13 posts tagged “iwmw2008”

The first live streaming of talks at a IWMW event took place at IWMW 2006, when we experimented with an in-house streaming service and use of the Access Grid.  The following year live streaming of the plenary talks was provided by staff at the University of York, and recordings of most of the talks were subsequently made available on Google Video.

On both occasions the numbers of people watching the live streaming video was low, with the maximum numbers of viewers being less than 20 at each of the events. Despite the low numbers we felt the service was valuable as it provided us with an opportunity to gain experience of not only various streaming technologies but also, and more importantly, the non-technical aspects of live streaming at events such as privacy, copyright, accessibility, etc.

This year’s IWMW 2008 event was held in the King’s Conference Centre at the University of Aberdeen.  I was not the only delegate who was impressed by the King’s Auditorium - as one person commented on the event evaluation form “Conference hall had great facilities and microphones meant that you could hear delegates questions“.

The venue also had an excellent AV facilities, and we were pleased that, once again, we were able to stream the plenary talks. The quality of the video was excellent, as you can see if you watch any of the videos of the talks.

But perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the live streaming was the numbers of people who watching the talks. As can be seen from the accompanying diagram there were 160 people watching the videos on the final day of the event. As IWMW 2008 attracted 180 participants, with a number of them having to leave before the event finished I suspect we can say that there were more remote people watching Ewan McIntosh’s closing plenary talk on “Unleashing the Tribe” that there were in the King’s Auditorium. When I mentioned this to my director, Liz Lyon, she wondered whether we will soon reach a ‘tipping point’ in which live streaming of talks at large conferences in the digital library environment will be expected as a mainstream offering.

For that to happen, though, there will be a need to establish the business case for providing the streaming service, ensure that it is easy to use and ensure that the risks are being addressed.

The business case is interesting. Who should pay for the costs of providing a video streaming service for an event? Should the costs be taken from the participants who attend the event? Or should remote viewers who wish to access the video stream have to pay? Or perhaps event organisers should be looking for commercial sponsorship to cover the costs (although in light of the current economic turbulence, now is probably not a good time to suggest this).   I wonder, though, whether the costs be covered by the host institution. Once the AV equipment has been installed, can the support costs be included i the rental of the facilities - just as we are now starting to expect access to WiFi network being provided as standard.

Once the business case has been sorted, there will be a need to ensure that the service is easy to use (back at IWMW 2006 people wishing to view the streaming video service needed to install “Real Player and the Xiph Player Plugin or Windows Media Player with the illiminable Ogg Directshow Filters for Speex, Vorbis, Theora and FLAC, with Linux users needing MPlayer with Ogg Theora“). Nowadays users shouldn’t need to concern themselves with details of the technologies, as use of Flash seems to provide the interface to streaming services (although there may be issues about versions of Flash). However I suspect there will be a need to provide a back channel, to enable the remote participants to discuss the talks. There will also be a need for the remote participants to join in discussions with the local audience, especially if a WiFi network is available. There will be a need, therefore, to ensure that the back channel is not tightly coupled to the video streaming service.

Finally there will be a need to address the risks. This will include addressing issues such as privacy, copyright and data protection. In addition there will be a need to consider the quality of service and reliability of the streaming service, especially if the costs in providing the service have been made transparent.

And the more I think about such issues the more I wonder whether live streaming at conferences has reached a tipping point. Might it simply be too much effort to provide on a regular basis?

The main change to the IWMW 2008 timetable this year was the introduction of a barcamp session.  As described on the IWMW 2008 Web site:

Wikipedia defines BarCamp as an international network of user generated conferences, open, participatory workshop events, whose content is provided by participants. A BarCamp is typically one or two full days held at a weekend attended by people with an interest in technology. The day is split into a number of sessions typically of around 30 minutes each. Depending on the number of participants, size of venue, etc. there may be several sessions running simultaneously.

For the IWMW 2008 event we still had the conventional plenary talks and parallel sessions which had been planned in advance. But in addition:

A board [was] provided at IWMW 2008 for people to post up ideas for slots, rooms will then be allocated. Screen projectors will be available in rooms for people to use. During the 45 minute allocated slot there will be time for up to 18 sessions and each session will be 20 minutes long.

