For ease of linking, here are my summaries of IWMW 2013 plenary sessions:
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Posted by janetmck
This post summarises the plenary sessions from day 3 of IWMW 2013. It follows on from the summary of day 2’s last three plenaries.
Richard Prowse talked about the need to put content at the heart of the website, and to get the three sides of the content story (Communications, Design and Developers) talking to each other.
If we can’t solve the problem of managing content, we’re not going to be able to engage with people in meaningful ways. However if we make our content findable, engaging, and useful, we can not only engage with our audiences but also reduce the workload of our support staff. Both of these things are part of the value of our content: it can make us money (by getting more students in) and save us money (by saving staff time). And structured content (and breaking content up into smaller reusable chunks) allows us to “create once, publish everywhere” (another time/money saving).
We also need to understand how target groups actually use the internet. Prowse gave us some useful statistics to bear in mind:
Mobile is important; but so is paper. We know that our mobile strategy can help from a ‘widening participation’ perspective, but we may have to return to paper to reach certain groups (particularly low-income groups) who might not be online.
Why is fixing content so hard? Because it doesn’t stand still while we try to fix it. “Fixing content is like trying to perform heart surgery while the patient is running a marathon.” However we can articulate the problem, have a conversation with the people responsible for the content and things will start changing. Content strategy does offer us a solution, by giving us a toolkit for better communication — it’s all about communication. We also need to enthuse our users and content creators about content — and remember that everyone has experiences to bring to the table to enhance our understanding and improve practice.
Further reading (books):
Like many of the plenary speakers, Dai Griffiths reminded us that the operating environment of universities is changing, and universities have to work out how to tell a coherent story about how they’re responding to the change — and the institutional web is at the centre of that hurricane, it’s a key player in the telling of that story. He went on to identify some of the conflicts and ‘double binds’ faced by universities.
We can either use the REF to boost the status of the university, or use open access journals to boost visibility. We need to publish to attract research funding, to attract students, to be useful… and because that’s what academics do. OA ticks these boxes, and can transform impact; but the institution controls the ‘target journals’, the accepted places to publish. Griffiths asked us “What’s your institution’s policy?” — but many of us in the audience weren’t sure.
Next, the question of MOOCs and the “disaggregation of HE”. Griffiths quoted Jimmy Wales on MOOCs: “…unless universities respond to the rising tide of online courses new major players will emerge to displace them. … it’s also been slower than anyone would have anticipated.” Online courses are a threat but also an opportunity. Again, Griffiths asked us what our institutions’ policies on MOOCs were, and whether they have a coherent story about how those developments fit into the institution’s identity — again, nobody in the audience seemed very sure of the answer!
Another contradiction was between “supporting students” and “balancing the books” — “how do we keep supporting the whole potential student body when university budgets are under pressure and costs to students are increasing?” Trying to widen participation but also save money.
Griffiths asked if these were just contradictions or “double binds” (a pathological situation — discussed in the study of schizophrenia — in which you are given repeated contradictory instructions, the instructions are reinforced by an explicit or implicit threat of punishment, and you’re not allowed to discuss the contradiction or leave the situation).
The next ‘double bind’ he identified concerned performance indicators — key performance indicators (KPIs), key information sets (KIS), etc. These cascade through the system, managers create targets for those below them, employees can’t question them or avoid them, and the institution can’t bypass them without putting funding at risk. Indicators and targets create a de facto representation of the system they intended to measure. Factors which are not measured are not candidates for consideration; and this may get out of step with the view that marketing or teachers have of the institution. It’s a pessimistic view… but an accurate one?
“We need to insist on using data to ask questions about the institution’s identity, not just to report compliance.” Questions we need to ask are:
Griffiths asked: is your institution capable of asking that last question? Is the question prohibited by a double bind? Is that why our jobs are so hard?
Further reading:
Neil Denny told us that it’s OK — it’s exciting! — not to know what the future has in store. He exhorted us to do more stuff we don’t know how to do (to get outside our comfort zones); to “get artisan” (adopt a mentality of deliberate design); and to “envision success and and temporarily suspend the need for a successful outcome” (we’ve never succeeded because we’ve never finished!).
I’m not going to attempt to summarise his talk in detail, just share a couple of his thought-provoking soundbites:
“People say they are looking for answers when in reality they are looking for someone to tell them just how little they have to change.”
