same - but think they are close enough to be of passing interest).

Secondly, I had my first chance to play on a Microsoft Surface - a kind of table-sized iPhone multi-user touch interface.  These things are beautiful to watch and interact with, and the ability to almost literally touch digital content is amazing, with obvious possibilities in the education and cultural sectors, as well as elsewhere.  Costs are prohibitive at the moment of course - but that will no doubt change.  I can't wait!

And finally... to that Mark Zuckerberg interview at the end of day 2.  I really enjoyed it actually.  Despite being well rehearsed and choreographed I thought he came across very well.  He certainly made all the right kinds of noises about making Facebook more open though whether it is believable or not remains to be seen!

It's easy to knock successful people - particularly ones so young.  But at the end of the day I suspect that many of us simply wish we could achieve half as much!?

eFoundations LiveWire

eFoundations LiveWire will get its first proper outing later today (wireless network permitting) with a live-blog from the Future of Technology in Education (FOTE) event at Imperial College in London.

LiveWire is a slightly different kind of blog, more like a container for a collection of live-blogs really, and you may have to bear with us while we work out how best to squeeze the live-blog format into the new container in the most effective way. There will probably be issues with date-stamps, URLs and so on.

We are hosting it on Typepad - a choice made largely for consistency with how we host this blog rather than because it is necessarily the best way of organising things - and we'll initially use CoveritLive as the live-blogging engine. We've also pre-populated it with a number of older live-blogs from the last 6 months or so.

Feel free to drop by every so often. Keep an eye on the LiveWire RSS feed if you are interested - we'll try and announce new live-blogs about a week in advance of any meeting we are covering.

Open Science

Via Richard Akerman on Science Library Pad I note that a presentation made to a British Library Board awayday (on 23rd Sept), The Future of Research (Science and Technology), by Carole Goble is now available on Slideshare:

The presentation looks at the way in which scientific and technology-related research is changing, particularly thru the use of the Web to support open, data-driven research - essentially enabling a more immediate, transparent and repeatable approach to science.

The ideas around open science are interesting.  Coincidentally, a few Eduserv bods met with Cameron Neylon yesterday and he talked us thru some of the work going on around blog-driven open labbooks and the like.  Good stuff.  Whatever one thinks about the success or otherwise of institutional repositories as an agent of change in scholarly communication there seems little doubt that the 'open' movement is where things are headed because it is such a strong enabler of collaboration and communication.

Slide 24 of the presentation above introduces the notion that open "methods are scientific commodities".  Obvious really, but something I hadn't really thought about.  I note that there seem to be some potential overlaps here with the approaches to sharing pedagogy between lecturers/teachers enabled by standards such as Learning Design - "pedagogies as learning commodities" perhaps? - though I remain somewhat worried about how complex these kinds of things can get in terms of mark-up languages.

The presentation ends with some thoughts about the impact that this new user-centric (scientist-centric) world of personal research environments has on libraries:

• We don’t come to the library, it comes to us.
• We don’t use just one library or one source.
• We don’t use just one tool!
• Library services embedded in our toolkits, workbenches, browsers, authoring tools.

I find the closing scenario (slide 67) somewhat contrived:

Prior to leaving home Paul, a Manchester graduate student, syncs his iPhone with the latest papers, delivered overnight by the library via a news syndication feed. On the bus he reviews the stream, selecting a paper close to his interest in HIV-1 proteases. The data shows apparent anomalies with his own work, and the method, an automated script, looks suspect. Being on-line he notices that a colleague in Madrid has also discovered the same paper through a blog discussion and they Instant Message, annotating the results together. By the time the bus stops he has recomputed the results, proven the anomaly, made a rebuttal in the form of a pubcast to the Journal Editor, sent it to the journal and annotated the article with a comment and the pubcast. [Based on an original idea by Phil Bourne]

If nothing else, it is missing any reference to Twitter (see the MarsPhoenix Twitter feed for example) and Second Life! :-).  That said, there is no doubt that the times they are a'changing.

My advice?  You'd better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone :-)

Losing it

I spent much of yesterday in what felt like a time warp - sorry, I can't think of a nicer way of putting it.

I was at the JISC Services Skills event, Illuminating Event Management, a day that was intended to "explore all aspects of Event Management, from traditional 'Dressing a Stand' through to new and novel methods such as using web 2.0 to enhance your event".  Unfortunately, on the day, the event felt far more "traditional" than "novel" - since when did a 'skills' day involve listening to presentations that wouldn't have been out of place 10 years ago?

I'm not being critical of the organisers here - on paper they looked to have pulled together an interesting set of sessions covering event management, getting the most from your conference stand, the use of online conferencing tools, the impact of Web 2.0 and Second Life and so on.  No... it was just the way the day panned out I think, in part because the scheduled speaker on Web 2.0 (Matt Jukes) was unable to attend.  As a result, the day lacked some of the balance that it might otherwise have had.

You can get a feel for the day by reading my live-blog for the event on eFoundations LiveWire - but note that I was pretty despondent by the end and not typing much :-(  Look, I know it's important to label the vegetarian options correctly at lunchtime - 't was ever thus - and I accept that we don't always do it successfully at our Eduserv events (despite having a vegetarian on the team) but did we really need that level of information from a 'skills' day?  JISC is supposed to be about innovation... right?

Where was the stuff about the amplified conference?  About using tags successfully?  About streaming options?  About Flickr and Crowdvine and blogging and live-blogging and Slideshare and ... oh, you get the picture.  I'd expect these things to be at the forefront of every event manager's thinking these days?  In our sector at least.  This stuff isn't that cutting edge after all... look at this paper by Brian Kelly et al. from 2005.

Instead, the closest we got to the Web during the first presentation were some URLs for venue searches (very useful BTW) and a suggestion that you need to get all your presenters to sign a bit of paper saying they are happy for you to put their slides on the Web (as PDF - OMG!).  I was desperate to do a James Clay - leaping up with my iPhone streaming live to qik.com to ask the speaker if she'd like me to ask her to sign a bit of paper.  This stuff is out there - get used to it.  In many cases, it's not even happening over our networks anymore.

Grace Porter of the JISC was up second.  She spoke about her event manager's toolkit - essentially a wiki (to which people in the community are invited to contribute).  This was more like it!  Good stuff. I've always thought that there was space for a social network of some kind for event managers - sharing reviews about venues, information about streaming providers, sample budget templates and the like.  This sounds spot on to me and I'll certainly try and get the guys here involved.  Grace also talked about making events greener, again a useful and timely contribution.

Then there was a talk about getting the most out of your conference exhibition stand.  My innovative side wondered if we'd hear something about using an ARG to get people to your stand.  Maybe something about Moo cards at the very least.  Alas, no - just advice about dress codes, setting 'new contact' targets for staff on the stand and remembering to shower before turning up!  Hmmm...

