The good news is that the ICO has recognised the complexities in implementing this legislation. As described on the BBC Web site:

UK websites are being given one year to comply with EU cookie laws, the Information Commissioner’s Office has said.

The UK government also sought to reassure the industry that there would be “no overnight changes”.

A year later the legislation has now come into force – and, as reported in the Guardian a few hour’s ago “Cookies law changed at 11th hour to introduce ‘implied consent‘”. The article went on to describe how:

In an updated version of its advice for websites on how to use cookies – small text files that are stored on the user’s computer and can identify them – the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has said that websites can assume that users have consented to their use of them.

The advice was only updated on Thursday, 48 hours before the deadline for implementing the new rules, and published the next day.

I have to say that I am pleased with this news. In an article entitled The new cookie laws: how aware are you? published in the JISC Inform newsletter I suggested that the priorities for institutions should be to audit their use of cookies, analyse how the cookies are being used, provide clear and prominently information about the use of cookies and “devise an appropriate mechanism for obtaining informed consent from your web site users”. In April a post on How is the Higher Education Sector Responding to the Forthcoming Cookie Legislation? surveyed the approaches which had been take by 30 universities – and the majority seemed to have taken the approach of documenting their use of cookies and explaining the purposes of the cookies.

In some quarters it was suggested that since the legislation required users to opt-in to use of cookies, web sites would need to provide a form at the top of every page requiring users to manually verify that they were willing to accept cookies. However as I highlighted in a post on The Half Term Report on Cookie Compliance “on 13 December the ICO, announced a new set of Guidelines on the Rules on use of Cookies and Similar Technologies (available in PDF format) in a blog post entitled Half term report on cookies compliance. And it seems that they have taken a pragmatic approach which describes realistic and implementable solutions for Web site managers.” Some time ago I came across a discussion about the cookie legislation which suggested that Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, would be looking for a ‘business-friendly’ solution to privacy concerns. I will not be alone in thinking the a Conservative Minister talks about ‘business-friendly solutions’ this means large pay rises for senior managers along with loss of pension rights and job security for workers. However in this case, although the solution is friendly for those working in the commercial sector, it is also a desirable solution for those of us who work in the education and other public sector services. The one’s who will lose out are probably those who paid attention to the scare-mongers are have implemented clunky opt-out interfaces on their web sites or have withdraw services, such as Google Analytics, which provided useful information which can help improve the quality of the service to the user community.

Of course, the legitimate privacy concerns which led to the EU directive have not been solved. But the EU directive was a flawed approach to addressing both the complexities of online privacy and the technical challenges in implementing solutions. However standards-based solutions are currently being developed, in particular the Do Not Track standard. As decsribed on the DoNotTrack.us Web site:

Do Not Track is a technology and policy proposal that enables users to opt out of tracking by websites they do not visit, including analytics services, advertising networks, and social platforms.

As described in Wikipedia:

The do not track header is a proposed HTTP header field that would request a web application to disable their tracking of a user. The “Do Not Track” header was originally proposed in 2009 by researchers Christopher Soghoian, Sid Stamm, and Dan Kaminsky. It is currently being standardized by the W3C.

In December 2010, Microsoft announced support for the DNT mechanism in its Internet Explorer 9 web browser. Followed by Mozilla’s Firefox,Apple’s Safari and Opera all later added support. It is not currently supported by Google Chrome, but will be incorporated by the end of 2012.

This will provide a standards-based way for users to manage their online privacy. Support for this proposed standard was announced recently by Twitter: as reported in the Guardian:

Twitter announced that it will officially support “Do Not Track,” a standardised privacy initiative that has been heavily promoted by the US Federal Trade Commission, online privacy advocates and Mozilla, the non-profit developer of the Firefox web browser.

The question now will be whether institutions feel this is an approach which should be deployed and, if so, how it will be implemented. Institutional responses to online privacy issues aren’t over just because a privacy policy has been published on the institution’s web site!

Finally in case people feel that they should be following the letter of the law, I suggest you take a look at the privacy policy for Francis Maude’s web site which states:

When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. Where services are delivered on the internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.

and goes on to add:

If you’d like to learn how to remove cookies set on your device, visit:http://www.aboutcookies.org/Default.aspx?page=1

The video clip on “How government websites use cookies” provided by Direct.gov and hosted on YouTube also makes it clear that the Government’s view is that cookies provide value to the online environment. I agree with this, and hope that the Government will be proactive in adopting the Do Not Track standard to address the still unresolved issue of online privacy. I’ll conclude with a sentence I didn’t expect to write: “congratulations to Francis Maude on the approaches taken by the Government in responding to the flaws in the EU Directive“!

Total nos. of Facebook Likes for Russell Group universities.

A recent post entitled  What Next, As Facebook Use in UK Universities Continues to Grow? summarised growth in institutional use of Facebook in the 20 Russell Group universities in the UK, based on the number of ‘likes’ for the official institutional Facebook page. As can be seen in the accompanying histogram, there has been significant growth since the surveys in January and September 2011.  However as Tom Wright, the Digital Engagement Manager at the University of Nottingham commented “to gauge how successful universities are with Facebook you really need to look at other metrics around engagement, reach, influence, etc.“

This is certainly true, but such metrics are not always publicly available and so in order to be able to answer the question “Are universities successful in their use of Facebook?” it will clearly be advantageous to be able to see a greater range of metrics. But in addition, the metrics themselves need to relate to the intended purpose(s) of the services and institutions may be using Facebook for a range of different purposes.

In order to help gain a better understand of how Facebook is being used across the sector, Tom and I have set up a SurveyMonkey form on institutional use of Facebook which invites respondents to summarise the purposes of institutional Facebook pages and the metrics they use to monitor the effectiveness of Facebook to achieve these purposes.  As Tom describes:

Understanding the roles which social networks such as Facebook can have in supporting business requirements is important for universities such as Nottingham with campuses in China and Malaysia and students from around the world. Facebook, with its international audience, has huge potential for today’s higher education institutions with their increasingly global reach, in the areas of student recruitment, marketing, internal communications and alumni support.

The survey is intended primarily for those working in institutional Web management or marketing teams in UK universities or FE colleges.  However we appreciate that universities around the world will have similar interests in the role of Facebook, together with concerns regarding the sustainability of the service, privacy issues and its relevance in supporting educational needs.

Such issues have been described in a paper on ”Social Networking and Education: Using Facebook As An Edusocial Space“ published in the Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2011 (pp. 3330-3338). This paper is also available on Scribd. The abstract for the paper states that:

The acceptance of Facebook by school-aged users is evident, but the potential of using social networking sites for educational purposes is still being debated. This paper explores the useof Facebook within a high school science-mentoring program. Results indicate that the use of Facebook positively affected the relationships between mentors and mentees. In addition, students believed that they learned more by using Facebook and would like to use Facebook for other educational purposes.

and concludes:

Social networking is already one of the most common ways that communication occurs virtually. While the majority of users spend time communicating with those who they have already built relationships with in reality, it may also have the potential to build relationships virtually.

Participation of a mentor and mentee on the Facebook group page was seen to positively affect their relationship both online and offline. Students and mentors that interacted regularly, posting questions and receiving feedback through the page, were observed as having a stronger relationship than other mentor-mentee pairs.

Might this suggest that there is a role to play in the development of Facebook apps which can support such collaborative activities? Back in March 2010 in a post entitled OU Facebook Apps, Reprise Tony Hirst mentioned work at the Open University which was “looking at rebooting the OU’s Facebook strategy. With a bit of luck, this means that we’ll be doing another push on the OU Facebook apps that were developed several years ago now and which I still believe provide a sound basis for a range of community building and social learning support services“.

But although the Open University might be working in this area, what is happening in the wider sector?  The concluding section on “Recommendations for future research” in the paper mentioned above described how:

Additional research is needed to explore the most beneficial design for an edusocial space. Though Facebook has been used for some educational purposes, research could explore the specific kinds of activities that are most beneficial to learners. Using social networking sites, however, is still a controversial issue with most schools blocking the site from students and faculty. Thus, it must also be understood if students can view sites like Facebook as educational spaces and be able to engage in learning activities at appropriate times.

The survey on institutional use of Facebook aims to gather information on such development activities.  We intend to present the findings at UKOLN’s Institutional Web Management Workshop, IWMW 2012, in Edinburgh on 18-20 June.  We hope that people within the sector will respond to this survey in order that we can gain a comprehensive picture of use of Facebook across the higher and further educational sectors.

On Tuesday a headline in the Guardian announced Facebook raises price range ahead of IPO with the article describing how “Facebook has increased the price range of its stock in what will be Silicon Valley’s biggest-ever initial public offering to raise more than $12bn (£7.4bn), giving the social network a valuation that could exceed $100bn“.

What will the reaction be after today’s IPO launch?  I suspect that my Twitter network will be talking about a bubble which is about to burst (if the shares go up in price) or will gloat if the price goes down.  I don’t expect people to say “the financial injection can support developments which will be beneficial to use of Facebook within higher education“!

But how widely used is Facebook within higher education? And are the trends suggesting that usage has peaked, with users becoming disillusioned with social networks such as Facebook or, perhaps, moving to other services, such as Twitter – as the recent announcement in the Guardian that “Twitter now has 10m users in UK” with the  “UK [being] the fourth-largest country for Twitter users in the world, with 80% accessing it with mobile phones” may suggest?

Facebook Usage for Russell Group Universities

In order to gather evidence to support discussions on the relevance of use of Facebook in the higher education sector a survey of Facebook usage, determined by links for institutional pages, has been carried out for the 20 Russell Group universities.  This survey follows on form previous surveys carried in in January and September 2011 which will enable trends to be detected. Note that the data provided in the following table is also available as a Google Spreadsheet.

Note

• The data for the surveys was collected on 11 January 2011, 25 September  2011 (estimate) and 16 May 2012.
• The Facebook page for the University of Edinburgh has changed since the last survey.

Summary

Figure 1: Growth in total nos. of Facebook ‘Likes’ for Russell Group universities.

In brief in a period of eight months we have seen an increase in the number of ‘likes’ for the twenty UK Russell Group Universities of over 432,300 users  with the largest increase, of almost 248,000 occurring at the University of Oxford. The largest percentage increase in that time has take place at University of Glasgow, which has seen a growth of 1,346% from 1,860 to 27,149 and UCL which has seen a growth of 679% from 4,346 to 33,493.

The overall trends are illustrated in the accompanying histogram. As can be seen this shows a significant growth in the overall number of Facebook likes across the Russell Group universities.

It should also be noted that according to Russell Group University Web site “half a million students are enrolled at Russell Group universities – one in five of all higher education students in the UK“. Although the numbers of Facebook likes will include members of staff and other interested parties, the data does seem to suggest that a significant proportion of students are using Facebook.

Discussion

I suspect that social media consultants who advise the higher education sector will find the evidence presented in this post useful in demonstrating the importance of Facebook. However some caveats need to be pointed out:

• There may be significant growth when six formers are deciding which universities to apply to.  The ‘liking’ of a university may provide a bookmark which is not an indication of engagement with the institution.
• New students may like their new institution’s Facebook page when they arrive, but may not use the service during their time at the institution.
• Students may not unlike their institution’s Facebook page when they graduate, meaning that the number of Facebook likes will include people who have left the institution and may no longer use the service or have an interest in the information provided.

In addition to the need to the interpretation of the data there will also be a need to make policy decisions which should be informed by such evidence, but may not need to be determined by the evidence.  It may be that Facebook can be regarded in a similar way to mailing lists: people use them and gain some value from them but development work is likely to take place using other technologies.  Alternatively the popularity of Facebook may mean that that it has a role to play as a platform for development of new services.  As described in a post on Facebook and Twitter as Infrastructure for Dissemination of Research Papers (and More) publishers such as Spring are providing mechanisms for researchers to share peer-reviewed papers using Facebook and Twitter, so perhaps Facebook could have a role to play as a sharing tool which is embedded within institutional tools.

Alternatively might Facebook have a role to play in more significant development work.  The initial popularity of the Guardian’s Facebook app suggested that Facebook could have a role to play in sharing one’s reading activities across one’s networks, although more recent evidence, as described in a post on “Facebook Social Readers Are All Collapsing” suggests that Facebook apps which provide ‘frictionless sharing’ are declining in popularity. A more recent post TechCrunch post which described how Decline Of Reader Apps Likely Due To News Feed Changes, Shows Facebook Controls The Traffic Faucet provided a more thoughtful analysis of the reasons for the decline in usage, but also highlighted the dependencies which organisations will have in reliance on commercial companies whose business decisions may adversely affect organisations which rely on their services.

Figure 2: Facebook ‘Likes’ for Russell Group universities
(see Table for institution names)

The question “What next for Facebook use in UK Universities?” will be an interesting one.  And with over half a million ‘likes’ will Oxford University be thinking about benefits which can be gained from such a large network?  Alternatively will institutions such as Newcastle University with small Facebook networks shrug their metaphorical shoulders at such suggestions and argue that Facebook has no value to their teaching and learning and research activities? Or might the popularity of Facebook at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, which, as can be seen from the histogram, has a significant affect on the overall totals for Russell Group universities, simply reflect the brand awareness for these two institutions?

What are your thoughts?  And what evidence will you need to gather if you feel that alternatives to Facebook will have a significant role to play?

“The hot IT buzzword of 2012, big data has become viable as cost-effective approaches have emerged to tame the volume, velocity and variability of massive data” – Edd Dumbill, O’Reilly Radar.

In the opening to the event, Andy Powell, the Eduserv Symposium chair, suggested that claiming 2012 as the year of Big Data probably means that the term will be over-hyped. Rather than revisiting suggestions as to what Big Data could do, Andy explained that the aim of the Symposium would be primarily to provide an opportunity to hear about what practitioners are actually doing.

This approach meant that many of the talks went into either technical details relation to software and systems (Hadoop, DB Couch, NoSQL, etc.) or of the application area (e.g. Genome sequencing). Due to my lack of expertise I will not attempt to summarise the details of the talks. If you do have an interest in the details of the presentations which were given you will be pleased to hear that recordings of the talks are available via the Eduserv Web site together with the speakers’ slides can also be accessed.

For those who are new to the area, my colleague Marieke Guy has summarised what is meant by Big Data:

Big data is considered to be data sets that have grown so large and complex that they present challenges to work with using traditional database management tools. The key factors are seen to be the “volume, velocity and variability” of the data.

Several of the talks addressed the relevance of Big Data in areas of scientific research. Although this is clearly of interest to the higher education sector, I felt that it was unfortunate that there were no talks on learning analytics. The popularity of the Learning Analytics and Knowledge 2012 conference, held in Vancouver on 29 April – 2 May 2012, indicates the importance of this area and as a number of people from JISC and JISC services attended the conference, I felt it would have been particularly useful if the symposium has addressed this topic – as I suggested at the event after hearing about how large retailers are gaining competitive advantages from analysis of purchasing patterns, although it may be interested to analyse electronics and cans of beans, analysis of data associated with student learning raises many interesting ethical issues which the sector needs to address.

The opening speaker who pointed out that the aggregation and analysis of large volumes of data would support evidence-based policy decisions. This is an approach I support, and over the past few years I have gathered small data in order to inform policy-making processes. For me the role of the data scientists and data journalists who can help to interpret, understand and communicate findings provided by data, big or small, will be important. For scientists the interpretation of the Big Data might inform the development of scientific understanding (as is the case in the Big Data being gathered by the Large Hadron Collider) whereas as we can be seen from the abstract for the talk on Making data a way of life for public servants given by Max Wind-Cowie Head, Progressive Conservatism Project Demos:

The data agenda has made great progress under this Government – particularly in the area of transparency. But public servants too often feel left out of the equation or, worse, see transparency as a threat. Too often the public sector looks at big data as a risk, a problem waiting to happen and a potential tool for undermining its work. If Britain is to truly reap the benefits of big data we need to make data – its collection and its use – a boon to public servants, not a burden.

The interest in Big Data in informing policy decisions by the Government clearly makes the subjectivity of the interpretation of the analysis of Big Data clearly an important issue!

My colleague Marieke Guy summarised some of the key themes in her report on the event, which included:

We don’t need to get hung up on the ‘big’ word. Many of the benefits of evidence-based policy decisions can be gained by analysis of data which may be regarded as Big based on the characteristics of “ volume, velocity and variability”.

The tools are now available. Marieke highlighted “Hadoop, DB Couch, NoSQL which all allow people to work easily with data sets“ – and may address the issues of tools which can be used for managing Big Data in her session on “Big and Small Web Data” which will be held at the IWMW 2012 event. I should also mention that a post on “Analytics Reconnoitre: Notes on Open Solutions in Big Data from #esym12” by Martin Hawksey of JISC CETIS also highlights a range of tools and provides a useful set of links to further sources of information.

We don’t yet know what data to get rid of. The issue of preservation of Big Data was of particular interest to me in light of my involvement in Web preservation issues. Preservation experts often point out the importance of selection criteria to define resources which should be preserved. However, as we heard at the symposium, such selection criteria is based on an understanding of what should be regarded as important. For the preservation of scientific data the decisions will be based on an understanding of a particular model – but what if the model is found to be incorrect? Donald Rumsfeld famously suggested that:

[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.

To paraphrase this:

[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know are of value and worth preserving.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know whether they are worth preserving.
But there are also incorrect unknowns – there are things we thought we knew we were mistaken.

Martin Hawksey concludes his report on the event by encouraging readers to:

watch some of the videos from the Data Scientist Summit 2011 (I’m still working my way through but there are some inspirational presentations).

I agree with Martin – there were some excellent talks at the event. I would also thank Andy Powell and his Eduserv colleagues for the live-streaming and for making the videos available shortly after the event was over. I was also pleased when I discovered that the videos have been made available on Eduserv’s YouTube channel, which means that I can now embed the Opening keynote – Big Data and implications for storage: Rob Anderson at Eduserv Symposium 2012 in this post:

I’m a fan of Lanyrd, which is described in Wikipedia as “a conference directory website created by Simon Willison and Natalie Downe and launched in 2010“. The article goes on to add that “The site compiles blog posts, photos and other coverage from events and keeps it organised by session and speaker. Users on the site are identified through the Twitter API and events are shown to users based on their contacts on Twitter“.

