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Michael Smethurst did a fascinating post about how the BBC make websites at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2009/01/how_we_make_websites.shtml covering concepts such as persistent URIs, REST, Domain Driven Design and Linked Open Data
A session from Michael, or something covering these concepts and how they can be applied in practical ways would be fantastics
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At BarCamp Liverpool I did a session titled "Create a better seach engine than Google" about website search engines covering how search is presented on HE websites and some ways to improve results and user experience.
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Are we being led by applications? Are some of the newer Web 2.0/social networking tools just fads? Can they really enhance learning and teaching and institutional Web services?
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Java-based Portal technologies were flavour of the times 5 - 10 years ago but seem to have faded. It's unlikely that the requirement has gone away so are there better ways of providing this functionality using modern toolsets and services? What are institutions doing now to integrate the presentation layers to multiple applications?
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Agile development has seen success in the commercial world with startups like 37 Signals (Basecamp). Large companies are also taking notice and its importance is growing in the current economic crisis, allowing them to deliver a return on investment quickly.
What is Agile development, Scrum and Extreme programming? How can the HE web community use these techniques to deliver value to our organisations. What questions do they raise for us and our relationships with other staff?
Possible content could be an introduction and cover how we are using Scrum at Bath or a workshop where we attempt to run a mini Scrum. A development focus could look at the kind of supporting tools and environment you need to get in place to run Agile projects. I am open to more ideas.
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"Demand for the mobile web exists not because it complements existing means of access, but rather because it replaces them." [Opera's chief executive Jon S. von Tetzchner, Oct 2008].
"Mobile phone users struggle mightily to use websites, even on high-end devices. To solve the problems, websites should provide special mobile versions." [Jakob Nielsen, Feb 2009]
In 2008, many countries experienced triple-digit or even quadruple-digit usage growth. In Britain, those who access the Internet via mobile phones are younger than PC-based Internet users with around a quarter aged between 15 and 24, compared to 16% of all PC Internet users. Almost 7.5 million Britons now access the web through their phone.
Many major Web 2.0 sites have established "m" microsites (eg Flickr, Facebook, Google, BBC, the list goes on).
- Are HE institutions being left behind?
- Do you test your institutional website(s) for mobile compatibility?
- When do you give up trying to accommodate all devices?
- Should we be building microsites/mobile specific sites?
- Are we offering the right online services in a mobile accessible format?
- Should we be embracing other mobile technologies: SMS, MMS, bluetooth?
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Some believe a photograph takes away a part of your soul. Oh my, what have we done? What are we but a tenuous and fragile amalgam of our memories, dreams and reflections? And yet we give our souls away willingly, blindly, naively, freely and non-exclusively to the faceless financial military conspiracy. And for what? The bleeding edge of beta 2.0 cool and our favourite username. Will it be your "Le Baiser de l’Hotel de Ville" [1] photo given away to Facebook, your "Without You" [2] lost to MySpace, your ad idea [3] given away to YouTube?
The revolution will not be televised. Nor will it be Flickrd, Twittered, YouTubed, MySpaced, Facebooked, Qiked or 12 seconded. We see the west in decline, accelerated by the frivolous anarchy of global capital. Such short memories we have, our Web Year Zero just a few short years ago. The next Year Zero will not be so gentle. Come the neo-con revolution, the state police inquisito-mullahs will know exactly what you look like, and which coffee bar you're currently wifi geo-located in with your brushed aluminium MacBook. Not only this, but they know whether you like tea or coffee for breakfast, love or hate marmite, how late your useless train service gets you to work, which exotically located conferences you've bragged about being at, how many goals your football team needs to score to win the league, and precisely when you got your iPhone.
Indulge your paranoia. It's already too late.
Refs.
1. http://www.worldsfamousphotos.com/tag/kiss
2. http://www.amazon.com/Without-You-Tragic-Badfinger-minute/dp/0965712222
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticipation_(Guinness)#Lawsuit
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How we use Web Analyitcs in our Insitution to guide web development and support Department's goals. Making your website work for you and be accountable.
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Web 2.0, Social networking and mobile web were all the buzz topics amongst developers five and even ten years ago. Only now are we beginning to see the fruits of those developer labours. So what are developers working on now that will be the next big thing? - It's called "Linked Data" and it is has just begun to take shape, as identified by TBL in his latest presentation at TED:
http://www.w3.org/2009/Talks/0204-ted-tbl/#(14)
With Linked Data efforts by the BBC, Yahoo! and even pockets in Google (though they won't admit it yet), what is this thing called Linked Data and what could it mean for web managers, i.e. how can you take advantage without having to understand what a triple is or even the dreaded Semantic Web :0
See: Microformats, HTML5, GRRDL and yes even RDFa
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Is the cloud really here? Is it safe? Have we got one? Can we get one? How will all this affect institutional web services and should we be worried about outsourcing?
