templatedata

There's been some heated discussion about the pros and cons of using Second Life in higher ed marketing and general student communication in this office. I haven't got around to writing a post about it but lucky for you somebody else has. Sardionerak at University web marketing and usability has written a quick appraisal of the Second Life presences of three Australian universities. There's also the ever-reliable Karine who wrote last July on using Second Life in uni marketing.

Does anyone use Twitter? (Yes, I know LOTS of people use Twitter, I meant any of you lot). It's been around for a while and as I recently took a break from the web for three months I missed it.

Anyway, I signed up for it but as I don't know anyone else who uses it I haven't actually experienced it properly. I haven't rushed to tell friends and acquaintances to use it because, well, I am doubting the usefulness of it.

If you haven't seen it, the premise of Twitter is to answer the question "What are you doing?" You tell it and it tells all your friends. It does this by posting your answer to your profile and if they have it set up, sending your answers to your friend's IM accounts and/or phones. It's more immediate and micro than a blog post and not quite an IM conversation.

At first I got all hot and bothered over the fact that I had found a new application that did something so immediate and allowed me to communicate so easily and then I went to answer the question and thought, hang on, I don't know if I want people to know what I am doing. And on top of that, what makes me think people would be interested in what I am doing?

As Kathy Sierra pointed out in December last year, Twitter is a sign that we are approaching a point of brain overload. We are already in a state of constant partial attention, our ability to focus is diminishing by the second. Having to think about what you are doing every hour or so and report it is not exactly conducive to focus. And to be honest, I can't think of many people who would like to know what I am doing all the time. And (whisper it) I can't think of anyone who I would like to tell me what they are doing constantly. Sometimes a little mystery is good thing.

Recently I had a conversation with someone in my family who shall remain nameless that went something like this:

That person: I love wikipedia. I use it all the time, you can get so much information there.
Me: Well, yes, it is useful but I wouldnt' think it's perfect, considering how it's written.
That person: So, who writes wikipedia anyway?
Me: Anybody. If you sign up you can write on whatever you want. Or something like that.
That person: What? Anyone?
Me: You mean you didn't know that anyone could write it?
(That person goes rather pale as they consider all the university essays in which they have used Wikipedia...)
Me: You ok?

I was reminded of this because Black Knight has issued a friendly warning regarding Wikipedia to his students after he reviewed the material on $PROTEIN_DOMAIN on it (I don't know what it is either and I don't dare look up wikipedia for help...).

Karine Joly has let us all know that her article in the March issue of Currents has been made available online. Unitl April 15, 2007 you can read User Generation and I strongly recommend that you do.

I've finally organised for Templatedata to have its own del.icio.us account. For future reference, it's linked from the sidebar or you can whack this rss feed into your reader.

I may be a bit slow on the uptake with this, having just taken three months off and all but if you're a university web designer/developer/monkey/whatever you may find the Edustyle site to be of some use.

It's a gallery of university websites that also allows for commenting and voting ('My style' / 'Not my style').

If you've got something intereting that you're just bursting to tell the Higher Ed Web community, here's your chance:

It’s that time again! The theme for this year's HighEdWebDev conference is "Collaborate. Participate. Innovate." We call upon you now to participate: submit a proposal for presentation at HighEdWebDev 2007!

We are looking for a wide variety of presentations. Possible formats include one-hour presentations, half-hour presentations (i.e. "Showcase"), poster presentations and half-day (3.5 hours) workshops. The committee will consider any presentations related to the Web, electronic communications, marketing or professional skills and higher education. __*Call deadline is May 31, 2007*__.

The HighEdWebDev conference examines the unique issues facing Web professionals at colleges and universities – a conference created *for* higher education Web professionals, *by* higher education Web professionals. We hope you'll join us on Oct. 14-17 in Rochester, NY, to collaborate, participate and innovate with others in your field.

Get more info at the HighEdWeb site.

South by Soutwest (SXSW) is currently underway in Austin, Texas. For those of us living in jealousy of the likes of our own Daniel Boud, you can check out coverage of the event on the SXSW site which includes podcasts of keynotes and interactive panels and videos of choice bits of the action.

Via Yiddish at Sydney: there's now an Australian student social networking site in the mould of FaceBook. It's called StudentFace.

I'm coming to thsi a little late (it was published in December last year) but thought I would give it a mention in case others missed it: How Web 2.0 is changing medicine. As it's in the BMJ you may not have seen it if you're not in the medical/health field.

Few concepts in information technology create more confusion than Web 2.0. The truth is that Web 2.0 is a difficult term to define, even for web experts.1 Nebulous phrases like "the web as platform" and "architecture of participation" are often used to describe Web 2.0. Medical librarians suggest that rather than intrinsic benefits of the platform itself, it's the spirit of open sharing and collaboration that is paramount.2 The more we use, share, and exchange information on the web in a continual loop of analysis and refinement, the more open and creative the platform becomes; hence, the more useful it is in our work.

We launched a new site last week: Life at Sydney. It's a site to showcase all the things happening at the University that are not directly related to learning and teaching.

Feedback welcome, of course (she runs for cover...).

One really annoying facet of building websites is the fact that different browsers treat the same code in varied ways. What makes it worse is that you can't install multiple versions of the most popular browser on a single machine. Just last week we had developers jumping from machine to machine trying to iron out a code problem that occured in IE6 but not IE7.

I haven't tried this but thought someone might like to give it a go: an installer that installs multiple versions of IE.

Via CreativeBits

Eric Sheid of IA Wiki fame has passed on the news that Peter Morville, co-writer with Louis Rosenfeld of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, will be in Sydney. Join him and other IA folks for a beverage at the Greenwood Hotel, North Sydney, this Friday 9 March from 5.30 onwards.