Accessibility seemed to feature very highly in the day - I'm not quite sure why?  Not that I have anything against accessibility you understand.  But two presentations, one about 'accessible email'  - surely that was over the top (even just as a way to demonstrate some remote presentation software)?

Then in the afternoon we had presentations about using online conferencing systems - particularly focussing on Elluminate and Wimba.  This was much more on target (for me at least) and it was interesting to see the tools in action.

Is it just me that hates the use of Java in systems like this?  I know these tools are now the accepted norm but I find Java applications pretty much unbearable!  I tried to construct a question around this in terms of accessibility but all I got back was assurance that they were fully accessible (whatever that means).  I didn't make myself clear enough.  Accessibility is about inclusion - it's a social thing more than a technical thing.  Java applications aren't inclusive because they're bloody horrible.  I guess it's just a personal thing...

So what else did I learn?

That Networkshop attendees don't like people typing on their laptops while they are listening to presentations - at least not according to the evaluation forms.  Hmmm... all that proves is that luddites are at least as loud on evaluation forms as evangelists.  The reality is probably somewhere in the middle?  And if the loudness of typing really is a problem, how about putting all your mains sockets in one area of the auditorium, thus naturally pulling all the live-bloggers together in one place and letting everyone else sleep peacefully.

Oh... and that delegates to virtual conferences can sometimes be stupid enough to want to tell you their dietary requirements! Lol.

So, there was some stuff I found useful and some stuff I didn't and for some reason I allowed the latter the get the better of me.  The straw that broke the camel's back (for me) was a question from the audience about whether the DPA allows JISC services to keep lists of email addresses to which spam about future events can be emailled.  I kinda lost it at that point... pointing out that spamming people by email might not be the best approach to sharing information about events, even if it turns out the be legal. 

My comments where misplaced and I probably went too far.  Everyone uses email and there are target audiences for whom it is the only option.  In my defence, I'd say that my interjection did at least cause a nice bit of discussion.  When I started with, "I probably live on a different planet to everyone else, but ..." about 80% of the room nodded cheerfully!  And when the next questioner referred to me as "passionate", everyone in the room knew that what he really meant was, "why did you just completely lose it, you *@#%ing idiot"! :-)

On balance and after some reflection, I think it was a useful day for me.  It's good to be reminded that we don't all live in a world where blogging and live-blogging and Twitter and Slideshare and the rest are the norm - in fact, for many people, they are not even on the horizon.  This is a shame... and part of the JISC's role is to encourage people to think about these things.  I'm absolutely sure they will continue to do so.  But I guess they also have to be mindful of where people actually are.

Oh, and I nearly forgot...  I was at the event to give a talk about Second Life and how it can be used for events.  I was up last.  What can I tell you?  Getting wound up and pissing off the majority of the audience just before your own presentation probably doesn't feature in most 'presentation skills' good-practice guides but I think I got away with it.  I did the whole session in-world, with a virtual audience as well as the real audience.

I'll blog the details of my session separately, probably over on ArtsPlace SL, but suffice to say that this is a much more stressful way of giving a presentation than usual, since you have two sets of people and the technology to worry about.  In many ways, it is a whole new way of giving a presentation - one that I think will grow in popularity and one that I hope I'm getting a bit better at each time I do it (but I'll have to let the two audiences be the judge of that).

If I offended anyone yesterday I apologise - I think it's better to be honest and upfront about stuff even if it can be painful at times.  I also know that I'm at one end of a spectrum and other people are, rightly, elsewhere.  If you want to respond to this post, positively or negatively, please do so - and I'm happy to be called an idiot, because I know I act like one some of the time.  Yesterday being a case in point.

Worlds apart together

Sometimes things just seem to come together in odd ways!

Take this afternoon for example...

On the one hand, the jisc-repositories mailing list came briefly to life with a discussion about the legality of storing images of people without having explicitly gained their permission.  A variety of viewpoints came forth, both for and against, which I would broadly categorise (very unfairly!) as common sense vs. legal sense.

Meanwhile, at almost exactly the same time in another corner of the universe, James Clay was waiving his mobile phone/video camera around indiscriminately during question time at the MoLeNET conference, broadcasting all and sundry live to qik.com and challenging (in quite an "in your face" way) the assembled panel to comment on the impact of mobile technology on the delivery of learning in FE. 

The sound isn't brilliant throughout, but it's worth watching.

I don't know what point I'm making here other than to note the obvious - that nothing is straight-forward and that the 'net continues to change, and change us, in quite fundamental ways.

Residents and visitors

My dislike of the terms 'Google generation', 'digital native' and 'digital immigrant' is on record so I was interested to see (via Twitter) Dave White, writing at TALL Blog, proposing an alternative to the latter pair, Not ‘Natives’ & ‘Immigrants’ but ‘Visitors’ & ‘Residents’.

I like the notion of 'residents' and 'visitors' much better:

The resident is an individual who lives a percentage of their life online. The web supports the projection of their identity and facilitates relationships. These are people who have an persona online which they regularly maintain.

...

The Visitor is an individual who uses the web as a tool in an organised manner whenever the need arises. They may book a holiday or research a specific subject. They may choose to use a voice chat tool if they have friends or family abroad. Often the Visitor puts aside a specific time to go online rather than sitting down at a screen to maintain their presence at any point during the day.

It seems to me that this is a much better characterisation of what is going on than the somewhat pejorative, often ageist, use that is made of 'immigrant' and 'native'.  What distibuishes people's use of the Web (and technology more generally) is their attitude, not their age demographic.

Thoughts on ALT-C 2008

A few brief reflections on ALT-C 2008, which took place last week.

Overall, I thought it was a good event.  Hot water in my halls of residence rooms would have been an added bonus but that's a whole other story that I won't bother you with here.

I particularly enjoyed the various F-ALT sessions (the unofficial ALT-C Fringe), which were much better than I expected.  Actually, I don't know why I say that, since I didn't really know what to expect, but whatever... it seemed to me that those sessions were the main place in the conference where there was any real debate (at least from what I saw).  Good stuff and well done to the F-ALT organisers.  I hope we see better engagement between the fringe and the main conference next year because this is something that has the potential to bring real value to all conference delegates.

I also enjoyed the conference keynotes, though I think all three were somewhat guilty of not sufficiently tailoring their material to the target audience and conference themes.  I also suspect that my willingness to just sit back and accept the keynotes at face value, particularly the one by Itiel Dror, shows what little depth of knowledge I have in the 'learning' space - I know there were people in the audience who wanted to challenge his 'cognitive psychologist' take on learning as we understand it.

