I'm very much looking forward to Bodleian Libraries' Oxford Social Media Day tomorrow! Two streams of events - one focussing on case studies and the theory behind use of 'Web 2.0' technologies in libraries, one where people get a chance to mess about with social media tools and get chance to ask people for advice on how to set them up etc.
http://23thingsoxford.blogspot.com/2011/08/oxford-social-media-2011-developments.html
I'm facilitating for blogs and facebook, and going to sessions on social media policy in public libraries and marketing academic libraries! Should be fun, if busy...
Wednesday 7 September 2011
Thursday 25 November 2010
Web 2.0 Untangled: Richard Francis on MobileBrookes & closing thoughts
Finally the day was finished by Richard Francis talking about the MobileBrookes project.
He started by giving us some background- telling us that PCs were dying, that c.60% of people at Cardiff University had smart phones, and that soon all our students would have smart phones capable of accessing the internet.
The MobileBrookes project is an spin-off of the MobileOxford project http://m.ox.ac.uk/, an attempt to build a set of web-based apps that can run on any smart phone. The plan at Brookes is to have the apps able to look up lecturer’s contact details, to guide you to your library or lecture, and to give new students guided tours using just their phones. It all sounded very exciting, although most of their apps weren’t running yet and I was rather worried about the digital divide- if smart phones become increasingly essential, what about the students who can’t afford smart phones?
In conclusion it was a great day, with a range of talks between theoretical and very practical. Lots of interesting things to ponder, and probably some tools I'll take away and use in my library. If I could have changed one thing, I probably would have had one less speaker- this would have given us more time for questions and answers. This in turn would have made the day less about passively being-presented-to and more of a dynamic process: after all, this is what Web 2.0 is all about!
(“Web 2.0 Untangled” was a day-long conference organised by CILIP’s UC&R BBO and CoFHE MidWest Circle, held at Wolfson College on the 24th November 2010. It featured 7 speakers on a variety of topics. I attended thanks to Oxford staff development funding. A condition of this funding is to write-up your experience of the session to pass around your colleagues in Oxford- which is what I'm doing here!)
He started by giving us some background- telling us that PCs were dying, that c.60% of people at Cardiff University had smart phones, and that soon all our students would have smart phones capable of accessing the internet.
The MobileBrookes project is an spin-off of the MobileOxford project http://m.ox.ac.uk/, an attempt to build a set of web-based apps that can run on any smart phone. The plan at Brookes is to have the apps able to look up lecturer’s contact details, to guide you to your library or lecture, and to give new students guided tours using just their phones. It all sounded very exciting, although most of their apps weren’t running yet and I was rather worried about the digital divide- if smart phones become increasingly essential, what about the students who can’t afford smart phones?
In conclusion it was a great day, with a range of talks between theoretical and very practical. Lots of interesting things to ponder, and probably some tools I'll take away and use in my library. If I could have changed one thing, I probably would have had one less speaker- this would have given us more time for questions and answers. This in turn would have made the day less about passively being-presented-to and more of a dynamic process: after all, this is what Web 2.0 is all about!
(“Web 2.0 Untangled” was a day-long conference organised by CILIP’s UC&R BBO and CoFHE MidWest Circle, held at Wolfson College on the 24th November 2010. It featured 7 speakers on a variety of topics. I attended thanks to Oxford staff development funding. A condition of this funding is to write-up your experience of the session to pass around your colleagues in Oxford- which is what I'm doing here!)
Web 2.0 Untangled: Levy & Webber on Inquiry Based Learning
Our next talk was Philippa Levy and Sheila Webber (https://twitter.com/sheilayoshikawa) from the University of Sheffield’s Information School talking about Inquiry Based Learning. Their presentation is on SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/sheilawebber
Inquiry Based Learning is where student inquiry and research drives the experience of learning right from the first year of university rather than having students passively listening to lectures. Obviously in such an environment information literacy, the ability to discern the best source of information, is key. In their particular course they used a lot of Web 2.0 technology- students conducted research interviews in Second Life, and communicated with each other for group exercises online.
It all sounded very interesting, and I could see the similarities with the Oxford tutorial system. The key differences were that there were more Web 2.0 applications; students were forming their own research questions at an earlier stage, thus giving them more experience by the time it came to making a dissertation question; and undergraduate students were engaged more with conducting research. See their slides for more details!
(“Web 2.0 Untangled” was a day-long conference organised by CILIP’s UC&R BBO and CoFHE MidWest Circle, held at Wolfson College on the 24th November 2010. It featured 7 speakers on a variety of topics. I attended thanks to Oxford staff development funding. A condition of this funding is to write-up your experience of the session to pass around your colleagues in Oxford- which is what I'm doing here!)