Lanyrd was released in September 2010 and I started to make use of it shortly after its launch and have been a fan ever since.

The IWMW 2012 Lanyrd Entry

Speakers at IWMW 2012

We have set up a Lanyrd entry for UKOLN’s forthcoming IWMW 2012 event. This provides a calendar view of the programme (which can be exported in various calendar formats), But perhaps of most interest is the social dimension to the service. As can be seen you can view the speakers at the event. Since the speakers are identified by their Twitter ID, once you have signed in to the service you can quickly see the speakers who you follow on Twitter or, if you aren’t currently following them, you can choose to extend your professional network by following them.

The service isn’t just for speakers, facilitators and organisers at an event, however. If you are attending an event you can register as a participant. If you are merely interested in the event you can also register your interest in the event by tracking the event.

Lanyrd has developed since its launch, and there are now dedicated Lanyrd apps available for the iPhone/iPad and Android devices. In addition there is also a mobile interface to the web site available which can be used of you haven’t installed an app or an app is not available for your mobile device device.

Reflecting on Previous Events

But in addition to Lanyrd’s potential for forthcoming events, it can also help to provide a better understanding of an event over the years, including the speakers, participants and the content.

A Lanyrd guide (a collection of related events) has been set up called IWMW which provides details of all 16 IWMW events since its launch in 1997. The entries for the early years (currently) provide details of the title of the event, the location and the the dates. But in addition, the abstracts for plenary talks and workshop sessions together with speaker details for events held since 2006 are also available.

Speakers at IWMW 2006

As can be seen we have provided speaker details going back to IWMW 2006, which, as you will see if you view the list of sessions held on Lanyrd, was the start of interest in Web 2.0 across the UK higher and further education sector.

We also made use of Slideshare for many of the plenary talks given at the IWMW 206 event (although these may have been uploaded after the event was held). And since Lanyrd supports embedded objects includes slides and videos, we have been any to facilitate access to the slides (and, in one cases, accompanying videos) for the plenary talks.

What benefits might this provide? I would suggest that use of Lanyrd in this way can:

• Provide a better understanding of the speakers and facilitators who have contributed to the event over the years.
• Help to raise the profile of the speakers and facilitators.
• Enhance participants’ memories of the events.

• Decoupling the content from the host Web site (which provides primarily a HTML view of the content).
• Avoiding the need for local development.

But what else might use of Lanyrd provide? A question on Lanyrd’s FAQ asks I want to play with your data. Will there be an API? and we find a positive response:

Yes, an API is in the pipeline. If you are interested in receiving announcements and updates about the API, you can join our API discussion mailing list.

As a conference organiser I’ve an interest in developing the APIs for Lanyrd guides. For the 16 IWMW events it would be useful to be able to display information on the numbers of speakers across all events, the numbers of times they have spoken. In light of the recent post which asked Are There Too Many Male Speakers at Events? it might also be useful to be able to provide statistics on gender balances, although I appreciate there are sensitivities with such questions.

But perhaps the most useful aspect of Lanyrd would be gained if participants at previous events used Lanyrd to list the events they have attended. This would help to give an understanding of the participation at events, beyond the speakers. Such information is clearly personal and would be covered by Data Protection Legislation. But if individuals were to provide such information for themselves that would overcome privacy concerns.

We tend to focus on using technologies to enhance forthcoming events. I wonder whether there may be value to be gained in data-mining the wide range of events held in the higher education sector over, say, the past ten years. Any thoughts?

On Saturday I discovered the Bottlenose service and quickly realised how it can enhance my Twitter, Facebook and other channels to enable me to quickly find content of interest to me. Within a few minutes of using the service I found myself agreeing with Mashable that “Bottlenose is a Game Changer for Social Media Consumption” and ReadWriteWeb that the service is “More intelligent than basic consumer dashboards like TweetDeck and HootSuite“.

I came across Bottlenose from a tweet posted by @suebecks. I found that I had previously registered for the service but hadn’t yet received an activation code. However since Bottleneck have stated that “if you happen to have a Klout score over 30, you can register and gain access straight away ” and my Klout rating is 48 I was able to use the service straight away.

A Web-Based Twitter Client

Figure 1: Display of Tweets

Once you have logged in and registered your Twitter account the display of tweets from your followers, incoming (@) message and direct messages is similar to the interface provided by other Web-based twitter tools such as Hootsuite. The accompanying screeenshot shows the tweets from my Twitter followers, together with my @ messages, including the tweet from @suebecks which alerted me to the service.

The Personalised Newspaper Feature

Selecting the Newspaper option, however, provides functionality which isn’t provided by Hootsuite. As illustrated in Figure 2 the display shows the content of links which have been shared by your Twitter followers.

In February 2011 in a post in which I suggested Who Needs Murdoch – I’ve Got Smartr, My Own Personalised Daily Newspaper! I described the first mobile app I had encountered which provided this functionality. A year later, in February 2012 a post entitled My Trusted Social Librarian explained how an app such as Smartr helps me find useful content from trusted people I follow on Twitter.

I still use Smartr on a regular basis, to download the content of links which have been tweeted which I read on the bus travelling to work. However the Smartr app can no longer be downloaded and the name now refers to an email contact manager app provided by Xobni. In addition since Smarts was only available as an app I was unable to make use of this useful functionality on my desktop PC. It now seems that Bottlenose is providing this functionality, and has integrated this with a Twitter client.

Figure 2: Display of the content of shared links.

The Sonar Feature

As described on the Marketaire blog:

The Bottlenose name was inspired by the dolphin, which is reflected in its primary feature known as Sonar – a visual representation of your online conversation. Bottlenose maps topics and tags throughout your social network, allowing you to see branches of information, also giving you the ability to dive into each one.

The Venturebeat blog agrees: “The tool’s most compelling feature is Sonar, a visual interface that distills stream updates into a clickable trending topic diagram“. The blog goes on to add “People can select the Sonar option to see which topics, hashtags and people are resonating across their networks, and click displayed words to view related content and re-center the diagram around each keyword“.

My use of the Sonar feature is illustrated in Figures 3 and 4. I can use thre Sonar interface to view tweets in a variety of ways, including all tweets from my followers and my incoming messages. In addition I can chose a filter which provides an auto-classified display of incoming tweets. Figure 3 illustrates use of the “TechNews” filter and the associated keywords and hashtags associated with this topic. Clicking on the RSS option displays tweets containing this topic from my Twitter follows during the selected period.

The Sonar view can also be used with the service’s search interface. In Figure 4 I have searched for “JISC” and have the ability to select additional keywords. It should be noted that although many of the tweets are relevant for me, there is a name clash with use of the acronym in Japan where it stands for the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee. One enhancement to the service I would find useful would be the ability to filter out content which aren’t in English.

Figure 4: Sonar search for JISC with Tech News filter and RSS keyword

Figure 3: Sonar search for Tech News filter and RSS keyword

Some other features of the service which are work mentioning include:

• Integration with Facebook and LinkedIn services.
• Integration with Google Reader which can provide Sonar interface for blogs.

On 9 May 2012, the day version 3 of Bottlenose was launched, TechCrunch announced Social Media Dashboard Bottlenose Gets Smarter, Adds Support For Multiple Accounts, Facebook Pages.

The article pointed out that “in many ways, directly competes with Hootsuite and Tweetdeck … [but] puts a stronger emphasis on filtering your streams, both by implicitly learning about your interest and by giving you a sophisticated set of tools to create your own filters“.

Discussion

A service which emphasis the importance of filtering capabilities to discover information of interest would appear to be relevant to the library community as well as the early adopters of social web services in the teaching and learning and research communities. I have previously described the value I have found in using Twitter to discover both content relevant to my professional interests and to develop my professional networks as I described in a post on You Have 5 Seconds to Make an Impression! the links which have been established in Twitter led to collaboration on an award-winning paper. My experiences have been echoed by Melissa Terras who documented her epxreinces in a post entitled Is blogging and tweeting about research papers worth it? The Verdict.

But if such as Bottlenose can provide useful resource discovery functionality, how should a provider of resources ensure that they can be easily discovered by such tools? As described in a paper on “Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information” which analysed 135 science blogs “most of the bloggers in our sample had active Twitter accounts connected with their blogs, and at least 90% of these accounts connect to at least one other RB-related Twitter account“. This suggests that scientific bloggers appreciate that Twitter can complement blogging activities. Initially this is likely to have focussed on the conversational aspects of Twitter and for many, including myself, the value of Twitter was first appreciated from use of Twitter at conferences. Such conversational aspects are clearly important and some early adopters of Twitter feel uneasy when Twitter is used for purposes such as marketing and when others services, such as Twitter archiving and analysis tools, become popular.  However my view is that Twitter is a tool and there is no single correct way in which it should be used.

So in addition to Twitter being an open conversational medium, I think we are also seeing Twitter being used successfully as an alerting mechanism. Back in 2009 Jeff Nolan asked Is Twitter Killing RSS?  I suspect that I am not alone in using Twitter as the tool for reading new content, including blog posts, which my Twitter community has brought to my attention, rather than using my RSS reader as my main channel for keeping up-to-date with developments.

But rather than regarding Twitter as the RSS killer, I feel that we can regard Twitter as the new metadata format for delivering content, with the key metadata element being the link, with the remainder of the tweet being a free text apart from a small number of common conventions, including RTs and the @ and # symbols. So when the questions about the minimum number of metadata fields needed to support resource discovery were being discussed perhaps, in one context, the answer was a single URL field, with the remaining content being left to users to fill in. We now seem to be finding that social discovery, in which one’s professional network support resource discovery, is being complemented by data mining tools.

As I finish this post, on Sunday afternoon on the final day of the football season and shortly after the Formula 1 Grand Prix has finished, I can view my followers’ reactions by using the Sports news filter and a search for “Manchester” provides a wider perspective, as shown below. I think this illustrates how tools such as Bottlenose may be used in s sporting, social, cultural and political context – and it might be work trying it during the next broadcast of BBC’s Question Time.  But what I would really like would be the development of a richer set of filter, ideally filters which can be created by the user or would learn from user behaviours, which would enhance social discovery to support professional activities. Although it has been suggested that “Twitter, like blogging, needs an edge, a voice, a riskiness“ I suspect this is coming. And I for one will be happy to continue to use tools such as Twitter to support my professional activities, even if they evolve from their initial purpose.

Today is the first Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). As described on the Global Accessibility Awareness Day Web site:

Global Accessibility Awareness Day is a community-driven effort whose goal is to dedicate one day to raising the profile of and introducing the topic of digital (web, software, mobile app/device etc.) accessibility and people with different disabilities to the broadest audience possible.

Today’s event therefore provides a valuable opportunity to highlight important work in the area of Web accessibility which has been developed in the UK and is relevant to a worldwide audience.

Revisiting WAI and WCAG

There will be little need to raise the profile of the work of  WAI, the Web Accessibility Initiative and the guidelines they have developed to help enhance the accessibility of Web resources: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) which describe how web content, including native W3C formats such as HTML as well as formats such as Flash and PDF which may be included on Web sites, should be defined in order to enhance access by people with disabilities who may be using standard Web browsers or assistive technologies which should support the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG).  Creators of Web content should be using authoring tools which are based on ATAG, the Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines, which will help to ensure that the content is WCAG-conformant.

Unfortunately experience has shown that this simple model is insufficient for developing Web products which reflect the diverse ways in which the Web is used today. As summarised in a paper on “Reflections on the Development of a Holistic Approach to Web Accessibility” the reasons for this include limitations in the guidelines themselves, limitations of the three-part model, the inappropriateness of an approaches based on universal accessibility for services which may be targetted at specific groups of users or even an individual user and the lack of guidance in the WAI approach on ways of providing ‘good enough’ accessibility as opposed to WAI’s ‘just-in-case’ approach. To give an example of the need to be able to develop ‘good enough’ solutions, if an institution’s institutional repository contains many thousands of research papers in PDF format and the PDFs, which may be deposited by the author, do not conform with accessibility guidelines, should the repository service be discontinued?

It should also be noted that the limitations of WCAG aren’t restricted to limitations of WCAG 1.0. As described in a paper on “Guidelines are only half of the story: accessibility problems encountered by blind users on the web” recently published in the Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems:

This paper describes an empirical study of the problems encountered by 32 blind users on the Web. Task-based user evaluations were undertaken on 16 websites, yielding 1383 instances of user problems. The results showed that only 50.4% of the problems encountered by users were covered by Success Criteria in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). For user problems that were covered by WCAG 2.0, 16.7% of websites implemented techniques recommended in WCAG 2.0 but the techniques did not solve the problems. These results show that few developers are implementing the current version of WCAG, and even when the guidelines are implemented on websites there is little indication that people with disabilities will encounter fewer problems. The paper closes by discussing the implications of this study for future research and practice. In particular, it discusses the need to move away from a problem-based approach towards a design principle approach for web accessibility.

But if WCAG has failed to live up to its expectations, is it no longer relevant?  We disagree with this view – rather there is a need for a higher level standards which provides a context for use of WCAG and other accessibility standards.

BS 8878: Web Accessibility Code of Practice

As described in a post entitled BS 8878: “Accessibility has been stuck in a rut of technical guidelines” the BS 8878 Web Accessibility Code of Practice has been developed in order to address limitations of WAI’s approaches. As described in a paper on “A Challenge to Web Accessibility Metrics and Guidelines: Putting People and Processes First” BS 8878 ”makes recommendations for accessibility being addressed across a 16 Step Model of the web product development and maintenance process“. The paper goes on to describe BS 8878 in more detail:

These steps span: initial conception and requirements analysis (steps 1 to 6); strategic choices based on that research (steps 7 to 11); the decision to procure or develop the web product either in-house or contracted out (step 11); production of the web product (steps 12 and 13); evaluation of the product (step14); the launch (step 15); and post-launch maintenance (step 16).

This model has been drawn up based on real-world experience in companies and organisations that have effectively addressed accessibility. BS 8878 addresses accessibility both at the organisational level and the individual product level. It needs to be adapted to any situation it is applied.

The official slides on BS 8878 from its launch, together with other free information including, case studies of organisations using BS 8878, detailed blogs on its use by SMEs, tools and training for applying the Standard, and news on its progress towards an International Standard, can be found at http://www.hassellinclusion.com/bs8878/

BS 8878 was published by the British Standards Institute and has not been adopted by standards body outside the UK.  However on  Global Accessibility Awareness Day it would appear particularly appropriate to highlight the valuable work which has taken place in the UK.  Perhaps Web accessibility practitioners, developers and policy-makers outside the UK should be asking “How can we learn from the approaches which have been taken in the UK?“; “Shouldn’t we be looking to implement a similar code of practice within our national standards body?” and even “Shouldn’t BS 8878 form the basis of an international standard?“

About the Author and his Previous Work

Brian Kelly attended the launch meeting for WAI in April 1997 and has been active in promoting best practices for Web accessibility ever since. Initially the focus of his work was in promoting take-up of WCAG guidelines across the UK’s higher and further education sectors.  However  following feedback from those involved in developing of web-based elearning services, it became apparent that use of WCAG guidelines was not always appropriate in the context of e-learning development work.  A paper on “Developing A Holistic Approach For E-Learning Accessibility“  published in the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology in 2004 introduced the idea of ‘holistic approaches’ to web accessibility.

The limitations of WAI’s approaches were described in a paper on “Forcing Standardization or Accommodating Diversity? A Framework for Applying the WCAG in the Real World” which described how “the context of the Web resource in question and other factors surrounding its use are used to shape an approach to accessible design” was published in 2005.

A paper on “Implementing A Holistic Approach To E-Learning Accessibility“ was awarded a prize for Best Research Paper at the ALT-C 2005 conference.

The importance of context was described in a paper on “Contextual Web Accessibility – Maximizing the Benefit of Accessibility Guidelines” which was presented at the W4A 2006 conference.

The importance of development of policies and  accompanying processes to support user-focussed approaches to Web accessibility were described in a paper on “Accessibility 2.0: People, Policies and Processes” presented at the W4A 2007 conference.

A review of work to date was given in a paper on “Reflections on the Development of a Holistic Approach to Web Accessibility” presented at the ADDW08 conference.

The need to adopt alternative approaches to Web accessibility was described in papers on ”Accessibility 2.0: Next Steps For Web Accessibility”  published in the Journal of Access Services and “From Web Accessibility to Web Adaptability” published in the Disability and Rehability: Assistive Technology journal, both published in 2009.

Insights from disability studies were included in a paper on “Developing Countries; Developing Experiences: Approaches to Accessibility for the Real World” presented at the W4A 2010 conference.

The limitation of accessibility metrics were addressed in a paper “Web Accessibility Metrics For A Post Digital World” presented at a W3C WAI online symposium in 2011.

These ideas were further developed in a post on “A Challenge to Web Accessibility Metrics and Guidelines: Putting People and Processes First” presented at the W4A 2012 conference.

These, and other peer-reviewed papers on Web accessibility can be accessed from the UKOLN Web site.

The UK Government’s current consultation document on policies for open standards has generated a fair amount of passion. In addition to articles published in the Computer Weekly by Mark Ballard, and Gylnn Moody I also recently came across the following tweet from @swardley:

I haven’t posted on the radar for a long time, really happy they took my article on the open standards battle - http://oreil.ly/Im5z0o

His post, entitled “The UK’s battle for open standards“, began:

Many of you are probably not aware, but there is an ongoing battle within the U.K. that will shape the future of the U.K. tech industry. It’s all about open standards.

and concluded:

The battle for open standards needs help, so get involved.

Earlier this year, the language used in title of Glyn Moody’s post on  UK Government Betrayal of Open Standards Confirmed suggested that this was likely to be a vicious battle and his more recent article made it clear who the enemy was: How Microsoft Fought True Open Standards.  Mark Ballard’s article on how Proprietary lobby triumphs in first open standards showdown reinforced the militarist angle:

In conclusion, I feel that this meeting and others like it, should not become vicarious battlegrounds for tech giants to slug out battles that they can’t or won’t conduct elsewhere – at the end of the day, it should be about delivering the best technology-enabled services possible at the best price point.  

