IWMW blogs

Live Video Stream at IWMW 2010

In order to maximise impact of the event and enhance discussion and debate of ideas we will be amplifying the plenary talks through use of a  live video stream.  This service is being provided by the University of Sheffield. Access to the live video stream will available via the University of Sheffield Web site.

We would like to encourage Web teams who cannot attend this year’s event to watch the talks together and participate in the Twitter discussions.

Full information on the streaming service is available on the Video Streaming page on the IWMW 2010 site.

Treating the Remote Audience as First-Class Citizens

As has been the case in previous years (have a look at these blog post to get a feel for what happened last year) we aim to treat the remote audience as ‘first-class citizens’ at the event. We will therefore:

• Promote the address for the live video stream.
• Promote the event hashtag (#iwmw10) to encourage  discussions on the Twitter channel.
• Ensure the sound levels will enable the remote audience to hear the plenary speakers .
• Ensure the questions from the local audience are asked using a microphone.
• Encourage  questions from remote audience.

Is there anything else we need to be doing? Please do let us know.

Evaluating the Remote Audience’s Experiences

As described previously this year we will also be supporting the JISC Greening Events project which has an interest in ways on which remote participation in events can support an organisation’s greening agenda. We hope that those who are participating remotely will be willing to share their experiences with ourselves and the JISC Greening Events project.

The JISC-funded Greening Events project will be conducting an exploratory investigation on ways of minimising the sustainability impacts of academic events (such as conferences and seminars, training, administrative and project related events) while gaining the maximum benefit from them. In addition to  interviewing a number of the remote attendees the project team also intend to analyse the  Web log data in order to monitor the locations of the remote audiences and the time spent viewing the video stream.

If you want to find out more about the project please contact Paul Shabajee.

The IWMW events provide an opportunity for the evaluation of new technologies and this year’s event is no exception, allowing delegates to gain experiences of various aspects of the mobile Web.

We will be providing an opportunity for delegates to  familiarise themselves with location-based sharing services such as FourSquare and Gowalla.  I will visit the main locations we will be using at Sheffield just before the event begins and geo-locate the main auditorium, the registration areas, the rooms used for the parallel sessions, the accommodation and some of the social venues – an idea I have described previously in  a post on Social Location Sharing Services.

If you have installed a FourSquare or Gowalla application on your mobile device (e.g. iPhone, iPod Touch, Android Phone, etc.)  and obtained an account, when checking in you should see details of other people who have also checked in.  If, for example, you have arrived early and have decided to visit The Fat Cat pub (well worth a visit) potentially you could see other IWMW 2010 delegates who, may be already there (details about the pub are available on FourSquare).

Of course there are lots of issues about privacy, personal safety, security, etc. But having a few days away at a friendly event can provide an ideal opportunity to evaluate such technologies.   If you wish to use this opportunity feel free to get in touch with me, either on FourSquare or Gowalla.

Note that a particular location-based sharing service is not being recommended. I personally prefer Gowalla but I know others who prefer FourSquare. I should also mention that in January Harvard University announced an official presence on FourSquare, so if you dismiss such services as trivia bear in mind the comments made by Perry Hewitt, director of digital communications and communications services for Harvard Public Affairs and Communications: “We believe that Harvard’s participation will allow our community to engage with friends, professors, and colleagues in new ways. We also hope visitors and neighbors will benefit from the platform as it grows through use”.

The JISC Greening Events  Project

Greening Events is a small exploratory project funded under the JISC Greening ICT programme . It is investigating how to minimise the negative sustainability impacts of academically related events (such as conferences and seminars, training, administrative and project meetings, etc.) whilst gaining the maximum benefit from them. The two main objectives of the project are:

1. To develop a prototype ‘systemic’ impact analysis methodology. By systemic we mean not only the direct impacts of an event but the knock on and incidental impacts (both positive and negative). Factors would include more concrete impacts such as energy, carbon, water and waste footprints and finances but also and the less tangible but no less important social, personal and organisational costs and benefits of people attending the events, thus enabling a more rounded exploration of the balance between costs and benefits.
2. To explore the use of a variety of technologies to help minimise the sustainability impact of events. To do this the project builds on two earlier JISC-funded software development projects and will lead to prototype software that will allow the event organisers to effectively plan their events and attendees to get connected and/or get information (including via mobile devices) towards “greener events”. Damien Steer, who is speaking at the event, will include a reference to how we are using Mobile Campus Assistant in the Greening Events project in his presentation.

The project is using real academic events as case studies and will be interviewing three virtual delegates from this year’s IWMW event as well as, if access if possible, study the Web logs of the video and Twitter feeds to see how virtual delegates are making use of these tools.