I live-blogged all three, as well as some of the other sessions I attended:

• Opening keynote - Hans Rosling (partial live-blog due to Coveritlive system maintenance)
• Games short paper session
• 2nd keynote - Itiel Dror
• Identity theft in VLEs session
  
• User informed design short paper session
• Final keynote - David Cavallo

I should say that I live-blog primarily as a way of keeping my own notes of the sessions I attend - it's largely a personal thing.  But it's nice when I get a few followers watching my live note taking, especially when they chip in with useful comments and questions that I can pass on to the speakers, as happened particularly well with the "identity theft in VLEs" session.

I should also mention the ALT-C 2008 social network which was delivered using Crowdvine and which was, by all accounts, very successful.  Having been involved with a few different approaches to this kind of thing, I think Crowdvine offers a range of functionality that is hard to beat.  At the time of writing, over 440 of the conference's 500+ delegates had signed up to Crowdvine!  This is a very big proportion, certainly in my experience.  But it's not just about the number of sign-ups... it's the fact that Crowdvine was actively used to manage people's schedules, engage in debates (before, during and after the conference) and make contacts that is important.  I think it would be really interesting to do some post-conference analysis (both quantitative and qualitative) about how Crowdvine was really used - not that I'm offering to do it you understand.  The findings would be interesting when thinking about future events.

The conference dinner was also a triumph... it was an inspired choice to ask local FE students to both cater for us and serve the meal, and in my opinion it resulted in by far the best conference meal I've had for a long time.  Not that the conference meal makes or breaks a conference - but it's a nice bonus when things work out well :-).  Thinking about it now, it seems to me that more academic/education conferences should take kind of approach - certainly if this particular meal was anything to go by - not just in terms of the meal, but also for other aspects of the event.  How about asking media students to use a variety of new media to make their own record of a conference for example.  These are win-win situations it seems to me.

Finally, the slides from my sponsor's session are now available on Slideshare:

As I mentioned previously, the point of the talk was to think out loud about the way in which the availability of notionally low-cost or free Web 2.0 services (services in the cloud) impacts on our thinking about service delivery, both within institutions and in community-based service providers such as Eduserv.  What is it that we (institutions and service providers 'within' the community) can offer that external providers can't (sustainability, commitment to preservation of resources, adherence to UK law, and so on)?  What do they offer that we don't, or that we find it difficult to offer?  I'm thinking particularly of the user-experience here! :-) How do we make our service offerings compelling in an environment where 'free' is also 'easy'?

In the event, I spent most time talking about Eduserv - which is not necessarily a bad thing since I don't think we are a well understood organisation - and there was some discussion at the end which was helpful (to me at least).  But I'm not sure that I really got to the nub of the issue.

This is a theme that I would certainly like to return to.  The Future of Technology in Education (FOTE2008) event being held in London on October 3rd will be one opportunity.  It's now sold out but I'll live-blog if at all possible (i.e. wireless network permitting) - see you there.

ALT-C, Crowdvine and (social) tagging

The Crowdvine social network for next week's ALT-C Conference is now available and delegates are signing up apace.

One of the interesting things about Crowdvine is it's use of social tagging (solicited through a conference-specific set of profile questions) to show delegates' various areas of interest, expertise, etc.  The idea is to help people get in touch with each other and, like any tagging system, it works as well as the tags it is built on.

For a community like ALT-C, the approach to tagging, and the resulting tags, makes for quite an interesting case study.  Here's a couple of examples...

1) '(e-)learning' - As a human reader, I understand where this tag is coming from.  It's trying to tell me that the tagger is interested in both learning and e-learning without needing to create two tags.  Brilliant... if saving bits was the point of the exercise! :-)  Unfortunately, it completely fails as a tag because clicking on it shows that no-one else is using it - everyone else uses one or more of 'learning', 'e-learning' and 'elearning'.  Which brings me nicely to my second example...

2) 'elearning' vs. 'e-learning' - Both are in use.  Clicking on the tags (at the time of writing) shows 18 people interested in 'e-learning' and 9 people in 'elearning' (there may be some cross-over).  I'll go out on a limb and suggest that all these people are actually interested in the same thing!  One is therefore tempted to ask why the 9 people chose to use the less popular tag?  Actually, I can guess the answer so please don't tell me - whilst I accept that such action is completely understandable, it is also non-optimal.

There are probably other examples.

The point is that social tagging is a social activity, so you have to look at what other people are doing to get the most out of - not just when you first assign your tags, but subsequently as the community grows. 

Hyphens may well offend your tagging sensibilities but if that's what most other people are choosing, it pays to go with the crowd.

Social media and the emerging technology hype curve

I've noticed two behavioural changes in myself over the last while...

Firstly, I'm trying to do less work at home outside of normal office hours.  Yes, this blog post indicates I'm not being totally successful at this - written on a Saturday morning as it is - but I'm not intending to be totally dogmatic about it, it's just a general trend.  Me, I quite like spreading my working day over a large proportion of the available 24 hours and I tend to find early mornings and late evenings both very constructive times to work, but my family don't like it much and I have to take that into consideration.

Secondly, I find I'm reading much more based on links that turn up in my Twitter feed than I do based on explicitly seeking stuff out using Bloglines (my preferred RSS reader).  This isn't necessarily a good thing, in fact I'm pretty sure it isn't a good thing - I'm just reporting what I find myself to be doing on the ground, so to speak.  It isn't a good thing because although I like my Twitter environment, I don't think it is particularly representative of the whole working social environment in which I want to be positioned.

Anyway... via @DIHarrison I discovered Study: Fastest Growing US Companies Rapidly Adopting Social Media on ReadWriteWeb which gives yet more evidence of our changing attitudes and habits around social media and the Web.

What does this mean? It means that when you tell people you write, read or listen to blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks and online video - if they give you a funny look, it is now officially them that's a freak, not you. Are these tools really as useful as so many people appear to believe they are? That's another question, but at least we're getting a healthy number of people and businesses trying them out.

It ends with Gartner's hype curve for emerging technology (July 2008) on which I was surprised to see that they'd positioned 'Public Virtual Worlds' and 'Web 2.0' at more or less the same point on the curve whereas I would have expected to see the former well behind the latter?  They also position 'SOA' as climbing out of the trough of disillusionment, which is not a view that I happen to share.

While I'm (just about) on the subject of virtual worlds, there seems to have been a recent surge in the breadth and depth in available virtual worlds - or, more likely, that breadth and depth seems to have been made much more visible of late - particularly as evidenced by this diagram and this video (both via Stephen Downes).  In my spare time I've vaguely started work on a project called MUVEable.com, which is intended to bring together material from various virtual world offerings, but I strongly suspect that I don't have the engery to do it justice, particularly in light of the breadth noted here and the first point above.

What Web 2.0 teaches us...

Preface: I've had this post on the back-burner for a while, worried that it might cause offense to various colleagues/friends/readers.  It's intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek and humorous but like most such things, from my perspective at least, I think it contains at least a grain or two of truth.