In brief we are seeing a “battle for open standards” that will “shape the future of the UK tech industry” in which we are seeing “UK Government betrayal” which has led to a “proprietary lobby triumph” . The ugly secrets of “how Microsoft fought true open standards” have been revealed and now every man must do his duty  and “get involved“!  Who said standards were boring?

“Losses 60,000 Men. Ground Gained 0 Yards”

I recently watched a DVD of the film “Oh! What a Lovely War“, a film I saw when I was young which chronicles the various madnesses of the First World War. The scene depicting how the generals were happy to send soldiers to their destruction as they were convinced of the rightness of their cause cam to mind when I read the blog posts which were suggested that success in the open standards battle would help the minor players (the open source community, which would be depicted by Belgium in an updated version of the film) against the evil empire (no prizes for guessing, but ignore the humanist comments of its former general).

But what of the foot soldiers? In the standards battle, these will be the users of IT services, but have little interest in the arcane decisions being made in Whitehall, in obscure European cities and by those plotting to overthrow the  existing order. Will they (we) see peace in our time (to use a saying from a later war) or might winning the open standards battle fail to deliver enhanced services for users?

Addressing the Needs of the User

I’ve tried to make the point the the militaristic language which is being used by the blogging community is inappropriate in discussions about government policies on open standards.  Rather than  continuing with this metaphor, the issue I feel needs to be addressed is “What are the consequences of a new policy means for users of government IT services?”  The current discussions are centred on the benefits of providing a level for developers, especially open source developers. But there is little discussions on what this will mean for end users, apart from an implied suggestion that open source solutions based on royalty-free open standards will inevitably provide a better environment for users of the services.

We have, for example, see how a well-intentioned government policy, such as the one which stated that All government Web sites must be WCAG compliant could lead to undesirable side-effects if it were to be implemented in a simplistic fashion. In this case, despite an Accessibility Summit meeting in which Web accessibility advocates, researchers  and researchers agreed the need to avoid simplistic checkbox approaches, the government  announced a policy which, if it had been implemented, could have resulted in  government web sites which had trivial WCAG errors would be withdrawn from service.

In Web accessibility arena, alternative approaches led to the development of the BS 8878 Web Accessibility Code of Practice. This provides a much more realistic approach to achieving the laudable goal of enhancing access to people with disabilities, which takes contextual issues into account and focuses on best practices for the various processes in developing accessible Web sites and avoids the risk that forcing Web sites to be WCAG compliant would lead to non-conformant Web sites being removed from services or potentially valuable Web sites not being deployed due to difficulties in achieving WCAG conformance.

The current debate on open standards faces similar risks.  To take a couple of simple and tangible examples:

• The MP3 format is based on patented compression algorithms. Would a government policy which mandated patent-free standards ban use of the MP3 format? If so, since poplar audio players such as iPods, support the MP3 format but not necessarily patent-free alternatives, how will podcasts be made available for popular consumers products such as the iPod and iPhone.
• The RSS (Really Simple Syndication/RDF SIte Summary format is not an open standard since it is not owned by a trusted neutral standards body.  Will RSS no longer be usable on Government Web sites and, if so, what benefits does this provide?
• The Microsoft Office format is now an ISO Standard. Does this mean that MS Office will be an acceptable format. If so, what are the current ‘battles’ about? If not, what principles are the battles about?

Although I’m not in favour of the discussions about policies on Government use of open standards being based on military metaphors, I do agree with the call to get involved. Your country does need you, if you have an interest in the role open standards can play in the development of IT services in the public sector.  In particular if you have an interest in the implications on user communities on the deployment of policies on open standards I’d encourage you to participate in the consultation.

I have now installed the app on my Android phone and iPod Touch. I’m familiar with the benefits which messaging applications can provide over email through over five years of Twitter use and am interested in exploring the potential of an app which can be used with non-Twitter users.

However in order to use such communication tools, you need to have people to communicate with. At present I only know the Kik username of one person. My username is ukwebfocus and I’d be interested in seeing how this app might be used to support my professional activities. Perhaps a tool such as Kik Messenger could have a role to play an an event, such as UKOLN’s 3-day IWMW 2012 event, in which it might not be appropriate to use Twitter for, say, administrative queries.

When making use of such new services I use three guiding principles to assist the decision-making process which were described in a paper on “Empowering Users and Institutions: A Risks and Opportunities Framework for Exploiting the Social Web“:

1. Understanding the reasons why a service will be used.
2. Understanding possible risks in using the service.
3. Identification of ways of minimising such risks.

A summary of how these principles have been applied in installing Kik Messenger are given below:

Reasons for using Kik Messenger
The reasons include:

• A desire to evaluate instant messaging tools to complement use of Twitter.
• A need to evaluate tools which can be used to support communication needs at an event.
• A wish to be an early adopter in use of a social networking / communications tool in order to claim a meaningful identifier and to facilitate the development of a community.

Risks in using Kik Messenger

The risks in making use of the tool include:

• The tool may fail to reach a critical mass.
• The service may not be sustainable and the terms and conditions may change or the service itself, and the accompanying network and data may be lost.
• Use of the tool may result in a failure to make use of richer alternatives.
• The tool may not address a significant need.
• The benefits provided by the tool may not be sufficient to motivate others to use it.

Approaches for minimising risks in using Kik Messenger

The approaches being taken to minimising the risks include:

• Raising awareness of the tool across my network.
• Acceptance of possible loss of content and community (as is the case with use of Twitter and text messaging on my mobile phone).
• Evaluation of use of the toll in different contexts.
• A willingness to use the tool in a small-scale context if it fails to gain significant market penetration.
• A willingness to accept the time lost in downloading and learning use of the tool if the service itself is not sustainable.

On his blog Doug Belshaw has documented his “3 principles for a more Open approach” which appear to provide a similar goal in documenting principles to aim the selection of new services:

“I’ve come up three principles to guide me:

1. I will use free and Open Source software wherever possible. (I’m after the sustainable part of OSS, not the ‘free’ part)
2. If this is not possible then I will look for services which have a paid-for ‘full-fat’ offering.
3. I will only use proprietary services and platforms without a paid-for option if not doing so would have a significant effect on my ability to connect with other people.”

It is interesting to note the differences between our two approaches. Doug, it seems, very much focusses on the service itself (it needs to be available as open source software) and a particular business model (a subscription service, rather than one which is funded through advertising, for example) although, like me, he provides an escape clause which acknowledges that there are risks in failing to use a service if doing so would mean he was unable to fulfil particular requirements. My approach, on the other hand, focusses on the outputs of the service and takes a disinterested view of the development approaches.

The principles which Doug mentions do, of course, have validity. However for me Open Source Software is simply software which should be evaluated alongside proprietary software, with an open source software licence being no guarantee of the value of the software or it sustainability. I agree with Doug on the value of services having a variety of business models for their sustainability. However although the availability of open source software so that users can install the software on their own server may help Doug, who runs his own dougbelshaw.com domain, and others who have the technical expertise, time and motivation to be system administrators, for many people this will not be the case. In should also be added the the availability of open source software is also not necessarily a guarantee that one’s host institution, which has traditionally provided the IT infrastructure will install the software. Indeed, even if software, including social software, is installed within one’s host institution, there is no guarantee that the service, the data or the community will be available if one leaves the institution. As Sarah Lewthwaite in a post entitled University Email: A PhD Exit Strategy reminded research students who were about to finish their PhD:

Your email account has been an academically sanctioned identity for three or more years. And, unless you have a particularly benevolent institution that guarantees email for life, your account is about to end. Full stop. You may receive a letter asking you to ‘forward all important emails to an external account’ before your account is sedated (suspended) and put out of its misery (erased). If, like me, you have come to rely on your university email, you need an exit strategy, fast.

Sarah went on to reiterate this point:

“Now, two essential factors come into play. They’re so important; so you can quote me.

1. Your email is not yours. It belongs to your university.
2. Your university email address constitutes and validates your academic identity. This signifier is about to expire.”

If you (as is the case for me) you do not wish to become a system administrator, you should understand alternative sustainability options. Many people will be happy to make use of free services for which advertising and other uses of activity data help to fund the service whereas others, such as Doug, will be willing to pay a fee for such advertisements to be removed.

It will be interesting to see the approaches to sustainability which users will select. There will be personal factors which come into play – and as someone who is happy to pay my TV licence feed and accept that when I watch ITV for ‘free’ that “I’m the product, not the user” I have chosen not to subscribe to Sky because of my antipathy towards Murdoch (although I have watch football on Sky in pubs).

Revisiting my initial comments about the Kik Messenger service, I should probably add that there would also be costs and risks in using an open alternative (perhaps Jabber/XMPP). But what if a proprietary approach, though not platform-specific such as Blackberry’s BBM, is needed in order to establish that there is a real user need and establish appropriate technical requirements before the open alternatives are developed? Karl Marx suggested that there were a number of evolutionary stages in society’s development (the slave society, feudalism and capitalism) which had to be passed before a more equitable society was reached. The evidence of Twitter’s success and social networks such as Facebook hints at the difficulties of achieving the seemingly more equitable online environment which, as Doug describes in a post on Why we need open, distributed social networks supporters of identi.ca and Diaspora claim these services will provide. But can we build Openness in one country or might Blackberry BBM users benefit from moving to a more open cross-platform solution which has an API, albeit a solution which is not open source and for which, according to the FAQ, it does not seem possible to pay for an account?

Sarah Lewthwaite introduced me to the term “adversive disablism” a couple of years ago when we had a brief discussion on Twitter and I was motived to follow the link to her (old) blog. Following a subsequent discussion Sarah drew my attention to a post she had written on Web Development and Aversive Disablism.

I quickly realised that Sarah’s expertise in disability theory added a new dimension to the Web accessibility research papers which David Sloan and myself, together with several other disability researchers and practitioners had published since my first paper, on Developing A Holistic Approach For E-Learning Accessibility, was published in 2004.

Sarah, David and myself subsequently wrote a paper on Developing Countries; Developing Experiences: Approaches to Accessibility for the Real World which was accepted at the W4A 2010 conference. In the paper (which is available in PDF, MS Word and HTML formats) we describe how:

Blatant forms of discrimination and prejudice towards disabled people appear to be declining in the UK and elsewhere. As such, it is not always clear how or why inequality persists, particularly online where disability could become a matter of relevance, rather than definition.

To understand this phenomenon, it is useful to consider Mark Deal’s concept of Aversive Disablism: ‘Aversive disablists recognise disablism is bad but do not recognize that they themselves are prejudiced‘ [6]. Where aversive racists are not anti-black, but pro-white [7], aversive disablists may not be anti-disabled, but rather pro-non-disabled. This disablism, is often unintentional.

The paper goes on to add:

In terms of Web development, significant inroads are being made through legislation, education and advocacy, but aversive disablism can and does persist at many levels. Importantly, since Web 2.0 thrives upon user-generated content and social interactions which are propagated and remixed across media, there are a multitude of levels and opportunities for aversive disablism to become integrated within systems.

But what does this mean in the context of Web development, especially for those who feel their approaches do not discriminate against users with disabilities but may, in reality, inadvertently do so? Four examples come to mind in which decisions taken by Web developers, managers and policy makers may provide unintentional barriers to users with disabilities:

1. I won’t use JavaScript on my Web site.
2. I insist that Web pages must validate.
3. We don’t make videos available unless they are fully-captioned.
4. We will only use HTML as a document format on our web site.

These views have, I suspect, been held by people with long-standing involvement in Web accessibility and would appear to be based on agreed best practices. But consider some alternative views to each of these points:

1. JavaScript can assist the usability of Web sites, including the usability by people with disabilities. And although some assistive technologies may not have supported JavaScript nowadays many tools will provide such support.
2. The vast majority of Web pages do not validate with formal HTML standards, but this is not necessarily a barrier to accessibility, especially for trivial HTML errors such as unescaped & characters.
3. Videos may be valuable for users with disabilities and to deprive such users of access to these videos due to a lack of resources to fund captioning may be a barrier to these users.
4. Institutional repositories currently host primarily PDFs of peer-reviewed papers. Insisting that an accessible HTML equivalent of such resources must be published will be a severe barrier to the implementation of open access policies.

We might then conclude that such disablist approaches may have been taken by people who regard guidelines such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as a a set of inflexible rules which must be applied at all times or who may interpret legislation as mandating conformance withe such guidelines are are unwilling to take a risk that such an interpretation is mistaken.

But in addition such disablist approaches may also be taken by those so immersed in the Web environment, that they fail to appreciate the benefits for people with disabilities of blended approaches, as illustrated in a post on Videoing Talks As A Means Of Providing Equivalent Experiences.

As we described in our most recent paper, the challenge for policy makers and developers involved in Web activities is to ensure that they put people and processes first. I would hope that such user-focussed approaches are the norm. However a post which asks Is PDF accessible in Australia? argues that “it is time the Australian Government Information Management Office and the Human Rights Commission fully embrace both the spirit and the recommendations of WCAG 2.0” which can only be met by use of the following technologies: XHTML1, HTML 4, HTML5. Implementation of such a policy would seem likely to result in significant new barriers to researchers including, ironically, barriers to researchers with disabilities.

To revisit the question I posed at the beginning of this post: “are web developers and web authors who have embraced WCAG guidelines unknowingly creating barriers for people with disabilities?” Might not those with understandable motives in developing a more elegant, robust and open Web environment hinder access to resources for people with disabilities who are living in today’s environment of flawed tools, complex business models and, perhaps, over-ambitious accessibility guidelines?

And if your response is that adopting WCAG has been better than doing nothing, that may have been the case when our understanding of web accessibility was limited. But now we have a better understanding of how WCAG can be applied in a pragmatic way – and in the UK we have BS 8878 which we can – should – be using as a standard.

In order to gain a better understanding of possible concerns, but also the reasons why service providers may use such clauses, I have documented some of the terms and conditions of services I use in the table below.

What are your thoughts on these terms and conditions?

I should add that a Verge article which asks Is Google Drive worse for privacy than iCloud, Skydrive, and Dropbox? carried out a more details comparison of the terms and conditions for Google Drive, Skydrive, Dropbox and iCloud services and concludes:

in order to run a massive online service that handles tons of user data, you need a lot of permissions from those users. Those permissions are fairly standardized, since the underlying copyright law itself is static — companies like Microsoft and Google need permission to copy and distribute your content to servers around the world to make services like Drive and SkyDrive work well. There’s also a tension between friendly language and legal precision — drawing in sharp lines often requires aggressive wording, while there’s real comfort in vagaries.

In the end, though, the actual wording of these documents doesn’t reveal much — they all set out to do the same thing, and they all accomplish their goals. What’s most important is how much trust you’re willing to give companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Dropbox as more and more of your data moves to the cloud. Contracts are meaningful and important, but even the most noble promises can easily be broken. It’s actions and history that have consequences, and companies that deal with user data on the web need to start building a history of squeaky-clean behavior before any of us can feel totally comfortable living in the cloud.

I suspect the recent flurry of tweets about the Google Drive terms and conditions wasn’t really about the terms and conditions themselves (which apply to all Google services) but were really a  statement from people who don’t trust Google.

The UK Government is currently seeking comments for its Open Standards Consultation for the Open Standards: Open Opportunities – Flexibility and efficiency in Government IT document (a 30 page document available in PDF format). I am currently formulating my responses to the consultation process. In light of the interests in open standards by many developers, managers and policy makers in the higher and further education sector I would encourage participation form those with interests in this area -  it should be noted, however, that the consultation closes on 1 May!

Update 27 June 2012: The deadline has now been extended to Monday, 4^th June 2012.

The Open Standards Survey 2011

As described in two posts entitled  UK Government Survey on Open Standards: But What is an ‘Open Standard’? and  “UK Government Will Impose Compulsory Open Standards” published a year ago I responded to the initial survey and gave my thoughts on the definitions of an open standard. I also commented on the flaws in the survey process which made it difficult to provide meaningful feedback.

My response was one of 970 received – and it was interesting to read in the Summary of lessons learned from the UK Government Open Standards Survey, 2011 (pdf, 246kb) that the majority came from the private sector.  Looking at the pie chart given in the report I would estimate that about 200-300 responses came from the public sector (excluding central government). How many of these are from the  UK higher and further education sector I do not know.

It should also be noted that although “the policy resulting from this consultation will apply to all central government departments, their agencies, non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs) and any other bodies for which they are responsible” the document goes on to add that “Local government and wider public sector bodies will be encouraged to adopt the policy to deliver wider interoperability benefits“. There is therefore an opportunity to influence government policy in an area which make affect IT development policies in the future.

Reflections on 20 years Involvement in Open Standards in UK Higher Education

Although I had serious reservations about last year’s survey in many respects I feel that the Open Standards: Open Opportunities - Flexibility and Efficiency in Government IT consultation document has its merits.

The feedback I gave in last year’s survey were based on work related to policies on use of open standards in higher education which I have been involved with since the launch of the eLib national digital library programme back in the mid 1990s.  Back then those of use who were involved in contributing to the eLib Programme Technical Standards document had, in retrospect, a very naive view on open standards, with the document suggesting that standards such as VRML and whois++ could have a role to play for eLib projects. Some projects may have used these standards (I know that for a period the who++ was felt to be important for the eLib Subject Based Information Gateways) but in retrospect we were over-enthusiastic in encouragement take-up of what at the time seemed to be potentially significant standards.

The dangers of promoting (or, worse, mandating) use of emerging open standards which are being actively promoted by their supporters (and by standards bodies themselves) became apparent when we realised that W3C standards such as SMIL and SVG were not significantly challenging proprietary solutions such as Flash.  In addition in 2005  a panel session entitled  Web Services Considered Harmful argued that a series of overly complex open standards (several thousand pages when printed out!) was proving costly to implement and that use of ‘grassroots’ approaches, including RSS and REST, would provide more cost-effective approaches to development.