Web 2.0 Untangled: Artie Vossel-Newman on MyStudyBar
After a lovely lunch, we were visited by Artie Vossel-Newman (http://twitter.com/ArtieVN) talking about MyStudyBar http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/eduapps/mystudybar.php, a free download that computer users with disabilities or dyslexia can use to help them.
It has ways of making computer screens tinted yellow, or making a box appear so you can read text one line at a time. It also features voice-to-text and text-to-voice software- ideal for impersonating Stephen Hawking. You can also save the text-to-voice as an mp3, which is a nice feature enabling dyslexics to make their own audio book-equivalents. There was also a program for creating mind maps. It’s all totally free and supported by video tutorials online.
It looks great for readers with disabilities and reading difficulties, and would help those readers be more confident with computers and thus be able to engage with Web 2.0 applications. So it’s great, especially as it’s all free!
(“Web 2.0 Untangled” was a day-long conference organised by CILIP’s UC&R BBO and CoFHE MidWest Circle, held at Wolfson College on the 24th November 2010. It featured 7 speakers on a variety of topics. I attended thanks to Oxford staff development funding. A condition of this funding is to write-up your experience of the session to pass around your colleagues in Oxford- which is what I'm doing here!)
It has ways of making computer screens tinted yellow, or making a box appear so you can read text one line at a time. It also features voice-to-text and text-to-voice software- ideal for impersonating Stephen Hawking. You can also save the text-to-voice as an mp3, which is a nice feature enabling dyslexics to make their own audio book-equivalents. There was also a program for creating mind maps. It’s all totally free and supported by video tutorials online.
It looks great for readers with disabilities and reading difficulties, and would help those readers be more confident with computers and thus be able to engage with Web 2.0 applications. So it’s great, especially as it’s all free!
(“Web 2.0 Untangled” was a day-long conference organised by CILIP’s UC&R BBO and CoFHE MidWest Circle, held at Wolfson College on the 24th November 2010. It featured 7 speakers on a variety of topics. I attended thanks to Oxford staff development funding. A condition of this funding is to write-up your experience of the session to pass around your colleagues in Oxford- which is what I'm doing here!)
Web 2.0 Untangled: Lucy Power on life scientists online
The final speaker before lunch was Lucy Power (http://lucypower.com/about/, http://twitter.com/pownet), who talked about a group of life scientists on the cutting edge of Web 2.0.
The life scientists she followed were using Web 2.0 to communicate, collaborate and share their data. They were generally using pre-existing technology, but shaping it to their needs. She looked at 2 main trends:
FriendFeed http://friendfeed.com/ is a place where you can pull together all our your RSS feeds- it updates whenever you change your Facebook status, post on your blog, add photos to Flickr, and so on. People can then “like” your updates and comment on them, rather like on Facebook (which bought FriendFeed several years ago and took that idea from them). It also has groups, where people who share a common interest can chat to each other. The Life Scientists FriendFeed group is very active, with people using it to engage in informal but useful chat- asking questions about research techniques, sharing information about funding sources, and seeking collaborators for projects. It’s networking water-cooler chat, and potentially very useful.
Open Notebook Science is the idea of posting to a blog or wiki all your experiment results in real time onto the internet- publishing from the bench. It’s currently rare, and Lucy discussed several of the leading groups. It’s great as you can embed pictures, YouTube videos and so on. And it enables people world-wide to follow your results. But it can raise issues for journals, as some journals see it as pre-published work (and this can then have knock-on results for funding, promotion, etc).
(“Web 2.0 Untangled” was a day-long conference organised by CILIP’s UC&R BBO and CoFHE MidWest Circle, held at Wolfson College on the 24th November 2010. It featured 7 speakers on a variety of topics. I attended thanks to Oxford staff development funding. A condition of this funding is to write-up your experience of the session to pass around your colleagues in Oxford- which is what I'm doing here!)
The life scientists she followed were using Web 2.0 to communicate, collaborate and share their data. They were generally using pre-existing technology, but shaping it to their needs. She looked at 2 main trends:
FriendFeed http://friendfeed.com/ is a place where you can pull together all our your RSS feeds- it updates whenever you change your Facebook status, post on your blog, add photos to Flickr, and so on. People can then “like” your updates and comment on them, rather like on Facebook (which bought FriendFeed several years ago and took that idea from them). It also has groups, where people who share a common interest can chat to each other. The Life Scientists FriendFeed group is very active, with people using it to engage in informal but useful chat- asking questions about research techniques, sharing information about funding sources, and seeking collaborators for projects. It’s networking water-cooler chat, and potentially very useful.
Open Notebook Science is the idea of posting to a blog or wiki all your experiment results in real time onto the internet- publishing from the bench. It’s currently rare, and Lucy discussed several of the leading groups. It’s great as you can embed pictures, YouTube videos and so on. And it enables people world-wide to follow your results. But it can raise issues for journals, as some journals see it as pre-published work (and this can then have knock-on results for funding, promotion, etc).
