I'd like use this blog post to do a bit of crowdsourcing around perspectives on institutional Web 2.0 guidelines and policies. This is a theme I'll pick up on for my open mic slot at the 2010 JISC CETIS Conference. It would be great to get some feedback before the event that I can fold into my talk, so please feel free to comment via my blog or add your thoughts to this Google Docs shared document. I'll take the results to our E-Learning Advisory Group meeting later in the month for discussion, so this is a good opportunity to influence policy.

First off, here's a quick recap on Web 2.0, courtesy of Michael Wesch:



Pretty upbeat stuff, isn't it? Some key Web 2.0 themes for me are: Encouraging people to share experiences (both positive and negative) of services, in addition to sharing ideas and content; choosing copyright/open source licenses strategically; use of techniques such as hash tags and RSS to build something which is more than the sum of its parts; your Plan B for if a service folds or ceases to be useful; traps for the unwary, e.g. sharing more than you intended - and the intersection of teaching and learning, research and admin. [As publicly funded University outputs, are OERs inherently different from research publications? Perhaps both have a place in the Institutional Repository?]

I'll expand on these points below, then hand over to you for some audience participation... :-)

This blog post describes some work that Garry Booth and I have been doing at Loughborough to prototype a Mobile Web site as part of our student portal project. It expands on the themes I raised in my talk at the recent Developing for the Mobile Web workshop hosted by UKOLN and the ILRT. My slides can be viewed below via slideshare.net...

Mobile Web at Loughborough

In this post I will present some stats around our students' choice of browsers and operating system which I have been gathering for the last month, as we begin a new academic year. These figures were arrived at in a similar way to my recent analysis of this blog's readership, using Google Analytics. Google Analytics stats were collected on visits to the login page for our student Google Apps domain.

Of particular note is that Internet Explorer is now at a rather meagre 42% take-up, with Chrome and Firefox vying for equal second place in the browser league table at 23% each.  In reality we may have any number of people who use more than one browser, but I'll quickly gloss over that and move on... :-)

The stats also sound a note of caution around any assumptions that Windows Vista can now be safely ignored - 40% of the machines using our service were running Vista. The digerati may have written it off and moved on, but people out in the real world are actually still running this stuff.

I’ve blogged in the past about our project to create a student portal at Loughborough this Autumn. This post is intended to provide a quick update and also to explore some of the architectural issues that have arisen.

In a previous post I introduced the concept that a portal did not necessarily equate to “a portal system”, i.e. a dedicated piece of software. This is a theme that I want to pick up on here. If we had been putting a portal in a few years ago, then we would almost certainly have surveyed the market and looked at packages like uPortal, Sakai and Liferay. Why not simply put one of these systems in now?

Here's why...

Martin Hamilton at IWMW10 from UKOLN on Vimeo.

Here's a slightly cheesy video interview with me from the recent Institutional Web Managers Workshop at Sheffield, filmed by live blogger Kirsty Pitkin from TConsult.  In it there is the implication that events like this are worth their weight in gold, and the statement that I have had the equivalent of tens of thousands of pounds of free consultancy from IWMW10 alone.

All fine talk, but let's spend a moment deconstructing this...  The highlight of IWMW10 for me was that I became aware of an open source product that will save my institution around £50K over a three year timeframe. In my view this alone amply justifies the £350 conference registration fee. I also consider the event to be a masterclass in "event amplification", which I look at further below.

I recently carried out a survey of IT directors to gauge the level of interest in the sector in a "user group" to discuss Google Apps for Education or perhaps cloud computing more generally. There were 28 responses, which is quite a good sample size for something like this. As this seems to be something that people are generally keen on, I will aim to organize an initial meeting for Autumn 2010.

Check back for further updates as this work progresses, but first a quick precis of the survey results...

Let's imagine that you can't see to find out what's in that tin you just took out of the cupboard. This isn't a hypothetical scenario if you're visually impaired. Rice pudding, baked beans, or dog food? Doesn't bear thinking about, does it? Later on in this post I'll offer a simple solution for Android devices, but first here's a bit of background...