This innovation was introduced by my colleague and IWMW 2008 co-chair Marieke Guy, with suggestions from Michael Nolan, Edge Hill University, who shared his experiences of barcamps: “One of the best presentations I’ve seen was titled “stuff I know” and was a guy drawing shapes, arrows and random words on a flip chart while telling us what we should know…“.

And having just had my first glance at the IWMW 2008 feedback forms it seems that the Barcamp idea was a great success.

The Overall views for the event included the comments “Bar camp was an excellent idea that should be utilised more in the future” and “Bit disappointed by the main session but the parallel/barcamp sessions were much better“.

Comments on the Most Valuable Aspects of the Event included
“Barcamp and discussion with others and seeing how successfully people have implemented successful change over the last year“, “Barcamp sessions“, “Barcamp” and “Barcamp” :-)

We were also keen to get feedback on Aspects Which Could Be Improved. Even the responses to this question were all positive about the barcamps: “Bar camps a bit rushed. The session were not too long but changeover times took too much out of 20 mins, More barcamp stuff please-lets build stuff!“, “Barcamps not long enough” and “Not enough time left between barcamp sessions to get from one room to the next“.

The Barcamp Topics

The barcamps were clearly a success. But what topics were covered? A list of the topics is provided on the IWMW 2008 Web site and is also given below. And note that a page has been created on the IWMW 2008 Ning social network which will enable the barcamp facilitators (and, indeed, the participants) to provide a summary of the session, notes on the discussions and links to relevant resources.

Session1: Wednesday 23^rd July 2008 from 14.15-14.35

1. Sex, Lies and Microsites [see Ning page]
2. So What Is A Good Open Source CMS?  [see Ning page]
3. Stuff You Need To Know About iTunesU [see Ning page]
4. How Can A WCMS Save £3.4 Million In 12 Months? [see Ning page]
5. Tenish 5-Minute Ways To Improve Your Website [see Ning page]
6. Web Analytics Guiding Web Development [see Ning page]
7. Web 2.0 In Student Activism: What We Can Learn From Anonymous [see Ning page]
8. How Qualified Do You Have To Be To Manage A Website? [see Ning page]

Session 2: Wednesday 23^rd July 2008 from 14.40-15.00

1. Canadian View On Life, Dearth and Social Software [see Ning page]
2. DIY CMS - Building A Low Budget System, Getting People To ‘Buy-In’ [see Ning page]
3. Immediacy WCMS In Action [see Ning page]
4. T4 CMS / Sitestat / Redesign / Rambling Q&A / Discussion [see Ning page]
5. Barriers To Making Things Work On Second Life [see Ning page]
6. Simple Scriptaculuous [see Ning page]
7. Forum: Feedback on Nedstat [see Ning page]
8. Migrating Into A CMS - What Is Your Experience? [see Ning page]
9. Live@EDU [see Ning page]

Of course, as the barcamps were fairly informal and may have been provided on an ad hoc basis, there is no requirement for the facilitators to provide such resources, but I think it is useful to have a record of the sessions which were held and to provide an opportunity for those who may wish to have a summary of the session to do so, without myself or Marieke acting as a bottleneck to the creation of such resources.

The First Use Of Realtime Chat An IWMW Event

The IWMW 2005 event held at the University of Manchester on 6-8^th July 2005 was the first time that a WiFi network was used at UKOLN’s IWMW annual event. I had attended the EUNIS 2005 conference a few week’s prior to this and presented a paper on Using Networked Technologies To Support Conferences. This paper described the potential benefits which networked applications could provide to what Lorcan Dempsey subsequently described as Amplified Conferences. As described in that paper we ensured that we described the technologies which would be available at the IWMW 2005 event and provided an AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) covering use of the technologies.

I think there were less than 20 participants who made use of the event ‘chat’ infrastructure, which was provided by IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and those taking part were mainly Web managers ho had a very technical focus, as can be seen from the IRC archives. The nature of the discussions changed, however, on the second day of the event, the 7th July 2005 or, as it became known 7/7 - a date that (fortunately) is not as globally significant as 9/11 but, especially for those with London connections, a date which will be associated with the London Bombings.

