I have summarised sections of the Horizon Report 2008 for my colleagues at USYD who work in these areas. The focus of my summary is on Grassroots Video and Collaboration Webs and I encourage you to read the whole report as well as visit the Horizon Wiki for further information.
The summary is available on the Economics and Business website.
For those of us who couldn't make it to Baltimore for the eduWEB conference, Karine at collegewebeditor has organised a feast of live blogging for the conference. Well worth a read.
At the inaugural University Web Forum yesterday several people mentioned that they would like to see case studies on higher ed websites, especially examples of 'good' design.
I have posted about this one before but just as a reminder, eduStyle is well worth a look if you want to see what's happening in Higher Ed web design and development. Registered users submit their sites and other users can appraise the sites, voting for or against them and leave comments. Most examples are from the US but there some Australian candidates.
Another site to check out is Design Meltdown that has featured two articles on higher ed web design, accompanied by copius examples. Read the first part here, and the second part here.
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').
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').
A post on College Web Editor brings together a list of other University web teams who blog. A few include:
There's more listed here.
One that's not listed, as it's not officially affiliated with a University is Animatty which is written by an old colleague of mine.
It's encouraging to hear from other people grappling with the issues around web development and support for Universities.
Two quick links: Yale are set to post some courses on the web for free.
The 18-month pilot project will provide videos, syllabi and transcripts for seven courses beginning in the 2007 academic year. They include "Introduction to the Old Testament," "Fundamentals of Physics" and "Introduction to Political Philosophy."The courses cannot be counted toward a Yale degree, and educators say they are no substitute for actual teaching.
Everyone knows about Wikipedia but there are who lot of other 'wikithings', including Wikiversity.
Wikiversity is a community for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. Wikiversity is a multidimensional social organization dedicated to learning, teaching, research and service.
stu.dicio.us is a rather 'web 2.0' tool that allows students to take notes online and share them with others. You can nominate your institution, class and teacher. There's also a whole lot of other add-ons such as auto-linking to wikipedia (!??!) and the ability to build todo lists.
A lot of these sort of things have sprung up lately and withered away, who knows if this will take off.
And in case you were wondering:
Sharing notes is not cheating. Everyone should have every advantage possible in increasing individual knowledge.
How many of the top students would want to put their notes online?
Not strictly about building websites but, BBC Radio 4 is running a series called 'The idea of a university' which can be listened to via the web. It is based on UK unis but still might be of interest to some.
Martha Kearney looks at how our universities have been transformed by six decades of expansion. Has our idea of what a university is for changed?
The University of Sydney library launched its Sydney eScholarship Repository. The Repository aims to:
bring together, in one secure digital repository, as much of the research and scholarly material which is generated by the wide variety of academic areas of the University of Sydney...The eScholarship Repository will provide long term preservation for a wide variety of material currently stored in a variety of electronic data bases and on individual computers. It will store numerous different digital formats including, text, audio, video images and data sets. Material in the repository will be discovered through web search engines such as Google.
HigherEd BlogCon kicked off on April 3. What is it?
a fully web-based event focused on how new online communications technologies and social tools are changing Higher Education.
Go and check it out.
Late last year I attempted to give an introduction to 'Web 2.0' for novices and discuss the implications of 'Web 2.0' applications for design and the higher ed sphere.
This month in the EDUCAUSE Review Bryan Alexander does a much better job of it in his article Web 2.0: A new wave of innovation for teaching and learning. I highly recommend you read it if you at all interested in the development of the web and its relationship to learning and teaching.
There's been a lot of hype around Web 2.0 and accompanying cyncism, some of which has a point. Alexander's article gets behind the hype and highlights a few of the critical elements. For me these were:
- The idea of microcontent. That is, thinking about content in terms of chunks and not pages. This has huge implications for design, for content syndication and the way in which people think about the web.
- Social bookmarking and writing platforms that offer great potential for researchers and anyone working in a collaborative environment. He points out some unis are already using these sorts of tools, for example the Penntags project and H20 at Harvard. Last week I pointed out Connotea and the tried and true favourite CiteULike has been around for while.
I don't think the web, especially the 'social' side of it, can be ignored when it comes to teaching students and communicating with them generally. The reality is undergraduate students are coming to university already comfortable with the notion of a social space online (think MySpace, blogs, and boredofstudies). This is how they find information, they are used to the non-linear web world, they are used to communicating online. They have learned to learn this way. It would be crazy to ignore it.
The blog You're It reports on open source code released by Connotea that can be added to 'Instituional Repositories' (IRs).
One general problem with IRs is that, notwithstanding services like Google Scholar, a lot of their content isn’t very easy to find, and it certainly isn’t easy to browse between related items in different repositories. Our new code aims to improve things by allowing IR users to tag articles and see links to related content, all from within the IR web page itself. Behind the scenes, the software communicates with del.icio.us and/or Connotea (Nature’s own social bookmarking service for scientists). Since Connotea is open source, it will also work with any instance of Connotea Code.
For those interested in such things, AICTEC is counducting a review of policy in regard to the administration of .edu.au domain names.
The policy for the .edu.au domain was endorsed by AICTEC in April 2003. Since that time a number of policy anomalies and difficulties have arisen as a result of the changing business environments experienced by Australian education and training organisations and jurisdictions. These need to be resolved in order to provide a firm base for the future operation of the .edu.au domain.
