Yesterday I was in Birmingham for the JISC Conference – you can read about individual sessions in the other blog posts I’ve done but I wanted to post some general reflections on the event.

Firstly, it’s worth acknowledging the effort that had gone into the online side of the event. There was a ‘social network’ for the event at http://jisc08.crowdvine.com, tags to be used on blog posts, photos and microblogs had been advertised in advance, and you could join the event on Facebook. Lorcan Dempsey referred to this kind of activity as ‘the amplified conference‘ (also some interesting posts by Brian Kelly and Matt Jukes – the latter being involved in the organisation of this JISC conference)

What this added to the day is hard to say. The ‘crowdvine’ tool meant that I had a list of people I wanted to meet, and I used the ‘personal schedule’ tool during the day to know where I was meant to be. I met two of the people on my list (out of six I’d listed), which I guess is a start.

The use of the tags jiscconference08 and jisc08 means that you can view a large amount of material relating to the conference via Google as well as via ‘Onetag’ in a number of guises:

• Slideshow
• RSS
• Colour coded

Searches on Flickr, Twemes, Hashtags and other services for the tags will find stuff, but Onetag is an attempt to bring most of the relevant material together.

As well as this, the keynotes were streamed live via the Ustream service and can still be viewed now.

This definitely captures the event, and gives it an online presence well beyond the boundaries of the one day conference. Also, via Twitter, I was able to find out how to get wi-fi access (and I wasn’t the only one), as Matt Jukes was following all this background buzz, and responding to questions – which was great.

However, I did have a couple of problems:

Firstly, there is a an issue with information overload though – during the opening keynote I was trying to follow the ‘twittering’ as well as blogging the event, and in the end it was too much – I had to turn off my twitter tracking on my mobile.

The second issue I have I think is related to the event more generally, rather than just the online side of it, so I’ll come back to this in a minute.

So – what about the event overall? I think the opening keynote by David Puttnam was well delivered and contained some challenges that are worth thinking about. My experience of the parallel sessions was that they were trying to squeeze huge amounts into far too short a time – leading to both overruns (cutting into time to network in the breaks) and also leaving me wishing some topics could be explored in more depth.

Overall I think there is a lack of ‘space’ to discuss the issues covered by the conference. JISC activities are so many and varied, one day to cover everything leaves the impression of rushing through things, without ever leaving time to catch your breath and debate the issues. I felt that perhaps spreading the conference over two days might help – giving a better balance of work and social interaction, and leading to more thoughtful discussion of the issues on hand. I also think that the sessions need to be seen as the seeds for debate – some achieve this, but some fall short. Coming back to the online presence – although there is lots of online information, there seems to be a lack of online debate around the issues linked to the conference (I mean via the conference channels, not in general).

So – for next year, what do I think (if anyone is listening!):

• Use the online tools again, but think about whether there are ways of taking the debate online
• Reduce the number of sessions and increase the amount of time available (possibly the Edinburgh venue will lead to more people staying overnight – can this be exploited?)
• Run sessions that provoke debate, and find space for the debate to flourish

Yesterday I was in Birmingham for the JISC Conference – you can read about individual sessions in the other blog posts I’ve done but I wanted to post some general reflections on the event.

Firstly, it’s worth acknowledging the effort that had gone into the online side of the event. There was a ‘social network’ for the event at http://jisc08.crowdvine.com, tags to be used on blog posts, photos and microblogs had been advertised in advance, and you could join the event on Facebook. Lorcan Dempsey referred to this kind of activity as ‘the amplified conference‘ (also some interesting posts by Brian Kelly and Matt Jukes – the latter being involved in the organisation of this JISC conference)

What this added to the day is hard to say. The ‘crowdvine’ tool meant that I had a list of people I wanted to meet, and I used the ‘personal schedule’ tool during the day to know where I was meant to be. I met two of the people on my list (out of six I’d listed), which I guess is a start.

The use of the tags jiscconference08 and jisc08 means that you can view a large amount of material relating to the conference via Google as well as via ‘Onetag’ in a number of guises:

• Slideshow
• RSS
• Colour coded

Searches on Flickr, Twemes, Hashtags and other services for the tags will find stuff, but Onetag is an attempt to bring most of the relevant material together.

As well as this, the keynotes were streamed live via the Ustream service and can still be viewed now.