It was a very surreal experience following a message on the IRC channel about was was initially reported as a train crash on the London Underground, and the subsequent discussion.

Jul 07 10:08:02 <Tim>explosion on london underground. entire network closed!!
Jul 07 10:09:04 <–DavidBailey has quit (Quit: CGI:IRC (EOF))
Jul 07 10:10:06 <JeremySpellerUCL>explosion where?
Jul 07 10:10:15 <Tim>liverpool street
Jul 07 10:10:35 <JeremySpellerUCL>Grief
Jul 07 10:10:40 <Tim>metropolitan line, two trains collided, several wounded
Jul 07 10:10:58 <Stuart_Steele_Aston>Tthe bbc site is grinding?
Jul 07 10:11:02 <JMHarmer>bbc news site not responding - u saw the news report? prrsumably everyone else is trying to now.

The launch of a WiFi-enabled IWMW event will be one that will be remembered for a long time  by those who took part in the discussions on that day.

The ‘Back Channel’ At IWMW 2008

Moving forward to IWMW 2008 we knew that many of the participants would expect a real time communications infrastructure to be provided, as this has been the norm at IWMW and many other UKOLN events since 2005. And as we were video streaming the plenary talks we expected to have remote participants joining in the discussions, too.

Over time the terms used to refer this technology has developed. Use of the term ‘chat’ has decreased, in part due to its derogatory connotations but also due to a move away from IRC to move native Web-based communications technologies. I have heard the term ‘back channel’ being used, and this term works when it is used if (as was the case with Ewan McIntosh, the final plenary speaker at IWMW 2008) it is used to provide realtime feedback to a speaker.  But more commonly the realtime communications technology is used by the audience (both those physically present, those watching a video stream and also, in some cases, those who may only have access to an audio stream or are viewing the PowerPoint slides). The term ‘micro blog’ has also been used (indeed this is how I described the service on the IWMW 2008 Web site) but that suggests a official commentary on an event, rather than the discussion forum which was how the service was actually used). I don’t think there is yet a widely agreed term to describe this, so for now I’ll use the term ‘back channel’.

Since IWMW 2007 Twitter has become very popular in certain circles, and most IWMW 2008 participants will have heard of it, even if they weren’t Twitter users. However we decided not to suggest use of Twitter as the event back channel, as, when I’ve tried this previously, I’ve found it is too intrusive those who follow me on Twitter who aren’t at the event or aren’t interested in the event.

There was a need for a tool, I felt, similar to Twitter, but which was less intrusive. I had some experience of Coveritlive (at events such as the eFoundations Symposia - although I haven’t been able to find the archive of the discussions). However I found a number of niggles with that software, including the need to (normally) approve comments.   In response to a tweet for alternative suggestions I decided to make use of Scribbeitlive.

This did have some advantage, but also some weaknesses. As Andy Powell commented on the eFoundations blog:

My feeling is that ScribbleLive makes better use of screen real-estate.  On the other hand, Coveritlive has better bells and whistles and more facilities around moderation (which can be good or bad depending on what you want to do).  In particular (and somewhat surprisingly), Coveritlive handles embedded URLs much better than ScribbleLive.  Overall, my preference is slightly twoards Coveritlive - though I could be swayed either way.

In response to Andy’s post Matt Jukes and Phil Wilson suggested that neither tool was ideal for the job. I would agree with this - I think we will see much development in this area, not only in enhancing the usability of the tools but also in allowing the data to be more easily integrated with other tools. I would like, for example, to be able to have tools to allow me to export the data to other environments (I have migrated the content to the IWMW 2008 Web site, but I had to do that manually). It would also be useful to be able to link comments with particular presneter’s slides or the video - without having the disucssion having to be tightly-coupled with the multimedia experience (as seems to be the case with, for example, the Elluminate service).

Another comment Andy made was “the importance of having someone in the venue dedicated to supporting remote participants “. Again I would agree with this. This was an area I had responsibility for - but found that I was not able to do this at the start of the second afternoon due to difficulties in connecting to the WiFi network. I also found myself failing to support the remote participants during Ewan McInitosh’s talk because I found it so interesting! But if we do need dedicated support for remote participants there will clearly be a cost in providing this support. Does this mean we should start to charge remote participants, I wonder?