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Lightweight development approaches have real potential for delivering services in our institutions. We need to treat such developments more seriously.
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At BarCamp North East last year, Tom Scott (professional pirate and currently President of York Student Union) gave a talk about creating video on the cheap and some tips managing (or not, as the case may be) viral campaigns on the web.
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A problem we all have to deal with: senior-level managers who don't "get" the web. How do you get the point across? This could be a talk by someone who has been successful in "converting" the non-webby, or a session to exchange tips.
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Adobe AIR offers cross-platform, AJAXy desktop web apps sans browser (all you Tweetdeckers): what does this mean for web and information management in education? Can this make online information systems more or less secure, usable, accessible.....?
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I recently came across EDU Checkup (http://educheckup.com/) where Nick DeNardis' screencast critiques HigherEd websites. Maybe we could find someone willing to cast the first stone and do short, 5 minute reviews of websites live. Possibly should be someone from outside the community so they're not shunned for life :)
Maybe Nick would be prepared to get up at Early O'clock and do some live remotely from the US?!
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What can they learn from each other?
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Our very small web team keeps on top of 300 websites, using various tools and techniques that we've evolved. These include handy things like warning us when the owner of a website leaves the university. I can share how we do things, and would love to hear some new ideas for ways we can make the computers, not the people, do the dull work of running webservers.
- Christopher Gutteridge
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Institutions maintain student services provision to protect and assist student interests and rights throughout their studies. Should not University websites and applications do the same?
Should the choice of proprietary site search, mapping tools, analytics and other services be informed as much by the protection afforded to student users as they are by features, popularity or cost?
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The BBC recently withdrew their use of microformats because of concerns about accessibility. In October 2008 W3C released a specification for RDFa - using which embeds RDF in attributes in XHTML. In the library world there has been some use of COiNS which embeds structured data in the form of an OpenURL in a span in (X)HTML.
What are the pros and cons of the different approaches? What are the overall benefits of embedding structured data in web pages? How does this compare with the idea of using http 303 to present machine-readable version of resources?
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It'd be great if some sessions could make use of the iLab facilities at Essex: http://www.essex.ac.uk/ilabs/colchester/
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The final (?) chapter in the adventure that is 'The University of Bradford CMS project'.
After last year's Aberdeen Adventure which left our plucky band of projecteers hovering with ink-laden quill over a contract toTerminalFour...what happened next? How have we gone about implementation? How have we changed as we move from implementation to adoption? Where does a 'green-field' web team start? Is change management still important? And most importantly, have we learnt anything that can be usefully shared with a wider audience? Claire and Russell hope to enliven the narrative for possibly the final time and reveal whether the heroes are rewarded, the baddies punished and seek to discover whether we can all live happily ever after...
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How is your institutional repository looking? Are you proud that it is part of your institutional Web site? As the local Web manager/Web expert, are you involved in setting it up, advising on Web issues such as usability, XHTML conformance, search engine optimisation and accessibility? If not, why not?
Do you think that institutional Web managers should be involved with institutional repositories and the way they fit into institutional Web sites?
What advice would you offer to the staff running your institutional repository?
Would there be any value in a session discussing these issues, or is everything in the garden looking rosy?
For background information see:
http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2009/02/repository-usability.html
and
http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2009/02/repository-usability-take-2.html
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Lots of universities are now starting to use Sharepoint as a model for there intranets, but how do you manage your other bespoke developments around Sharepoint, can Sharepoint do everything? Or can you use some of the resources in your Sharepoint environment to manage aspects of your bespoke systems.
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I have a perception that we are punching above our weight in terms of the success we deliver through the limited resources we dedicate to online marketing here - but I do not know for sure.
Surely there is a way we can submit our data and anonymise it so we can establish a UK wide benchmark? - and for hyper-meaningful criteria too: our conversion rates - our success at moving poeople further along the conversion path - the number of online marketers in the organisation per thousand students; that kind of thing.
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Is the end-user interface for searching and accessing the institutional repository a red herring? Should we be looking at making the IR vanish as far as the end user is concerned? Google is increasingly the tool of choice for discovering content, and many repository folk are putting a lot of effort into making the IR search-engine friendly. Should we be running with this and building repositories that push content through other applications but are invisible themselves?
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