"A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities."

UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.

About

Brian Kelly gave an hour-long talk on Maximising Impact And Access Using The Social Web for academic staff at the University of Aberystwyth on 21^st October 2009.

Background

The talk will be part of an event organised by the Gwella project. Gwella is a HEFCW/HEA project to support the implementation of the HEFCW E-learning Strategy across Welsh institutions. The aim of the project is about enhancement (Gwella is the Welsh for improving / enhancing).

Each Welsh institution has its own priorities for Gwella and will focus on five areas: good practice; e-assessment; technology-enhanced learning; student engagement and policy and procedure. The event on 21^st October will focus on two of these five areas: (i) dissemination of good practice and (ii) technology-enhanced learning. In is intended to launch a number of Gwella-funded initiatives on the day including a wiki of good practice. The organisers also aim to demonstrate a number of developments in the area of technology-enhanced learning including software for blogs/wikis/podcasts in Blackboard, audio/video capture tools, our interactive voting system, etc.

Abstract

The are well-documented techniques, known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which can be used in order to ensure that Web resources can be easily found in search engines such as Google. But how can the Social Web be used in order to help users to find your services or resources?

This talk will explore a number of ways in which Social Web can be used by organisations seeking to maximise access to their services. The talk will discuss the potential of various technologies such as blogs, micro-blogs (such as Twitter) and wikis, as well as popular social sharing services (e.g. YouTube, Slideshare and Flickr) and social networking services such as Facebook.

The session will describe a number of ways in which the effectiveness of such services can be monitored. The ethical aspects of use of social services to support organisational aims will also be explored.

Slides

Maximising Impact And Access Using The Social Web

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

Accompanying Resources

Biographical Details

Brian Kelly has been involved in Web development since January 1993, when he helped to established a Web site at the University of Leeds (one of the first institutional Web sites in the UK). Since 1996 Brian has been employed at UKOLN, a national centre of expertise in digital information management based at the University of Bath in the UK. His responsibility is to advise the UK's higher and further community and the cultural heritage sector on ways of maximising the potential of the Web.