We encouraged presenters and workshop facilitators at IWMW 2008 to make their slides available on Slideshare using the IWMW2008 tag. And I’m pleased to say that not only have a number of the slides have been uploaded, but that they getting large numbers of views.

The most watched slide is Ewan McIntosh’s Unleasing The Tribe closing keynote talk. However the figures are somewhat misleading, as the slides were uploaded a month ago, after Ewan gave a similar talk at a conference in Ireland. Discounting this the most popular slides and from the workshop session on “Mind Mapping for Effective Content Management” given by Gareth Saunders and Stephen Evans (University of St Andrews) following by Michael Nolan’s slides on “Stuff What we’re doing at Edge Hill University“.

I am pleased that the resources which were delivered to about 20-30 people at each of the two sessions I’ve mentioned have been shared with, and used by, a much larger community. Let’s do more of this, I say.

And if you are wondering why Gareth and Stephen’s slides are so popular, why now view them for yourself, or read Gareth’s blog post about his session.

Due to one of the speaker’s not being able to attend, we had to find, at the last moment, a couple of speakers to take part in the opening session at IWMW 2008. I was pleased that Claire Gibbons, University of Bradford and Mike Ellis, Eduserv, were able to provide brief presentations which helped to engage with the IWMW 2008 theme of The Great Debate.

I videoed Claire’s talk, in which she described why the University of Bradford had set up a social network using Ning. I have previously commented on institutional use of Ning, including Bradford’s service, but it was good to hear why this social network was established (to support newly arrived students) and how it is envisaged that the social network is expected to have an impact only during the first term of the new academic year. Such social networks, according to Claire, don’t always have to have long term sustainability - and maybe a social network can be for just until Christmas.

Please note that this video is available on YouTube (and further details of Claire’s talk are available on the IWMW 2008 Web site).

The Innovation Competition held at this year’s IWMW 2008 event probably differentiates itself from other mashup events, hackfests, etc. in welcoming not only examples of technical innovations, but also submissions which do not require technical expertise. So it was pleasing that the most popular submission was the IWMW theme song, performed by Debbie Nicholson (University of Essex), Claire Gibbons (University of Bradford), Miles Banbery (University of Kent) and David White (Sheffield Hallam University), which received 117 votes on the electronic voting system (and is available on YouTube).

However although this submission (entitled A collaborative cross-institutional user-generated interactive mashup thing) may have been a clear crowd-pleaser a number of the more technical submissions could have more significant impact on the sector.

The Live Train Departures info submission by Dawn Petherick, University of Birmingham gathered 92 votes for, I think, two main reasons: it is user-focussed (we all have an interest in knowing when the trains we are planning to catch will arrive) and Debbie stated that the code used to develop this service can be freely used by others. I am sure, incidentally, that Debbie’s comment that it was her birthday did not influence the voting :-) An image of the interface within the University of Birmingham portal is shown. You can also view the full portal page, a more complete view of train information, and a diagram of the technical architecture of the service.

The first submission to the contest, Mashing Points of Interest for your Institutionreceived 87 votes. This submission, by David Mackland, University of Abertay display points of interest on a Google map without the need for any HTML or coding knowledge and allows the management of multiple maps for various audiences from a single source. This submission was popular with Mike McConnell, one of the local organisers for IWMW 2008, as he had used the service to support the IWMW 2008 event - a clear example of a mashup service developed for the use of one institution which provided a valuable service to another.

