Shock of the Old Conference 2007:
Does Web 2.0 Herald The End Of In-House Development And Provision Of IT Services?

The following proposal for a talk on Does Web 2.0 Herald The End Of In-House Development And Provision Of IT Services? has been accepted for the Shock of the Old Conference 2007. The talk was given by Paul Walk. The conference was held on 22^nd March 2007 at the Said Business School, University of Oxford.

Abstract

Much of the interest in use of Web 2.0 technologies in e-learning focusses on their use in enriching teaching and learning and related institutional challenges. There is also a need to consider the implications of use of externally hosted Web 2.0 services on institutional IT development, support and hosting environment.

The increasing takeup of social networking services by young people is setting their expectations on the services they will expect to use at University. At the University of Edinburgh's Star Gazing 2006 conference, for example, two students who spoke at the conference argued that the quality of the email service provided by GMail was much better than that provided by the institution.

Are we, therefore, seeing the beginning of the demise of software developed by, and perhaps even hosted at, institutions? Perhaps this is too radical a position to hold, but a conference which is addressing the Shock of the Social should provide a valuable opportunity to address such issues. This paper will challenge some of the orthodox approaches taken in the development and provision of e-learning services by asking a number of challenging questions:

• With social networking services which get better as the number of users grow, can institutions seriously expect to be able to compete with commercial services which have a global reach?
• Repository services such as Slideshare.net have become popular very quickly for both the number of slide resources uploaded and the numbers of access to the resources (The "10 Ways to a Killer Blog" slideshow has been viewed almost 4,000 times in 2 months). How does this contrast with institutional experiences in deploying institutional repositories?
• Popular Web 2.0 services can generate profits for the provider, whereas in-house development clearly costs money, time and effort. If institutional use of such third party services makes money for the service (with, for example, advertising revenue ensuring the financial stability of the service provider) and saves institutions from having to invest resources in seeking to compete with such service, isn't this a win-win situation for all parties?
• What can institutions learn from the commercial Web 2.0 approach to development?

Materials

Slides

Does Web 2.0 Herald The End Of In-House Development And Provision Of IT Services?

[MS PowerPoint 97/2000 format] - [HTML format]

Chat Facility

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