“People don’t resist change itself, only the loss within it.”
Further reading:
I’m not going to try to summarise Brian’s summary of the event, but I will note that he also talked about possible directions for the future of IWMW, and ended on a note of cautious optimism for IWMW and for the staff of UKOLN (follow their progress at the UKOLN Diaspora site: http://ukoln-diaspora.org.uk/). It feels a bit glib to say “hope to see everyone at IWMW 2014”, but I think there’s still a place for the event and I know there’s still a lot of goodwill and enthusiasm in the IWMW community, so… keeping fingers crossed!
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Posted by janetmck
This post summarises the last three plenary sessions from day 2 of IWMW 2013. It follows on from the summary of day 2’s first three plenaries.
Paul Walk talked about how learning to work well with developers can help institutional web managers get the most out of their software/systems. He said that managers need to get good at estimating the time projects will take, and learn some of the developers’ jargon (though they shouldn’t pretend to know more than they do), specifically understanding what key concepts like ‘the cloud’ and ‘software as a service’ really mean.
Over the years we’ve had lots of different words for developers: developer, programmer, engineer, analyst, data-wrangler… even “software authors”. Different words have different connotations; the words we choose can tell us a lot about how we think about the work of development. We also have different words for the process: we talk about “writing” software, software “engineering”, software as a “craft”, as an “art”, and so on. “The last time people constructed a vocabulary for software development was in the 1960s, when they coined the phrase software engineering, both as a wish and a direction for the future.” The different words reflect different development paradigms.
Walk gave an overview of the ‘waterfall’ methodology and then moved on to ‘agile’ development and how it differs. The ‘agile’ attitude can be summed up as “rough consensus, running code” and its articles of faith are that innovation happens in a local context and local developers empower the organisation to innovate. ‘Local’ in this sense means ‘close to the users’ — we have to recognise that the users are part of the process, and that building software is about building on existing relationships. There are lots of advantages to having local developers, e.g. better understanding of local context, and better availability/responsiveness during projects.
It’s not just about developers doing development work, though; Walk argued that Universities need more technical people in their higher echelons: “bring engineers into your company at all levels, including the top” (as Eric Schmidt puts it). He also identified a gap in the career path for developers, the difficulty of letting developers keep developing but also contribute to management, strategy, and governance, and claimed that universities can learn from industry in this area.
Further reading:
‘What happened then’ was that the A-level results came out, and universities got a shock as they realised that the game had changed. 17 of the Russell Group universities went into clearing in 2012: applications were down by 7% across the board. But we don’t need to wait for A-level results to find out how bad things are: we can get the data and work out who we need to target and how.
Sidhu talked about how ‘data science’ was becoming more prevalent (in fact, apparently, “the sexiest job in the 21st century“) and how we need to work out what we should be analysing: the web is uniquely placed to analyse statistics and help universities to target the area it needs to. And this targeting is big business: Sidhu estimated an £8,500,000 spend by universities in the week after clearing; a keyword ad in the top spot on Google during clearing costs £22.12 for just one click. Online marketing is perfect for targeting our spending more effectively, and we need to get more students in — Sidhu claims that tuition fees are the only way that HEIs can make money now.
However Sidhu warned of the dangers of thinking ‘big data’ will solve everything (“If you didn’t do anything meaningful with the small data you had, why will you do anything with the big data?“) and reminded us that databases are easy, but you can’t outsource thinking. He was particularly sceptical about the value of UniStats (apparently fewer than 1 visitor per day actually clicks the UniStats widget).
After lots of hard figures Sidhu finished with some more philosophical questions: whether free content is destroying diversity; whether the free pricing model unfairly benefits the rich (should people pay more if they can afford it?); and whether early adopters of tracking/analytics technology (what we used to call ‘spyware’) have a responsibility to make sure it’s used ethically.
Further reading:
Paul Boag didn’t pull any punches in his talk; highlights included telling us that we were a bunch of whingers and that when it came to our organisational structures we were all, not to put too fine a point on it, completely screwed. It’s just his way of showing how much he cares…
He identified the problem as our “pre-web organisations” being mired in bureaucracy, with slow, committee-based decision-making, lots of internal politics, a “project mentality” and lots of departmental silos, and a misunderstanding of what the web is (a marketing tool, an IT service). The “project mentality” is unhelpful because the web requires cross-departmental working: organisational structures are a barrier to this. Departmental silos occur for the same reason: websites and services are organised around organisational structure, departments, faculties etc. This slow-moving bureaucracy results in “big bang redesigns” (rather than incremental change) leading to yo-yoing expenditure and long periods of ineffectiveness.
