Keep SMILing

· ostephens

OK – really practical session here. SMIL (Synchronized Media Integration Language – pronounced smile) is a markup language designed to present multiple media files together. SMIL presentations can integrate audio and video with images, test or many other media type.

The syntax and structure is similar to HTML, and the current version is SMIL 2.1 (released Dec 2005).

Some examples are a presentation by Stephen Emmott or presentation by Molly Holzschalg – you’ll need Quicktime or Realplayer to view these.

We are going to put together a presentation based on a set of slides from last years IWMW and an MP3 recording of the session.

Creating a SMIL presentation:

First you need to have some media to put together into a presentation. So – perhaps starting by recording some audio.

Then you need some software to edit the audio. We are going to use Audacity.

The kind of processing you need to do is:

Slide change timings (if you are synching with a slide presentation)
Editing
Equalisation
Amplification
Pitch change
Volume compression
Flitering (e.g. Noise reduction by Steinberg Cleanup)
File Compression (typically to mp3)

If you are wanting to combine powerpoint slides and an mp3 recording, you’ll need to export the powerpoint slides as graphics (powerpoint has an option to do this as jpegs or pngs)

Then you are ready to create the SMIL file. This has a <head> tag containing information about the appearance of the playback window. Then there is a <body> tag which contains information about what media (files) you want to play, and (where necessary) how long you want each file to be displayed (for the slide images).

I need to play around with this a bit more – we’ve done an example, but might try to do something of my own to put online later.

Sector Statistics

· ostephens

This talk by Ranjit Sidhu from Nedstat (a company specialising in Web site stats).

He is going to look at:
Benchmarking the sector against the web
Benchmarking your institution
Future Trends

The First Sector Statistics Snapsho was done of 22 institutions in March 2006. The second snapshot is going to be for the month of May 2006, and intended to then repeat every 6 months.

So – what should be measured? This is tricky in education, because the client base is so varied – prospects, existing students, alumni, staff etc.

So – now some stats – these are going to be posted on the web at some point – so I’ll just pick out some of these here:
Visitors accepting Cookies
Sector: Accept 95.93% (slight decline) – acceptance from internal IPs is slightly higher than overall, but external slighly lower.
Overall: 96.8%

How do people find my site?
Direct entry (entering URL)
Overall: 56.29%
External to the Uni only: 39.98%

External Referrer
Overall: 20.93%
External: 21.62%

Search engines
Overall: 28.66%
External 38.38%

Shows how when looking at Search Engines – for traffic from non-university computers, a large number come in from Search engines

Geographical – where are the visitors located?
Average figures usually:
UK 1st (by a long way)
US 2nd
India 3rd

What does ‘openess’ mean to a web manager?

· ostephens

Brian Kelly again on this session, thinking more about the openess of content, as opposed to software:

Creative Commons
A way of granting rights to re-use of content. I saw a really interesting talk by Lawrence Lessig who is the driving force behind this (at Hay-on-Wye a couple of weeks ago). The important thing here is that anything that (I think) anything you publish is automatically granted copyright – this makes it illegal for others to use that content (excluding fair use) without your permission.

If you are actually happy for people to reuse the content you create, you have to say so – explicitly. Creative Commons is a way of doing this, without necessarily just giving away all your Intellectual Property rights.

What about Web 2.0 and Open content? Re-usable content is a key part of Web 2.0 – for example, ‘mashups’ (combining data from disparate sources to provide a richer application) can only work if their is data available and you are free to re-use it. Google Maps is a good example. However, Amazon is perhaps a counter example of how it is possible to allow re-use in a commercial context (you can use Amazon data as long as you make it link to Amazon – to drive traffic to Amazon).

So – institutions need to give serious thought to how we relate to Intellectual Property for both Open Source software (can your software development team develop open source software and contribute back to the community – or is this not allowed by your institution?)

What does ‘openess’ mean to a web manager?

· ostephens

Brian Kelly again on this session, thinking more about the openess of content, as opposed to software:

Creative Commons
A way of granting rights to re-use of content. I saw a really interesting talk by Lawrence Lessig who is the driving force behind this (at Hay-on-Wye a couple of weeks ago). The important thing here is that anything that (I think) anything you publish is automatically granted copyright – this makes it illegal for others to use that content (excluding fair use) without your permission.

If you are actually happy for people to reuse the content you create, you have to say so – explicitly. Creative Commons is a way of doing this, without necessarily just giving away all your Intellectual Property rights.

What about Web 2.0 and Open content? Re-usable content is a key part of Web 2.0 – for example, ‘mashups’ (combining data from disparate sources to provide a richer application) can only work if their is data available and you are free to re-use it. Google Maps is a good example. However, Amazon is perhaps a counter example of how it is possible to allow re-use in a commercial context (you can use Amazon data as long as you make it link to Amazon – to drive traffic to Amazon).

So – institutions need to give serious thought to how we relate to Intellectual Property for both Open Source software (can your software development team develop open source software and contribute back to the community – or is this not allowed by your institution?)

What does ‘open source’ mean for the institutional web manager?

· ostephens

This is being presented by Randy Metcalfe (from OSS Watch)

So – Randy’s key messages:

  • open source is more than just a copyright licensing paradgm
  • no one needs to tell you to use open source software (everyone in the audience showed that they use open source software)
  • good policy helps embed best practice
  • standards, especially open standards, are a good thing
  • pragmatism is also good

OSS Watch provides unbiased advice and guidance on free and open source software for UK HE and FE. It is funded by JISC.

So – what is Open Source?