The advent of desktop publishing software, way back when, showed us that although pretty much anyone could use clip-art and fonts, most people weren't (and indeed still aren't) graphic designers.  Over the years we've mostly got used to calling in the professionals whenever necessary, though there is always a place for do-it-yourselfness.

So, what does Web 2.0 tell us?

• That anyone can blog but not everyone can write (or even spell-check!)?
• That anyone can podcast but not everyone is a radio chat-show host?
• That anyone can make a video but not everyone is a TV presenter?

In short...  Web 2.0 technology democratises production but creative talent and presentation skills remain rare commodities.  For the record, I include myself mostly in the "have-nots", as my limited attempts at YouTube and Veodia demonstrate admirably.  (I'm not even going to embarrass myself by including links!)

Seesmic is a good case in point.  Seesmic is a kind of video Twitter.  It's a brilliant idea and has been well executed technically.  The trouble is, like the video phone, one is left asking, "Do I actually need this?" (by which I mean, "Does video really add anything to what I'm trying to do here?").  Perhaps it is just me - clearly there are a lot of Seesmic users who like what it offers, though I couldn't find an actual number anywhere on the site?

Take 140 characters from Twitter, turn it into anywhere between 30 seconds and 5 minutes of variable quality audio and video, where the video carries no additional information over the audio and where the audio carries little additional information over the original 140 characters.  That's Seesmic in a nutshell.

Now... maybe I fall into the category of "people who haven't tried it and therefore don't get it"?  Maybe I'm just plain wrong and within a month I'll be Seesmic'ing with the best (and worst) of them!  Anything is possible - stay tuned to find out...

With apologies to everyone and no-one.

I appreciate that I'm sounding a bit like Andrew Keen.  But that's not my intention.  My point is not that amateurs don't have anything interesting to say - I think they do - and indeed, for the most part I include myself as one.  My point is that our desktop use of audio and video in particular tends to highlight an amateurish approach to production.  There are exceptions of course - Mike Ellis' video of the museum mashup day a while back and the podcasts produced by our PsychoPod project being good 'local' examples.  Maybe the dross is the price we have to pay for this kind of good stuff?

Reflecting on this for a while, I think the problem is two-fold.  Firstly the linear nature of audio and video tends to defy attempts at scanning the content. Fast-forwarding and reversing are difficult at best, as is getting a feel for whether the next 3-5 minutes of audio/video is worth sticking around for (though Slideshare slidecasts offer an interesting counter-example, since the slide transitions do give a nice way of quickly navigating the content).  These tasks are much easier with text and most of us have well-honed skills at scanning and appraising textual material pretty quickly (even where that material is just a 140-character tweet).  Secondly, the problem is not so much with the video quality (shaky camera work and the like - I'm quite happy with that within reason) - it's with the audio.  Some people's voices simply become wooden when faced with a microphone and the 'record' light, to the point that listening to them is painful.  (That's not to mention that those of us in shared office spaces can't really engage in this kind of dialog anyway).

Being able to talk to camera (or microphone) is a skill that I wish I could learn - the trouble is, I'm not sure that it is learnable?  A voice coach would probably help I guess.  Maybe I should ask for voice training in my next staff appraisal? :-)

BTW, there is no doubt in my mind that there will be some interesting applications of this kind of immediate micro-vodcasting in teaching and learning - learning foreign languages comes to mind very quickly - (kids are nearly always better at this kind of thing anyway) so I haven't written it off completely.  Just feeling somewhat cautious (err... snobbish?) about its use too liberally.

No tweets by SMS in the UK

Twitter is no longer delivering tweets by outbound SMS in the UK.  This doesn't bother me, since I've never wanted to clutter my mobile phone with the kind of noise one generally gets on Twitter (don't get me wrong - I like the noise, I just don't want it to appear as text messages on my mobile phone).  But clearly this change will affect some users and there is already a Facebook group to protest about the change (primarily aimed at UK mobile operators rather than Twitter).  The announcement from Twitter suggest some alternatives for those (unlike me) with reasonably up to date phones.

What is interesting about the announcement is that it highlights a certain level of tension between mobile operators and services providers such as Twitter as well as the inconsistency of approaches to text messaging business models internationally (Twitter have reached business agreements with telecom companies in the US, Canada and India for example, and are continuing to try and do so in other countries).

Note that the change does not stop UK twits from sending tweets via SMS.

Stop the Web, I want to get off...

I used to be happy with Facebook and Twitter and regularly updated my statuses in both... for a while at least!

Then Facebook got a bit stale, started suffering application spam, and I sensed people moving on.  I still use it, but only really as a place to share stuff with friends and family - and as the home of my Second Friends Facebook application.

Then Twitter began struggling under the weight of its own success and people have started talking about identi.ca and Pownce and various other alternatives.

Good grief!

Now I seem to need Ping.fm, just to let me post to all the places that people might be listening.

I'm suffering social network overload and I need help.  Is there some kind of f2f group I can go along to?  "Hello, my name is Andy and I've just accidentally pinged the wrong tweet to my ning network".

Oddly, Spike Milligan predicted much of this chaos and confusion as long ago as 1968 (I still remember getting a copy of Silly Verse for Kids in my Christmas stocking that year):

On the Ning Nang Nong

On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the Cows go Bong!
And the Monkeys all say Boo!
There's a Nong Nang Ning
Where the trees go Ping!
And the tea pots Jibber Jabber Joo.
On the Nong Ning Nang
All the mice go Clang!
And you just can't catch 'em when they do!
So it's Ning Nang Nong!
Cows go Bong!
Nong Nang Ning!
Trees go Ping!
Nong Ning Nang!
The mice go Clang!

What a noisy place to belong,
Is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!!

Spike Milligan in Silly verse for kids, 1968

Facebook blocks Google Friend Connect

I beg your pardon,
I never promised you a rose garden.
Along with the sunshine,
There's gotta be a little rain sometimes.

(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden, Joe South

So Facebook - you know... that bastion of privacy protection - have blocked Google Friend Connect on privacy grounds.  Yeah right!  More like, "we've realised that the walls round our garden weren't high enough and we've just added a few more rows of bricks" :-(

Google Friend Connect

This did the rounds fairly extensively on Twitter yesterday but is still worth a mention here...

Google have announced Friend Connect (currently on a limited beta release as far as I can tell) which "lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website".  The following video gives a nice introduction to its use:

I haven't yet worked out if this is anything more than a set of widgets that allow you to layer social features onto an existing non-social Web site or whether it provides APIs that support proper integration with your local content and services?

Whatever... there's no doubt that it is an interesting development, and one that deserves more investigation, especially as we begin to see growing dissatisfaction with Facebook.  Google Friend Connect would, for example, have allowed us to add social features to the main symposium Web site this year, without needing to go out and create a separate social network on Ning.  Having said that, I have to confess that the example sites aren't very compelling currently.

