JISC has announced a HEFCE funded programme designed to help prepare the sector for increasing demands on course data. Information about the call is available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities.aspx

All eligible institutions are invited to take part in Stage 1, by submitting a letter of commitment (deadline 12:00 noon UK time on Wednesday 7 September 2011) signed by key senior staff, in order to receive £10k of JISC funding. For the full call document, including details of an online briefing about the call to be held between 15.00 and 16.30 on Tuesday 19 July – go to http://goo.gl/nv6ec.

Eligibility:

Letters of Commitment may be submitted by Higher Education (HE) Institutions funded by HEFCE. FE institutions in England that teach HE to more than 400 FTEs are also eligible to bid providing involvement in this programme supports the HE in FE agenda. HE and FE institutions in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales are not eligible to bid.

Stage 1 funding of £10,000 is available for all eligible institutions which submit a Letter of Commitment which provides evidence of support from Senior Managers responsible for Teaching and Learning, Marketing, Management Information Systems/IT and the institutional course web sites.

Relevance for IWMW

Increasingly those involved in the provision of institutional Web services are finding that their responsibilities are going beyond the provision of quality information related to institutional activities to providing access to data related to the institutional activities.  The importance of data for those involved in the provision of Web services is being recognised at the IWMW 2011 event with a DevCSI workshop on “Open Data and the Institutional Web” beginning on Monday 25 July, the day before the start of the IWMW event.  This event, which is free to attend, is aimed at both developers and those with an interest or responsibility for institutional data who may be looking for ways in which such data can be reused.  If you would like to attend please complete the online booking form.

One area of technology which will be of interest to participants at the IWMW 2011 event will be HTML5 and the related Open Web Platform portfolio of W3C standards which can help to provide richer functionality with enhanced user interfaces.  A plenary talk on “HTML5 (and friends)” given by Patrick Lauke at IWMW 2010 helped to generate interest in HTML5′s potential for use to support institutional Web services in a range of areas. But in the year since then how has the sector gone about using HTML5, CSS, AJAX and related technologies?  Are we seeing significant benefits and if so, in which areas?  What approaches are being taken to deploying HTML5 – in-house development work, use of HTML5 from existing content management systems, application development environments, VLEs, etc.?

Request for Proposals For Case Studies

In order to find answers to these questions the JISC is funding case studies on use of HTML5 and related standards in areas of relevance to the higher/further education sector. UKOLN, which is managing this work, has announced a Request for Proposals (RfP) For HTML5 Case Studies and a summary is given below.

The proposals for HTML5 case studies and demonstrators should describe best practices and scenarios for making use of HTML5 and related Open Web Platform standards in areas of relevance to those working in the higher and further education sectors.

The proposals should address new features of the emerging HTML5 standard (e.g. canvas; geo-location; local storage; video; form fill; etc.) or related standards which form part of the W3C’s Open Web Platform such as the CSS, DOM, MathML, etc.

Application areas might include, but are not restricted to, benefits to institutional Web site (e.g. SEO benefits or enriched functionality); teaching and learning applications (course lectures delivered via video, audio, etc.; lab notebooks); research applications (e.g. articles, series, journals; books; table of contents; bibliography; citation); multi-channel access; etc.

The proposals should describe how the work was implemented and the ways in which the new functionality was (or could be) implemented in a real-world context of legacy browsers; possible lack of development tools; etc.

Case studies must be made available under a Creative Commons licence and if accompanying code is provided this should be made available under an appropriate Open Source licence.

A sum of £5,000 is available for each accepted submission. The deadline for submissions is Monday 18 July 2011. Accepted proposals must agree to provide final case studies by 16 September 2011.