In the UK higher education sector we are aware of the dangers of mandating inappropriate open standards, with universities being mandated to support OSI networking protocols, with  Coloured Book software providing a transition to this environment.  Then the Internet came along and universities were initially permitted to access Internet services by a TCP/IP tunnel across JANET before the clear benefits provided by the Internet eventually became apparent to policy-makers and the sector made native use of TCP/IP.

Our understanding of the benefits which can be gained by use of open standards together with the risks of a naive and uncritical acceptance of  the realities of use of open standards led to a series of papers which sought solutions to this minefield being written by myself, my colleague Marieke Guy and Rosemary Russell, my former colleague Pete Johnston, Paul Hollins and Scott Wilson (JISC CETIS), Alastair Dunning (at the time of AHDS), Sebastian Rahtz and Randy Metcalfe  (then of JISC OSS Watch) and Lawrie Phipps (then of JISC TechDis):

• Openness in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Access, elPub 2007.
• Addressing The Limitations Of Open Standards, MW 2007.
• A Contextual Framework For Standards, WWW 2006.
• A Standards Framework For Digital Library Programmes, ichim05, 2005.
• Ideology Or Pragmatism? Open Standards And Cultural Heritage Web Sites, ichim03, 2003.

Open Standards: Open Opportunities - Flexibility and Efficiency in Government IT

In light of this background, what feedback am I planing to give to the report? I have highlighted a number of comments in the report which I intend to comment on.

I welcome your comments on my views on the consultation document. More importantly, however, I’d encourage you to give your views on the consultation web site – as that is the place where your views can influence government policy decisions. Note that if you would would like to see responses which have already been submitted, I suggest you visit Jenni Tennisons’s post on UK Open Standards Consultation.

Whilst installing the Skydrive tool on my PC I noticed a tweet which announced that Google Drive had been released.  Google Drive, like Skydrive and Dropbox (the utility I normally use for shipping files between various devices)  provide cloud storage – and, as described in a BBC News article, Google Drive offers up to 16TB of storage with 5Gb for free – not as much as Microsoft’s offering but, to be fair, I’m getting that deal as an early adopter.

Shortly after the initial tweet I encountered the scepticism with a tweet from @sydlawrence saying:

Holy crap. Google owns everything on google drive. Tell me a business that will use it… cl.ly/1W2h1A163p0W2A … 

which linked to the following screenshot of the Google Drive terms and conditions:

There is clearly a discrepancy between the tweet and the terms and conditions: how is “Google owns everything on google drive” reconciled with “You retain ownershop of any intellectual property that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours“?

But if we ignore such hyperbole, what should we make of the terms and conditions page which states:

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.

Although it was truncated in the screenshot I should add that the terms and conditions went on to say that:

 The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. 

Indeed, as I asked on Twitter in a different context though related to terms and conditions for social media service, what should we make of terms and conditions which state:

We may update these Terms (including our Privacy Statement) from time to time. Changes will have immediate effect from the date of posting on this Site and you should therefore review these Terms regularly. Your continued use of this Site after changes have been made will be taken to indicate that you accept that you are bound by the updated Terms.

My view is that I will use these three Cloud storage services for both personal and work-related activities. I’m pleased that Google have been open about the fact that they may modify my content as this will include compressing my files – a Cloud storage service which did not do this would be guilty of using energy unnecessarily: something which should not be done in light of global warming concerns.

I’m also happy if Google decide to explore ways in which they can monetise my attention data, just as Facebook do when they observe my interests in beer and sport and present me with a personalised ad.

But what if they use the terms and conditions to take a copy of my content and sell it on?  I don’t think this is likely, but I do accept that it is risk. I will therefore assess such risks when I make use of the service – and would advise others to take a similar approach if they store content on the service.  But I’m also aware of the missed opportunity costs if I don’t use such services.

So I’ll use Google Drive, once I’ve been given access to the service. What about you?

Last month Steve Wheeler on his Learning With E’s blog published a couple of posts which explored the development of the “Content is King” meme and the variations on the “Content is Dead” ripostes.

Steve began by suggesting that “Content is a tyrant…” – a lengthy and well-written post which generated 79 tweets and 14 likes on Facebook.

The following day Steve published his own riposte: “…context is king” which he introduced by providing the context to his initial post:

In yesterday’s post I made the statement that the internet is better as a creative space than it is as a repository.

and went on to conclude that:

As I argued yesterday however, content is no longer the driving force of the web, and should not be viewed in isolation. The context within which the content is situated should also be focused upon as an important component of any analysis of web based learning activity.

I contributed to the discussion in a comment on the post:

I’ve previously suggested that “Communications is king” (if the network goes down people say “I can’t access my email” and not “I can’t access the VLE or the OPAC“.

I then realised that “Community is king” – communication channels are no use if you’ve no-one to chat with“.

Although some people are dismissive of use of such soundbites I find that it can be helpful to be able to crystallise a viewpoint in a few brief words, whilst acknowledging that the true picture will be more complex.

Communicating Succinctly

I was reflecting on ways in which one may communicate an “elevator pitch” if, for example, you are in the lift with a senior manager and have a brief opportunity to explain the value of one’s professional activities. As describe din a post on How Twitter Expertise Helps Your Writing and Dissemination  Twitter is a valuable tool for developing the skills in being able to communicate succinctly.

From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2011/may/25/steve-bell-bell-epoque-cartoon

As an aside I should also add how funny I find many of the @guardianstyle tweets, which demonstrate that if you have skills in writing headlines you can include an initial comment and a witty reply is 140 characters. As an example the following tweets were posted while I was writing this post:

RT @caffyrelf: RT @suzanne_moore: The past, present and future walked into a bar. It was tense. [source]

Having walked into a bar, the barman served a dangling participle. [source]

Into the bar, a man walked and bought a drink – what linguists call thematic ordering. #grammar #language [source]

So this zeugma came into a bar and some money … [source]

I have to admit that I didn’t know what zeugma meant (did you) but was sufficiently motivated to Google it and then understood that last tweet – and have expanded my vocabulary:-)

The Guardian is renowned for its headlines. As described in the Guardian style guide:

In the 1970s and 80s the Guardian suffered from a reputation for excruciating puns; today, we want to be known for clever, original and witty headlines.

In addition the Guardian is also famous for its cartoon’s especially those made by Steve Bell. An example of how a political point can be made in a single image is illustrated in this cartoon from the Steve Bell: Bell Époque – in pictures article published in the Guardian (25 May 2011). If you are a Guardian reader of a particular age this cartoon of Margaret Thatcher, Geoffrey Howe and Michael Hesletine published in 1990 will still, 22 years on (!) still bring back strong memories of those Thatcherite times.

Communicating Visually

As I do not have any drawing skills I also felt that being able to communicate using cartoon was not foe me. However I was recently introduced to Pixton and decided to give this cartoon creation tool a try.

The aim of the cartoon was to explain succinctly and visually the origin of the term “Content is king” and how it was challenged by the notion that “Communications is king“; how communication channels are of little value unless there is a significant community of users and how such a community may leave an established and thriving service if alternatives are provided and adopted. In light of such complexities, rather than seeking to identify a single best environment, there is a need to acknowledge that that a variety of tools will be used to reflect different user preferences, functionality and, indeed trends and fashions. Or to put it briefly: “Context is king“.

Cartoon 1: [source] (35 words)

Cartoon 2: [source] (46 words)

Cartoon 3: [source] (37 words)

Cartoon 4: [source] (44 words)

This came to a total of 162 words. But what Steve Wheeler actually said, in 183 words, was:

In essence, Kozma and McLuhan both believed that context (i.e. the tools, the media), were at least as important as the content they delivered, whilst Clark agreed with Gates that the content was king. Increasingly, in today’s digital age, many of us are following Clark’s perspective, focusing on content, without paying much attention to the tools we use to make sense of it. In some ways, this is a natural progression, because tools and technologies are becoming more transparent and easy to use without too much thought. Yet in focusing on the content, as McLuhan warned, we may miss the entire message. Highly digitally literate individuals are able to communicate effectively across several platforms without loss of power or nuance. This is known as ‘transliteracy’, a sophisticated grasp of the affordances of the media and technologies that is becoming the passport to success for today’s digital learner and scholar. Transliteracy goes beyond content, and exploits the power and potential of many different tools and services, giving the user an edge over content, enabling them to connect, communicate, consume, create and collaborate more effectively.

Of course both approaches can be equally valid – after all, context is king.

The question I am now asking myself is whether I should continue to make use of Pixton? This post contains the first four cartoons I created. I am conscious of the stereotypes in the characters) bearded professor advising bright young (white) female student. I wonder how easy it is to edit the characters and the scenes in Pixton. Hmm, it seems it’s very easy:

Note: the cartoons as well as the text in this blog post is provided under a Creative Commons licence. The image from The Guardian has been used to illustrate the power of a cartoon. A link has been provided to the source material. It is not felt that use of this cartoon will deprive the Guardian or the cartoonist of funding or undermine their status. However the cartoon will be removed if the copyright holder requests this.

The slides David used were uploaded to Slideshare in advance of his talk, so that the remote audience watching the live video stream would be able to have a better view of the slides that would be the case if only the video stream was available. Such an approach can clearly help to enhance access to the resource by those who were not present at the conference. In addition this can mean that the slides can also be viewed on a mobile device by conference attendees who might have difficulties in viewing the screen display.

Use of Slideshare would therefore appear to be very relevant for a conference such as W4A 2012, the 9th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, which seeks to understand innovative ways of enhancing access to web resources for people with disabilities. However in my experience such process-driven solutions tend not to be overlooked, especially by those who regard conformance with WAI’s WCAG guidelines as the definitive solution for enhancing web accessibility.

Our paper challenged such views by arguing that “web accessibility is not an intrinsic characteristic of a digital resource but is determined by complex political, social and other contextual factors, as well as technical aspects which are the focus of WAI standardisation activities. It can therefore be inappropriate to develop legislation or focus on metrics only associated with properties of the resource.” In addition to legislation and metrics we could well have added policies, not only for institutions but also for event organisers.

The paper (which is available in MS Word, PDF and HTML formats) proposed that BS 8878 provides an relevant standard for ensuring that appropriate processes are being addressed and provided a case study from the Open University which illustrated how learning analytics can be used to help identify problems being experienced by students with learning difficulties (which might include difficulties experienced which are due to problems beyond conformance with WCAG guidelines) and suggest appropriate interventions.

How might such approaches be applied in the context of conferences and other events which seek to minimise barriers for people with disabilities? Might not a reasonable policy for event organisers be:

We will seek to ensure that slides used by speakers in presentations will be made available on Slideshare (or equivalent service) so that the slides can be viewed by delegates on popular mobile devices (including Apple iPhone/iPad and Android devices) . This will help participants who may have difficulties in viewing the screen display provided at the event.

This suggestion, which focusses on the processes needed which can provide clear benefits to an identified user community, is itself an example of the ideas described in the paper which argue that WCAG conformance is simply one part of a much wider set of issues which need to be considered when addressing accessibility issues. Unfortunately, as we mention in the presentation “If organisational policy focuses exclusively on technical guideline conformance, there [is] a risk accessibility efforts can be mis-focused“.

It should be noted that the “seek to ensure” wording is used as it is appreciated that this may not also be possible: speakers may not use a desktop presentation software such as PowerPoint or may be presenting confidential or sensitive information which would not be appropriate t0 publish openly.

The slides are available in Slideshare and embedded below.

I should also add that by the end of the third day of the conference there had been over 2,000 views of the slides. Note bad for a presentation given to a audience of about 60 and an example of how the potential benefits provided to remote users and local users may also help in raising awareness of the ideas outlined in the paper. These figures also illustrate the benefits of uploading the slides in advance with, at the time of writing, only two other slideshows have been uploaded (although two additional slideshow have been tagged with the w4a2012 tag). These were uploaded after David’s and have been viewed 5 and 316 times, perhaps because the buzz generated by the #w4a12 tweets had dissipated after delegates went home after the event.

The reason for the Searchengineland.com’s headline seems self-evidence from a image showing the growth in traffic for Blekko.com since January which, to provide a comparison, is contrasted with traffic for the duckduckgo.com search engine. As described in the article:

According to comScore’s numbers, Blekko is now getting about triple the traffic of fellow underdog search engine DuckDuckGo

Blekko’s CEO seems to have provided a significant contribution to the article, and is quoted as including the following reasons for Blekko’s popularity:

1. Improved index quality.
2. Dissatisfaction with Google.

Are we seeing an example of weak signals of a significant change in the search engine marketplace?  And if this is the case, should institutions be making plans for changes in working practices?

Using Alexa to compare the daily traffic for Blekko, Duckduckgo and Google we see a different picture: or perhaps it is difficult to see the story, because the traffic for Blekko and Duckduckgo  fails to move above the x-axis, with a percentage traffic close to zero.  It order to see a comparison of the traffic rank, there is a need to display this information on a logarithmic scale, as shown below.

Although there is a need to monitor indications of new developments, there is also a need to avoid over-hyping something new. I think there was a similar over-reaction when Yahoo sold the Delicious.com social bookmarking service, with some of the teething problems encountered in the migration of the service to new ownership leading to people migrating, perhaps prematurely, to new services. Perhaps a more appropriate headline for the Searchengineland.com article (which appears to have been based on a press release) would be “One Little Used Search Engine Used More Than A Rival“.

However one interesting aspect of the story was the suggestion of user dissatisfaction with Google.  Yesterday the BBC featured an article which described how Google tackles temporary Gmail access failure which began “Google says it is looking into why thousands of users have been unable to access their Gmail accounts“.  The thousands of Gmail users were apparently less than 2% of Gmail’s user base.  But closer to home, yesterday Tony Hirst tweeted about how his OUseful.info blog had seemingly disappeared from Google, and he was no longer receiving the large amount of traffic which Google sends to him blog.  As a prolific blogger (who has an entry in Wikipedia) Tony described his experiences in a post entitled So Google is No Longer OUseful.info’s Friend…? Use Bing.com instead… But today a Google search for “Tony Hirst blog” now seems to be working.  Another minor glitch, it seems, which is quickly fixed.

I can’t help but feel that the more significant issues surrounding Google aren’t to do with performance and reliability issues: after all we have no evidence that Bing, Blekko or Duckduckgo will provide a reliable service if they had the volume of traffic which Google has and, as described last year in a post which asked Time to Move to GMail? local email service can also be unreliable. For me the more significant stories which we have seen in the past few days which may have an impact on Google’ longer-term relevance are to do with legal disputes with the BBC News describing:

• Oracle and Google’s Android copyright row trial begins

and Google’s battles with Facebook and Apple being highlighted in the Guardian:

• Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google’s Sergey Brin

In order to help identify the ways in which institutions are advising visitors to their web sites on institutional policies on cookie usage a summary of interesting highlights from privacy policies provided by Russell Group Universities (which were surveyed in a post on Privacy Settings For UK Russell Group University Home Pages published in May 2011) together with a number of other universities who provided institutional details to a Google Spreadsheet on UK HEI Privacy Policies is given in the following table.

Note that the information provided in this table given below was collected on 13-16 April 2012.

Moves Towards Pragmatism

The approaches which are being taken appear to reflect the pragmatic guidance which has been provided recently.

The post on The Half Term Report on Cookie Compliance drew attention to the ICO’s Guidelines on the Rules on use of Cookies and Similar Technologies (available in PDF format) which seemed to appreciate the difficulties which institutions may face in implementing policies and practices which conform with legal requirements (“The Information Commissioner will take a practical and proportionate approach to enforcing the rules on cookies. He has to enforce the law, but he does have some discretion in how he exercises his formal enforcement powers“). The guidelines made clear the importance of making web site visitors aware of reasons why personal information is being gathered and used: “A key point here is ensuring that the information you provide is not just clear and comprehensive but also readily available“.

The emphasis on providing appropriate information rather than implementing technical solutions was highlighted last week in a post on Enforcement of cookie consent rules for analytics not a priority, ICO says published on Out-law.com, a Web site which provides legal news and guidance from Pinsent Masons, an international law firm. This article began:

The UK’s data protection watchdog is not likely to take action against the users of data analytics cookies on websites even if they fall foul of new EU rules on cookie consent, it has said. 

A statement from the ICO said:

” … it is highly unlikely that priority for any formal action would be given to focusing on uses of cookies where there is a low level of intrusiveness and risk of harm to individuals.“

It should also be noted that the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) UK has issued new guidance (15-page / 296KB PDF) on cookies. The guidance, which has been welcomed by the ICO, contains information on the different categories of cookies that website operators use and when consent to those cookies will be required to be obtained.  From this document I learnt that:

The Government and the ICO have said that browsers will be an important part of giving users the increased access

It seems that the government does have an understanding of the need for technical privacy standards such as the W3C’s Tracking Protection Working Group which aims to “improve user privacy and user control by defining mechanisms for expressing user preferences around Web tracking and for blocking or allowing Web tracking elements“.

The ICC’s guidance document also helpfully defines four categories of cookies:

1. strictly necessary cookies
2. performance cookies
3. functionality cookies
4. targeting cookies or advertising cookies

The document adds that “we are keen to ensure that these categories do not become entrenched but  rather evolve as industry discovers cookies that need more accurate categorisation” which again emphasis the realistic approaches which are being taken.

I might add that I suspect that concerns regarding privacy issues and c0okies will primarily focus on targeting cookies and advertising cookies, with cookies which are

• strictly necessary “in order to enable you  to move around the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the website“;
• performance cookies which “collect information about how visitors use a website, for instance which pages visitors go to most often, and if they get error messages from web pages” and
• functionality cookies which “allow the website to remember choices you make (such as your user name, language or the region you are in) and provide enhanced, more personal features“

will not be the prime area of concern for the ICO (although I should add that IANAL) .