An @foo convention for blogs

I've noted before in this blog that Twitter has a very simple convention for prefixing someone's Twitter account name with '@' to indicate that you are responding to them in your tweet - @andypowe11 for example.  (In Twitter, being made up of messages that are only 140 characters of plain text, all conventions are by definition simple!).  This allows me to reference another twit (someone who tweets) but doesn't tie my response directly to a particular tweet, or thread of tweets.  It works, within the confines of tweetspace because all Twitter account names are unique.

In the blogsphere we have the opposite problem.  If I want to respond to a particular blog post I can do so using the entry's trackback (or ordinary) URL.  But if I just want to refer to someone, as I did in my recent entry about podcasting, there don't seem to be any lightweight conventions for doing so.  I could use a microformat or an OpenID I guess, but my current blogging tool, Typepad, doesn't give me an easy way of doing so afaik?  In any case, the complexity of this approach makes it hard to see it taking off in the way that the @foo convention has done in Twitter.

So what I'd like, and please tell me if it already exists, is an easy way of dragging and dropping the names of the people I regularly refer to in my blog entries (there aren't that many btw!) into a blog post such that the result is more machine-readable than just the person's name as a text string.  Does such a convention and/or tool exist?

Here comes everybody... well, some of us anyway

Writing in the Times Higher Education, Tara Brabazon (Professor of Media Studies, University of Brighton) provides an interesting review of Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations.  Having not read the book, I can't comment on the quality of this review as a critique, but it does serve as a useful reminder we are too easily fooled into thinking that the transformative changes brought about by Web 2.0 are equally beneficial to everyone.  Of course, they are not.  We live in a digitally divided world and it is arguable whether the gap is opening or closing?

Older citizens, the poor, the illiterate and the socially excluded are invisible in Shirky's "everybody". Once more, the US, and occasionally the UK, is "the world" in the world wide web. The hypothesis is clear: the internet/web/Web 2.0 changed "everything". The question remains: for whom? Shirky states that "the hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the existing society". Yet he is no Bolshevik. His collectivised hippydom hits trouble when dealing with the less palatable/consumerable parts of social networking, such as cutter communities and the "pro-ana" anorexia websites. In response, Shirky simply continues his metaphor for radical change: "it's not a revolution if nobody loses". "Everybody" suddenly evaporates.

When I introduced our OpenID meeting in October last year I spoke about the increasingly varied use that members of my immediate family are making of the Web in general and social networks in particular and used the examples as evidence to support an argument for lifelong user-centric online identities rather than sector-specific institutionally-centric ones.  I think the argument remains valid, but I must admit that several members of the audience made comments along the lines of, "interesting talk, but one that bears no relationship to many of the students we get coming to our institution".

I disagree with Brabazon on one point.  Towards the end of the review she says, "The long tail of proliferating mediocrity, where bloggers link to other bloggers and podcasters namecheck other podcasters, is the great cost of Web 2.0".  I find myself frustrated by the continual association of Web 2.0 and mediocrity, not that I think that is quite what Brabazon is arguing - but there is a danger that it will be interpreted in that way.

Tech support via Twitter

I spent a few hours yesterday copying-and-pasting text from PDF into Powerpoint in order to create my Slideshare version of the Byron report summary for children.  Then I uploaded it to Slideshare and waited for it to appear on the Eduserv Foundation's Slidespace... and waited... and waited.  By this morning I'd waited 15 hours for the conversion to Slideshare's internal format to happen, something that usually only takes a few minutes at most.

I sent a tweet on Twitter asking if other people were having similar problems.  One of my followers (tango2) came back to say not.

Then something unexpected happened... I got a message via Twitter from someone at Slideshare saying:

  @andypowe11  Hi Andy, the SlideShare team is fixing the issue at the moment. It will be done in a couple of hours. Arun from SS.

A couple of tweets later and everything had been sorted, including a couple of stuck upload attempts of mine being removed.

Unsolicited tech support via Twitter... now that's what I call service!

Response to grants call

The response to this year's grants call has been pretty overwhelming - 128 bids were received by the close of play on Friday (about 30 more than last year).  That gives us 256 sides of A4 to read and review.

It is clear that our three themes (online identity, the open social graph, always-on Internet access and mobile computing) generated a lot of interest.

The next step is for us to ask about 15 of the bidders to come back to us with a more detailed proposals, of which we'll interview about half, and fund 3 or 4.

On that basis can I just say, "apologies in advance" to the ~124 of you that don't get funded :-(.

Technologies for open social networking

Over on ReadWriteWeb, Sean Ammirati provides a quick introduction to four of the key technologies that underpin open social networks - hCard, XFN, FOAF, OpenID, and OAuth... wait... that's five... five of the key technologies that underpin open social networks... NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!

The man whose tweets were all exactly alike

Two significant Twitter-related things happened yesterday... I blogged the first, the release of CommonCraft's Twitter video tutorial.  The second was that the technology section of the UK Guardian ran a short piece about Twitter under the headline, Why are there no spam or trolls on Twitter?

This is not the first time that the Guardian has covered Twitter and it certainly won't be the last.  But it seems to me to be indicative of a gradual mainstreaming of Twitter as a tool, as is the CommonCraft video.

Mainstreaming will bring with it greater numbers of users.  That, in turn, will bring growing pressure to use it as a channel for spam and other less-than-desirable uses.

The thrust of the Guardian article is that Twitter has a natural immunity to spam-like problems because of the way it works.  I don't strongly disagree with this.  On the other hand, spammers are inventive people and if they can find a way to make the benefits outweigh the costs, they probably will.  We don't tend to see much of it at the moment because of the relatively low numbers of Twitter users and because most of them are currently tech-savvy people (err, geeks).

Mainstreaming will also bring with it self-inflicted issues - wanting to following large numbers of other twits (twitterers) for example.  Email isn't a broken technology as such, it just didn't cope with scalability issues very well.  Will Twitter go the same way or is it genuinely protected from such a fate?

Sharing, socialising and institutional IT service provision

The second theme for my UCISA presentation next week will be around 'sharing and socialising'...

It is clear that there is currently a huge interest in the management and disclosure of scholarly assets by institutions.  This is most visible in the open access repository movement, the growing interest in open data, and the push for open and re-usable learning objects.  The focus tends to be be both on managing and preserving the content, and sharing it openly on the Web with the aim of letting others re-use it in various ways.  And a large part of the policy agenda is concerned with institutional solutions, an approach that I've spent some time arguing against of late.

At the same time there is a whole spectrum of less formal sharing going on in the form of blogs, wikis and uploading content to Flickr, YouTube, Slideshare and so on, most of which tends to happen using Web 2.0 services outside of the institution.

