Background
On Monday 12 March 2007 I gave a seminar on Deployment Strategies For Web 2.0 at the University of Nottingham, following an invitation from Stephen Pinfield, Deputy Chief Information Officer at the University I received the invitation from Stephen following a similar presentation (entitled Web 2.0: How Should IT Services and the Library Respond?) I gave in November to senior managers in library and IT service department at East Midlands Universities.
The aim of this presentation was to engage with a wider range of staff responsible for the delivery of services in support service departments. About 100 people signed up for the seminar, which included staff from several of the local universities.
I was particularly pleased when I arrived at the University to discover that the talk was being videoed to China! Apparently the University of Nottingham Ningbo Web site. So a video link was set up to enable IT support staff at the Ningbo campus to attend the seminar.
The Talk
The talk gave an introduction to a variety of aspects of Web 2.0, with a particular emphasis of its applications within a higher education context. A new development to this talk was the addition of links to relevant postings published in this blog. This aims to provide access to additional reading materials, but, more importantly I would argue, access to comments about the posting and the ability to engage in those discussions. In particular I updated one of my slides which suggested that encouraging take-up of the FireFox and various FireFox plugins can provide a simple means of engaging with various Web 2.0 services. Following the comments made by Mark Sammons and Phil Wilson to my posting on FireFox – The Researchers Favourite Application I now describe the difficulties in managing FireFox across a large organisation and invited the participants at the seminar to engage with the issues made in the comments.
Another new aspect of the talk was in extending the discussion on strategies for deployment of Web 2.0 technologies within an organisation. A set of new slides suggest the need to develop a risk assessment and risk management approach to using Web 2.0, with the advice that this approach should also be applied to defending the status quo (there are risks associated with doing nothing) and in sticking with the traditional approach of use of licensed software from well-established software vendors (we have seen company takeovers which can affect published roadmaps and, of course, companies may also go out-of-business).
Reflections
In my talk I argued that some of the traditional assumptions that made have been made are no longer necessarily true. In particular I suggested that in a Web 2.0 context, we no longer need to own the applications which are used to provide services to our user communities. I summarised this view by suggesting that “Ideology is dead; pragmatism rules“. Rob Kirkwood, a former colleague of mine at Loughborough University, responded by suggesting that “Ideology may not be dead, but a greater emphasis need to be placed on pragmatic approaches to the provision of IT services” – a less snappy conclusion, but one which is more accurate, I would feel.
The other interesting aspect to this talk was the video-conferencing link to China. I was very pleased that this worked so well ()and one aspect that I introduced shortly before that talk started was use of a Gabbly chat facility to allow that participants in China to have a mechanism for providing comments and feedback). It helped that the opening slide for my presentation explicitly stated that I granted permission for my presentation to be broadcast, as illustrated (and can be seen from the slides which are available on Slideshare). It would have been unfortunate if I had not given permission for my talk to be made available to a remote audience (which I would legally be allowed to do) or for the talk to be recorded (which I would have been happy with, although, in this case, the talk was not recorded).
We are likely to see much greater take-up of communications technologies to allow users at various locations to participate in meetings, seminars, etc. so there will be a need to address the technical issues and also, and more importantly, I feel, the non-technical issues associated with maximising the benefits to a distributed audience. UKOLN has published a briefing document on “Guidelines For Exploiting WiFi Networks At Events” which covers some of these higher-level issues. One additional area that should be added to this document, based on my experiences at Nottingham, are ways of engaging effectively with both the local and remote audiences: at the start of my talk I mentioned that remote audience and received feedback from them (using Gabbly) on who they were and what they hoped to get from the session); however at the end of the talk, I moved nearer to the audience for the questions and discussions session, forgetting (until I was reminded by the AV technicians) that the remote audience then couldn’t see anything and couldn’t hear the questions and my responses.
Feedback
I would welcome feedback from participants at the seminar on any of the issues raised during the talk, or more general issues related to deployment strategies for Web 2.0, engagement with remote audiences, etc.
I hope I said something a little snappier than “Ideology may not be dead, but a greater emphasis need to be placed on pragmatic approaches to the provision of IT services” although this does accurately represent my sentiment. Ideology isn’t necessarily dead but there is a greater need for pragmatism in practice. There are many more ways of providing services these days and there is a very wide set of requirements and of experiences. To reuse an excellent cliche, we can no longer work on the basis of a “one size fits all” IT culture, if we ever could. Hence Web 2.0 possibilities should be observed and adopted where they can provide real benefits but this should be evidence-based, not just based on enthusiasms, or ideology.
Cheers, Rob.
Hi Rob – thanks for the comment (and the clarification of my half-remembered summary of what you said just before I dashed off to the JISC conference). I would very much agreed with you that what we should do should be based on evidence (and this includes Web 2.0 innovations).
