UCISA 2004 Management Conference:Brian Kelly gave a talk on What Can Internet Technologies Offer? at the UCISA 2004 Management Conference which was held at the G-Mex International Conference Centre, Manchester on 17th-19th March 2004.
The talk took place in the session which ran from 10:15-11:00 on Friday 19th March 2004.
This year's UCISA conference recognises the need for an increased customer focus within the services we deliver and will seek to addresses the strategies needed to support an environment in which Universities are entering a more competitive marketplace in which students see themselves as consumer.
As well as political factors such as the increased student numbers and changes in student funding the changed environment reflects the pervasive nature of networked technologies, such as email, the Web, online games, etc. This environment is still continuing to develop. Technologies as Blogs, Wikis, the Semantic Web, etc. are currently being developed. Such technologies often emerge from the Internet development community and are often available as open source software. Although this may provide financial benefits to the sector it can be difficult to get a feel for the bigger picture. There is also a danger that unmanaged deployment of such applications in an environment in which departments can deploy applications for themselves can lead, in the longer term, to unmanaged growth and support problems.
In this talk Brian Kelly, a JISC-funded adviser on Web technologies, will outline the potential for Internet technologies to support collaborative working and seek to provide a bigger picture which addresses longer term issues such as support, data preservation and data migration.
Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus - an advisory post funded by the JISC and Resource:
the Council for Libraries, Museums and Galleries to support the Higher and Further
Education communities and the cultural heritage sector in making best use of the
World Wide Web.
Brian is a long-standing Web developer, having helped establish the Web service at the University of Leeds in January 1993 - one of the first 50 Web services listed in CERN's directory of public Web sites. Although instantly spotting the potential for the Web for providing the Campus Wide Information Service at Leeds, Brian was concerned that inferior, although more widely used solutions such as Gopher, would become the de facto standard. So Brian sought to convert the Higher Education sector to use of the Web by giving presentations and seminars at a variety of conferences.
Following the universal acceptance of the Web, Brian sought further involvement with Web technologies as the senior trainer at the Netskills training organisation, based at the University of Newcastle. In 1996 Brian was appointed as UK Web Focus at UKOLN, a national centre of expertise in digital information management based at the University of Bath.
Following the universal acceptance of the Web, prior sought further involvement with Web technologies as the senior trainer at the Netskills training organisation, based at the University of Newcastle. In 1996 Brian was appointed as UK Web Focus at UKOLN, a national centre of expertise in digital information management based at the University of Bath.
Brian is the JISC representative on the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium), the body responsible for overseeing the development of Web standards. Brian is an active proponent of the use of open standards in order to provide the application and platform independence which are of particular importance in the Higher Education sector.
This talk is informed by the paper on "Building Online Communities: The Barriers and the Bruises" which was written by John Heap (LMU) and Brian Kelly and which was presented at the IADIS Web-Based Communities 2004 conference.
In addition the talk was informed by an Instant Messaging Poll carried out by the network Development Team at the University of Edinburgh.