Boag argued that fundamental changes are needed – we need to:
Policies can help us say “no”, e.g. if we can’t remove redundant content simply because it’s irrelevant, we can establish policies to help facilitate this, such as saying that if a page isn’t updated within a certain amount of time, or falls below a threshold of visits based on analytics, then it gets marked as archived, removed from search, and so on.
Boag suggested some other techniques to help us improve our sites in the face of organisational obstructions: “user cards” (and insisting on them before introducing new content/functionality) can help us build a user-focused experience; testing and monitoring everything can help us justify our decisions. We also need to communicate: we need to share best practice, blog our experiences, find ways to talk to each other. We also need to talk to senior management, tell them what we think, market ourselves within the organisation.
His diatribe against institutional culture ended with telling us that if we want to enjoy our jobs, we need to fix our organisations or look for another job. I’m not sure the audience were entirely convinced by his insistence that losing/leaving your job is nothing to be afraid of, but I think most of us recognised the relevance of at least some of the ranting!
Further reading:
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Posted by janetmck
This post summarises the first three plenary sessions from day 2 of IWMW 2013. It follows on from my summary of day 1’s plenaries.
“What I want is to strategically embed inclusion into [my organisation]’s culture and business-as-usual processes, rather than just doing another inclusion project.”
This quote sums up where people want to be, Hassell said, but in general organisations are scared of accessibility — they don’t really understand it, or they only have one committed individual who does it, or it only happens in specific projects/products; they don’t know what’s in it for them apart from risk mitigation. Accessibility solutions often seem piecemeal — they’re tactical, not strategic.
They also feel like they’re competing for your time with (rather than linking in with) other useful web strategies:
As a result, people tend to do the bare minimum for accessibility, then spend their time firefighting as complaints come in. This is just treating the symptoms: “we need to fix the problem in the process, not the product.” But this is made harder by organisational structure and culture — it’s difficult for individuals to change processes.
We need to reframe the accessibility question, says Hassell, to see it as a business opportunity: by increasing inclusion we can maximise our reach. There are a lot of people out there for whom accessibility is an issue:
BS8878 is a new accessibility ‘code of practice’ which gives a framework for reducing costs and improving quality; it allows you to choose the right guidelines for your product/audience, rather than making you mould your product to rigid guidelines.
Hassell compared BS8878 to other accessibility guidelines — many assume you actually code HTML by hand — most of us don’t any more; instead we need to think about how we can make the best of CMSs and other third-party software that we can’t ‘fix’ completely. Some of that is about the people using them — how can we motivate content creators to do their job better? WCAG 2.0 is good as a ‘roadmap’ but doesn’t tell you if you’ve got there — that’s when you need to do user testing to see if people can actually use your product. Remember the goal is to “build a better website, not just a compliant one.”
Further reading:
“Get your content ready to go anywhere, because it’s going to go everywhere.”
David Cornforth reminded us that we need to stop thinking in terms of “web pages” and how they look, and start thinking about content and how we can achieve content parity between desktop and mobile.
He gave a quick history of how the web used to be (including some nostalgia-inducing screenshots for those of us who remember the days of Times New Roman and blue underlined links!) and how we used to design for different screen sizes, different browsers… and how this became unsustainable as the number of different devices and browsers increased exponentially.
Instead of designing device-specific experiences, we need to embrace the flexibility of the web, and stop making assumptions about the content users want based on the device they’re using (90% of users switch devices to complete a task; 98% move between devices on the same day). We also need to be more iterative and more agile to cope with responsive design.
Further reading:
Once again we were reminded that the Higher Education landscape is changing significantly and rapidly, with MOOCs and ‘open by default’ being among the key culprits.
Hamilton took us through an array of cutting-edge technologies before asking us whether our institution was ready to embrace this sort of change, or whether it was stuck in the past. He then talked about ‘extinction level events’, comparing the drop in student numbers in the age of the MOOC with the recent failure of businesses such as Jessops to adapt to competition from Amazon.
