Suffering from typing fatigue – today I’ve blogged, wikied, IMed and actually talked and listened. Part of the point of today was to look at all these technologies and their use, and I feel like I’ve given them a pretty good workout.

I remain to be convinced that wikis will take off. It seems to me that most of the use of wikis today could have been much better served by blogs and Instant Messaging. In terms of interacting with the conference, the using of IM was the newest to me, and also I think the most useful – although it was a shame their were only a handful of people using the chatrooms (although their were obviously technological problems – perhaps proof that this isn’t ready for the real world yet)

Although I’ve also been blogging this, it was nice to be able to discuss what the presenters were saying as they said it. Also to ask questions – which others are able to answer. Given a choice, I’d have preferred to concentrate on IM, and then use transcripts for the basis of a published report afterwards.

After a very interesting presentation by Derek Morrison we’ve had some discussion of the use of wikis and blogs.

There seem to have been some problems agreeing what a wiki is – there are already plenty of notes online for this discussion. Alison obviously types much faster than me!

As far as blogging goes. There was quite a bit of interest in this, and lots of potential uses – but also many issues about Acceptable Use. The fact we are all so concerned about this may point to the fact that we don’t have good enough AUPs already? We already have personal web pages on University space, and blogs may expand the number of people publishing, but the core issues remain the same as far as I can see.

Some interesting questions about whether you continued to host blogs after students left – would they want to take the content with them, or perhaps leave them accessible? There is obviously a similar issue to email. This seems to come back to a point made this morning – why should we provide this type of service if commerical providers already do this? I know that many students prefer to use hotmail to the institutional email service.

Reports on the morning sessions:

Instant Messaging and Txting

Some confusion about the different kinds of technology in this area. A lot of use for keeping in touch with friends and family. Use of chat rooms in learning environments – but often done at fixed times etc.

Power (i.e. electricity) came up again!
Is there a generation gap – how effectively can people multitask?
Linguistic issues – does txt degrade languge?
Virus issues
Security
SMS Etiquette?

Mobile devices (see previous posts)

Instant Messaging

Divide in the group – pro and against

Suggestion that there should be a separation of leisure and study use for IM
Material needs to be delivered in a platform independent way
Social and Learning interaction blurring. [this isn’t new – we always used to chat over coffee about problems with work when I was at University]
The type of institution is important – not so much need for this kind of technology if you have a compact campus [not sure about this either – do these institutions use email or internal post less?]
Students are arriving at University having already used this type of technology – so we should be providing support for this…
Do people have the will/interest [or time?] to engage with this. Especially lecturers
What about IPR? Already an issue with lectures being recorded, so what about comment and discussion.
Immature technology
Users still like email [not sure what this statement is based on – they have to use it, but I’m not clear they ‘like’ it]

Newsfeeds

Not a lot of people using Newsfeeds.
Some use of external feeds – e.g. BBC, RDN – for portals
Not much use for internal feeds. Some use for small groups, or people with blogs.
Could be used more internally – top down and bottom up. But possible need to editorial role.
Need to support publication tools and clients
Perhaps wise not to overplay the technology, but integrate [technology often at its best when the user doesn’t notice it]
Issue with management of content, rather than newsfeeds specifically

Reports on the morning sessions:

Instant Messaging and Txting

Some confusion about the different kinds of technology in this area. A lot of use for keeping in touch with friends and family. Use of chat rooms in learning environments – but often done at fixed times etc.

Power (i.e. electricity) came up again!
Is there a generation gap – how effectively can people multitask?
Linguistic issues – does txt degrade languge?
Virus issues
Security
SMS Etiquette?

Mobile devices (see previous posts)

Instant Messaging

Divide in the group – pro and against

Suggestion that there should be a separation of leisure and study use for IM
Material needs to be delivered in a platform independent way
Social and Learning interaction blurring. [this isn’t new – we always used to chat over coffee about problems with work when I was at University]
The type of institution is important – not so much need for this kind of technology if you have a compact campus [not sure about this either – do these institutions use email or internal post less?]
Students are arriving at University having already used this type of technology – so we should be providing support for this…
Do people have the will/interest [or time?] to engage with this. Especially lecturers
What about IPR? Already an issue with lectures being recorded, so what about comment and discussion.
Immature technology
Users still like email [not sure what this statement is based on – they have to use it, but I’m not clear they ‘like’ it]

Newsfeeds

Not a lot of people using Newsfeeds.
Some use of external feeds – e.g. BBC, RDN – for portals
Not much use for internal feeds. Some use for small groups, or people with blogs.
Could be used more internally – top down and bottom up. But possible need to editorial role.
Need to support publication tools and clients
Perhaps wise not to overplay the technology, but integrate [technology often at its best when the user doesn’t notice it]
Issue with management of content, rather than newsfeeds specifically

Perhaps we are thinking too big? Is there a half way house between all out support, and not doing anything?

How can we start small with mobiles? Trials and prototypes…

Training and Support – do we need to provide this? What should we be providing training for? It is only when they want to use the services you are providing you should need to provide support. We can’t afford (IMO) to support students in the use of specific devices.

We need to get to a point where the technology doesn’t get in the way of the information.

Perhaps we need to look at marketing – not training? About students being given the option to opt in.

There is a balance between how we go forward, and how much we continue to support existing methods (e.g. snailmail vs email – when do we stop sending snailmail?)

Finally – how do we get the providers (i.e. staff) to the level where they can effectively use new technologies to communicate with consumers (i.e. students)

The first discussion group of the day – I’m in the yellow group, and we are going to be discussing the use of mobile devices.

The first question posed is – what are people doing now? Seems to be a feeling that at the moment there is some support of ‘traditional'(!) mobile computing (i.e. laptops). Also someone reporting an experience of students using SMS instead of email.

The next question seems to be – should we be proactive, or just let it happen?

One issue just coming up is ‘power’ – it is fine to be mobile – but if you don’t have power, then you can’t use the device for long. Especially true of laptops – not so true of handheld devices – pdas and mobile phones.

Interesting issue here about handhelds – where is the line between mobiles and pdas? Mobiles are ubiquitous – and low cost. SMS is a standard – but perhaps more of a feed, rather than conversation? Has ‘realtime’ sms taken off?

Keeping records up to date is an issue – but is it new. Mobile phone numbers change regularly – but is this a new problem, or just the same as knowing their postal address? There seems to be a feeling that if their is a motivation to get the information, people will make sure they can get. Possibly what we need to do is set up methods for users to specify preferences – how do they like to be communicated with? Push vs Pull. Reusable content an important issue here?

Finding it difficult to keep up with the discussion here – time for a new post

I’m at the ‘Beyond Email’ conference organised by UCISA and UKOLN. All about using new technologies in an HE context. So far we’ve had a lightening tour of Blogs, Instant Messaging, IRC, Wikis, Skype (IP Telephony), RSS, SMS, Social Software (e.g. Orkut).

It’s really great to be at a conference already using some of these technologies. I can’t get onto the chat rooms at the moment (not sure if this is just me, or whether they aren’t up yet), which is a shame, as it would be good to be able to engage with the discussions while the talks are going on.

On the other hand, the wiki is up and running, but I’m not sure how much this is just substituting for online dicussion (from my point of view anyway)