Published on July 17, 2008
in JISC.
After spending much of Monday discussing future web strategy with various JISC folk and then following the blog and Twitter coverage at JIF08 at Keele I was inspired to come and check out the old blog and give it a bit of a spring clean!
Thankfully Akismet has been working its magic so I was pretty spam free and its cool to see the upgrades to the plug-ins that Hector has implemented and while the backend to Wordpress MU hasn’t had the recent improvements that wordpress.org and .com have benefitted from its still a comfortable fit for me.
I’m doing alot of blogging in my main new day job at Jiva/Beanbag and while at Jiva the entire site is based on the most recent version of WP and thus is a joy to use the Beanbag blog has no such luxuries - allowing nothing but a little hand crafted HTML in the body, no tags, no categories, no embedding of media (well thats not true - I’m pretty sure I could do it given time but it would not be smooth sailing!) so popping in to blog here feels like a luxury!
Anyway I’ll continue to stop in here from time to time as long as this blog exists (and I’m allowed to access it) as I’m proud of my involvement with jiscinvolve and also intend to stay in touch with the happenings of the JISC community (oops is the ‘c’ word off limits after John Selbys talk at Keele?) as much as possible - who knows maybe if the start-up life doesn’t pan out I’ll be back!!
Published on March 14, 2008
in JISC.
Things have obviously been a little quiet here for a while and beyond my usual laziness in getting posts up on a regular basis the main reason is that I am now primarily blogging at http://backpass.org
This is in light of my soon to be freelance status and a feeling that I’d like my blog to be a little more..diverse..than I felt was appropriate here. Anyway its been a going concern for a few weeks now and I am maintaining a better than usual rate of publishing so fingers crossed!
Going forward I may cross-post to this blog as well when appropriate - I don’t really want to leave the Involve platform - I’m pretty proud of it and the work Hectors been coordinating on it since I moved on has only added to it - I think its a valuable resource and one that will gather momentum in the coming months.
Published on February 3, 2008
in JISC.
Its been a busy old week in the wide, wacky world of the web..
- Flavour of the month (and a personal fave of mine) Twitter has been down for often than not in the last week or so. There also seems to be some infrastructure moves going on behind the scenes that have the Web 2.0 conspiracy geeks all worked up..
- I finally got my Seesmic invite so I can see what all the fuss is about but after a first look I’ve got to say..uh?
- Microsoft makes a semi-hostile takeover bid of Yahoo - it’ll be interesting to see how a successful takeover would sit with the users of Yahoo services like Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming etc which have large early adopter/bloggeratti support and are not known for their love of all things Microsoft. Also it would create an insanely large webmail business..
- Potentially the biggest news (for me at least) was the release of the Google Social Graph API. Just this week I was reading the NMC Horizon report where it identified ’social operating systems’ as one of its emerging technologies in the four-to-five year adoption period..I think it might have been a little fast forwarded this week. Tim O’Reilly has written a post on how he sees this as an important step towards an ‘internet operating system’ and I think he is right. I also think its a step towards the semantic web (sometime sickening called web 3.0) that people like Paul Miller at Talis and his colleagues have been posting about at Nodalities. However as the semantic web regularly gives me a migraine I can’t quite be sure about that! It certainly seems much more important that they more hyped, but kind of rubbish Open Social offering that Google were behind late in 2007.
Anyway all in all a big week and I look forward to following the stories as they develop..
Published on December 18, 2007
in JISC.
The demise of Eduspaces is a real pity as it seemed to be a community with a decent niche and a well established user-base. That said it is a tough thing to make money from and not everyone is Facebook and the team at Curverider have mortgages to pay like most of us I’m sure.
It seems to me though that this could open up an opportunity for services like this one at JISC Involve but also Edublogs down under (which inspired this service) but maybe more significantly the JANET Collaboration Service that while still in beta is pretty well established by now. An offer of migration support would be a nice Christmas present for alot of users over at Eduspaces.
A hot topic on the Eduspaces forum has been the idea of a ‘Eduspaces Foundation’ to take forward the network and keep it running for its users. I think its a nice idea but I’m not sure the comments about the cost of maintenance, hosting and management are very realistic. I think it’ll be tougher than people realise.