He then moved on to the main focus of his talk, the move towards ‘open by default’ as a result of a combination of drivers towards openness: funders requiring Open Access publication, funders requiring research data to be made available, demands for University statistics, developments in Open Educational Resources (OER). However, he reminded us that the flip side of ‘open by default’ is the increase in useless information: “you can splurge all this information out, but if it’s not useful, what’s the point?”
Hamilton then took us through several interesting Jisc case studies using course data, VLEs, and ‘big data’, before leading into the ‘crowdsourcing a Jisc innovation strategy’ promised in the title. This was an interesting exercise in collaborative brainstorming, though it inevitably leaned more towards voting on existing suggestions (by adding a ‘+’ after them) rather than coming up with new input.
Further reading:
1 Comment | Uncategorized | Tagged: accessibility, agile, governance, higher education, iwmw13, open access, responsive web design, strategy, web, web development | Permalink
Posted by janetmck
I was delighted to be able to go to IWMW 2013 this year. IWMW (the Institutional Web Managers’ Workshop) is an inspiring and entertaining three-day conference for institutional web folk (webmasters, web developers, web managers, web editors… whatever we’re calling ourselves in this job, this institution, this decade); it has been organised by UKOLN, so this may be its last year in its current format now that Jisc have dropped funding for UKOLN. Appropriately for this time of uncertainty, the conference theme was “What next?” — not just for IWMW but for web management, the web community, and HE in general.
I’m attempting to write up all the plenaries and both the parallel sessions which I attended. This will be a relatively neutral writeup, partly for my own record, partly for the benefit of colleagues or other interested people who couldn’t attend; I’m aiming to do some more personal opinion-based pieces on specific bits later.
Brian gave us an overview of the current situation in the world of the institutional web: the continued financial challenges we all face (an unsurprisingly prevalent theme throughout the conference) and the changing technical environment.
He also gave us a whistle-stop tour of the history of IWMW, from the first meeting at KCL in 1997 (before the name ‘IWMW’ was coined) through to 2013; it was interesting to see how the buzzwords and focus shifted: web strategy, e-business, web 2.0, APIs, video streaming… then from about 2009 onwards there were constant rumblings of “change”, “managing change”, “uncertainty” and similar concerns — and for UKOLN, of course, all that anxious uncertainty resolved into an awful reality earlier this year when Jisc cut the organisation’s funding and decimated its staff.
With so much doubt about the future, I thought it’d be hard to begin the conference on an optimistic note; but as always Brian’s enthusiasm for the institutional web and the IWMW community was infectious, and without further ado we launched into the plenary sessions…
Cable Green explained that open educational resources (OER) let us “take advantage of the technical and legal tools of the day to make sure everybody on the planet has access to education“. This balance of the practical and philosophical basis for OER sums up the tone of his talk; he moved effortlessly between lucid explanations of the ins and outs of Creative Commons licences and passionate advocacy for the social benefits of freely and openly available educational resources.
However, as he clearly showed, there are tensions between technology, morality and legality; the technology means that “we are now in a read/write world“, and educators and publishers are still adapting to that change. We now have the ability to share resources at the speed of light, but the law prevents this; Green pointed out that copyright can be a positive thing, but it hasn’t kept pace with the available technology.
Green recalled his own OER journey, from the first time he published his own course materials on the web, inviting people to use them (“it’s free!”) without realising that the institutional copyright statement at the bottom stymied his attempt to give his work away. He discovered that “to get your work into the public domain, you have to die! and then wait 70 years!” — but as educators, we want to share now, not 70 years after our death.
He gave a clear explanation of the Creative Commons framework (“the backbone of OER”), the way the licences are a sliding scale of “how free” something is, the importance of open licensing for internationalization and accessibility (translating and creating accessible alternatives is often prevented by more restrictive copyright) and for customisation and affordability of educational resources (allowing you to modify, modularise, only take the bits you need).
If the marginal cost of producing and distributing digital resources is effectively zero (this was illustrated with figures comparing the cost of “copy” for hand-copying a book, printing it traditionally, ‘print on demand’, and digital copying) then, argued Green, educators have a moral responsibility to share. “Publicly funded resources should be openly licensed resources“, and, as Winston Churchill put it, “If you have knowledge, let others light their candles with it“.