Whist the discussions around how best to openly share content on the Web are interesting, in the context of my UCISA talk I'm more interested in the social networks that grow up around these activities than I am in the sharing activity itself.  Learning and research are social activities and one of the things I'm interested in is how we build online social networks that support them most effectively.  Social networks are like gardens... they need a certain amount of care and attention and they tend to flourish best in the right environment, one facet of which is the concentration effect that Lorcan Dempsey has been talking about recently.  Large-scale globally concentrated social services bring with them network effects that are not possible in smaller-scale service scenarios.

Consider Slideshare as an example, a global Web 2.0 service that has rapidly become "the best way to share your presentations with the world".  It is hard to imagine that the kind of presentation sharing service we see in Slideshare today could have grown up around a set of institutional activities (however well coordinated they might have been) - the service works primarily because it is global in scale.  For similar reasons, social activity has built up around the presentations, both within the confines of the Slideshare service itself (tagging, favoriting, etc.) and beyond (by embedding presentations into other services).  As a result it has become a very compelling place to share presentations on the Web.

So what is the lesson here for institutions and institutional IT services?  I think they need to take note.  Whilst (in some cases) they may have the technical competence to build global-social social services, it is not typically part of their function to do so.  To put it bluntly, their business is to serve the institution, not to serve the world.  As a result, IT services have to begin seeing themselves as the enablers rather than the providers of such services.

This means more than simply providing the network pipe thru which the services are accessed.  There are functional requirements in the educational space that go beyond those catered for by external services directly - the need to preserve the scholarly record and comply with QAA requirements being two good examples.  I'm sure there are others.  I think there is an interesting debate to be had around what it means for institutional IT services to properly enable and support access to external Web 2.0 services.

I'll touch on this again in my third and final theme for the talk - the 'shared service' agenda.

Twitter by CommonCraft

For those of you that still don't get Twitter, maybe this will help:

Discovered via @sirexkat on Twitter (of course!).

Concentration and diffusion - the two ways of Web 2.0

Lorcan Dempsey has now blogged his ideas around two key aspects of Web 2.0, concentration and diffusion, The two ways of Web 2.0, which I referred to in my keynote at VALA 2008 but was unable to cite properly.

As I said in my talk, I think these two concepts are very helpful as we think about the impact of Web 2.0 on the kinds of online services we build and use in the education space.

P vs. P in a user-centric world

I'm currently doing some thinking around the 3 or 4 themes that I want to pull together for a talk at the UCISA 2008 Conference in Glasgow next week.  (Brian Kelly recently blogged about the same talk - it is a joint effort - under the title "IT Services Are Dead – Long Live IT Services 2.0!").

One of the themes I want to touch on is our general move towards user-centricity (is that a word?) and in particular the use of the word 'personal' in both Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and Personal Research Environment (PRE).  I've been laboring under what turns out to be a misapprehension that the P in PLE is used differently than the P in PRE.  Why did I think this?  Well, when I first read the PLE article by Scott Wilson et al, Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the dominant design of educational systems I must have particularly picked up on this paragraph:

While we have discussed the PLE design as if it were a category of technology in the same sense as the VLE design, in fact we envisage situations where the PLE is not a single piece of software, but instead the collection of tools used by a user to meet their needs as part of their personal working and learning routine. So, the characteristics of the PLE design may be achieved using a combination of existing devices (laptops, mobile phones, portable media devices), applications (newsreaders, instant messaging clients, browsers, calendars) and services (social bookmark services, weblogs, wikis) within what may be thought of as the practice of personal learning using technology.

At the same time I conveniently ignored the following paragraph:

However, for the design to reach equivalent or superior levels of efficiency to the VLE, as well as broader applicability, requires the further development of technologies and techniques to support improved coordination. Some initial investigations include the work of projects such as TenCompetence and the Personal Learning Environments work at the University of Bolton cited previously.

I really like the first of these two paragraphs, it sums up my view of the PLE as a way in which the learner can pick and mix from the wide range of [Web 2.0] services out there on the Web in order to get whatever task is at hand done most efficiently.

I tend to dislike the second, only because it puts one in mind of a portal-like approach, i.e. where the learner uses some kind of institutional or desktop tool as an access point to the range of external  services in which they are interested.  I'm afraid that I have a somewhat unjustified hatred of the 'portal' word/concept ever since I used it in the early days of the JISC Information Environment work and then had to spend 4 or 5 years explaining that I didn't really mean what people thought I meant!

Anyway... it seems to me that the P in PRE does tend to be used very much in the sense of 'research portal' - a single point of activity that brings together whatever combination of things it is that a researcher needs to do in order to undertake their research.

A couple of days ago, I asked my Twitter followers a question: is a PLE an approach or a bit of software?

To his credit, Scott replied, summing up the PLE concept rather nicely in 140 characters or less as follows:

@andypowe11: environment (web,society,family)+tools(sw, hw, process, technique)+disposition = PLE   02:25 PM February 29, 2008

I used to have a (regularly broken) rule of thumb that if you can't write something in one side of A4 or less then you haven't thought about it hard enough.  Seeing Scott's reply made me wonder whether that should be downsized to 140 characters - i.e. if you can't tweet it, don't bother!

I remain slightly disappointed that the notion of a PLE has to include some aspect of a tool to aggregate things together (and typically an institutional tool at that) though I suppose I have to grudgingly concede that such a thing is necessary, at least in as much as one needs to tie together assessment-related information based on the learning being undertaken in the PLE.

In terms of the talk, the theme remains pertinent I think.  We are now quite used to using the term 'user-centric' in the context of identity management (particularly OpenID).  But, of course, this trend is more pervasive, covering all kinds of activities and including both learning and research.  Whether there is an in-house aggregation layer (a portal, or PLE, or PRE, or whatever one chooses to call it) to bring the outputs of distributed learning and research activities back together is largely a moot point.  The point is that those activities are increasingly likely to be carried out using services outside the institution and where the institution has varying degrees of control over service level agreements, data protection, and the like.

And despite my negativity, one of the advantages of having that in-house aggregation layer is that it gives the institution some way of pulling external content created by its members back inside the institution where it can be retained as part of the scholarly record or for QAA type purposes, or whatever.

Homework vs. network

British 15-to-19-year-olds admit spending significantly less time doing homework than they used to as a result of their use of social-networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, according to research published today.

So reported the Guardian yesterday, based on the findings of a study produced by Entertainment Media Research for media law firm Wiggin.  I think I could have told them that.  Just come round our house.

Similarly unsurprising, only 13% of men in the 45 to 54 age group (it's my birthday today and I'm rapidly approaching the middle of that group) "regularly browse social-networking sites", as opposed to 55% in the 15 to 19 age group.

But my favorite obvious statement from the report... 79% of people fast-forward thru the adverts in recorded TV shows "most" or "all" of the time.  Err, so what's wrong with the other 21%, can't they find Frank quickly enough?  (Frank->Frank Zapper->Zapper->TV remote control).  As a result, "some advertisers have been experimenting with adverts that make sense only when watched in fast forward". Lol.