Finding Out More

If you would like more information about the project or would like to get involved in one of the interviews please contact the project analyst Paul Shabajee (paul.shabajee@bristol.ac.uk) or the project manager Debra Hiom (d.hiom@bristol.ac.uk).

At IWMW 2010 I (Owen Stephens) am running a workshop on mashups – ‘FlashMash‘. The rather foolhardy aim of the session is to actually build a working mashup in the 90 minutes available.

There’s no nice way of saying this, so I’ll just come right out with it In order to stand a fighting chance of getting something useful done in such a short time we are going to have to cheat! Well, at least do some decent preparation advance. So this is where I need input before we all get to Sheffield. If we can narrow down what we want to do in the workshop beforehand, then I hope in the workshop itself we can do the following:

• Agree on how we are going to do the mashup
• Split the work into reasonable tasks
• Split into groups to tackle the tasks (each group with a mixture of expertise)
• Pull all the relevant bits together at the end

Depending on the experience of people at the workshop, we will introduce new tools and techniques as appropriate – we won’t be assuming any experience or knowledge of computer programming – the point is that with many mashups you can get stuff done with easy to use tools that are available online – e.g. Google Spreadsheets or Yahoo! Pipes.

A possible starting point is the list of RSS feeds available from previous IWMW events – which are helpfully all listed at http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/about/rss/. However, we can use any sources of information, and I’m not above scraping stuff out of web pages if we need to!

So, feel free to post ideas here – don’t worry (at this point) how practical they are, we can work is out as we get closer to the workshop (you don’t have to be coming along to the session to contribute – all suggestions are welcome).

As there will be a good few TERMINALFOUR Site Manager users at this years event again we are trying to gauge interest in a Barcamp session or a meeting after the main event. If you are interested and are attending then please email laura.murphy@terminalfour.com with your details and preference.

The suggested slots are:

1. Barcamp
Day 2
Tuesday 13 July
BARCAMPS (14:15-15:30)

2. Post-event Workshop
Day 3
Wednesday 14 July 13:30

BarCamps have been a part of IWMW for the past two years and they’ve proved to be really popular. A BarCamp is defined in Wikipedia as a user generated conference whose content is provided by participants. At IWMW events they are impromptu sessions that are not planned too much in advance but often evolve through the experience had by delegates at the event – short, informal knowledge sharing sessions!

However we don’t mind a little bit of planning and they are also an opportunity for people to give the presentation they wanted to submit to the call, but for some reason couldn’t get in on time. They are a chance to talk about:

• A technology you are currently working with (you could demonstrate the technology)
• A project you are currently working on
• A discussion area you feel strongly about
• Anything you can think of related to the Web and HE/FE

Alternately you could run a user group or just get a lot of people together to ask what they think about something. Basically anything goes!

This year we have a 1 hour 15 minute slot for BarCamps on Tuesday (day 2) afternoon. We’d like to have 30 minutes for a BarCamp with 15 minutes change over time. We have 9 rooms available but are also happy for people to use the bar, restaurant or sit outside (if the weather suits). There should be good WiFi access around the venue so anywhere goes too. This means that we have 18+ slots for people to use.

We’ll have a sign-up board available in the information area but you are also welcome to float your BarCamp ideas on the blog or send your idea over to me.

Further information is available from the IWMW 2010 BarCamp page.

This blog entry is for people attending the Personal Contingency parallel session to share what they hope to get out of the session. The aim of this session is to explore key maxim’s that will help you prepare for a change of career or a change in your work situation. Whether you’re planning to change roles, find a new job, become self-employed, or set up a business.

Either let me know here or email keith@consequencing.com if you have anything specific you would like covering, otherwise I’ll look forward to meeting you on the day. I’ll have some fun and interesting topics ready for you!

An online BuddyPress group for the session is also available: http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/blog/2010/groups/b4-developing-your-personal-contingency-plan-beat-the-panic

Cheers

Keith Doyle

Last year I (Helen Sargan, Web Manager, University of Cambridge) ran a parallel session on choosing Plone for a CMS pilot (Another step closer to a CMS – dallying with Plone). This went ahead and the first site will be published shortly, with several more at pilot stage. If anyone is interested I can catch them up with how the project progressed, or if there are several we could retire to a room and I could show you round the vanilla site that users get on set-up, and what’s been done with it, and what issues we came (and are coming) up against.

This year I will be facilitating a session on Stylesheets for mobile/smartphones. There are strategies with stylesheets that will give a better experience for users of mobile devices and the session will look at how these strategies work and whether they help enough to be worth pursuing. Please do come along.