This definitely captures the event, and gives it an online presence well beyond the boundaries of the one day conference. Also, via Twitter, I was able to find out how to get wi-fi access (and I wasn’t the only one), as Matt Jukes was following all this background buzz, and responding to questions – which was great.

However, I did have a couple of problems:

Firstly, there is a an issue with information overload though – during the opening keynote I was trying to follow the ‘twittering’ as well as blogging the event, and in the end it was too much – I had to turn off my twitter tracking on my mobile.

The second issue I have I think is related to the event more generally, rather than just the online side of it, so I’ll come back to this in a minute.

So – what about the event overall? I think the opening keynote by David Puttnam was well delivered and contained some challenges that are worth thinking about. My experience of the parallel sessions was that they were trying to squeeze huge amounts into far too short a time – leading to both overruns (cutting into time to network in the breaks) and also leaving me wishing some topics could be explored in more depth.

Overall I think there is a lack of ‘space’ to discuss the issues covered by the conference. JISC activities are so many and varied, one day to cover everything leaves the impression of rushing through things, without ever leaving time to catch your breath and debate the issues. I felt that perhaps spreading the conference over two days might help – giving a better balance of work and social interaction, and leading to more thoughtful discussion of the issues on hand. I also think that the sessions need to be seen as the seeds for debate – some achieve this, but some fall short. Coming back to the online presence – although there is lots of online information, there seems to be a lack of online debate around the issues linked to the conference (I mean via the conference channels, not in general).

So – for next year, what do I think (if anyone is listening!):

• Use the online tools again, but think about whether there are ways of taking the debate online
• Reduce the number of sessions and increase the amount of time available (possibly the Edinburgh venue will lead to more people staying overnight – can this be exploited?)
• Run sessions that provoke debate, and find space for the debate to flourish

Some closing remarks from Malcolm Reid. Over the next year JISC is to focus on:

• Continued provision of services (JANET etc.)
• Better integration across advisory services
• Repositories – especially research data, and especially small team laboratory based research; also learning resources
• More shared services
• Green computing

Next year’s conference is in Edinburgh on Tuesday 24th March…

 

Some closing remarks from Malcolm Reid. Over the next year JISC is to focus on:

• Continued provision of services (JANET etc.)
• Better integration across advisory services
• Repositories – especially research data, and especially small team laboratory based research; also learning resources
• More shared services
• Green computing

Next year’s conference is in Edinburgh on Tuesday 24th March…

 

The closing keynote of the JISC Conference is being given by Angela Beesley who is a co-founder of ‘Wikia’ – the commercial arm of Wikimedia, and is currently chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board.

Angela is outlining what Wikimedia and Wikipedia is – I don’t think I need to repeat this here. Now she is talking about ‘Wikiversity’ – which is a place students can go to explore their learning goals, having collections of pages dedicated to learning, and teachers can create and share lesson plans, and it also links to another project Wikibooks. As with Wikipedia, these wikis are openly editable.

Angela says that you can’t always trust all the information on wikipedia – but you can trust the process, which leads to corrections, and tends towards accurate information. She’s just shown a slide where the Wikipedia entry on JISC is flagged as ‘written like an advertisement’. This seems fine to me, but I was interested to read an article in the Guardian last week about the process of editing – what is clear is that it is very difficult to keep up with all the changes that are happening (need to put in link here).

Angela just comparing the size of Wikipedia to Libraries – 1.7 billion words in Wikipedia, whereas the contents of Libraries worldwide estimated in the trillions.

Angela says that if Wikipedia is the encyclopaedia, Wikia is the rest of the library.

Wikia allows more depth in specific areas – e.g. the WoW Wiki has 55,000 articles about World of Warcraft.

Wikia brings in more collaborative tools, as well as providing Integration with 3rd party applications and information.

Wikia Search – new this year, which is an attempt to apply a wiki model to search. This was launched earlier this year with some fanfare, but not exactly critical acclaim. Angela acknowledges if you use it at the moment, you won’t get very good results.

Angela covering how to go about setting up a wiki:

Socialtext, Confluence, Google Wiki, Wikia, PBwiki etc.

