A quick report from Eduserv Symposium 2008, titled “Inside out – what do current web trends tell us a out the future of ICT provision for learners and researchers”.
First, a bit about the event itself, and how it worked as a learning experience
It was a one day event, held at the British Library's conference centre. Sadly the air-con had broken, so it was a little warm (understatement).
Given the subject area, it was fitting that much use was made of web technology, so we had a social networking site based on Ning (http://efsym2008.ning.com/ ), a webcast, live chat with CoverItLive, used by both delegates at the event and remote viewers (about 20-25?), plus we were encourages to blog/twitter.
So what do this do for the event? About a quarter of the delegates (I guess) uploaded their photos/profiles to the social network – this didn't really add anything. If it had been a multi-day event it may have been useful to put names to faces, but for a one day event I don't think it really worked. For me, FaceBook is probably better for this sort of thing, as most of us use it anyway.
That still left the live chat, twittering, taking blog notes and listening to the presentations – an interesting exercise in multitasking – particularly on more small eee PC screen. This all seemed to work really well – there was a continuous stream of activity on the chat, almost all adding to the presentation, allowing comment and observation from the audience to be shared before the thoughts are gone as the presentation moves on. The only time I lost i was when a particularly lively debate broke out about whether IT staff knew anything about at all about pedagogy (most thought not, quite strongly!) at the same time Gráinne Conole from the OU was explaining a interesting but complicated learning design model. An archive of the chat can be viewed here: http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/symposium/2008/livechat
The main reason I attended the event was for the presentations from the Guardian and BBC, and I was fascinated by their approaches. Bobbie Johnson from the Guardian explained how they'd actively embraced the web, and that it was a huge change given that the paper had barely altered for 160 years - ““all journalist work for the digital platform – its demands are pre-eminent”. It's paid off big-time – the paper sells (I think) about 300,000 copies, but they get 18million readers online. It's also changes how they react to news, they can now throw everything at a major news story away, covering major stories from every angle. They've also embraced audience interaction with their 'Comment is Free' section, where readers can (and so!) comment on editorial content (but not, interesting, news).
The BBC site is the third most visited in the UK. Jeremy Stone (Portfolio Executive for social media in the BBC’s Internet Group) was rightly proud of this, but, given the BBC's huge resources and history surely we should expect this. (BTW Google is number one, and MSN number 2. Does anyone ever actively choose to visit MSN??? Surely this is just from people who don't know how to change their IE home page)
The BBC have invested heavily in the technology in the last two years, to the point that they now see themselves as a software developer. So you get iPlayer, and the new iGooglesque front page.
Their strategy has also been to go to the viewers/listeners spaces (something for University's to learn from?), so they are more than happy for the Sun, or Guardian or whoever to set up mini-sites relating to their content, and more than happy to encourage twittering and Facebooking their programmes (but could they stop it?).
One things they both had in common was the use of blogs to communicate with their audience – the Guardian through its Comment Is Free section, and the BBC through blogs for communication about BBC matters.
A quick summary of the other talks.
Larry Johnson, NMC, talked about the past and future of disruptive technologies. The term disruptive technologies doesn't do it for me! AK47s, nuclear weapons, CO2 emitting SUVs, now those are what I'd call disruptive technologies, not Facebook and instant messaging! He made the interesting decision to use Second Life as his presentation platform. Didn't really work for me, but was worth trying. Second Life has always seem really clunky to me, and it made a lot of the presentation text pretty hard to read. More about his work here: http://www.nmc.org/horizon.
Geoffrey Bilder, CrossRef, entitled his talk 'Sausages, coffee, chicken and the web: Establishing new trust metrics for scholarly communication'. OK, strange title! Lots of content on this one, but essentially he was explaining the problem of creating a process so we know we can trust web content. Amazon and Ebay did this really well with their reviews/rating systems, and obviously, traditional journal publishing has a long established process. No answers, just posing the question.
David Harrison from Cardiff talked about their modern working environment project (and was under pressure as he knew colleagues were watching back at base. In the end, it worked really well for him, as his colleagues ended up answering question on the online chat, and even posting extra diagrams! There's more about MWE here.
Chris Adie, University of Edinburgh talked about Web 2.0: Managing the risks. I'm sure I've talked about this before so I won't repeat myself – all sensible stuff, but perhaps comes across as over cautious?
Gráinne Conole from the OU's talk was 'Disruptive technologies or new pedagogical opportunities?' (That phrase again). I'm not going to try to bluff this one – she presented what looked like a useful model for learning design, to help map tools to pedagogy. The heat and over-multitasking mean that I'll probably not give it justice, but I'll go back through the slides and attempt to explain more clearly another time.
Closing thoughts then – good range of speakers, good conference. What did I get from physically attending rather than watching online? Essentially the social conversations at lunch and during the drinks reception (especially about PDPs with the learning technologist guys from Buckingham New University, and a particularly useful discussion about OpenAthens, OpenID and Shib during the drinks reception - honest!).
Terminal Services Web Access is a new feature in Windows Server 2008 that lets you run full applications from a web browser, even if you don't have them installed on your local computer. It's been possible to do this for quite a while using
Citrix products, but this is the first time it's been built into Windows (so much better for us from a licensing perspective, and no extra applications set to learn and support).
To set it up, you need to install the Terminal Services role on Server 2008, install the applications that you want users to be able to run on the server, and then add them in as RemoteApps from the Terminal Services Manager by clicking a box - all very straight forward.
User can then go to a web page and see a list of applications - like this:
They can then click on the application, login, and it runs, just as if you had it installed on you computer:
So far, so good.
So what are the catches?
Firstly, you need Windows XP with Service Pack 3 (not released at the time of writing) or Vista Service Pack 1 on the desktop. So it doesn't work on Macs or Linux (you need Citrix for that).
The second one is licensing. You need, for example, a Word and a Terminal Services Client license to run Word in this way. and it can get more complicated with other vendors. Easy to resolve for University owned PCs, not so easy for home users.
The third is it won't scale in the same way as Citrix, so we couldn't use this to replace our full desktop service - MS were open about this in the presentation I went to in Cardiff last week.
Still, I can see uses for this, particularly in provide services to remote sites, where we have a few users some distance away on a slowish link (for example we have remote sites in Ebbw Vale and Tredegar) - we could use this to provide a better service at a low cost and with a low support/development overhead - something for next year's service development plan.