Discussion

Note click for enlarged view of University of Sheffield’s Privacy Policy

When I started writing this post I was intending to comment on the patterns which we can see starting to develop. These include:

• The ways of addressing privacy policies in a very distributed environment, as can be seen in the approach taken at the University of Cambridge.
• The detailed technical information about specific cookies which is being provided at institutions such as Bath Spa and King’s College London.
• The commonly used sections provided in Privacy policy pages such as the Privacy Policy at the University of Sheffield, which is illustrated.
• The ways in which use of Google Analytics is documented, such as can be seen at Bath Spa and the University of Leeds.
• The ways in which users are advised to disable Google Analytics, such as can be seen at the University of Glasgow.
• The popularity of the All About Cookies service for further information about cookies.

However in light of  ICC’s guidance document and its endorsement by the ICO it does occur to me that it would be useful for institutional privacy policies to make use of the language provided in this document.  This suggestion might be particularly relevant for those institutions which do not appear to provide a privacy policy which can be easily found from the institution’s home page!

At the IWMW 2012 event, to be held at the University of Edinburgh on 18-20 June, Claire Gibbons (University of Bradford) and John Kelly (JISC Legal) will be running a 90 minute session on Responding to the Cookie Monster. I wonder if the cookie monster will turn out to be not as scary as we first feared?

“Hitherto, philosophers have sought to understand the world; the point, however, is to change it” Karl Marx famously argued. But in the twenty-first century it is researchers rather than philosophers who have a higher public profile in seeking to understand the world. The question then is “is it the role of researchers to also change the world?“

From my point of view I have been involved in various aspects of research for which the purpose of the research is to identify and develop best practices – and the purpose of this work is for such best practices to be embedded by practitioners. If the research output is seldom downloaded from an institutional repository (or, worse, is hidden behind publisher’s paywalls) it will be difficult for the work to achieve the goal of developing understanding and informing practice. Promoting the research is therefore, for me, an essential aspect of a researcher’s activities.

In a review of How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism by Eric Hobsbawm published in The Guardian suggested that “Marx’s celebrated over-statement attempted to build what might now be called an ‘impact requirement’“. This suggests that Marx’s quote may continue to be applicable in today’s research environment in which society expects to see evidence of the benefits of work which society (the tax-payer or the student fee-payer) pays.

But if, like me, you feel that researchers have some responsibility in seeing ideas produced through research processes, how might this be done?

Helping To Enhance Impact

Last month a post on this blog described a Paper Accepted for #W4A2012 Conference. The paper, on  “A Challenge to Web Accessibility Metrics and Guidelines: Putting People and Processes First” has been accepted for the W4A 2012 conference, the 9th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility which takes place in Lyon on 16-17  April 2012. The paper is the latest in a series of peer-reviewed papers on Web accessibility based on work led by myself and David Sloan, an accessibility researcher based at the University of Dundee.

This paper is co-authored with Martyn Cooper (the lead author, who is based at the Open University), Sarah Lewthwaite (based at King’s College London who was a co-author of our award-winning paper on Developing Countries; Developing Experiences: Approaches to Accessibility for the Real World presented at the W4A 2010 conference) together with David Sloan.

In order to help to maximise the impact of the paper we have made it available from Opus, the University of Bath’s institutional repository.

Whilst providing open access to a research paper is a desirable goal, it is still a passive approach which does not necessarily help in seeing the ideas provided in a paper being widely adopted.

As part of a pro-active approach to sharing our ideas, myself and my co-authors have agreed to raise awareness of our paper across our professional networks through use of our preferred social media channels. In addition to this post Martyn Cooper has published a post on his contribution to the paper and Sarah Lewthwaite has mentioned the paper on her Slewth Press blog. We can also expect @martyncooper, @sloandr and @slewth talking about the paper on Twitter.

In addition to such blogging activities I have produced a 90 second video summary of my contribution to the paper, which, to allow the video to be easily embedded elsewhere, has been published on YouTube and is embedded below.

In addition to raising awareness of the paper we are also providing opportunities for the ideas described in the paper, including adoption of the BS 8878 Code of Practice For Web Accessibility, to become better understood by practitioners. EA Draffan, who was a co-author of one of our earlier W4A papers on “One World, One Web … But Great Diversity” will give a plenary talk on Beyond WCAG: Experiences in Implementing BS 8878, at UKOLN’s forthcoming IWMW 2012 event. At the same event David Sloan will facilitate a 90 minute workshop session on Managing the Process of Providing an Inclusive Institutional Web Presence.

We also hope that the delivery of the paper at the W4A 2012 event on Monday 16 April will help to raise the visibility of our ideas, not only for the event participants but also by using Slideshare and, we hope, recording the presentation itself.

Your Thoughts

In a recent post on Marketing for Scientists Martin Fenner described how:

Scientists may feel uncomfortable about marketing their work, but we all are doing it already. We know that giving a presentation at a key meeting can be a boost for our career, and we know about the importance of maintaining an academic homepage listing our research interests and publications. And people reading this blog will understand that a science blog can be a powerful marketing tool.

I would be interested in other researchers’ views on approaches to maximising the impact of their work. Is this something which you feel is a fundamental aspect of research activities; is it something to be done, out somewhat reluctantly, perhaps due to departmental REF-related pressures or, alternatively, should researchers have a disinterested view of take-up of their ideas in order, say, to maintain one’s objectivity and detachment?  Comments are welcome. Alternatively feel free to complete the accompanying brief survey.

Yesterday I announced that UKOLN’s annual IWMW 2012 event is now open for bookings.  But is the event, aimed at those responsible for managing institutional Web services, dominated by male speakers? In a recent Twitter discussion Nicole Harris revisited this topic which she has commented on previously:

… more lack of female presenters i moan about. % of female speakers at UKSG plenaries even, not just tech

As we run many events at UKOLN I wondered whether we too tended to fail to give female speakers an opportunity to talk.  In order to base subsequent discussion on evidence I looked at the numbers of male and female plenary speakers at IWMW events and also included the figures for the forthcoming IWMW 2012 event. The figures are summarised in the following table.

It seems then that there have been only 13.5% female plenary speakers at the 16 IWMW events, with the IWMW 2005 and IWMW 2009 events held at Manchester and Essex seemingly being men-only events from a speaker’s perspective. A post about a Gendered Conference Campaign on the Feminist Philosophers blog”aims to raise awareness of the prevalence of all-male conferences …  of the harm that they do“. Is the IWMW event guilty of “All-male events and volumes help to perpetuate the stereotyping of [web technologies] as male” as is highlighted on the blog in the field of philosophy?

Although the IWMW event hosts a number of plenary talks, the main focus is on the parallel workshop sessions which aim to provide a more interactive and participative approach to learning and staff development.  What are the gender balances for the workshop facilitators? The figures are given in the following table.

Note:

• A record of the facilitors of the sessions held at the first IWMW event was not kept.
• The numbers given in the two tables may contain small inaccuracies due to people running multiple sessions, late replacements, etc.

From these figures we can see that there are almost twice proportionately as many female facilitators as plenary speakers. We can conclude that the event is not based on only men leading talks and sessions, although we are far from parity.  But does this simply reflect the gender disparity  across the institutional web management community?  One way of finding an answer to this would be to look at the gender split across the participants at IWMW events.

Since we do not record gender information we made use of the Status field (Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms). This approach does mean that the gender of attendees who are Doctors or Professors may be mis-recorded but for the IWMW event, these numbers are likely to be small.  The figures for recent years are given below.

We can thus conclude that the overall numbers for plenary speakers and facilitators (354 males and 96 females or 78% and 21%) are not significantly different from the overall gender split at the event.

Do We Need to Gather Gender Statistics?

Dr Chris Sexton

In order to be able to analyse gender information  for both participant as well as speakers at future events we have started to have a discussion as to whether we should explicitly ask for such information on registration forms.  We had to manually identify whether participants were male or female and are aware that in some circumstances, such as ambiguous or unfamiliar first names, such as Dr Chris Sexton, mistakes may we made.

When we raised this question on Twitter, the responses were mixed. Some people felt that it was inappropriate, perhaps because we should be minimising personal questions which are asked but also, it seems, because of a feeling that gender issues aren’t a simple binary split.  But others felt that it would be appropriate to ask such questions, especially if the purpose of asking the question was provided.

This specific issue does raise a more general question regarding gathering of information.  Some people feel that information on booking forms should only be used if the information will be used in some concrete fashion.  For the IWMW 2012 event we ask about the mobile devices which people are likely bring to the event partly to be able to ensure that any technologies we intend to use at the event  can be used on popular devices, but also so that we can identify trends in the numbers of devices people are taking to the IWMW events and the types of devices themselves.  We are unlikely to make use of gender information in any specific ways, but we are wondering whether the information about the speakers and facilitators should inform our policies for future events.  Should we, for example, actively solicit more contributions from women? On the other hand, if the number of female speakers correlates with the numbers of female attendees, might the imbalance be a larger societal issue for which we, as event organisations, are not in a position to address?  Or maybe you feel that such suggesting there should be some form of quotas for female speakers is ‘political correctness gone mad’?

We have now opened up bookings for IWMW 2012, without asking for gender information. In addition Sally Kerr, EA Draffan, Dawn Ellis and Helen Sargan will be giving plenary talks, with Katherine Pickles and Marieke Guy chairing sessions and Claire Gibbons, Sheila MacNeill and Marie Salter, together with Marieke Guy  facilitating workshop sessions.

But what about other UKOLN events? And what about other events held across the sector? How does the gender split for participants and speakers at IWMW events compare with, say, ALT-C, UCISA and JISC conferences?  And do such organisations have policies which seek to ensure appropriate levels of representation from women? Alternatively, if you run a library event with female participants in the majority, do you face these issues in reverse?

I should add that after the first few years of running successful IWMW event the programme committee pro-actively sought female speakers and workshop facilitators, which resulted in 28% of the workshop facilitators in 2001 and 2002 and 52% in 2003 being female.  However in subsequent years gender issues seem to have been forgotten about, with no plenary speakers giving talks in 2005 and 2009.

Your views would be welcome. Feel free to leave a comment on this post. Alternatively you may wish to resp0nd to the survey forms which ask for your views on asking for gender information on event booking forms and policies on seeking larger numbers of female speakers.

I’m pleased to announce that bookings are now open for IWMW 2012, the sixteenth annual Institutional Web Management Workshop. This year’s event will be held at the University of Edinburgh on 18-20 June. We have reverted back to the three-day format for this year’s event, and since we’ll be starting on the opening morning (rather than after lunch) we are able to provide a fuller programme than usual, with 11 plenary talks and 20 parallel sessions.

A summary of the content of the IWMW 2012 event is given below.

Embedding Innovation

The theme for this year’s event is “Embedding Innovation” . The event will provide an opportunity for those with responsibilities for providing institutional Web services to hear about and discuss ways in which news ways of working are being embedded to reflect technological developments and the changing funding and political environment.

Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski

I am particularly pleased that this year’s event sees the first plenary talk by a Vice-Chancellor. Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski, the Principal and Vice-Chancellor at Robert Gordon University who, in addition to being a regular blogger and Twitter user, is also featured in Wikipedia. Professor von Prondzynski will contribute to the event’s theme in asking the question “Going Online – Do Universities really Understand the Internet?“. Having come across Professor von Prondzynski’s blog post on Institutional tweets in January 2011 which began “Do universities that maintain Twitter pages know what they are doing, or why they are doing it?” I am particularly looking forward to this talk which will, perhaps, invite delegates to rethink their approaches to use of online services – after all, if we are looking to embed innovation we should probably rethink the approaches we have traditionally taken in the provision of our services. Earlier this year in a post on “Learning, unlearning and relearning” Steve Wheeler, Associate Professor of Learning Technology in the Faculty of Health, Education and Society at Plymouth University, made this point when he suggested that “there are times when unlearning just has to be done“.

The need to rethink established approaches to the development of Web sites will be continued in EA Draffan’s talk on “Beyond WCAG: Experiences in Implementing BS 8878“. In the talk she will suggest that a resource-based standard such as WCAG may need to be used within the context of a process-based standards and, within the UK, we are now in a position to make use of the BS 8878 Web Accessibility Code of Practice. But are universities, after over ten years of suggesting that conformance to WCAG would bring out universal accessibility, ready to acknowledge that, beyond the simple provision of informational resources, universal accessibility – whilst a laudable goal – may not be achievable?

The final plenary talk on the theme of “Embedding Innovation” will address ways in which institutions should be preparing for the Mobile Web. In a talk entitled “Do I Need an App for That?” Rob Borley will point out that although last year saw the 15 billionth download from the Apple app store and there are now over 500,000 different apps available to consumers, in developing a mobile strategy there is still a legitimate need to ask: “Do I need an app for that?“.

Data: the New Content

The second theme for the plenary talks at IWMW 2012 is “Data: the New Content“. The talks in this session will highlight the opportunities provided for those involved in providing institutional Web services in moving beyond the management of content (often text, images and multimedia resources) into the management of and access to data.

This session will provide an opportunity to hear from open data developments beyond our sector, with Sally Kerr, corporate Project Manager at the City of Edinburgh Council, describing “Open Data Development in the City of Edinburgh Council“.

But once you have open data, what can your (and other) developers do with it? In a talk entitled “Data Visualisation: A Taster” Tony Hirst and Martin Hawksey will illustrate how open data can be gathered, processed and visualised – and they hope that this taster presentation will encourage participants to sign up for their 90 minute “Data Visualisation Kitchen” workshop session (although I should add that participants will need to sign up for the parallel sessions in advance!).

We will not, however, focus only on the interests of policy makers and developers. In a talk entitled “Design Work for Key Information Sets” Stuart Church will outline the user-centred design (UCD) process that was used to design the Key Information Sets (KIS) and discusses some of the design challenges that were faced. In addition, he will consider some of the design approaches that can be used to make online ‘infographics’ more effective. For those who are unfamiliar with KIS, are part of a HEFCE initiative to provide comparable sets of standardised information about undergraduate courses. From September 2012, universities and colleges will be expected to publish these information sets on their web sites.

Institutional Case Studies

In a time of cuts, those who work in institutional Web teams should welcome the new opportunities which will be highlighted in the two strands summarised above. But in addition there will be a continued requirement to manage and develop existing institutional Web services. The third strand on “Institutional case Studies” provides an opportunity to hear from practitioners on the approaches they are taking to their mainstream work activities.

In this session we will hear from Dawn Ellis who will provide answers to the question “What Do You Really Want?“, Keith Doyle and Paddy Callaghan who will address the challenges in having to “Serve Two Masters: Creating Large-Scale Responsive Websites“, Helen Sargan on “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Two Years of Running a Content Management Service” and Stephen Emmott who will give the final plenary talk on “Measuring Impact“.

The Parallel Workshop Sessions

Although the plenary talks aim to provide shared experiences for participants, with the opportunity to hear about changes, developments and working practices, the importance of active participation at the event has always been emphasised.

This year there will are currently twenty parallel sessions, which last for 90 minutes, which aim to provide opportunities for active participation.

Topics to be covered in these parallel sessions include addressing the legal implications of cookie legislation, development of mobile services, user centred design techniques, agile development, developing large-scale responsive web site, evaluation of conferencing tools, mobilising WordPress, data visualisation techniques, identifying and responding to emerging technologies, addressing digital literacy challenges and more.

More detailed information about the parallel sessions is available. It should be noted that IWMW 2012 participants will be able to three sessions. In addition, we have kept two sessions free to enable anyone who wishes to organise a session at the last minute can do so.

Booking for the Event

Our Dynamic Earth, venue for the IWMW 2012 reception

The online booking form is now available. The cost is £350 per person with two night’s ensuite accommodation or £300 per person with no accommodation. This will include the meals listed on the booking form and refreshments.

In addition to the main event meal on Monday, on Tuesday there will be a wine reception which will be held at Our Dynamic Earth. As described in Wikipedia “Our Dynamic Earth is a science centre in Edinburgh, Scotland. It is a prominent visitors attraction in the city [which] sits in the Holyrood area, beside the Scottish Parliament building and at the foot of Arthur’s Seat“.

When you book for the event you will be able to select your parallel sessions. Please note that since places on the parallel sessions are provided on a first-come first served basis, we advice early booking if you wish to guarantee a place on a preferred session.

A series of guest posts have been published on this blog over the past week or so. As described in the Announcement of a Series of Openness Guest Blog Posts the posts were published following a series of articles about openness which were published in the latest issue of JISC Inform. The guest posts were:

• Open Access to Science for Everyone, Ross Mounce, 30 March 2012
• Being Openly Selfish and Making “OER” Work for You, James Burke, 2 April 2012
• Librarians meet Wikipedians: collaboration not competition!, Simon Baines, 3 April 2012
• Professional Development Using Open Content, Marieke Guy, 4 April 2012
• Opening Up Events – The GEII Event Amplification Toolkit, Kirsty Pitkin, 5 April 2012
• Openly Commercial, Joscelyn Upendran, 6 April 2012
• Syndicated Post: The Commons Touch, Steve Wheeler, 7 April 2012

For me these posts, and the articles in JISC Inform, explored the benefits which could be gained through adoption of a variety of open practices, ranging from open access for research papers, development of open educational resources (OERs), making content available on Wikipedia, consuming content provided by Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) to support personal staff development and embracing openness by supporting ‘amplified events‘ as well as exploring ways in which Creative Commons licences may be used to support such goals.

“Openness in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Access”

Openness was regarded as a means to an end, and not as a goal in itself.  Such approaches reflect the ideas described in a paper on Openness in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Access by myself, Scott Wilson (JISC CETIS) and Randy Metcalf (JISC OSSWatch) in which we provided the following abstract:

For national advisory services in the UK (UKOLN, CETIS, and OSS Watch), varieties of openness (open source software, open standards, and open access to research publications and data) present an interesting challenge. Higher education is often keen to embrace openness, including new tools such as blogs and wikis for students and staff. For advisory services, the goal is to achieve the best solution for any individual institution’s needs, balancing its enthusiasm with its own internal constraints and long term commitments. For example, open standards are a genuine good, but they may fail to gain market acceptance. Rushing headlong to standardize on open standards may not be the best approach. Instead a healthy dose of pragmatism is required. Similarly, open source software is an excellent choice when it best meets the needs of an institution, but not perhaps without reference to those needs. Providing open access to data owned by museums sounds like the right thing to do, but progress towards open access needs to also consider the sustainability plan for the service. Regrettably institutional policies and practices may not be in step with the possibilities that present themselves. Often a period of reflection on the implications of such activity is what is needed. Advisory services can help to provide this reflective moment. UKOLN, for example, has developed of a Quality Assurance (QA) model for making use of open standards. Originally developed to support the Joint Information Systems Committee’s (JISC) digital library development programmes, it has subsequently been extended across other programmes areas. Another example is provided by OSS Watch’s contribution to the development of JISC’s own policy on open source software for its projects and services. The JISC policy does not mandate the use of open source, but instead guides development projects through a series of steps dealing with IPR issues, code management, and community development, which serve to enhance any JISC-funded project that takes up an open source development methodology. CETIS has provided a range of services to support community awareness and capability to make effective decisions about open standards in e-learning, and has informed the JISC policy and practices in relation to open standards in e-learning development. Again, rather than a mandate, the policy requires development projects to become involved in a community of practice relevant to their domain where there is a contextualised understanding of open standards.