We’ve got a Confluence installation at Imperial College, and the Library has been using it for a number of things, including documentation, collaborative working and document sharing, and we are currently considering using it to start creating a specification for a ‘next generation’ search product for our library collections. One of the issues with the Confluence wiki is that you have to have an Imperial login to use it, so it is not easy to collaborate with users from outside the institution. What we haven’t got is a ‘community’ aspect to it – the wikis are inward facing for the library, and access is limited to library staff, or even specific staff within the library. In some areas this is because the information could be confidential, but we should give some thought as to how we might exploit it more in a community type way.

Overall, the talk was basically an introduction to wikis – OK, but not that inspiring. A question that came up at the end was about what should lecturers say to their students about using Wikipedia – and Angela was clear that we should ensure that students understood the nature of Wikipedia, and the information on there, and to use it appropriately (i.e. don’t trust it without verifying the information) – this is interesting as it is very much the ‘Information Literacy’ approach to information (not just Wikipedia).

Angela blogs at wikiangela.com/blog

The closing keynote of the JISC Conference is being given by Angela Beesley who is a co-founder of ‘Wikia’ – the commercial arm of Wikimedia, and is currently chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board.

Angela is outlining what Wikimedia and Wikipedia is – I don’t think I need to repeat this here. Now she is talking about ‘Wikiversity’ – which is a place students can go to explore their learning goals, having collections of pages dedicated to learning, and teachers can create and share lesson plans, and it also links to another project Wikibooks. As with Wikipedia, these wikis are openly editable.

Angela says that you can’t always trust all the information on wikipedia – but you can trust the process, which leads to corrections, and tends towards accurate information. She’s just shown a slide where the Wikipedia entry on JISC is flagged as ‘written like an advertisement’. This seems fine to me, but I was interested to read an article in the Guardian last week about the process of editing – what is clear is that it is very difficult to keep up with all the changes that are happening (need to put in link here).

Angela just comparing the size of Wikipedia to Libraries – 1.7 billion words in Wikipedia, whereas the contents of Libraries worldwide estimated in the trillions.

Angela says that if Wikipedia is the encyclopaedia, Wikia is the rest of the library.

Wikia allows more depth in specific areas – e.g. the WoW Wiki has 55,000 articles about World of Warcraft.

Wikia brings in more collaborative tools, as well as providing Integration with 3rd party applications and information.

Wikia Search – new this year, which is an attempt to apply a wiki model to search. This was launched earlier this year with some fanfare, but not exactly critical acclaim. Angela acknowledges if you use it at the moment, you won’t get very good results.

Angela covering how to go about setting up a wiki:

Socialtext, Confluence, Google Wiki, Wikia, PBwiki etc.

We’ve got a Confluence installation at Imperial College, and the Library has been using it for a number of things, including documentation, collaborative working and document sharing, and we are currently considering using it to start creating a specification for a ‘next generation’ search product for our library collections. One of the issues with the Confluence wiki is that you have to have an Imperial login to use it, so it is not easy to collaborate with users from outside the institution. What we haven’t got is a ‘community’ aspect to it – the wikis are inward facing for the library, and access is limited to library staff, or even specific staff within the library. In some areas this is because the information could be confidential, but we should give some thought as to how we might exploit it more in a community type way.

Overall, the talk was basically an introduction to wikis – OK, but not that inspiring. A question that came up at the end was about what should lecturers say to their students about using Wikipedia – and Angela was clear that we should ensure that students understood the nature of Wikipedia, and the information on there, and to use it appropriately (i.e. don’t trust it without verifying the information) – this is interesting as it is very much the ‘Information Literacy’ approach to information (not just Wikipedia).

Angela blogs at wikiangela.com/blog

Chris Awre – VRE and eReSS

eReSS is the ‘eResearch Specifications and Standards’ which is an observatory type project that set out to capture the use of standards in the JISC VRE Programme, and advising projects on standards usage.

There is a eReSS wiki (introduction to this at http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/eress_wiki_intro.html, but seems to be down at the moment)

The project covers Technical standards, Community standards, and looks at open/closed standards, and the issues around using various standards.

The Future of VREs

(just missed who the speaker was – possibly Mark Baker?)

