This December, Intute is once again running an “Advent Calendar” on its blog, with the theme of user-created content. It started on Tuesday with a post about the independent film Born of Hope, set in Tolkein’s Middle Earth. My own post, “Voluntary work for an obscure educational charity”, discusses contributing academic material to Wikipedia. Paul Meehan’s post today discusses augmenting a human-maintained web catalogue with Google Custom Search Engine. There’s more to come through the month on web2.0/community themes, and as usual the Intute blog has that bit more depth than the rest.

This year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop 2009 was, as last year, a very friendly, useful, forward-looking conference. I suspect that some organisations didn’t send people this year because of the economic climate, which is a pity because the mindset of the conference was very focused on coping with future changes. There was, as last year, a lot of discussion of what the commercial sector can provide, and whether Google will conquer all. A phrase that got some use was “80/20 solutions”, i.e. 80% of the functionality at 20% of the effort.

For me the most interesting contribution was Prof. Derek Law’s opening keynote. He warned that the HE library sector may be too focused on responding to changing economic conditions, when the cultural changes happening now are arguably more significant. More and more of our culture is visual rather than verbal, and reading is becoming an optional lifestyle choice rather than a requirement of university life. University-level assessments are increasingly practical or multimedia rather than essays. It is nearly possible to get a PhD in some subjects without being  literate in a conventional sense: by learning to operate software and getting Google Scholar to do most of your literature review. Moving into the digital age is not merely about digitising old formats. It requires engaging with the difficult questions of how to access and preserve the new kinds of cultural objects that new technologies make possible. Law proposed a “Library 2.0″ approach that compromises between “Web 2.0″ and the traditional bricks-and-mortar library.

I went to Mike Ellis and Tony Hirst’s session on mashups, which was similar to last year’s, but it’s a pleasure to hear about new tools and mashups, and their enthusiasm for opening up the web’s data is inspiring. I hope their exhortations are heard across the sector.

Paul Boag contrasted the experience of finding a course on a university web site with the experience of using a typical ecommerce site. The experiences are poles apart, with course finders being almost universally hard work for the user. Isn’t promoting courses to potential students a core function of university sites?

The keynote session on How the BBC make Web Sites illustrated a polar opposite to a standard procedure of Design-in-Photoshop-then-convert-to-HTML. They started with the question “what is this site about?”, analysed the data structure of the domain and thought very deeply about URL design. Page layout, design and branding were added as a penultimate layer, with interactivity being the final addition.

A number of sessions that I attended were case studies in things going wrong. From Jeremy Speller’s and Russell Allen’s session on implementing university portals, I learned the term “Zombie project” (see ZDnet blog post). A lesson learned was that a tech project will only succeed if you get buy-in from the suits, the techies and the users.

One delight of the conference was this “Hug a Developer today” video. Someone out there cares!

Thanks to the IWMW community, and hopefully see you next year.

These don’t work in all browsers yet, and they work faster in Google Chrome than other browsers, but the Chrome Experiments show how far Javascript has come thanks to things like the canvas tag and powerful libraries. Witness a faithful recreation of the Amiga operating system and desktop, including the command line manager; a replication of the MilkDrop music visualisation plugin;  games; 3D effects and a version of cartoon physics.

This 20-minute talk by Jeff Veen, formerly of Google, is worth blogging not just for the reflections on user interaction with data, but a quick look at how far technology has come in the last 25 years. Show it to the non-ancient geeks and tell them what it was like!

One of my favourite jobs each year is evaluating innovative practice in engineering education for the Engineering Subject Centre’s Teaching Award. This year one of the innovations I am evaluating is “Examopedia” where students can work collaboratively on a wiki to solve past exam questions. Examopedia is the work of Manish Malik and his students at the University of Portsmouth. It uses a University of Portsmouth installation of twiki as a platform, where Manish puts the questions from a past exam; students then put their answers to these questions onto the wiki, suggesting alternatives or amendments if an answer has already been posted. Manish can intervene to point out if the answer is being developed has any problems, or to confirm that it is OK.

Working through past papers is a common form of exam revision in engineering, the idea of Examopedia is that students can work together during what can be a stressful and isolating phase of their course. You’ll have to wait for me to finish the evaluation for a full consideration of how well it succeeds, but I think I can safely say that it is appreciated by many of those who really made use of it, and several of those who didn’t use it wish they had.

Currently there’s lot of interest in Open Educational Resources, and so I got to thinking about how, given the will, could Examopedia work as an example of OER. It strikes me that Examopedia works on three levels, all of which are worth replicating:

1. the content level, where it makes past paper questions available for revision; this is straightforward OER content.
2. the platform level; using a wiki to support dissemination of OER content, with scope for collaborative creation of part of the content (the model solutions).
3. the service level, where it supports a specific group of students studying together; you would need some way of cloning the question-only version of a wiki page relating to a past paper, and giving access to the group of students–quite straightforward if you start with the content on a wiki.

It seems to me that the real educational value is in the third level (though some keen students might engage at the second level). Does the choice of platform for disseminating content affect the ease or likelihood of realising this value? Perhaps, in some cases, it does. Using a wiki as the OER host would serve as an exemplar, and I can imagine a fairly simple tool to clone the question-only version into a semi-restricted section of the wiki for the group of students to use as their own, or perhaps to the students’ local wiki.

If you’re interested, you can see an instance of Examopedia used by one of Manish’s recent classes (this isn’t an OER, so unless you happen to be registered for that class you won’t get write access).

From an opinion blog post on PC Pro, an attack not on Dreamweaver software but the static-content mentality that says that creating web sites is a matter of having the right kind of editor.

In the relatively near future every website will be a dynamically-generated web application and all of today’s sites built on multiple static pages will be ripped out and replaced. The good news of course is that this is actually a huge opportunity – think Klondike gold-rush – for the web designer who can adapt. But how?

The offered solutions – Drupal and Joomla – are hardly surprising, but it sells these approaches on the grounds that users’ basic expectations of sites will demand more interaction and less old-fashioned broadcast publishing.

I quite like this little jQuery plugin that someone has written to make checkboxes look nicer. Just some included files and a line of Javascript: it’s a practically instant improvement. It seems like it would degrade gracefully. The only oddness is that the state doesn’t change when I click directly on the image.

Having been allocated the shared calendars subgroup of the Gateway Project I would appreciate thoughts on the shared-calendars project from my colleagues in the network. As you may have guessed, it was a surprise to both me and Rob that we were given overlapping projects but not put in touch with each other at the outset. I expect we will be able to clarify our combined approach at the Awayday in December.

So far I have been impressed at what we can get out of Mozilla Sunbird and how it will be a very useful tool to browse across all the network events. However, I am disappointed at the lack of enthusiasm for iCal from some corners. Anyhow, we have a small budget for enthusing our network contacts.

My view is that we should require all SC network sites to a) issue an iCal feed and b) redisplay their calendar using the same iCal feed on their site – Google Calendar is one solution that springs to mind, but if the same db that generates the iCal also generates a dynamic page of events then that should be quite sufficient. So far, we have Gateway project agreement to declare iCal as the standard feed.

CalDAV seems to be the next avenue to explore so if anyone knows of a suitable CalDAV we could publish to, then by all means post it on this thread. We do not need a CalDAV, but it would be useful.

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-markup-validation-report/

October 14, 2008 will be the world’s first Open Access Day.

The founding partners are SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science.

Open Access Day will help to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access, including recent mandates and emerging policies, within the international higher education community and the general public.