(“Web 2.0 Untangled” was a day-long conference organised by CILIP’s UC&R BBO and CoFHE MidWest Circle, held at Wolfson College on the 24th November 2010. It featured 7 speakers on a variety of topics. I attended thanks to Oxford staff development funding. A condition of this funding is to write-up your experience of the session to pass around your colleagues in Oxford- which is what I'm doing here!)
Web 2.0 Untangled: Helen Clough, Elluminate web conferencing
The next speaker, Helen Clough (http://twitter.com/helenalex), was looking at a specific situation & tool: the way the Open University uses Elluminate Web Conferencing http://www.elluminate.com/ to deliver virtual library inductions. Her presentation is on Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/helenalex
The OU has around quarter of a million distance learners, and a great online library. The OU was founded with the idea of using communcations technology to enable learning- originally this meant books, TV, radio and recordings, but now they’re embracing the internet.
They’ve been using web conferencing technology to run library induction sessions. Some of the key issues they’ve found have been:
- Concentration spans- they keep all the talks an hour long at most
- The number of students who turn up- it could be 4 or 40
- Keeping it hands on- they do lots of exercises in the session, and make people communicate using lots of tick/cross exercises and emoticons
- They don’t want to be interrupted by the real world- so the trainers have a special locked office they go into when running the sessions
- They want to make their talks consistent- so they use a script
They also have a number of pre-recorded sessions. These can be used by students who can’t make one of the scheduled times, or by staff wanting to get ideas of how to run their own sessions.
They trained their staff using a mentoring scheme. First some staff learnt how to use the software and used a best practice “bible” to design talks. Then once they’d all done many talks and were confident they trained up the other staff- using a mix of reviewing pre-recorded sessions and practice sessions on other staff.
Their next step is to review the content of their sessions, as some of their newer sessions have more interactive elements that they want to put into their older sessions. They also are going to start peer reviewing their presenters to ensure consistency and help everyone develop their skills.
(“Web 2.0 Untangled” was a day-long conference organised by CILIP’s UC&R BBO and CoFHE MidWest Circle, held at Wolfson College on the 24th November 2010. It featured 7 speakers on a variety of topics. I attended thanks to Oxford staff development funding. A condition of this funding is to write-up your experience of the session to pass around your colleagues in Oxford- which is what I'm doing here!)
Web 2.0 Untangled: Dr Eric Davies, Ethics and Law in Web 2.0
Peter’s talk (http://snipurl.com/web2untangled1) was followed by a talk by Dr Eric Davies (http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/lisu/pages/staff/eric.html), introducing a note of caution to the day as he considered the ethical and legal implications of Web 2.0.
He started with an overview of Web 2.0 as an enabler; people collaborating, participating and sharing information; distributed co-creation (wikis etc); and dynamic content. He introduced the idea of Web 2.0 as a mutation, a move in society from mass consumerism to individual creation & consumption, with individuals empowered to publish. But with great power comes great responsibility…
He then got us looking at the many issues Web 2.0 raises:
- Trust. Like Peter’s information literacy, a key question in Web 2.0 is how reliable is the content you can find in a world without peer-review?
- Privacy. Obviously there are always issues about people’s privacy in Web 2.0 applications – look at the Google / Facebook issues that keep arising.
- Identity. Conversely, people don’t like how anonymous Web 2.0 applications can be- how can we know that people are who they say they are? Grooming etc.
- User control of contents. Collaboratively created information like Wikis leads to copyright headaches! Plagiarism is also an issue, it’s so easy to copy & paste with computers…
- Public welfare. Not everyone can access Web 2.0 tools- disabled/dyslexic people may need special equipment, poor people may be the other side of the Digital Divide.
- Unacceptable use. If anyone can publish anything, this can lead to obscenity, blasphemy, race hate, terrorism, leaking official / trade secrets, defamation & libel, advertising, pornography, flame wars, stalking, cyber-bullying, identity theft, DoS attacks, viruses, hacking, file sharing, spam… If your instititution is provide internet access or hosting Web 2.0 platforms, you could be responsible for what your users do!
We then finally looked at how to manage Web 2.0 issues with legislation, codes of practice, good netiquette and acceptable use policies; as well as considering the difficult line to walk between enabling & regulating or content regulation & censorship.
(“Web 2.0 Untangled” was a day-long conference organised by CILIP’s UC&R BBO and CoFHE MidWest Circle, held at Wolfson College on the 24th November 2010. It featured 7 speakers on a variety of topics. I attended thanks to Oxford staff development funding. A condition of this funding is to write-up your experience of the session to pass around your colleagues in Oxford- which is what I'm doing here!)
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