Tony Hirst’s submission: Steps towards a media release tracking/effectiveness dashboard widget received 84 votes. As Tony has described in his blog post, this application uses Yahoo Pipes and the Yahoo Search term extractor to explore the impact of institutional press releases, with a visualisation of the output being provided using a Dipty timeline. And in response to a question from Paul Walk, this demonstrator only took about a couple of hours to produce (the additional time taken in cleaning the data and learning the tools traditional doesn’t count in a developer’s man month :-)

Finally I should mention Mike Ellis’s StudentViews submission which received 72 votes. The Studentviews application is based on the premise that students (in fact most users) aren’t likely to be particularly interested in “the corporate, preened and sanitised view of an HE institution. Instead, peer viewpoints, reviews, alumni pictures, video and Facebook comments are likely to be the first port of call for most freshers when considering which HE institution to apply for.” The StudentViews application aimed to mash HE data with Flickr pictures of the institution and surrounding area within a quick, intuitive interface. Because the build involves the gathering of institution data which should be freely and easily available to all, this data will also be exposed via a simple Web API. However Mike’s plans were thwarted by the University of Aberdeen firewall which restricted access to devices on the WiFi network. But Mike did successfully build a very simple “API” which lets you query institution name (see example) with queryable RSS output. In addition Mike also produced a KML file of locations of UK HEIs (for use with the Google Earth application), a simple IM (Instant messaging) application for accessing institutional information and finally a Google Custom Search Engine which spiders all 190 UK HE sites.

I’ve now back at work after a very tiring (not helped by train delays from Birmingham airport last night) but also very enjoyable IWMW 2008 event at the University of Aberdeen.

Myself and my fellow co-chair of IWMW 2008 read though the evaluation forms for the event on the plane last night.  We agree with the overwhelming positive comments which were made for Ewan Mcintosh’s plenary talk which closed this year’s event.  For those who weren’t at the event or had to leave early, a version of the talk Ewan gave at a conference in May 2008 is available on Slideshare, and is embedded (with audio commentary) below.

We will see if we can get a video of Ewan’s (longer) talk given at IWMW 2008, which will be embedded in the IWMW 2008 Web site.  [Note a streaming version of the talk is now available - added on 26 July 2008.]

I will be writing further posts about the IWMW 2008 event, but I felt it would be worth giving a speedy comments on Ewan’s talk as those who were stimulated by his talk may wish to sow their appreciating by voting for his blog in the Computer Weekly IT Blog Awards 2008 . And note that as Ewan’s blog has been shortlisted in the Public sector IT blogs category, the UK Web Focus blog, which has been shortlisted for the Web 2.0 and business blogs category, is (fortunately) not a competitor to me :-)   But hurry - as the deadline for votes in 31 July 2008.

JISC and Innovation

I recently attended the JISC Innovation Forum 2008, held at the University of Keele on 15-16^thJuly 2008. Several blog posts about the event have already been published includes one’s by Paul Walk, Owen Stephens and Chris Rusbridge.  Rather than repeating such reports, I feel it is appropriate to mention Sarah Porter’s introduction to the event. Sarah, Head of Innovation Group at the JISC, described what JISC meant by ‘innovation’. She provided a description of the term which she obtained from Wikipedia (dated 17 July 2008):

Innovation is typically understood as the successful introduction of something new and useful, for example introducing new methods, techniques, or practices or new or altered products and services.

The emphasis which JISC is placing on innovation clearly reflects developments to the UK Government’s policy initiatives in this area, in particular the establishment of the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, DIUS.

MLA and Innovation

Elspeth Hyams’ editorial in the CILIP Update magazine (June 2008, Vol. 7, No. 6) has the byline ”In This Climate, You Have To Innovate“.  As Elspeth describes, the need to innovate applies equally to the information sector: “The age of the quiescent library or information manager or service is dead“. The editorial goes on to describe the MLA’s action plan for public libraries and reports on the MLA’s Chief Executive, Roy Clare, calls for “radical action on structure, far-sighted leadership vision and more public Private Partnerships“. The editorial concludes with the warning that “It’s not just a challenge for the academic schools, but for all of us” but also suggests that “we should use tough times as a golden opportunity to focus on the strategy - and upgrade and refresh our skills“.

UKOLN and Innovation

As UKOLN is funded by both the JISC (we are a JISC Innovation Centre) and the MLA, there is a need for us to respond to these clearly-stated policy directions.  So I’m pleased to report that we helped to provide staff in museums, libraries and archives in the London region with an opportunity to “upgrade and refresh [their] skills” with the most recent  Web 2.0 and Social Networks workshop aimed at the cultural heritage sector. And next week we’ll be running the twelfth of the annual Institutional Web Management Workshops (IWMW 2008),  in which we will be providing further examples of innovation which we hope will be both new and useful for members of the higher and further education communities including our explorations of use of Twitter by event organisers,  use of video blogging, a live video stream of the plenary talks, the establishment of a Ning social network for the event and the innovation competition. 