VREs offer:

• Customised user interfaces
• Focussed entry point
• Personalised services
• Role based security
• access to information and services, hiding the underlying complexity
• Provides a supported working environment
• use for finding, sharing and disseminating information
• Facilitates collaboration across institutional boundaries

There are now a wide variety of portals – both on the open web (iGoogle, Twine, etc.) and institutional frameworks (e.g. Sakai)

The VRE provides a web-based portal where seientists/engineers can login and access various tools

If using a portal framework, potentially applications and services have to be ported to the system

If not using a formal Portal Framework, then more or less all the infrastructure, services and utilities need to be designed and implemented from scratch

Many attempts to embed web based applications into portals is that they end up forking software to put them in a ‘portlet’.

‘Bridges’ are a way around this – bridges allow you to consume a normal web application – in the VERA project they have developed the Recycle Bridge (vera.rdg.ac.uk/software) allowing them to bring in web applications into a portal.

I have to admit I don’t really understand the approach the speaker is advocating. I find the idea that researchers want a a ‘supported working environment’ interesting – the speaker suggests that researchers want to buy into a ‘supported’ suite (however, do they care who supports it?), and I have to admit as we see the changes in thinking around VLEs/PLEs I would have thought a more personal approach would be where VREs are going to – researchers want to define their own environment, and what is needed is that you can plug insitutional tools , services or information sources into this environment (easily!).

Finally the speaker suggests that web based environments are only a stepping stone, and eventually these will be replaced by desktop based environments (essentially getting rid of the web ‘one-stop shop’)

Chris Awre – VRE and eReSS

eReSS is the ‘eResearch Specifications and Standards’ which is an observatory type project that set out to capture the use of standards in the JISC VRE Programme, and advising projects on standards usage.

There is a eReSS wiki (introduction to this at http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/eress_wiki_intro.html, but seems to be down at the moment)

The project covers Technical standards, Community standards, and looks at open/closed standards, and the issues around using various standards.

The Future of VREs

(just missed who the speaker was – possibly Mark Baker?)

VREs offer:

• Customised user interfaces
• Focussed entry point
• Personalised services
• Role based security
• access to information and services, hiding the underlying complexity
• Provides a supported working environment
• use for finding, sharing and disseminating information
• Facilitates collaboration across institutional boundaries

There are now a wide variety of portals – both on the open web (iGoogle, Twine, etc.) and institutional frameworks (e.g. Sakai)

The VRE provides a web-based portal where seientists/engineers can login and access various tools

If using a portal framework, potentially applications and services have to be ported to the system

If not using a formal Portal Framework, then more or less all the infrastructure, services and utilities need to be designed and implemented from scratch

Many attempts to embed web based applications into portals is that they end up forking software to put them in a ‘portlet’.

‘Bridges’ are a way around this – bridges allow you to consume a normal web application – in the VERA project they have developed the Recycle Bridge (vera.rdg.ac.uk/software) allowing them to bring in web applications into a portal.

I have to admit I don’t really understand the approach the speaker is advocating. I find the idea that researchers want a a ‘supported working environment’ interesting – the speaker suggests that researchers want to buy into a ‘supported’ suite (however, do they care who supports it?), and I have to admit as we see the changes in thinking around VLEs/PLEs I would have thought a more personal approach would be where VREs are going to – researchers want to define their own environment, and what is needed is that you can plug insitutional tools , services or information sources into this environment (easily!).

Finally the speaker suggests that web based environments are only a stepping stone, and eventually these will be replaced by desktop based environments (essentially getting rid of the web ‘one-stop shop’)

OK, I now know the chair of the session isn’t David, as he is speaking now.

He starts by saying that the VRE is the web. He is going to describe his view of ‘the new e-science’:

The new e-science is:

• Everyday researchers doing the everyday research
• A data-centric perspective, like researchers
• Collaborative and participatory
• Benefiting from the scale of digital science activity to support science
• Increasingly open
• Better not Perfect
• Empowering researchers
• About pervasive computing

Essentially a lot of this is about the idea of researcher-centric activity – if they have access to the right tools they will build what they need.

OK, I now know the chair of the session isn’t David, as he is speaking now.

He starts by saying that the VRE is the web. He is going to describe his view of ‘the new e-science’:

The new e-science is:

• Everyday researchers doing the everyday research
• A data-centric perspective, like researchers
• Collaborative and participatory
• Benefiting from the scale of digital science activity to support science
• Increasingly open
• Better not Perfect
• Empowering researchers
• About pervasive computing

Essentially a lot of this is about the idea of researcher-centric activity – if they have access to the right tools they will build what they need.