It is a copyright licensing paradigm. Either your software is released under an Open Source Initiative (OSI) certified licence or it is not open source software (there are many licenses that are certified – GPL being the best well known)

Open Source is related historically to ‘Free software‘ (as Richard Stallman said – free as in free speech, not free beer)

Open Source is also a development methodology.

In October 2003 the open source virtual learning environment Moodle did not register on OSS Watch’s initial national scoping study. By March 2006 56% of FE colleges reported they are using Moodle. An incredibly fast takeup – why? Randy suggests Market Forces.

Conference bags

· ostephens

I’m always irritated that the first thing you get at a conference is a bag – who comes to a conference without a bag? (and if you do, how do you carry your laptop!)
Anyway – IWMW 2006 wins a prize for actually giving out 2 bags – a bag within a bag – now, what is the point of that?

Who updates the university entries on Wikipedia?

· ostephens

This question was asked by Andy Powell before lunch. So, some research, the RHUL entry was created by ‘Angela‘ – a wikipedian.

However, it’s been updated since (see the history). By the IP addresses, some of these have definitely been done by people on the RHUL network – although could be staff or student.

Interesting to note the following change:
(cur) (last) 15:45, 26 April 2006 Badgerpatrol (→Current Position – rm ‘globally’- A handful of UK universities have a global reputation, RHUL is not one of them.)

Should the University strike back?

Web 2.0 – behind the hype

· ostephens

Brian Kelley from UKOLN is now demonstrating some Web 2.0 types of applications. I’ve captured links as I can, but will add more as I have some time afterwards.

To start – try searching for ‘IWMW 2006’ in Google – the vast number of top 10 hits are ‘web 2.0’ type – blogs, wikipedia, rss feeds.

However – there are some concerns that we need to think about with Web 2.0. Web 2.0 can be useful – but need to:
Learn from mistakes
Remember it will be used by marketers
Need to remember accessibility
Need to be user-focussed

These are really no different to concerns about WWW that were around in the 1990s.

So – real life demonstrations of Web 2.0:

IMWM RSS – used for news and syndication of content from conference
OPML – Used to group RSS files, and can use software such as Grazr to browse them
Mashups – combining information from multiple sources – http://iwmw2006.superglu.com
Blogs – 3 blogs directly related to IWMW 2006 (this one, http://iwmw2006.blogspot.com and http://wib-wob-web.blogspot.com/)
Wikis
Podcasts (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/podcasts/)
Online Chat (e.g. IRC channel at this conference, http://gabbly.com)
VoIP, Access Grid (http://www.skype.com, http://www.agsc.ja.net/)
Del.icio.us

Brian is singling out Microformats as an upcoming formate. What are they?
Basically adding some very simple semantics to web content using html spans and divs around text. There is a session about this today (which I’m unfortunately not attending) – I need to have a look at this.

Some issues coming up through the Q&A:
Quality of Service – I’d be reluctant to rely on any of the prototype ‘perpetual beta’ technology to deliver a real service. Scott Wilson suggested that perhaps we can defray these issues with web 2.0 approaches – perhaps we need to stop trying to supply central services so much, and essentially outsource more. I’m not 100% convinced this is practical – but perhaps it is a matter of time – I would now consider the idea that we don’t need to provide email to all our students (although we do at the moment), and perhaps other services will develop to the extent where I feel the same about them – but give it 10 years perhaps.
Repetition of Information – we maintain our own webpage, but there is also a wikipedia entry for RHUL – how is this information kept up to date?
How do we best engage the academic community in this type of technology?

Web 2.0 – behind the hype

· ostephens

Brian Kelley from UKOLN is now demonstrating some Web 2.0 types of applications. I’ve captured links as I can, but will add more as I have some time afterwards.

To start – try searching for ‘IWMW 2006’ in Google – the vast number of top 10 hits are ‘web 2.0’ type – blogs, wikipedia, rss feeds.

However – there are some concerns that we need to think about with Web 2.0. Web 2.0 can be useful – but need to:
Learn from mistakes
Remember it will be used by marketers
Need to remember accessibility
Need to be user-focussed

These are really no different to concerns about WWW that were around in the 1990s.

So – real life demonstrations of Web 2.0:

IMWM RSS – used for news and syndication of content from conference
OPML – Used to group RSS files, and can use software such as Grazr to browse them
Mashups – combining information from multiple sources – http://iwmw2006.superglu.com
Blogs – 3 blogs directly related to IWMW 2006 (this one, http://iwmw2006.blogspot.com and http://wib-wob-web.blogspot.com/)
Wikis
Podcasts (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/podcasts/)
Online Chat (e.g. IRC channel at this conference, http://gabbly.com)
VoIP, Access Grid (http://www.skype.com, http://www.agsc.ja.net/)
Del.icio.us

Brian is singling out Microformats as an upcoming formate. What are they?
Basically adding some very simple semantics to web content using html spans and divs around text. There is a session about this today (which I’m unfortunately not attending) – I need to have a look at this.

Some issues coming up through the Q&A:
Quality of Service – I’d be reluctant to rely on any of the prototype ‘perpetual beta’ technology to deliver a real service. Scott Wilson suggested that perhaps we can defray these issues with web 2.0 approaches – perhaps we need to stop trying to supply central services so much, and essentially outsource more. I’m not 100% convinced this is practical – but perhaps it is a matter of time – I would now consider the idea that we don’t need to provide email to all our students (although we do at the moment), and perhaps other services will develop to the extent where I feel the same about them – but give it 10 years perhaps.
Repetition of Information – we maintain our own webpage, but there is also a wikipedia entry for RHUL – how is this information kept up to date?
How do we best engage the academic community in this type of technology?