Although the paper was written in 2007 such pragmatic approaches appear particularly relevant for today’s changed environment in which institutions need to make policy decisions which take into account not only the a continually changing technical environment, but also reduced levels of funding and changing expectations from the user communities, including students who will be paying significant sums of money to attend university and research councils who will be facing pressures to demonstrate the value of investment in research activities.

As described in the Enabling Open Scholarship blog:

The UK’s Research Councils have proposed a revised policy on Open Access (PDF format) which further clarifies RCUK’s definition of OA and strengthens some of the criteria that must be satisfied. In particular, the policy commits to libre Open Access as the agreed RCUK definition, and permits an embargo of not longer than 6 months except for research  funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council.

I welcome this policy, which was featured in yesterday’s Guardian in an article which described how the “Wellcome Trust joins ‘academic spring’ to open up science“. However I do acknowledge that some people, such as Tom Olijhoek, have expressed objections:

I do have strong objections to the acceptance of delayed open access as a valid form of open access. This may be a compromise so that (certain) publishers will accept the policy, however there are enough open access publishers that do not impose an embargo and I don’t see why we (scientists) should give in to the wishes of a specific group of publishers. 

The Hard Line Perspective

Others, such as Glyn Moody, have expressed similar strong objections to a perceived failure to mandate another form of openness – open standards – with Glyn Moody, in January 2012, making his views clear in an article published in Computer Weekly:  UK Government Betrayal of Open Standards Confirmed.  Glyn Moody’s post, which suggested that “The British government withdrew its open standards policy after lobbying from Microsoft, it has been revealed in a Cabinet Office brief leaked to Computer Weekly“, was based on a posts by Mark Ballard published in January 2012 who initially argued that Microsoft hustled UK retreat on open standards, says leaked report but then went on to suggest that Hope shines through crack in lid of open standards coffin. This latter post described how “An informal public consultation [PDF format] meanwhile came out resoundingly in favour of open standards – giving the Cabinet Office a second mandate for its policy“.

 I commented on the Government’s informal consultation in a post entitled “UK Government Will Impose Compulsory Open Standards”. In that post I described how fundamentally flawed the survey was: for example as can be seen in a question on proposed Web service request delivery standards, SOAP v1.1 and v 1.2 were given as options but despite the form inviting alternatives, it was only possible to add a few words. As I concluded in the post

sadly I see nothing to indicate that the government has an understanding of the implications of any decisions that may be taken as a result of this flawed information-gathering exercise.

The report on the survey acknowledged the survey’s many deficiencies with “Around a quarter of the additional comments were critical of the survey, especially the content and its structure, ease of handling and the time it took to complete“.  In its analysis of 970 responses (which include responses to the various sections from me)  the report (in a page which, strangely, seems to be scanned and therefore can’t be copied as text) states that “issues were raised regarding the difficulties in implementing an open standards approach … A please was also made for Government not to impose regulatory constraints or red tape that would make it difficult for suppliers to comply, in particular smaller SMEs“. The so-called UK Government betrayal of open standards seems hardly to be due to lobbying by Microsoft but a recognition of the fundamentally flawed survey methodology which, ironically, seemed to regard Microsoft’s RTF format as an open standard but has no place for RSS (in any of its guises) which, whilst not recognised by a formal standards body (unlike Atom) is not a proprietary standard and is widely used on a global basis.

Openness in One Country?

Is it desirable to mandate a particular ideology (a set of ideas that constitute one’s goals, expectations and actions), such as an open standards ideology? Back in 2003 myself, Alastair Dunning, Marieke Guy and Lawrie Phipps  write a paper entitled Ideology Or Pragmatism? Open Standards And Cultural Heritage Web Sites  in which we highlighted risks of a top-down imposition of standards, particularly at a time of innovation. We developed these ideas further in papers on “A Standards Framework For Digital Library Programmes” , “A Contextual Framework For Standards“, “Addressing The Limitations Of Open Standards” and “What Does Openness Mean To The Museum Community?“.

In January 2010 JISC CETIS organised a “Future of Interoperability Standards” meeting. The reports on the meeting included the following comments:

• “The second day attracted more people than expected: the good news is that quite a few people seem to care about the future of interoperability standards. The bad news is that the day was organized because of the feeling of dissatisfaction with how standardization of learning technologies is taking place. … the standardization process is far from optimal: it is slow, doesn’t always lead to results, or at least not always to results that matter to folks outside of these meetings” Published on Erik Duval’s blog.
• “.. it is generally agreed that the development and adoption of specifications and standards is not a simple and straightforward process …” Meeting report by Li Yuan [PDF format].

“… the interoperability standards in the LET domain failed miserably. Second, the ICT developed more to the benefit of Learning, Education and Training than anybody could dream of. All of sudden, anybody (well, so we claim) can do almost anything with technology to support what they want in learning, e.g., finding information, expressing views from different perspectives, building communities, etc. Who asks any more for standards? Well, the enduser shouldn’t anyway, but then the ones that should ask for LET standards are not very enthusiastic either!“

It seems that whilst journalists and policy makers may welcome the certainties provided  by commitments to open standards, experts in the field continue to have reservations.  Experts who are well-versed in the history of mandating standards within the higher education sector may recall the difficulties this caused when OSI networking standards were mandated, and Coloured Book software was developed to provide a migration path to full use of the OSI network stack. However a alternative set of standards, not developed by ISO, a formal international standards body, but by an organisation called IETF which developed RFCs (Requests for Comments)  started to become popular and eventually user pressure led to an embarrassing (and no doubt costly) move away from OSI standards and an adoption of TCP/IP standards.  There is clearly a need to avoid repeating such mistakes!

And yet whilst I continue to warn against premature mandation of open standards, the value of ‘standards’ (such as RSS) which may not be endorsed by an open standards body and the benefits which can be gained by use of design principles (such as REST) rather than open standards (such as the Web Services stack) I have previously given by support for research council’s mandates for open access.  Is there not an inconsistency in these views?

For me, the difference is in prioritising the users’ perspectives.  Open access can facilitate ease of access to resources  by end users. As Ross Mounce pointed out in his guest blog post on  Open Access to Science for Everyone:

But the withdrawal of open standards, such as RSS, which are not endorsed by an open standards or open standards, such as the MP3 audio format, which are encumbered by patent which makes it difficult for them to be used in an open source environment, will cause problems for the end user.

Another difference is that policies on open access are primarily about business models for institutions, publishers and funders, rather than technical issues. In contrast policies on open standards will be influenced by marketplace considerations across a variety of sectors (e.g. software vendors, hardware vendors, mobile phone vendors, media companies, etc.) and will affects a much wider group of stakeholders, including academics, researchers and students as consumers and individuals as well as within their place of work or study.

We can benefit from open practices. But when Engels asked “”Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone?” we saw from Stalin’s doctrine of Socialism in One Country of the dangers of such approaches.  If we want the government to support open standards across our country, we need to ensure that the accompanying policies our flexible enough to embrace user needs and the complexities of the market place. And if this means that users will want to listen to podcasts produced by central and local government and other public sector bodies on their iPods, we should allow them to do so, even if this means continued support for RSS and MP3.

RT @LnDDave: Too many people focus on the metric instead of the impact < and its impact that matters otherwise what is the point#trainchat [source]

RT @LnDDave: Too much of ROI is sterile data; use the data to help tell a better story < I like story telling makes it real #trainchat  [source]

Interestingly, Lesley noticed that I had favourited her tweets and provided some additional contextual information:

@briankelly…tks for faving tweets. I have taken part in a couple of really good tweetchats this week worth a look #trainchat swchat

This made me realise how the simple act of favouring a tweet is an action which can provide an identification of interest and lead to a subsequent dialogue – a good example, I feel, of frictionless sharing in action.  Having been given the context to those two tweets I was able to find a post on “#TrainChat: Recap of our Twitter Chat with David Kelly“. This summary,  incidentally described how “For the sake of clarity, we’ve condensed Kelly’s various tweets into a single response, and in places cleaned up a little bit of Twitter grammar” – an interesting example of an emerging practice for the curation of tweets.

Although this online Twitter chat covered “Three Essential Tips for New Online Trainers” the discussions about metrics for learning resonated with me in another context – our rapper sword dancing team’s performance in the annual DERT 2012 competition. We had a great time dancing in pubs in Soho and felt that our dances reflected the dedication we had shown in practices coming up to the competition, although we were conscious of the mistake we made in one of the competition spots. However it wasn’t until we saw how the other teams did that we realised how disappointed we felt – we were in bottom place :-( Even worse, not in the bottom place in the Premier Class, but the Olympic Class, the second division. I’ll not comment on the fact that in this traditional male dance we were beaten by three women’s team and two mixed teams, but being beaten by a morris team was embarrassing!

In the debriefing which took place on the first practice evening after the competition we agreed that our standard of dance had failed to keep up with our peers in recent years.  We acknowledged that the judges’ comments were fair and that even though the marking system had its flaws, the scores were a valid reflection of the standard of our dance compared with the other teams (we should add that with scores for the comic characters from one judge of 10 and 12 out of a maximum of 10, the aberrations in the marking sometimes worked to our advantage!)

At the debriefing we agree that we should set a goal of being in the top three at next year’s event, for the dance team, musicians and characters. We also agreed that we needed to develop a new dance, in keeping with the current expectations and standards which have been raised over recent years. We also agreed that to achieve these new team goals we needed to have a more coherent approach to our weekly dance practices and regular dances in pubs around the area and at folk festivals.

How does this relate to the comments about ROI and learning analytics? For me it is clear that in this context:

• It is easy to be self-deluded about the quality of one’s  performance.
• It is also easy to be self-deluded when reading scores and interpretting the feedback.
• Being able to have evidence on one’s ranking with one’s peers can provide a better understanding of the perceived value of the performance.
• Such evidence can inform subsequent goals for improvement.

But the interesting aspect was that the stories, the comments from the judges which said, for example “Good strong beat and nice changes” could be misleading. In our case the value was to be found in the numeric scores, but the scores in comparison with others and not in isolation.

Of course, whilst such considerations may be important in the context of rapper sword dancing, it would be inappropriate to apply such views to, say, learning analytics. After all, rapper dancing is important, whereas learning is supposed to be about fun, isn’t it.

Finally, we were pleased with the performance after our first dance. The judges gave us the following scores:

What do you think – perhaps of our dance, but also on the value of metrics for such cultural activities? A video of the dance is available on YouTube and embedded below.

Steve’s post provides an useful introduction to Creative Commons and the benefits which Creative Commons can provide across the sector and concludes by suggesting that Creative Commons is “going to be very big news indeed for all web users in the near future“.

I agree, but how should one reuse resources published under a Creative Commons licence, as I’m doing here, and what are the associated risks?

The licence allows me to reuse the content for non-commercial purposes provided a give acknowledgements to the rights owner (as I have done) and I make my post available under the same licence conditions (and I have included the rights statement and Creative Commons logo from the source post).

Although I am under no legal obligation to inform Steve of my reuse of his post I have chosen to do so so that he is not surprised if he sees the republished post.

I did point out that replicated web content may (slightly) undermine the Google ranking for the resource, as Google can treat replicated content as an attempt to spam Google’s index.  However, as Steve is aware and has commented in his post, the value of providing an additional access path for such content will outweigh this slight concern.

Reusing content provided under a Creative Commons licence can also  lead to the question regarding what the content actually is.  In this case I have chosen to reuse the words, images and links, although the underlying HTML representation may have changed since we use different blog platforms.  Since Steve has not applied a No-derivative clause in the licence I could, however, have chosen to edit the content which might have included not including the image and links provided in the source material.  It should also be noted that in a comment made to the blog post Joscelyn  pointed out a minor error in the original post – the post stated that ”Much of the content on Wikipedia for example is licensed under Wikimedia Commons – a version of CC” but in fact “Wikipedia text is licensed with Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike (CC BY SA) licence not a version of a CC licence“]. I could have edited the original post but chose to include an editor’s note.

The final comment I would make is that the licence which applies by default to content published on this blog is CC-BY; a more liberal Creative Common licence which does not restrict reuse to non-commercial purposes or require reuse to apply the same licence.  The blog now contains resources with a variety of licences which, ideally, would be described in a machine-understandable form through use of tools such as the WordPress Creative Commons License Manager or the Open Attribute plugins. The latter describes how:

OpenAttribute allows you to add licensing information to your WordPress site and individual blogs. It places information into posts and RSS feeds as well as other user friendly features. This plugin is an part of the OpenAttribute project which is part of Mozilla Drumbeat.

However these plugins are not available on the WordPress.com platform,  so it does not seen currently to be possible to describe the rights for blog posts and embedded content in a machine-readable fashion. But since this is the case for many digital resources, this is not of great concern to me.

I am still in agreement with Steve that Creative Commons is “going to be very big news indeed for all web users in the near future” and we should all develop (and share) practices for consuming other people’s content which they have provided using such licences. I’d also welcome suggestions as to who should be described as the author of this post as, unlike other guest posts I’ve published this week, this contains significant intellectual content from me.  I think this will have to be described as a post with joint authors.

The Commons Touch

Many people assume that because the web is open, any and all content is open for copying and reuse. It is not. Use some content and you could well be breaking copyright law. Many sites host copyrighted material, and many people are confused about what they can reuse or copy. My advice is this - assume that all content is copyrighted unless otherwise indicated.In the last few years, the introduction of Creative Commons licensing has ensured that a lot of web based content is now open for reuse, repurposing and even commercial use. The Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig is one of the prime movers behind this initiative. Essentially, Creative Commons has established a set of licences that enables content creators to waive their right to receive any royalties or other payment for their work. Many are sharing their content for free, in the hope that if others find it useful, they will feel free to take it and use it. Creative Commons is a significant part of the Copyleft movement, which seeks to use aspects of international copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work for free, as long as it is attributed to the creator. Any subsequent reiterations of the work must also be made available under identical conditions. In keeping with similar open access agreements, Copyleft promotes four freedoms:

Freedom 0 – the freedom to use the work,
Freedom 1 – the freedom to study the work,
Freedom 2 – the freedom to copy and share the work with others,
Freedom 3 – the freedom to modify the work, and the freedom to distribute modified and therefore derivative works.

Finding free for use images on the web is now fairly easy. Normal search will unearth lots of images. But these are not necessarily free images. Many will have copyright restrictions. To find the free stuff go to Google and click on the cog icon at the top right of the screen. Select the Advanced Search option. Next, scroll down the screen until you find the drop down box labelled ‘usage rights’. You will be presented with four options:

1. Free to use or share
2. Free to use or share, even commercially
3. Free to use, share or modify
4. Free to use, share or modify, even commercially

Whatever option you choose, you will be presented with a reduced collection of images that still meet the requirements of the search, but under the conditions of that specific licence. Now you have a collection of images you can use under the agreements of Creative Commons. Use them for free under these agreements and you are complying with international copyright law. Don’t forget the attribute the source!

So why would people wish to give away their content for nothing? I have previously written about my own personal and professional reasons for doing so in ‘Giving it all away‘, but just for the record, I will summarise:

Giving away your content for free under a CC licence ensures that anyone who is interested in your work does not have to pay for it or worry about whether they are licenced under copyright law to use your content. In today’s economic uncertain climate, it makes sense to be equitable and to give content away that others have a need to see and can make good use of. It also means that users will do some of your dissemination for you. Your ideas will be spread farther if you give them away for free, than they necessarily will if you ask people to pay a copyright fee or royalty. If you allow repurposing of your content, the rewards can be even greater. Some of my slideshows have been translated into other languages. Having your content translated into Spanish for example, opens up a huge new audience not only in Spain, but also most of the continent of South America. Many are now licensing their work under CC because they know it makes sense. Much of the content on Wikipedia for example is licensed under Wikimedia Commons – a version of CC [Note that in a comment on Steve Wheeler's post Joscelyn  has pointed out that "Wikipedia text is licensed with Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike (CC BY SA) licence not a version of a CC licence"]. So look out for Creative Commons licensing – it’s going to be very big news indeed for all web users in the near future.

Image source

The Commons touch by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Openly Commercial

The Non-commercial component of the Creative Commons (CC) licences has occasionally given rise to some uncertainty and debate amongst those interested in copyright licensing. (See About the Licences for a reminder of the different CC licences.)

The CC licences which contain the NC component refers to commercial use, as used:

in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.

So what does that cover exactly?

CC guidance below and from @mollyali is very useful, but as with many things of a legal nature, they do not provide absolute certainty, as there are usually a number of factors at play. As described in the FAQ which asks ‘Does my use violate the NonCommercial clause of the licenses?‘ on the Creative Commons wiki:

In CC’s experience, whether a use is permitted is usually pretty clear, and known conflicts are relatively few considering the popularity of the NC licenses. However, there will always be uses that are challenging to categorize as commercial or noncommercial. CC cannot advise you on what is and is not commercial use. If you are unsure, you should either contact the creator or rightsholder for clarification, or search for works that permit commercial uses. Please note that CC’s definition does not turn on the type of user: if you are a non profit or charitable organization, your use of an NC-licensed work could run afoul of the NC restriction; and if you are a for-profit entity, your use of an NC-licensed work does not necessarily mean you have violated the term.