On a slightly more serious note, the report claims that "70% of British 15-to-54-year-olds who have illegally downloaded copyrighted material would not do so again if they got an email or call from their ISP".  Well maybe... though I can't say that I'm totally convinced.

Inside Out - Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2008

I'm very pleased to announce that this year's Eduserv Foundation Symposium, Inside Out: What do current Web trends tell us about the future of ICT provision for learners and researchers?, will be held on Thursday May 8th at the British Library in London.

Intended as an opportunity to think about how the Web (and in particular Web 2.0) is disrupting the delivery and use of ICT for both learning and research within the education sector, the day will bring together seven different viewpoints covering educational institutions, the mainstream media and academic publishing.

The list of speakers is as follows:

• Larry Johnson, New Media Consortium (US)
• Bobbie Johnson, Guardian (UK)
• Jem Stone, BBC (UK)
• Chris Adie, University of Edinburgh (UK)
• David Harrison, UCISA / University of Cardiff (UK)
• Gráinne Conole, Open University (UK)
• Geoffrey Bilder, CrossRef (UK)

The breadth and depth here is intentional - we didn't want a day that was just the education community talking to itself.  Rather we wanted to bring together a mix of viewpoints, trying to understand how recent Web trends impact on service delivery both inside and outside the sector.  I'm really pleased with the line up and am looking forward to an informative and enlightening day.

Interested?  Go to the main symposium page or the registration page.  Please note that registration for the event is free and includes a drinks reception after the presentations.  However, there will be a small charge if you are unable to attend on the day.

Twitter stats

Twitter have published some stats of the kind of usage they are seeing, including a breakdown of traffic to the Twitter Web site by country and a chart showing the breakdown of twits (twitterers?) by how many followers they have.  As they note, these kinds of breakdown may be heavily skewed by the fact that they are only looking at Web traffic, not tweets via SMS or via the Twitter API.

Speaking personally, I'm seeing a significant growth in the usage of Twitter in my social network, both in terms of number of twits and number of tweets - a trend that I expect to continue for the next while.

Preserving the ABC of scholarly communication

Somewhat belatedly, I've been re-reading Lorcan Dempsey's post from October last year, Quotes of the day (and other days?): persistent academic discourse, in which he ponders the role of academic blogs in scholarly discourse and the apparent lack of engagement by institutions in thinking about their preservation.

I like Grainne Conole's characterisation of the place of blogging in scholarly communication:

• Academic paper: reporting of findings against a particular narrative, grounded in the literature and related work; style – formal, academic-speak
• Conference presentation: awareness raising of the work, posing questions and issues about the work, style – entertaining, visual, informal
• Blogging – snippets of the work, reflecting on particular issues, style – short, informal, reflective

(even though it would have been better in alphabetical order! :-) ) and I'm tempted to wonder whether and how this characterisation will change over the next few years, as blogging continues to grow in importance as a communication medium.

Lorcan ends with:

Universities and university libraries are recognizing that they have some responsibility to the curation of the intellectual outputs of their academics and students. So far, this has not generally extended to thinking about blogs. What, if anything, should the Open University or Harvard be doing to make sure that this valuable discourse is available to future readers as part of the scholarly record?

As I argued in my most recent post about repositories, I suspect that most academics would currently expect to host their blogs outside their institution.  (Note that I'm hypothesising here, since I haven't asked any real academics this question - however, the breadth and depth of external blog services seems so overwhelming that it would be hard for institutions to try to compel their academics to use an institutional blogging service IMHO). This leaves institutions (or anyone else for that matter) that want to curate the blogging component of their intellectual output with a problem.  Somehow, they have to aggregate their part of the externally held scholarly record into an internal form, such that they can curate it.

I don't see this as an impossible task - though clearly, there is a challenge here in terms of both technology and policy.

In the context of the debate about institutional repositories, my personal opinion is that this situation waters down the argument that repositories have to be institutional because that is the only way in which the scholarly record can be preserved.  Sorry, I just don't buy it.

Educause SW

I just asked a question of one of the speakers in the Second Life session at the start of day 2 of the Educause SW Regional Conference 2008 in Houston (US) without ever leaving my office in Bath (UK).

Now, you are probably thinking, "So what?  There's nothing particularly special about that in this day and age!".  And you'd be right.  At least in part.  But the somewhat serendipitous way in which I got to virtually attend the conference and interact with the speakers is more unusual, and indicative of how things are changing in the loosely-coupled world we now inhabit.

I use Twitter a lot.  It's "do one simple thing and do it well" approach hits all the right buttons for me and I find myself using it more and more.

One of the people I follow on Twitter is called @cmduke.  As far as I know, I have never met @cmduke and I don't know much about him (I'm assuming he is a him - as you know, on the Internet no-one knows you are a dog) other than that his first name is Chris and he maintains a Second Life blog, written under his SL avatar name of Topher Zwiers, called Muve Forward.  I'm guessing that the reason I follow him on Twitter is because of the blog - though I could be wrong. I don't actually remember how or why I started following him on Twitter to be honest - which is part of the fun!

Earlier on today Chris tweeted (i.e. sent a micro-blog via Twitter) to say that he was about to start live-blogging the Second Life session at Educause SW.  Intrigued, I followed the TinyURL Chris had embedded into his tweet in order to take a look.  The link took me to a page on Chris' site containing an embedded CoveritLive live-blogging session.  Chris was already in full swing... there's an art to live-blogging and as far as I can tell Chris has a pretty good handle on it.

CoveritLive looks like an interesting tool - one that I'll investigate further in due course (though I'm sure there are alternatives).  It basically provides the reader with a Web-based interface to a stream of live-blogging entries written by the author (in this case, Chris), updated in real-time.  As a reader, you get the opportunity to make comments and ask questions in real time (moderated by the live-blog author).  In this way, Chris was kind enough to relay one of my questions on to the presenters of the session, with their answer coming back to me thru the live-blog.  Neat.

Once the live-blog session is over, the same URL takes you to an archive of the session.

Now, as I said above, in many respects there is nothing particularly unusual or special about this scenario and readers of this blog will probably be very familiar with similar scenarios in their day-to-day work.  I repeat it here only because I think it represents an interesting shift in how we do things - the serendipity of social networks like Twitter and Facebook and the easy availability of high-quality Web 2.0 tools is fundamentally changing the way we do things.  Or so it seems to me anyway.

For info... Chris is covering many of the remaining sessions at Educause SW.  See here for details.

Repositories follow-up - global vs. institutional

There have been a number of responses to my my VALA 2008 keynote on the future of repositories, which Brian Kelly has helpfully summarised to a large extent in a post on his blog.  There are several themes here, which probably need to be separated out for further discussion.  One such is my emphasis on building 'global' (as opposed to 'institutional') repository services.