From a personal point of view I never really liked Elgg and found it a bit clumsy compared to Ning or even People Aggregator and while I appreciated its open-source status and the passionate community around it I could never be convinced it could compete with these other services - its only a personal opinion though and I know many people speak highly of it.
Anyway, like I said - its a real pity and I think the timing is a real shame as well - I can imagine many people will be forced to spand more times on their laptops this Christmas than perhaps they’d hoped.
Published on December 18, 2007
in JISC.
Over the last few months I’ve spent alot of time thinking (and reading ….) about this whole ‘amplified conference’ idea - and especially in the last few weeks its been something of an oasis of web 2.0 fun in a desert of mundane web 1.0 activity!
Both Brian Kelly and Andy Powell (sometime together) have been doing some interesting things around this and people as illustrious as Dave Winer (the rather grumpy ‘creator’ of RSS) have been talking about similar concepts.
Anyway like Andy recently mentioned on his blog sometimes you have to stop talking (or writing) about things and just get on and do them. Apart from his unhealthy fondness for SecondLife Andy tends to talk sense!
So anyway it looks like I’m going to put JISCs money (though it has to be said we are sticking to free services!) where my mouth is try some of these concepts out at a JISC event or two (even though I am technically at HEFCE at the moment!) - culminating in a whole heap of activities around the JISC Conference.
Anway these are some of the ideas I’m currently scoping out:
- live microblogging from sessions to a combined Twitter feed
- live (and recorded) video streaming using either Mogulus or uStream - no SecondLife feed from me though!
- ‘near live’ blog summaries of all the sessions (this went down well last year)
- an event specific social network (using something like Ning or Crowdvine)
- all presentations posted on Slideshare (and an attempt to create live ’slidecasts’ of all presentations)
- a conference wiki (though not sure what for at the moment!)
- a conference ‘backchannel’ chatroom (not 100% convinced on this one - I’ll be honest)
- adding pictures to Flickr as we go
- GoogleMap mashups of who is coming from where (not really much more use than the delegate list but could be fun!)
- offline podcasts with speakers - recorded on the day
- using Yahoo Maps to create one RSS feed based on multiple searches and existing feeds
- creating one final ‘portal’ that aggregates all this info into one place (thinking about using the JISC-funded Iugo)
Obviously we’ll make sure the event tag is publicised early and often..anyway I’m looking forward to working on these concepts and it fits in with some wider thinking I have been doing lately about wider issues of using technology to enhance communications and marketing activities - something I keep threatening to blog about but haven’t quite got their yet.
Published on December 3, 2007
in JISC.
Its becoming increasingly apparent to me that I have been living and, more importantly, working in some kind of bubble for the last couple of years. The great leaps forward in the web that I saw happening around me were actually an illusion and they had failed to take hold in the wider public conciousness (well certainly not the civil service part of it!!) I feel like I am in a particlarly dull and geeky version of Groundhog Day, having the same conversations, facing the same barriers and feeling the same frustrations as I did while at the ESRC five years ago or more!
The slavish commitment to WCAG 1.0 and the hugely outdated WAI-AA stamp of approval seems horribly mis-placed when taken against the Accessibility 2.0 agenda put forward by people like Lawrie, Brian and David Sloan over the last couple of years - plus lets not forget even the WAI realises the problems and has been chugging along on WCAG 2.0 for what seems like an eternity!
The traditional publishing metaphor is rampant as well, layers upon layers of editorial controls, workflows, sign-offs - basically a bureacracts dream! The idea of user-generated content, rapid publishing models, becoming a part of the conversation, social networks as another communications channel - basically anything that gives up control of the ‘message’ is looked on with distrust (to say the least!).
Major web projects are commissioned, project managed and developed with noone with any real strategic level web knowledge involved in the process and considerations like usability, interoperability, future proofing and things like archiving are seemingly completely bypassed.
This obviously a one eyed view of the world at the moment - born out of frustration rather than any kind of in-depth research! Things like the Power of Information report and the fact that there is a eGov BarCamp in the new year proves to me that there are like minded souls working in this environment but I wonder if they are in positions to makeany headway?