A CC commissioned study on “how people understand ‘noncommercial use’” was published in 2009. @plagiarismtoday provides a good potted summary of the report. Notwithstanding the 2009 report and “known conflicts” relating to the NC licensed being “relatively few” the NC component of the CC licence still generates much deliberation and debate.

Some objections to the NC licences relate to a viewpoint that they are not truly ‘open’ as they block licence interoperability and frictionless remix and reuse of content. The NC licence remains popular, however, and some CC adopters may well experiment initially by using a NC licence before choosing more permissive licences in due course.

The CC BY NC SA licence is a popular choice of licence amongst Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs). The Open University’s OpenLearn, MIT Open Courseware (MITOCW) and Open Yale Courses (OYC) all use a Creative Commons (CC) BY NC SA licence for their open educational resources (OER).

The JORUM Final Report published in 2011, indicates that the majority of the resources deposited within the JORUM repository are from the Academy/JISC OER Programme and a high percentage is from HEIs and licensed with a CC BY NC SA licence.

Although OpenLearn, MITOCW & OYC, all use a CC BY NC SA licence, all three institutions provide additional ‘”guidelines intended to help users determine whether or not their use of OCW materials would be permitted”

There are differences between the guidelines provided by the three institutions in the degree of permissiveness. For example OpenLearn permits “educational institutions, commercial companies or individuals to use the CC licensed content” and permits use of the “content as part of a course for which you charge an admission fee” and permits the charging of “a fee for any value added services you add in producing or teaching based around the content providing that the content itself is not licensed to generate a separate, profitable income” This would therefore appear to permit a commercial training company to reuse OpenLearn CC BY NC SA licensed content as part of a fee paying training course as long as the licensed content itself is not monetised.

OYC, by contrast, does not permit sites, that “provides and/or promotes services for which the user will be charged a fee (e.g., tutor services)” to use the CC licensed content.

MITOCW, whilst stating that “A corporation may use OCW materials for internal professional development and training purposes“also states “A commercial education or training business may not offer courses based on OCW materials if students pay a fee for those courses and the business intends to profit as a result“. So a commercial organisation can carry out staff development using MITOCW CC BY NC SA licensed content but they may not provide chargeable external training.

Does it matter that even though MIT, Yale and the Open University all use the CC BY NC SA licence yet they intend and permit different uses of their licensed content?

Some of the benefits of CC licenses include the ease of use, and the familiarity of the symbols and the speed in understanding the human-readable Commons Deed. This enables the user of the licensed content to glean quite easily and quickly what their rights and obligations are in respect of the content. The provision of additional guidelines in the above examples may undermine some of these benefits and place an unnecessary burden on the user. It also contributes to uncertainty and detracts from any possibility of  consensus on the use and understanding of a NC licence.

The reason many institutions choose the NC licence may be to control the potential or perceived potential commercialisation of the licensed content. There is quite a compelling argument that content arising from state funded programme should be licensed with the most permissive terms. For example the US Department of Labour is funding $2 billion over four years to create OER materials for career training programs in community colleges. Where new learning materials are created using the grant funds, those materials must be made available under CC Attribution licence (CC BY).

I imagine it would not be easy in UK universities and colleges to demarcate “sate funded content” from the University’s “privately funded content” . Many HEIs and FEIs have a revenue generating ‘business arm’. What is state-funded and what is the commercial arm of the institution may be quite blurred.

To achieve the widest possible access and participation in global education the most appropriate CC licence for ‘open’ educational resources is the CC BY licence. But it doesn’t appear to be always such an easy procedural or cultural step for organisations to take.

If an institution decides that a CC licence with a NC component is the most appropriate licence for its needs, the CC+ Protocol may be worth exploring  for example by universities who may be making moves towards becoming private.

Creative Commons developed its free licences to enable people to share their works as they choose. Using the CC+ protocol permits copyright owners to easily accommodate acceptable non-commercial uses while directing commercial traffic to their own fee-based agreement.

What is CC+?

CC+ is a Creative Commons license plus another agreement, for example:

A copyright owner may pair a CC Attribution-Non-Commercial license [that is the CC] with a non-exclusive commercial agreement [that is the +] enabling a copyright owner to license the work commercially for a fee.

The [+] is a means to provide a simple click through to rights or opportunities beyond those offered in the CC licence. The creator is able to leverage the expanded exposure that results from otherwise freely distributed content.

CC+ is not another CC licence; rather it is a means to point users toward the copyright owner’s own “extension” of rights that may be additional to the existing CC license. The copyright owner is responsible for constructing the license that expresses those additional terms and conditions.

CC+ has many uses and advantages for both commercial and non-commercial users, for example:

• A copyright owner of content may choose to use a CC Attribution Non-Commercial (CC BY NC) Licence to make content available on the web so they can be shared easily and freely on a non-commercial basis providing attribution is given
• The copyright owner in this example may pair this CC BY NC licence with a + click-through to non-exclusive rights beyond those permitted under the CC licence such as allowing commercial use in return for a fee.

Other additional permissions beyond those provided in CC licences may include: permission to reuse without providing attribution (paired with any of the six CC licences); or permission to use without having to share alike (paired with CC BY SA or CC BY NC SA licences) or permission to create derivative works (paired with the CC BY ND or CC BY NC ND licences).

CC+ is another means by which copyright owners are able to exercise their copyright as they choose, on their own terms. Using the CC licence enables the free, easy and legal means of sharing on the web whilst the “extension” of permissions provided by the + has the benefit of clear “signposting” to commercial terms for additional uses of the copyrighted works.

This is a guest post by Joscelyn Upendran (@Joscelyn on Twitter). Any views expressed are personal views and not that of any organisation or employer, and not intended to be legal advice nor should they be relied upon as such.

Opening Up Events

Workshops, seminars, conferences: just some of the learning opportunities that are often closed, with any knowledge or resources contained therein accessible only to those who are able to physically attend a fixed point in time and space where the event takes place.  Yet these are some of the key ways we can disseminate and share knowledge in a really interactive, practical way.

UKOLN has a well-established role at the forefront of what have become termed “amplified” or open events. These are events where the event materials and discussions are amplified out via the local audience to their own professional networks using online social networking tools.  Such activities overlap neatly with the emergence of hybrid events, which are specially designed to allow a remote audience to participate in an event simultaneously with the local audience. Amplified events can often be used as a stepping stone for organisers who are consciously looking to move into hybrid events, or organisers who are just looking to increase their audience without substantially increasing the carbon impact of their event.

The JISC GEII Event Amplification Toolkit

Event amplification at IWMW 2012

I have been working with UKOLN in this area to help develop an Event Amplification Toolkit, as part of the JISC Greening Events II project.  The toolkit is designed to help event organisers decide what type of event is most appropriate for their needs (a traditional, hybrid or a fully virtual event) and provides tools to help organisers approach the task of amplifying their event.

The toolkit has been developed using lessons drawn from a series case study events, including Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2011), UKOLN’s Metrics and Social Web Services workshop, and most recently the 7th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC11).  These lessons have been condensed into a number of simple templates and two-page best practice briefings, which can be mixed and matched according to the event organisers’ requirements.  As new online services are emerging all the time, whilst others wane in popularity, these best practice briefings focus on general amplification activities, rather than specific third party tools.  The toolkit covers approaches to live video streaming, live commentary, discussion, and curation tools, providing examples of existing services, business models, resourcing requirements and risks which need to be considered.  The templates provide models for assessing risk and structuring an amplified event to achieve specific outcomes.

Open Approaches vs Open Tools

Whilst an event may be considered open by virtue of being amplified, many of the individual tools and services used to achieve this are third party commercial services, which may vary in their degree of openness and accessibility (depending how you define open, of course!).  This means that organising an open event can become a pragmatic exercise – using open platforms where available and offering alternative options where necessary to help make the event accessible to the widest range of users.

A prime example of this is the most popular tool for use at amplified events: Twitter.  Whilst Twitter is considered to be one of the more open social media platforms, participants must have an account with the service in order to take an active part in an event discussion. If you don’t have an account, you can only watch the discussion unfold, you cannot contribute. Opening up an event to the widest possible audience means you must consider those people who do not want to have a direct relationship with a service provider, like Twitter, by establishing an account with the service, no matter how little personal information is required in the process.  Tools like CoverItLive and ScribbleLive can provide the option for remote participants to offer comments and questions publicly without a registered account and without having to part with any information about their identity. The role of an event amplifier would then involve integrating these comments into the wider discussion beyond in a sensitive manner, particularly if that discussion is taking place prominently on Twitter.

As this example demonstrates, an amplified event may need to provide a mix of access points to open up all aspects of the event. This means that, in many ways, openness in an events context is less about the specific technologies employed and more about the attitude of the organisers and the way they blend a selection of tools to provide open access.  An open attitude when running an event could be summarised as:

• A commitment to the online audience as first class citizens, providing the same opportunities to access and interact within the live event as those physically in attendance.
• A commitment to sharing resources in multiple contexts as an aid to future discovery and reuse.
• A commitment to linking between resources so the audience has a clear path to guide them to other event resources or the same resources in alternative formats.
• A commitment to the use of creative commons licences, with respect to the speaker or copyright holder.

Looking Forward

We intend to amplify the toolkit itself according to these same principles and using the same techniques detailed in the report.  Our hope is that these resources will help others to approach the problem of opening up their events and reduce the carbon impact of their event by facilitating more people engaging from afar.

Kirsty Pitkin is a professional event amplifier. This is a newly emerging role, which involves working with conference organisers to help deliver an online dimension to traditional events by leveraging social media and other online tools to expand the audience for the event. She explores current research and best practice associated with amplified and hybrid events in her blog. Kirsty holds a Masters in Creative Writing and New Media from De Montfort University.

Email: kirsty.pitkin@tconsult-ltd.com
Blog: http://eventamplifier.wordpress.com/
Twitter: @eventamplifier

As a home worker Marieke takes a pro-active approach to her professional development as can be seen from her posts on her Ramblings of a Remote worker blog. In this post Marieke describes her participation in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC).

Professional Development

For me professional development has always been about being proactive. Patience is not one of my virtues. I’m not the sort of person who would sit and wait for my team leader to send me on a course, though I’m always open to suggestions.

Professional development according to Wikipedia refers to “skills and knowledge attained for both personal development and career advancement“. The way I see it, there are areas that I need to know more about to make me better at my job, and then there are areas that I want to know more about to give my job context and meaning. The goal is to balance the two and also to fit them alongside my day job.

I work from home (see my Ramblings of a Remote worker blog) and already travel a reasonable amount so any activities I can do from the comfort of my own swivel chair suit me fine. Over the last few years online professional development has really taken off, in a similar way to online learning. Although many courses cost there is now a plethora of open content out there that can be used in anyway you chose.

MOOCs

Massive Open Online Course crib sheet. This crib sheet was created for a workshop being presented at ISTE 2011 on using a MOOC model for professional development by Jeannette Shaffer

One recent addition is the Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs. The courses are free, open to all and comprise of open content. They tend to be hosted by Higher Education institutes and often students from that particular institution are encouraged to register. Often there is no credit for the course (though some use the Mozilla open badge systemor similar approaches) and no feedback for participants from the course leaders. The approach taken is a fluid one where participants are encouraged to blog about what they learn and interact with other participants by commenting on their posts.

As described in “7 things you should know about MOOCs” (PDF format):

“For the independent, lifelong learner, the MOOC presents a new opportunity to be part of a learning community, often led by key voices in education. It proves that learning happens beyond traditional school-age years and in a specific kind of room … Certainly as MOOCs develop, the scale on which these courses can be taught and the diversity of students they serve will offer institutions new territory to explore in opening their content to a wider audience and extending their reach into the community.“

The Massive Open Online Course crib sheet which is illustrated was created by Jeannette Shaffer and is available from Flickr.

Openness in Education

My first MOOC learning endeavor has been the Introduction to Openness in Education course (see the #ioe12 tweets) co-ordinated by David Wiley, associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University, US. This was an open course about openness in education – a little postmodern?! I came across the course via a colleague’s Twitter feed and after registering discovered that a couple of other colleagues were also giving MOOCs a go. We ended up meeting for coffee (See my post on #ioe12 Coffee Breaks with a Little Open Licensing Thrown In) to discuss how things had gone so far. Always good to have some support.

I’ve found the course a challenge, mainly due to time constraints, but also because the concept of ‘open’ is complex one. What does being ‘open’ truly mean? Some of the more orthodox advocates of the open movement could offer up a checklist of criteria to help us decide if a license, piece of software, resource, data set, policy, … (add whatever takes your fancy) is strictly open. For them openness is an ideology and a goal. However much of what is out there falls into the spaces in-between and often for good reason.

I’d agree that the movement towards openness is a good thing, though I am still unsure on how I feel about many aspects of it. Openness is not always possible or desirable and it brings with it responsibilities. My current work activities take me into the area of Research Data Management where FOI has a big impact. Requests for data sets (such as the recent Philip Morris smoking research request) are becoming more frequent and are not always for just reasons. A colleague of mine recently pointed me in the direction of a paper written back in 2000 by Martin Strathern entitled The Tyranny of Transparency. To summarise: transparency measures often have paradoxical outcomes like eroding trust and turning knowledge into information rather than information into knowledge. Openness, like free speech, is a double edged sword and we’d do well to ensure that we use the tool appropriately.

Conclusions

All my posts relating to my experiences of MOOCs and learning from open content are available from my blog. There’s no doubt that use of online courses and open content will significantly contribute to my professional development in the future. Learning in this way gives me the flexibility that my job and lifestyle require, however I know that I need to be disciplined and keep motivated if I want to make the most of these opportunities. As Oscar Wilde, a man who held a fairly cynical view of formal education, once said: “Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught“. Maybe a pro-active approach using MOOCs would have been more up his street!

It isn’t really news to say that the world libraries inhabit has changed almost beyond recognition in less than 20 years. Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight it will be possible to make sense of the rapid technological change and resulting shift in behaviours which combine to challenge the collections, services and perhaps the very existence of libraries. Whilst we continue to live through this information revolution, we seek to make educated guesses at the next trend, respond as we can to the very different expectations of our user communities, and develop strategies to ensure we remain relevant and sustainable in challenging times.

Several trends in particular seem to me to have made a marked contribution to the seismic landscape disruption which has followed the invention of the Web:

1. Transition to online from print – published content, particularly journals, being made available online and becoming, fairly quickly, the dominant delivery channel.
2. Challenges to traditional models of publishing – the rise of the open access agenda, and a general trend towards widespread support for openness, not just for published material but for underlying data, with a view to fostering sharing, reuse and linking.
3. The Social Web – interaction and conversation, sharing, tagging, developing personal networks for both social and business purposes.  Publication is no longer primarily about dissemination, but about sharing, reuse and conversation.
4. The development of large scale global public and commercial content hubs which have grown to dominate the ways in which information is published, discovered, and shared.

These, of course, aren’t entirely independent developments, and can instead be seen as components of an evolutionary (if not revolutionary) process which has brought us to today’s information landscape.  Equally, it is clear that change continues, and recent challenges to traditional scholarly publishing models serve to underline that.

The creation of one of these ‘hubs’ is the focus of this blog post. In just a few years we have seen the very rapid ascendency of Wikipedia as the preferred starting point for the sort of reference enquiry that would once have been directed to a traditionally published encyclopaedia, or a library reference desk. Despite scepticism, it has become a hugely popular resource, with evidence to support the reliability of crowd-sourced factual information, as a result of strict editing policies and zealous, perhaps over-zealous, editors.

In 2007, whilst Digital Library Manager at the National Library of Scotland I was interested to read of a project to use it to make library collections more widely known, and this encouraged me to initiate work at to do likewise. Unfortunately, the timing was not good, as concern about the credentials of editors, and allegations about attempts to influence Wikipedia entries had resulted in very careful vetting, and an aversion to anything which even hinted at advertising, even from the cultural sector. Some forays into relevant Wikipedia entries in fact resulted in my web developer’s account being shut down, almost immediately. Somewhat discouraged, we directed our effort at the more welcoming global networks, such as Flickr and YouTube.

Since then, Wikipedia seems to have adopted a more mature stance, still managing entries very carefully, but recognising that partnership with organisations with information which enriches its entries is to be welcomed rather than resisted (although a recent verbal exchange with a Wikipedia editor makes me think that this is still somewhat dependent on the outlook of individual editors). I was very interested to see the creation of the concept of the ‘Wikipedian in Residence’ at the British Museum, although my move from the National Library back into HE required a focus on other priorities.

Advertisements for the Wikipedia Lounge in the John Rylands University Library

An interior shot of the John Rylands Library in central Manchester

My move to The John Ryland University Library at the University of Manchester coincided with contact from Wikimedia UK, who were now actively seeking partnerships with education institutions, recognising the mutual benefit of working with students, academics and libraries to foster more effective use of Wikipedia as a resource, to encourage content creation and editing by experts, and to link entries to relevant resources. As a Library at a major research intensive institution, with the additional responsibility of steward of an internationally important special collections Library, we were identified as a particularly valuable pilot partner. For our part, influenced very much by the sort of strategic thinking coming from organisations like OCLC, which encouraged libraries to collaborate with large information hubs, we were very enthusiastic about a partnership which would help us connect to a global network level hub, and also address the digital literacy agenda.

We have begun the engagement process, which we hope will develop into a substantial project which includes a ‘Wikipedian in Residence’. To date, we have hosted a ‘Wikipedia Lounge’, which saw academics and students meet Wikipedians to learn more about getting involved and creating content.  This event attracted academics, students and librarians, and we have plans to repeat it.  We are now in discussions with Wikimedia UK about setting up a 12 month pilot project which would see a Wikipedian in Residence based at the John Rylands Library, working with our curators, students and academics to expose our collections, encourage further research and learning, develop a network of Wikipedians at Manchester (we already have some), and place Wikipedia within our digital literacy strategy as a powerful tool which when used effectively can play an important part in University teaching and research.  There are already a number of references to our collections in Wikipedia entries, e.g.in biographical pages such as that of the author Alison Uttley, which serve to demonstrate the very great untapped potential.  Perhaps the best entry which focuses on a specific item on our collections is for the Rylands Library Papyrus P52, also known as the St John’s fragment (illustrated) which ranks as the earliest known fragment of the New Testament in any language.