Before I do that however, I just want to clarify one thing.  Mike Ellis suggests that he is "bemused as to *why* repositories (at all)".  I'll leave others to answer that.  Suffice to say that I was not intending to argue that the management of scholarly stuff (and the workflows around that stuff) is unimportant.  Of course it is.  Just that our emphasis should not be on the particular kinds of systems that we choose to use to undertake that management, but on the bigger objective of open access and how whatever systems we put in place surface content on the Web and support the construction of compelling scholarly social networks.  I am perfectly happy that some people will build systems that they choose to call repositories.  Others will build content management systems.  Still others something else.  The labeling is almost irrelevant (except insofar that it doesn't get in the way of communicating the broader 'open access' message).

OK, back to the issue of global vs. institutional services.  Rachel Heery says:

I don’t really see that there is conflict between encouraging more content going into institutional repositories and ambitions to provide more Web 2.0 type services on top of aggregated IR content. Surely these things go together?

Paul Walk makes a similar point in his blogged response:

The half sentence I don’t quite buy is the “global repository services”. Why can’t we “focus on building and/or using global scholarly social networks” (which I support) based on institutional repository services? We don’t have a problem with institutional web sites do we? Or institutional library OPACs? We have certainly managed to network the latter on a global scale, and built interesting services around this...

Yes, point(s) taken... though I think that the institutional Web site and the OPAC are not primarily 'social networks' (and even if they are, the network they are serving is largely institutionally focussed) so there is a difference.  As I argued in the original blog entry, scholarly social networks are global in nature (or at least extra-institutional).

Of course, the blogosphere is a good example of a global social network being layered on top of a distributed base of content.  On the face of it this seems to argue against my 'global repository' view.  So what is different?  Well, to be honest I'm not sure.  Clearly, the blogosphere is not built out of 'institutional' blog services and my strong suspicion is that if we approached academic blogging in the same way we approach academic repositories we would rapidly kill off its future as a means of scholarly communication :-) .  Long live an open, free market approach to the provision of blogs!  God help us if institutions start trying to lay down the law about when and where its members can blog.  There is a role for institutional blogging services but only as part of a wider landscape of options where individuals can pick and choose a solution that is most appropriate to them.

And that is one of my fundamental points about repositories I guess...  when institutional repositories stop being an option that individuals can choose to make use of and instead become the only option on the table because that is what mandates and policies say must be used, we have a problem.  Instead we need to focus on making scholarly content available on the Web in whatever form makes sense to individual scholars.  My strong suspicion is that if someone came along and built a global research repository, let's call it ResearchShare for the sake of argument (though I'm aware that name is taken), and styled its features after the likes of Slideshare, we would end up with something far more compelling to individual scholars than current institutional offerings.

Note that I'm not being overly dogmatic here.  In my view there are as many routes to open access as there are ways of surfacing content on the Web.  If individual scholars want to do their own thing that's fine by me, provided they do it in a way that ensures their content is at a reasonably persistent URI and is indexed by Google and the like.

This leaves institutions with the problem of picking up the pieces of the multiple ways in which individual scholars choose to surface their scholarly content on the Web.  Well sorry guys... get used to it!

Overall, I don't disagree much with Stu Weibel's take on this.  It's a complex area with lots of competing interests, some rather entrenched.  As Stu notes:

It is still possible that another entirely different model will emerge... more in-the-cloud. A distributed model does seem to complicate curation, (and that institutional reputation thing), but I wouldn't count it out just yet. Still, some institution has to take care of this stuff... responsibility involves the attachement to artifacts, even if they are bitstreams.

Repositories thru the looking glass

I spent last week in Melbourne, Australia at the VALA 2008 Conference - my first trip over to Australia and one that I thoroughly enjoyed.  Many thanks to all those locals and non-locals that made me feel so welcome.

I was there, first and foremost, to deliver the opening keynote, using it as a useful opportunity to think and speak about repositories (useful to me at least - you'll have to ask others that were present as to whether it was useful for anyone else).

It strikes me that repositories are of interest not just to those librarians in the academic sector who have direct responsibility for the development and delivery of repository services.  Rather they represent a microcosm of the wider library landscape - a useful case study in the way the Web is evolving, particularly as manifest through Web 2.0 and social networking, and what impact those changes have on the future of libraries, their spaces and their services.

My keynote attempted to touch on many of the issues in this area - issues around the future of metadata standards and library cataloguing practice, issues around ownership, authority and responsibility, issues around the impact of user-generated content, issues around Web 2.0, the Web architecture and the Semantic Web, issues around individual vs. institutional vs. national, vs. international approaches to service provision.

In speaking first I allowed myself the luxury of being a little provocative and, as far as I can tell from subsequent discussion, that approach was well received.  Almost inevitably, I was probably a little too technical for some of the audience.  I'm a techie at heart and a firm believer that it is not possible to form a coherent strategic view in this area without having a good understanding of the underlying technology.  But perhaps I am also a little too keen to inflict my world-view on others. My apologies to anyone who felt lost or confused.

I won't repeat my whole presentation here.  My slides are available from Slideshare and a written paper will become available on the VALA Web site as soon as I get round to sending it to the conference organisers!

I can sum up my talk in three fairly simple bullet points:

• Firstly, that our current preoccupation with the building and filling of 'repositories' (particularly 'institutional repositories') rather than the act of surfacing scholarly material on the Web means that we are focusing on the means rather than the end (open access).  Worse, we are doing so using language that is not intuitive to the very scholars whose practice we want to influence.
• Secondly, that our focus on the 'institution' as the home of repository services is not aligned with the social networks used by scholars, meaning that we will find it very difficult to build tools that are compelling to those people we want to use them.  As a result, we resort to mandates and other forms of coercion in recognition that we have not, so far, built services that people actually want to use.  We have promoted the needs of institutions over the needs of individuals.  Instead, we need to focus on building and/or using global scholarly social networks based on global repository services.  Somewhat oddly, ArXiv (a social repository that predates the Web let alone Web 2.0) provides us with a good model, especially when combined with features from more recent Web 2.0 services such as Slideshare.
• Finally, that the 'service oriented' approaches that we have tended to adopt in standards like the OAI-PMH, SRW/SRU and OpenURL sit uncomfortably with the 'resource oriented' approach of the Web architecture and the Semantic Web.  We need to recognise the importance of REST as an architectural style and adopt a 'resource oriented' approach at the technical level when building services.

I'm pretty sure that this last point caused some confusion and is something that Pete or I need to return to in future blog entries.  Suffice to say at this point that adopting a 'resource oriented' approach at the technical level does not mean that one is not interested in 'services' at the business or function level.

[Image: artwork outside the State Library of Victoria]