Regular readers will be aware that such technologies have been discussed for some time now. But their use at events and within institutions is still, I feel, fairly unusual and so can be regarded as new. Whether they will be regarded as useful can only be judged by trying things out and receiving feedback.

In February 2008 I asked the question “Is Southampton Setting A New Standard For Institutional Web Sites?“. There was subsequently a lively discussion about the iSoton service, with Helen Aspell, Head of Digital Marketing at the University of Southampton and the person who led this collaborative project, describing the background to this work.

But in addition to the main iSoton page, which provides access to information about the University of Southampton held on Web 2.0 services including Youtube, Flickr and Wikipedia, it is also work noting the approach taken to the provision of a search interface for resources at the University of Southampton. The search page is illustrated below.

It is interesting to observe the single search box used for searching (on the top row) publications, people and experts and (on the bottom row) the main University of Southampton Web site and all Web sites at the University of Southampton.

And although the Search publications option allows you to refine a search or start an advanced search, this isn’t the case with the other searches.

Does this, I wonder, reflect the evidence that very few users ever make use of the advanced search capabilities? Or is this a worrying trend, a dumbing down of search for what should be typically an intelligent group of users?

I have to say that I’m looking forward to hearing Helen give a talk about the iSoton service at this year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2008). Alison Widish, head of Web Services at the University of Bath recently commented on a presentation by Helen at the CASE 2008 conference: “I eagerly awaited Helen’s talk and I wasn’t disappointed“. Alison went on to say:

Overall I was really impressed with Southampton not just with the website (which I find visually appealing and easy to use) but with the way the University LIVE their brand. It’s incredibly important to know who you are as an Institution and to provide an experience which reflects that… and it’s great to see this being carried across to the web.

Lots of food for thought!

And as this year’s theme for IWMW 2008 is “The Great Debate” I’m sure Helen’s talk on the first day of the event will help to contribute to the discussions on future directions for both the institutional Web site and institutional approaches to search. But if you can’t make it to Aberdeen, feel free to engage in the debate here.

The Innovation Competition was introduced at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2007, held at the University of York. This provided an opportunity for developers (and, it should be added, non-developers) to submit examples of lightweight examples of innovation which provided valuable services to a user community and/or were, in some way, ‘cool’, provoking a reaction of “Wow, we should be doing that” to IWMW 2007 participants.

The competition, which was sponsored by Amazon, was a great success, with four prize-winners receiving Amazon vouchers:

• Sebastian Rahtz’s Alternative Course Discovery using Calendars and Maps (first place)
• Michael Nolan’s How To Find Us and Hi From Edge Hill (second place)
• Paul Walk’s Community Focus Mashup (equal third)
• Mike Ellis Mashed Museums Directory (equal third)

This year we will be repeating the Innovation Competition. This time, rather than relying on a commercial sponsor, the Universities of Aberdeen and Bath and Edge Hill University are the sponsors. These three institutions have recognised the potential benefits of opening up their data and APIs to the community, and invite members of the community to demonstrate what can be done with their RSS and Atom feeds, their XCRI data, their microformats, their OpenSearch APIs and other data on their Web site.

And although we welcome submissions based on data from the sponsoring institutions, we also invite other submissions as well (perhaps use of multimedia or Second Life). One change we have made from last year’s competition, however, is that we would not expect submissions to be based on mainstream institutional development work. You may choose, however, to submit a proposal which brings together content from a number of institutions, perhaps on a regional basis or using data provided by organisations outside the HE/FE sector.

Further details are provided on the IWMW 2008 Web site. There will be prizes for the winning submissions and, depending on the numbers of submissions, we may even, as we did last year, also provide prizes to runner’s-up or for special categories (the funniest submissions and perhaps even submissions created during the event).

We look forward to receiving your submissions.