His final soundbite or ‘thought for the session’ was this: “the opposite of ‘open’ isn’t ‘closed’. The opposite of ‘open’ is ‘broken’.”
http://www.slideshare.net/dajbelshaw/iwmw13
Doug Belshaw gave an overview of the Mozilla Open Badges infrastructure and how it underpins the new learning standard for web literacy which is being developed.
Open badges, he explained, are essentially just “images with metadata hard-coded into them” (not unlike Creative Commons licences as explained in the previous session). They’re a “portable credential” which can be embedded in digital content, and they “can accommodate formal and informal learning pathways”, capturing learning wherever and however it occurs. This simple but powerful infrastructure allows any organisation to issue its own badges, and lets users bring their badges together into a single ‘backpack’ or portfolio — breaking through the “silos of accreditation” which currently constrain our qualifications.
Of course, open badges can represent any qualification, accreditation, achievement or statement about a person’s experience, from a university degree to the example ‘Open Badges 101’ badge you can claim from the Open Badges site — or to badges which aim to change behaviour, such as a badge for releasing resources under a CC licence. The value of an open badge comes from how rigorous the criteria are.
Belshaw then moved on from general issues of qualifications and competencies to the specifics of the open learning standard for web literacy that is currently being developed. Mozilla are working on the ‘skills layer’ now with the web community: this is the time to get involved.
http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/iwmw2013/talks/kyriaki/kyriaki.pptx
MOOCs are looming large in the HE landscape at the moment; it’s not clear if they are ‘the answer’ (and if so, to what?) but Anagnostopolou’s talk gave us plenty of questions.
She started with some useful facts and figures about: levels of participation in and completion of courses (with the caveat that these ‘traditional’ measures of success may not apply); the costs of running MOOCs (where estimates vary so wildly that direct comparisons are often impossible); the way institutions are currently funding them (usually through marketing or ‘widening participation’ budgets); and the ‘openness’ of MOOCs (the data often isn’t ‘open’).
Then on to the questions, a mixture of practical and philosophical considerations (I’ve only included a selection):
She also raised the questions of how ‘learning analytics’ will work as a new research area, what the business model of MOOCs might turn out to be, and the broader consideration of what education is actually about: is it simply transmission of content or a more holistic experience? Lots of food for thought!
Amber Thomas talked about how the landscape of research is changing and how we as digital experts could do a lot more to support researchers (especially early career researchers), as well as giving specific examples from her own department at Warwick.
The funding and evaluation of research has changed: many funders now insist on Open Access publication; a new focus on impact is changing the notion of where research happens and who the end users are; and research data is now a more prominent part of the research process.
Lots of the signs of change are already familiar to us: academic blogging, open lab notebooks, collaborative texts, crowd sourcing, citizen science, open access research papers, public datasets… and they’re all pointing to a more participatory and public scholarly discourse. Public engagement doesn’t just mean putting up information on the institutional website — it can be “the long tail of scholarship“, making research more accessible to all.
The changed research landscape is also more collaborative and interdisciplinary — and there’s a danger that this doesn’t fit well into the fixed web structures we maintain. Research these days is more social: and the social is happening outside our institutional websites. Research is also broadening in terms of what ‘counts’ (no longer just traditional publications but research datasets, code, blogs, slidedecks, podcasts, videos…). More collaboration and interdisciplinarity means that research is happening between specialisms, across departments, across borders, outside the university.
Out of this diversification came Altmetrics, the new movement towards new ‘social web’ metrics for analyzing and informing research and its impact. Within this movement “some fundamental questions are being asked that could change how we manage and evaluate research within universities“. Research footprint monitoring provides a way to collate usage data “from where your research lives and breathes”, and feed this back onto institutional web pages through APIs, feeds, and widgets. (Examples of specialist aggregators of analytics from research outputs include AltMetric, ImpactStory, PlumX.)
Thomas then talked about her work in the new Digital Humanities department at Warwick: the themes and technologies which are emerging in research support (CMSs/databases, visualisation tools, social media, impact and analytics); and the importance of the one-to-one conversation between digital technologist and researcher in the requirements gathering process — and how to maintain that relationship throughout the life of a project. She concluded by saying that the implications for the institutional web are that we really have to get good at the following:
and finally, admitting that we don’t know the answers sometimes!
2 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: creative commons, HE, higher education, iwmw, iwmw13, MOOCs, OER, open education, research technology, web, web literacy | Permalink
Posted by janetmck
The shape of things 