Hi Brian
I really enjoyed your presentation, especially slides 29 & 30 on IT and Librarian ‘Fundamentalists’.
I’m already using a blog, Flickr, YouTube, etc – but for social stuff not work. Your presentation has helped me to see connections with the services we provide and this will inform how we develop digital library services.
One point that came through very strongly both in your presentation (and in Tom Loosemore’s ‘BBC 2.0’ presentation at the JISC conference yesterday) was the need to link to and adapt stuff from what is ‘out there’ rather than assuming we have to do it all ourselves.
Cheers,
Ruth
PS As I mentioned to you yesterday, someone from the marketing department at Warwick University responded to a blog posting I had made which mentioned Warwick. So universities are already starting to be more proactive in finding out what is said about them beyond their official websites. I will find out whether Nottingham is doing this yet.
Hi Ruth – Thanks for the comments. Funnily enough I discovered a report on the seminar this morning which seemed to be in agreement with you about the highlight of my talk: “Beware both IT and Librarian fundamentalists (this bit was very funny, and was basically about the fact that we like to think we know better than our users what is good for them)“.
Enjoyed the presentation – will try to get marketing more involved!
I was surprised that you didn’t mention Google Reader when you mentioned blog readers – two advantages of this are that you can share items of interest with others & it’s web based, so you can read on multiple PC’s.
The talk was titled “Deployment Strategies For Web 2.0”, but most of the presentation described web 2.0 applications – I would have liked to have looked at the few ones I didn’t know (eg facebook) before the event & then concentrated on what we (as service departments) should be doing.
I didn’t ask a question about deployment: Should we be deploying applications in house, or having squabbles about which external one to use, or just not care? eg should we deploy wordpress in house, recommend wordpress for the University or just let any body use any blogging software?
Hi Anthony – Thanks for the comments. Due to lack of time I only mentioned one Web-based blog reader – Bloglines. I used this as an example as it is so well-known (the most-used RSS reader for this blog, for example, with 31% of the RSS traffic). However I’ve just noticed that Google Reader (or, more accurately, the Google Feedfetcher robot) is gaining in popularity, being used for 24% of the reads of the RSS feed.
I’m pleased that you have suggested that seminar participants could look at some of the applications prior to the seminar. This blog provides a mechanisms for follow-up discussions afterwards, but I think it would be useful to do more in advance (which is something I started recently, when I mentioned a forthcoming talk on What Can Web 2.0 Offer The Research Community and invited ideas on what could be included in the talk. It would be good to do more with this idea.
Finally when you ask “Should we be deploying applications in house, or having squabbles about which external one to use, or just not care?” my answer would be, yes, all of the above 🙂 Users in your institution will be using a variety of third-party applications, and you’ll have to accept that. But you’ll probably need to evaluate in-house solutions as well (and they’ll probably arrive in any case, with your VLE, your CMS, your portal, etc.) And you will have squabbles (or informed discussions and debates) about the best solutions. I suspect this will be the norm for a while, until patterns of best practices established become established.
I liked the idea of moving away from the thinking that we have to have final versions of software, applications or eLearning content and instead we can just release constantly work in progress versions. We did a student pilot of some learning materials a while back for a large eLearning project for The University of Nottingham and students at the pilot were keen to use the materials even at that early stage. They understood there were bugs and incomplete sections but still showed enthusiasm to use what we had done by that stage (about 1/3 of the way through producing the materials).
Offering students the use of alternative online software applications is also interesting. We abandoned the use of Writely a while back as a tool for students to use, as we considered an online app risky considering that it might disappear or become a paid-for service. Sure enough it disappeared (sort of) but if we had included similar options (Zoho show, Empressr) they would have worked like a fail safe mechanism. Or would it just have created confusion among the students – ‘which one do we use?’ ‘which is best?’ ‘do we have to use all 3 tools?’. I am thinking as I type here. We ended up creating some tools of our own – it takes more time but they cater for exactly what the academic author wants, nothing more (so should be lightweight and easy to use)
Finally I was wondering how to get that quick firefox rss reader working, I search through the extensions but couldn’t see it.
Hi Mark – That’s a really useful case study which shows that students are willing to make use of materials when they are still under development.
I’ve used Writely (Google Docs) on a number of occasions, such as joint planning of papers, events, etc. I had one or two problems (email messages inviting others to be joint authors). However I think this happened after Google had purchased Writely and had some teething problems in the migration to the Google servers. Part of my risk management strategy was to save a copy of the file both locally and publish to a blog. SO the data was safe – I was using Writely as a collaborative writing tool. And, as you say, there are other alternatives, such as the Zoho family of office products.
If you are referring to the great lightweight floating RSS display, this is RSS Panel – I’d recommend it.