A discussion paper on these issues has been prepared and is available for download.
Submissions and comments on the policy issues raised in the discussion paper are invited, with a view to providing recommendations on the future operation, application, and administration of the .edu.au domain.
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QUT are looking at how they could use mobile phones, PDAs and iPods to support the learning experience.
QUT may soon be able to shrink the typical uni student's 5kg+ backpack into a 150g iPod and turn the pesky mobile into teachers' pet learning device.These are just two uses of the ubiquitous personal communication devices used daily by students being trialled or researched for their teaching potential by Queensland University of Technology's Teaching and Learning Support Services (TALSS) in collaboration with a number of faculty partners.
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Fron our very own University news site: Meeting the demands of the Net Gen.
A succession of international speakers will tell a University of Sydney symposium in November that the traditional university campus, with its heavy emphasis on classrooms and lecture theatres, is rapidly becoming outdated...Meeting the expectations of Net Gen students is one of the biggest challenges facing universities. What needs to change? And what might the University of Sydney campus of the near future look like?
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Stanford university has made their audio material available through iTunes.
Stanford on iTunes provides university-related audio content via the iTunes Music Store, Apple’s popular music jukebox and online music store. Stanford on iTunes gives alumni and the general public free access to a wide range of Stanford-specific digital audio content. The project includes two sites:
- a public site, targeted primarily at alumni, which will include Stanford faculty lectures, learning materials, music, sports, and more.
- an access-restricted site for students delivering course-based materials and advising content.
More at the Stanford Report. Now, if only there was an Australian version of iTunes...
25/10/05 UPDATE: There IS an Australian iTunes. Apple has quietly launched it, media announcement yet to come. Just load up your iTunes and choose your country. Thanks to Mr Andrew Jessup for alerting me to this fact.
Via Syndication for Higher Ed:
Classcaster is a blogging service with podcast facilities built in. Using a cell phone as a microphone, instructors can call in a lecture and it’s automatically posted to their blog and an enclosure is generated in the appropriate RSS feed.
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Mark Nearhos from Economics and Business has pointed me in the direction of Purdue's lecture podcasting. This has prompted me to dig out some other references to unis who are using podcasting and what they are doing with it. There is discussion around the uni about the possibilities here - anyone wanting to add something, leave a comment.
So, what other unis are doing:
Although Web Services is not directly involved in online learning, I thought this article may have been interest to some: Usability testing for E-Learning. We are, after all, a education institution.
Via Column Two.
Dartmouth are implementing a new security system that may be secure but sure isn't cheap:
Over the course of the next 12 months, Peter Kiewit Computing Services will phase in new security procedures requiring students to use a physical USB device, together with new security software, in order to access information on the Dartmouth intranet including student grades, administrative files and personal data.
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Via collegewebeditor, Ohio State University have undergone the dreaded redesign process and have just launched. Interestingly, they made use of a blog during the redesign process.
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Several universities have started offering their students and staff blogging facilities. Via blogwithoutalibrary: a list of academic uses of blogs.
One such service is being offered by the University of Minnesota Libraries, run on Movable Type. They have even branded it: UThink. The obvious quetion to ask is why? Why provide students and staff with such a service? In the words of Minnesota Libraries:
Libraries believe passionately in intellectual and academic freedom, and our role as advocates for those freedoms. Blogs are an excellent tool whereby students, faculty and staff at the University can let their opinions be heard. Blogs offer a way to rapidly discuss opinions, issues, and ideas, and allow people from across the country, and campus, to connect with each other through these ideas.
In some ways the blog service is just an extension of the 'web-space' concept - users having access to their own webspace where they can post their own website. Putting it into a blog context streamlines the websites and formalises it somewhat. There is a central repository or entry point for the blogs instead of a wildly random, in content and quality, collection of websites. It also focusses the purpose of the sites on discussion and, oh joy, it encourages people to write.
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Ohio University is about to release its revamped homepage - an unashamed attempt to attract new students.
I think this is a great idea but I am wary of it becoming the only homepage of the University. I am becoming more and more of the opinion that a university needs several homepages complete with accompanying separate domains that reflect the targetted audience of each. The homepage of any university site attempts to do so much for so many that it is impossible to keep all happy. The philosophy of our front page is for it to act as a launching point only. Audiences are channelled off into their own 'subsites'. When the site was designed we found that this was the only way to deal with the huge amount of information we had to cover and the incredibly diverse audiences who would be visiting the site.
If dedicated homepages were built for each major audience and promoted with their own domains this may reinforce the idea that the University website has become much larger than a single site, it is a group of sites. A central homepage could still exist but it would act as a launching point only.
In terms of information architecture and navigational tools this makes sense too. Different audiences may need different architectures. There would be an overall architecture that ensured that all sites fit together but individually the architectures of each site would operate alone. A 'one-size-fits-all approach to architecture is not the optimal way to do it. Content could still be reused across sites through the CMS, as we do now.
Anyway, just an idea.
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Some universities in the US are considering upping their fees to cover technology costs. The extra fees would be used to cover the costs of such things as upgrading labs and installing wireless internet access.
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