• The event is a bargain at £200 (or £250 including accommodation): There are other great conferences for those working in the delivery of large-scale Web services but they are likely to cost significantly more:  such as this one-day event costing £225+VAT or this two-day conference which costs £595 (plus VAT and no accommodation).
• The programme is designed for those working in higher/further education: Many of the speakers and facilitators work in higher education or work for companies which specialise in supporting the sector.
• You can get “tens of thousands of pounds worth of free consultancy“!: Martin Hamilton, head of Internet Services at Loughborough University, described in a video interview how at the IWMW 2010 event he had “gotten tens of thousands of pounds worth of free consultancy” from the various discussions he had attended during his 3 days at the first IWMW event he had attended! On his blog he subsequently described how “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.“
• You’ll hear about SEO strategies for a University context: In a keynote talk Professor Melius Weideman, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa will provide empirical research results from analysis of UK university Web sites which will indicate where improvements can be made to increase the visibility of UK HE Web sites to search engines.
• You’ll have an ideal opportunity to cultivate professional network: The growing importance of social networks to support professional activities is becoming more widely acknowledged. However, despite the potential benefits of services such as Twitter and LinkedIn, the value of face-to-face meetings provided by events such as IWMW should not be under-estimated.
• You’ll have an opportunity to engage and not just sit back and listen: In higher education we are well aware of the value of active learning. The IWMW has always provided opportunities for participants to actively engage in discussions , especially in the 90 minute workshop sessions.
• You can attend accompanying DevCSI workshop on Open Data and the Institutional Web: This free DevCSI workshop begins on the day before IWMW 2011 and will provide an opportunity for developers and those who wish to engage in or commission development work related to access to, use and reuse of institutional data to share ideas, hear case studies and engage in lightweight development activities.
• You can engage with marketing and techie communities: Some Web events tend to be very focussed on marketing perspectives whilst at other events techies may dominate and talk in a strange language of TLAs (and even XTLAs).  At IWMW 2011 Amber Thomas will give a plenary talk on “Marketing and Other Dirty Words” in which she will “bring together key messages from marketing, social media around content, usage tracking and strategy, with ideas for how we can present our intellectual assets online to get maximum effect”.
• You can hear a plenary talk about how an institution has gone about embedding Web 2.0: As described in a post on the IWMW 2011 blog Martin Hamilton will share the experiences gained at Loughborough University.
• You can also hear about and discuss legal issues and the Web: One of the 90 minute parallel workshop session will address Your Top Ten Legal Issues To Be Thinking About Now.  Since every University will this year have to be considering how to respond to the new cookie legislation, this will be of interest to many.

Can you afford not to attend?

This will allow those involved in institutional Web management activities who have a particular interest in open data to participate in the workshop. The workshop will continue on the opening morning of the IWMW 2011 event. DevCSI participants will have the opportunity to continue their development activities whilst those who have signed up for IWMW 2011 can attend the opening two plenary talks.

Note that since there are only 30 places available for the DevCSI workshop you should book your place soon.

In light of this late announcement, we will be keeping bookings for the IWMW 2011 event open until Friday 8th July, and we have decided to provide day tickets for those who are unable to attend the full 2-day event.

The Institutional Web Management Workshop (or IWMW) is an event for those involved in the creation of institutional (Higher Education and Further Education) Web sites. This year’s event will be 2 days long and will take place at the at the University of Reading from Tuesday 26th to Wednesday 27th July 2011.

The IWMW Web site provides more details on booking a place, the programme and speakers. While the Web site is the formal publishing mechanism for the event this blog will hopefully be the informal publishing/discussion outlet. It is available for all delegates, speakers, exhibitors, sponsors, facilitators, remote attendees and any interested parties to use.

Although we want people to be involved it still makes sense for the blog to have some structure so we will be publishing posts related to lots of different aspects of IWMW including:

• Plenary talks
• Parallel sessions
• Social activities including local pubs and meet ups
• Transport to IWMW
• Community ideas
• Discussion topics

We will also be posting interviews with delegates, video and audio content and lots more. Much of this content is likely to be delivered during the event itself.

Enjoy the blog and let us know if you are interested in publishing a post.