Helen

I’m (Ben Butchart) putting together material for the workshop on Location Based Services Without the Cocoa and would like your help in deciding how to structure the content. The main aim of the this workshop is to share the experience we have gained during the JISC alternative access project that looked into the potential for delivering Edina Digimap services to mobile.

A part of the technical evaluation strand of the project we ran a series of experiments using different technologies to help us understand the tradeoffs and merits of different technical approaches, code libraries and frameworks available to mobile application developers. The three main technical approaches we investigated were Mobile Web, Native and Hybrid development. In the Mobile Web paradigm, where applications are delivered through the mobile web browser (Safari, Opera , IE etc.) we focused on how mapping frameworks such as OpenLayers can integrate with emerging web standards such as the W3C Geolocation API, HTML5 Canvas and Local Storage. To develop our skills in building native applications, where programming languages and tools are unique to a particular device or operating system, we worked on an iPhone mapping client written in ObejctiveC and Cocoa Touch. We also investigated some augmented reality frameworks and built a demonstration 3D Layar app for iPhone and Android. Finally to evaluate the hybrid approach (where a lightweight web browser is integrated into a skeleton native app), we dipped into the PhoneGap framework and also built our own hybrid agent for the iPhone

We feel that we were fortunate to have a chance to try out these technologies for ourselves and discover the tradeoffs and advantages of each and we thought it would be a good to share this experience with a wider audience. The learning objectives I originally had in mind for the workshop were:

1. Understand different approaches to building applications for mobile devices, e.g. browser based apps, native apps ( Symbian, iPhone Cocoa, Android etc), hybrid apps, Mobile Web Touch.
2. Understand tradeoffs between browser based mobile applications and native applications.
3. Learn how to use W3C Geolocation API to obtain location of user.
4. Learn how to create a browser based (mapping) rich internet application for touch devices, including techniques for converting mouse events to touch gestures.
5. Learn how to use HTML5 Canvas 2d graphics for mobile browsers and understand problems and advantages.
6. Learn how use HTML5 Local Storage and Application Cache to cache points of interest to enable offline access to data.
7. Learn how to use augmented reality browsers such as Layar for displaying points of interest to camera views.

For those of you that have signed up to the workshop or are thinking of doing so, it would be good to know what you are hoping to get from it. To what extent would you like some hands on experience using these technologies?

I think I could set up some simple examples and ask participants to make some minor changes to HTML/ JavaScript to demonstrate some of the technologies. Although the examples would be really simple, I’m worried the sight of HTML and JavaScript might frighten some people off and it is the lessons learnt rather than full understanding of the technology itself we want to convey.

For managers deciding on a strategic direction organizational needs, sustainability and resource management are just as important as the technical pros and cons. We could do some interesting exercises around these topics too. Also from talking to many people and research groups in HE during the scoping study we learnt a lot about future direction for Location Based Services in teaching and learning with exciting developments in the area of virtual worlds, augmented reality and 3D visualization. Would an overview of this topic be useful too?

I’m more than happy to adapt the material we have to the audience so use the comments to let me know who you are, what your interest is in LBS is and what areas you would like me to focus on. With your help we will be able to create a great interactive session which will bring together participants experience, share knowledge and build an expert group of LBS practitioners.

The dilema over creating inhouse versus buying-in a solution is not a new one for Web managers or IWMW. Over the last 14 years during which IWMW has been running there have been quite a few sessions asking us to think about the pros and cons or both. For example in 2007 we facilitated a panel session entitled Dealing with the Commercial World: Saviour or Satan? and back in 2003 we had a session on Content Management – Buy or Build?.

In the past different institutions have leaned in different directions driven by different agendas. However today we are all united by a common agenda – cost cutting. We are now working in an environmemt where institutions may place much more emphasis on buying cost-effective software rather than use inhouse developement.

At this year’s IWMW you will have opportunity to hear about various products available. As well being sponsored by commercial organisations (Jadu and TerminalFour) we will also have an exhibition where a number of commercial organisations will be able to tell you about their products.

IWMW is also an opportunity to hear about other institution’s experiences with software products. For example James Lappin and Peter Gilbert, University of the West of England will be talking about The impact of MS SharePoint in Higher Education and Richard Brierton, University of Sheffield will be talking about their upgrade of Polopoly: a commercial CMS.

As delegates you should also take advantage of the opportunity to network with others and ask about their experiences. You’ll be able to do this in person at the event and also online through this blog. You can also share your own experiences either online or by giving a BarCamp.