At times I complained about the lack of momentum at JISC and the fact that our Communications projects sometimes stalled due to what seemed like an overabundance of oversight and a slow moving committee system - I now see how lucky I was to work in an environment that was always looking to embrace new ideas and models for communications. JISC may not have led the way as often as I would have liked but it managed to stay in the chasing pack. Currently I feel like the chap who did the marathon in a diving suit - finishing days behind!
AArrrrrggghhhhh! Rant over…the thing is everyone is perfectly nice and reasonable and absolutely convinced they are on the right path and to be honest who am I to tell them differently??
Published on November 6, 2007
in JISC.
No sooner had I finished mulling over the implications of the Power of Information report I wrote about earlier in the week when I came across another eGov/Web 2.0 article - this time from Richard MacManus at the Read/WriteWeb blog (based on a couple of Gartner reports).
In this case it is very much a US based report but as with all things web-based where America leads…all in all its pretty damning of the ‘one-stop portal’ concept (i.e. Directgov!) and supportive of the idea of reusable information supporting ‘mash-ups’ and the like through the use of web services (very similar to the Power of Information report). One qoute that is pulled out from the report is pretty damning of the portal concept “in the future, government single points of contact will become even less relevant than they are today”..ouch!
Also, like the Power of Information report, it supports making use of existing non-gov controlled channels and that government agencies “should make sure that their information, services and applications are accessible through a variety of different channels, some of which are not controlled or directly owned by government.”
I think this is the way the wind is blowing and that these two reports really demonstrate the way the web is changing to something thats less about pages and more about data and collaboration - unfortunately the UK model is still very set in a Web 1.0 world.
I think a new generation of digital confident civil servants are going to need to get out there and enter the conversation and accept that they won’t be able to control it. Thats not to say there is no place for something like Directgov - however it needs to be more flexible and less monolithic than it stands at the moment. The work I am doing for the HE section at Directgov is certainly valid in the short-to-medium term - we all know things don’t happen overnight in these circles - but I’d like to see more evidence of these more flexible, web 2.0 inspired ideas being embraced or at least discussed.
Published on November 5, 2007
in JISC.
During the summer a pretty radical (well for the government) paper was published called The Power of Information. Brian Kelly recently wrote about it on his blog and it reminded me I had been carrying it around with me since I left JISC! It took a hard look at government information over the web and made a number of pretty forward thinking recommendations - a number of which could be important to the HE space online. The really amazing thing is the government accepted almost all the recommendations! I wonder whether this is something that DIUS is considering becoming involved with. I would suggest that the ideas considered in the paper would effect the direction of the Directgov offering in the longer term…and a department with Innovation so prominent in its title should be looking at this sort of thing.
Some of the things it recommends include:
- Working with existing user-generated sites rather than creating anything new ones
- Researching what user-generated sites exist in the space and where there is duplication terminating or modifying the gov versions
- Making more use of self-help fora online
- Encourage civil servants to become active in these communities (once given training and guidance)
- Publishing data in open formats that can be re-mixed and re-used
All of these ideas are very much of interest to me (as anyone who knows me professionally is well aware of!) and I’m very interested to see how the government and, more importantly, the individual departments take things forward.
Published on October 16, 2007
in JISC.
As of the 22ndOctober I will be leaving JISC for six months while I undertake a secondment for HEFCE managing the HE content on the governments Directgov portal. It promises to an interesting and challenging assignment. I’ll be working with members of HEFCE, DIUS, the Directgov team and HERO on the project and the aim is to make the Directgov section the primary information resource for potential students of higher education…
I will continue to blog here during this period though its likely the posts will start to have a more e-gov flavour to them as I try to get my head back in to that space..
Published on October 16, 2007
in JISC.
The Digital Ethnograpy crew at Kansas State university who previously produced the extremely popular Machine is Us/ing Us video (that I often use in my presentations to help explain the evolution of the Web..) have put a couple of new videos out both of which are extremely interesting (and as ever skillfully produced)
A Vision of Students Today is a really clever 5 minute video that should be of interest to anyone who was interested in the recent JISC Student Expectations study..
Information R/evolution covers in a 5 minute video what it took several hundred pages of David Weinbergers Everything is Miscellaneous book…
I can’t recommend these videos highly enough. They seem to be doing some genuinely cool work at Kansas State and have a real flair for making it interesting..
http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/