Fragment of St John's Gospel: recto

Of course there are concerns about Wikipedia: it may not be reliable; it can be used as an easy substitute for comprehensive research and study; it can be difficult to change erroneous content, etc. But to ignore it or dissuade students from its use reminds me of the approach that was sometimes taken in the face of the rapid rise of Google in the late 1990s. It is a battle we are unlikely to win, and so much more could be achieved by working with, not against, the new information providers, especially when so much of what we are about has synergy: open access, collaboration, no profit motive, etc.

It is early days for us in this engagement at the moment, but I have high hopes. And I’m sure that when we introduce our Wikimedia UK contacts to the wonders of the John Rylands Library, they will find it impossible not to see the obvious potential!

Simon Bains is Head of Research and Learning Support and Deputy Librarian, The John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester. You can see his Library Website staff page or follow him on Twitter: @simonjbains

In this guest post  James Burke (@deburca) explores what the term OER currently means to him, although he admits the “I’m sure that it will mean something different to me 12 months from now…“.

What is/are OER?

Even though OER has a new global logo it is one of those terms that appears to have no formally agreed definition and people’s use of and reference to the term OER changes over time.

“The term OER is broad and still under discussion” and over the past few years OER has been used as a “supply-side term” and remained “largely invisible in the academy”. Metaphors (“Open Education and OER is like…?”) have been used to take a light hearted look at potential issues and tensions such as those between “Big OER and Little OER” and all in-between. On the definition front Stephen Downes has written a useful “Half an Hour” essay: “Open Educational Resources: A Definition” and David Wiley (Open Content and the 4Rs) recently put forward: “2017: RIP for OER?” (or not…)

The FAQ page for Open Education Week (held on 5-10 March 2012) provides a useful, current overview of OER and Open Education.

One of the “core attributes” of OER is that access to the “content is liberally licensed for re-use in educational activities, favourably free from restrictions to modify, combine and repurpose the content; consequently, that the content should ideally be designed for easy re-use in that open content standards and formats are being employed”. So, now that I have re-used the new and “liberally licensed” OER global logo in this post I have a number of options and queries regarding adherence to the licence and provision of any requested attribution such as “how do I properly attribute a work offered under a Creative Commons license?” leading me to “what are the best practices for marking content with Creative Commons licenses?”.

I’ll settle with using: “OER Logo” © 2012 Jonathas Mello, used under a Creative Commons license: BY-ND

…but maybe I should have included this attribution directly beneath the image to be less ambiguous to the human reader?, or maybe I should have associated the licence and attribution more “semantically” and unambiguously with the image for the “machine reader”?, or maybe I should have just have made my life simple and just used “Kevin” to add attribution directly to the image to cater for both human and machine readers?, and what is this “machine” anyway…?

Machine readable, but what “machine”?

The Creative Commons license-choosing tool provides you with a snippet of RDFa that you can embed in your web-based content with the idea that this “machine readable” metadata can be automatically identified and extracted by “machines” such as search engines and made available via their search, e.g. Google Advanced Search. This “machine readable” licence can also be used to facilitate accurate attribution via browser and CMS plugin “machines” such as Open Attribute as well as being used for automated cataloguing, depositing etc..

Creative Commons is not the only “machine readable” licence, many countries have their own “interoperable” Public Sector Information/Open Government Licences such as the UK Government Licensing Framework , and many “vanity licenses” for content in both the public and private sectors have also emerged but Creative Commons remains the most widely used technically & legally interoperable licensing framework.

The Google Advanced search help refers to their usage rights filter but states that this filter is used to show “pages that are either labeled with a Creative Commons license or labeled as being in the public domain”. Bing does not have an equivalent usage rights filter but their “advanced operators” can be used to derive the similar results, e.g. inbody:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by “search term” loc:gb can be used to find UK content that likely has a Creative Commons licence deed link in the metadata or in the HTML body.

The implementation of Creative Commons licences into content can be quite variable ranging from using a Creative Commons icon in a PDF file that contains no link to the license deed through to a complete snippet of RDFa containing the full works title together with attribution, source and more permissions URLs.

Mainstream Web Applications such as Flickr, Soundcloud, Vimeo, Scribd and SlideShare all allow the association of a Creative Commons licence with uploaded image, audio, video or “Office” document content that is then publicly visible and searchable via Google and Bing et al with the site: operator and a usage rights filter. Oddly, for most of these Web Applications Google and Bing provide the best search results and usage rights filters within the Web Applications can be a rare find.

So, to me, the “machine” that is “reading” OER is really any Web application that can consume openly licensed content accessible via the Web and for convenience the best way of me finding this “stuff” is via the mainstream search engines, even if I do have to use a usage rights filter…

Openly licensed resources and “stuff” is readily available on the Web

Arguably, the Internet and the Web would not be where it is today without being “open” and built upon a “stack” of standards and simplification that specifically lack patents and their associated licences that need to be paid for. The Web has significantly lowered the cost of software and content collaboration, creation and publishing and encouraged the embracing of serendipity.

“Most of the Internet is run by volunteers who do not get paid, most of the Internet is run by amateurs”. – (video: Innovation in Open Networks) Joi Ito, Thinking Digital May 2010 (@joi)

Joi Ito speaking at #TDC10 from Codeworks Ltd on Vimeo.

http://prezi.com/bin/preziloader.swf

One of “open’s” main advantages over proprietary digital content has been the lowering of cost and the cost of failure. The main source of friction in the production of digital content used to be primarily at the content layer in the stack (see prezi and video above) but as this eased the highest cost and restriction causing the most friction to be present whilst consuming and publishing content has shifted towards the legal domain. With the introduction of open licensing frameworks such as Creative Commons that offer worldwide legal interoperability this legal friction is being eased.

More and more educational content is going through a “rights clearance” process and being published by Institutions with more permissive open licenses “openly” to the Web and by “openly” I mean visible to search engines and not behind authentication “walls” such as learning platforms. Quite often this Web published content is a copy with attribution back to the Institution and Institutionally held source and copied to more than one location – if you have a PowerPoint presentation why not upload to Scribd and SlideShare?

This content can now be readily discovered and shared, promoted or “amplified” via Social Networks and usage via metrics, metadata and paradata from various sources is readily and, in a lot of cases, openly available. Properly attributed derivative works should contains links back to the source and if not there are various methods of monitoring and obtaining duplicate content “openly” via Web Applications such as Blekko. This content being consumed can also surface people that are consuming it that can subsequently be used to discover how the re-used work is being used whether that be in a different context to the original, different language etc.

Derivative works are often created by “consumers” who are individuals and not Institutions or organisations and attribution is made to them personally so why not include attribution to the “authors” within the original Creative Commons license?, e.g. Copyright is held by the Institution but why not add acknowledgement to the people (with links to their preferred Social Graph “node”) that created the works so that they get their “whuffie” and be “openly selfish”?

I tend to follow people rather than organisations and to me the attribution to a person tends to be more important than attribution to the copyright owner as it tends to be the person that provides the most context in how the content is being used and from them I tend to “serendipitously” discover new content. This is nothing new and fundamental to the emerging MOOCs.

“Being an expert is less & less about knowing everything but knowing how to find something.” Reid Hoffman @ #TED chi.me/yUQort

— Bill Gross (@Bill_Gross) February 29, 2012

What OER means to me at the moment

For me, at the moment, the most important aspect of OER is the availability of openly licensed content accessible via the Web, that has a clear provenance of all assets used with attribution to the people that created it as well as to the copyright owner, kind of “OeR”.

This “OeR” includes all “non academic institution” content such as that from Khan Academy, Peer 2 Peer University and Flat World Knowledge and ideally this “OeR” has more permissive Creative Commons licenses and avoids the NoDerivs and NonCommercial conditions that restrict my usage rights as per the “4Rs Framework”.

..but is this OER and can this type of OER use that new global logo?

Before the internet, there were non-trivial costs associated with disseminating paper-based research publications – each and every page of every article of every journal cost the publisher money to produce. Every single paper copy of those journals needed to be physically sent by post to all institutions, libraries and individuals that wanted those journals. This was both a costly and complex process, so it was sensibly outsourced to full-time professional publishers to deal with, some of whom were commercial for-profit enterprises – at first this didn’t cause any problems.

But now the internet allows unlimited copies of research publications to be created for zero cost and these can be advertised and disseminated at relatively insignificant costs – just the cost of bandwidth, keeping servers up and running, maintaining a user-friendly website that search engines can crawl, and providing an RSS feed to notify interested parties of new journal articles. Indeed, when Tim Berners-Lee created the Web in 1991, it was with the aim of better facilitating scientific communication and the dissemination of scientific research.

Note that for the sake of clarity we’ll ignore the role of manuscript-submission, organising peer-review, and the peer review process itself here – I contend these are only of minor administrative cost. Peer-review is provided for free by other academics and manuscript-submission is a largely automated process often requiring little editorial input. Only organising peer review is an administrative task that might conceivably have a significant and real time cost. Furthermore these processes need not necessarily be performed by the same organisation that acts to distribute the publications (decoupled scholarly publication), a nice idea as popularised by Jason Priem.

Yet, the models of payment for publication of, and distribution of research works are still largely centred on paying-for-access, rather than paying-to-publish. In the digital age this is inefficient and illogical. Why try and charge millions of separate customers (institutions, libraries, academics, and other interested persons) for a resource – a complex undertaking to organise in itself, when you can simply ask for a sustainably priced one-off charge to the funder/authors of the content to be published. The latter author-pays model is clearly the simpler, easier to implement option. Yet, I contend that the reader-pays model is currently dominant, especially with commercial for-profit publishers because it can generate excessive profits through its opaqueness and inefficiency (relative to the ultimate goal of providing free, Open Access to scientific knowledge for everyone).

The interests of shareholders, and board members of for-profit publishing companies are now hugely conflicting with that of research funders, institutions and academics. By definition, the primary goal of a for-profit publishing company is profit. In that respect, some academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist, with their unscrupulous profiteering as gatekeepers denying access to scientific knowledge. Whereas the goal of STM researchers & funders is surely for knowledge to be created and shared with the world. To myself and thousands of other academics it is clear without further explanation that these two goals cannot be simultaneously be maximised. One strategy works to maximise profit by proactively denying access to vital materials, and punishing those caught sharing materials, whilst the other works to maximise dissemination potential, so that all (who have access to a computer – unfortunately not everyone has access to one of these, but this problem is out of scope) can if they wish read the material, whilst forfeiting maximum profit-potential.

Of course, if research is entirely privately funded, it need not be openly-published – one cannot force private companies to disclose all research and development they do (although efforts by certain privates to share to cure malaria and other humanitarian problems are certainly very welcome!). But as I understand it, the majority of scientific research is publicly-funded and thus there is a clear moral duty to share results with everyone e.g. taxpayers. To paraphrase James Harvey: if you want to keep your research private, fund it yourself. That’s the privilege of private funding.

The tension between librarians (who have to negotiate to buy subscription-access to journals) and academics united on one side, and for-profit publishing companies on the other is particularly noticeable at the moment, hence The Economist’s labelling of this as a potential Academic Spring, analogous to the recent revolutions overthrowing malevolent incumbent powers – the Arab Spring.  Note that a cartoon representation of this debate can be seen on YouTube and is embedded below.

Indeed it is not just academics who benefit from access to scientific literature – as is being documented by a new initiative called Who Needs Access? There are a huge number and variety of people that would benefit from legally unrestricted, free, Open Access to scientific publications e.g. patients, translators, artists, journalists, teachers and retired academics. When one hits a paywall asking for 51USD for just 24 hours access to a single article on palliative care – it’s no wonder people are often put-off reading scientific literature. Thus everyone with even the slightest bit of curiosity about scientific research would stand to benefit from Open Access to scholarly publications, as achieved by the author-pays model.

So where would all these publications go, if not on servers owned and controlled by for-profit publishers? The ideal, natural home as Björn Brembs argues are libraries and university presses as institutional repositories for research publications, code and data. Currently IRs are used as Green OA archives which achieve only limited success in providing free full-text access. But as Networked Repositories for Digital Open Access Publications perhaps they might enable Open Access for all, as well as reducing the overall cost of publishing research.

In areas of science that have already shifted to this model e.g. some of Physics and related subjects with ArXiv (which is arguably analogous to a subject-specific Cornell University IR); Science is distributed pre-review with remarkable ease and cost effectiveness at <$7 per article submitted.

Some final thoughts:

• “We the public pay 10 billion USD annually in journal subscription fees and 200 billion USD for research; what value do we get? And what value do we lose by closed access?”
• Can We Justify The Involvement Of Corporate Publishers In Scholarly Communication?

We lose so many legal freedoms with closed access publishing, and its tendency to assign all copyright to publishers (not just mere access, but also text-mining rights, and the right to re-use information in even vaguely commercial contexts) that we cannot and should not allow this continue any longer, as it is causing irreparable damage to the future usability of scientific literature.

Ross Mounce, a PhD Candidate at the University of Bath is an active member of the Open Science community, pushing for beneficial reforms in scholarly publishing. Having had trouble in the past getting research data from publications, he is very proactive in blogging and giving talks on how scientific publishing can improve utility and dissemination by making greater and better use of digital technologies.

Contact details

Email: ross.mounce@gmail.com
Blog: http://www.science3point0.com/palphy/
Twitter: @rmounce

The latest issue of JISC Inform, which was published yesterday, features several articles on the theme of openness.

In an article entitled “Open Doors” several JISC programme managers describes aspects of openness of importance to them and the programmes they manage.  Rachel Bruce, the Innovation Director of Digital Infrastructure Team, provides an overview of “How your digital infrastructure supports open learning and research” which introduces the following contributions:

• Amber Thomas on ‘Open resources’
• Neil Jacobs on ‘Open communication’
• Simon Hodson on ‘Open research data’
• Andy McGregor on ‘Open developer communities’
• Ben Showers on ‘Open standards’

In addition an article on “Making the most of the open web” provides advice from “three experts [who] discuss how to use the social web to increase traffic to your work and make it more discoverable“.  I have contributed a piece on blogging as an open practices, based on the approaches taken in publishing this blog. In addition Grace Owen, JISC Communications Coordinator, provides a video summary on “Running a successful hybrid event” and Steph Gray, director of Helpful Technology, gives a podcast providing advice for “colleges and universities embarking on their first use of digital communication tools such as Twitter and Facebook through to those who are well established and looking for the next new tech trend“.

Finally Jennifer Jones (@jennifermjones) describes a day in the life of an open researcher.

The importance of openness as a means of achieving institutional business objectives in teaching and learning, research and related areas on work are frequently addressed in this blog.  I’m therefore pleased to announce the launch of a series of guest blog posts which will be published on this blog tomorrow and next week which will address a range of aspects related to openness, including open research, open education resources, open scholarly practices and open licences.

Myself and the guest bloggers hope that these posts will encourage a discussion on the ways on which a variety of open practices can enhance the effectiveness and impact of activities which take place across the higher and further education sector.

On Saturday, while having a few day’s holiday in Madrid, I came across a guide to the Internet The guide will be familiar to many, but I hadn’t realised that it was to be found in the Prado Museum in Madrid. The strange thing about the guide was that it was created between 1490 and 1510. The guide is shown below and in case you are unfamiliar with the name, as I was, it is known as The Garden of Earthly Delights by the Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch.

Image from Wikipedia

When I saw the painting (a triptych) I was reminded of the poster entitled The Web Is Agreement by Paul Downey which I highlighted in post entitled Tower of WS-Babel in January 2008.

Image from thewebisagreement.com. Available under a Creative Commons licence.

Paul’s poster illustrated the Web as a place containing both good and evil, with the dark places representing both inappropriate content and inaccessible places which could not easily be visited due to a failure to abide by the Web’s commandments.

The Role of The Librarian

Bosch’s painting is described in Wikipedia as providing “a didactic warning on the perils of life’s temptations“. Whilst the title of Borsch’s painting focusses on earthly perils, we now know there are perils to be faced in the online environment. But what is the role of librarians in a world in which we need to acknowledge that there are perils to be faced online?

In the early days of the Web there was a feeling that the role of librarians was to identify the safe areas of the Web and to provide maps of such areas. Initially librarians who had HTML authoring expertise would provide such links and later services such as the RDN, which later was renamed Intute, provide links to trusted sources.

The role of the librarian was, it seems, to provide guides to the safe areas of the Web; areas in which, perhaps,  unicorns would safely graze with no beasties to be found.

But today we know that such patronising approaches are no longer applicable, especially in a higher education context. Instead the role of the librarian continues to provide maps of the online environment, but in addition to provide advice if the visitor chooses to explore off the beaten path.  The librarian is also well-positioned to warn of the dangers in unquestioning trust in maps provided by others – Karen Blakeman, for example,frequently highlights the risks in treating Google as an infallible guide, views which have been echoed by Phil Bradley.  It should also be noted that the warnings depicted in The Web is Agreement poster also highlight  terrain which it might be difficult to access, special browser technologies, such as Flash support, may be needed – but again the emphasis is on providing education on dangers rather than imposing barriers to travel.

What of the Marketing Department?

Detail taken from Wikipedia image

If the role of the the librarian is a be a supportive guide, which is the role of the marketing department?

Traditionally we probably feel that our institution’s marketing department tends to provide a positive gloss on our institution: the sky is cloudless; the sun is shining and the students are  attractive. The marketing department at Borsch’s institution would , no doubt, pick on the unicorns as a positive image, and highlight statistics on unicorn satisfaction levels and future employability.

A post by Karin Joly entitled Not your usual #highered Admissions Video: Beer, Blood and Applications? published on the CollegeWebEditor.com blog suggested an alternative way of making your institution appealing to potential students. This time, as can be seen on the YouTube video, rather than the cliche of a happy student environment, we had a unearthly guide who magical powers sadly came to an unfortunate end.