UCISA WLF / UKOLN Workshop: Beyond Email - Strategies For Collaborative Working In The 21st Century
UCISA WLF / UKOLN Workshop: Beyond Email - Strategies For Collaborative Working In The 21st CenturyBrian Kelly organised a workshop on Beyond Email: Strategies for Collaborative Working and Learning in the 21st Century in conjunction with the UCISA WLF. The workshop was held at Weetwood Hall, University of Leeds on 22nd November 2004. The official Web is available at <http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/groups/wlf/events/2004_beyond/>.
For many institutions the main use of the World Wide Web is for the publication of information, either for use by external visitors or by staff and students within the institution. However as well as its role as a publishing tool the Web is increasingly being used as a communications channel. This may include real-time communications between individuals or small groups using dedicated or Web-based instant messaging tools; news alerts systems; Blog software which can be used by individuals to share their views of particular topics and solicit feedback and collaborative authoring environments such as Wikis which enable groups to collaborate in the development of Web pages.
This workshop will provide an opportunity for delegates to gain an understanding of these technologies and hear about how they can be used. Delegates will also have an opportunity to address the challenges which need to be faced when deploying such tools in an institutional context.
By the end of the workshops participants will:
The workshop is aimed at staff who are responsible for or have an interest in:
The following information about the workshop was made available after the workshop had concluded:
The workshop included a number of discussion groups which addressed the following application areas: IM, Newsfeeds, Blogs and Wikis. The discussion groups addressed the following issues:
In addition the discussion groups identified action plans for (a) the individual participants; (b) the participants institutions and (c) national bodies such as UCISA.
Each discussion group had a chair and a reporter who gave a brief report on the issues discussed and recommendations made.
The timetable is given below.
| Time | Topic |
|---|---|
| 09:30 | Registration & Coffee |
| 10:00 | Welcome and Introduction Talk: About / Wiki page - [HTML format] - [MS PowerPoint 97/2000 format] |
| 10:15 | Talk 1: 'Setting The Context - Emerging Collaborative Environments' Brian Kelly, UKOLN |
| 11:00 | Case Study 1 - 'The Perspective From The Research User' Paul Shabajee, ILRT, University of Bristol |
| 11:30 | Discussion Groups: IM, Newsfeeds and Mobile Devices |
| 12:10 | Report Back |
| 12:30 | Lunch |
| 13:15 | Welcome to afternoon session |
| 13:20 | Case Study 2 - 'Weblogs: Niche or Nucleus?' Derek Morrison, CDNTL, University of Bath |
| 13:50 | Discussion Groups: Blogs and Wikis |
| 14:30 | Coffee |
| 14:50 | Report back and recommendations |
| 15:10 | A Vendor View from Mirapoint Kevin Woods, Mirapoint |
| 15:25 | Conclusions |
| 15:30 | Workshop ends |
Brian Kelly is partly funded by the
JISC
to advise the Higher and Further Education communities on best use of
Web technologies (he is also funded by the
MLA
to advise the museums, libraries and archives sector).
He is been a long-standing advocate of the Web, having set up a Web server
in January 1993 when working in the Computing Service at the University of Leeds.
Concerned that the inferior Gopher technology might emerge as the standard for
providing what was then known as a Campus Wide Information System
(CWIS)
Brian gave many presentations during the mid 1990s throughout the community,
including UCISA events and UKERNA JANET User Support Workshops.
Since 1996 Brian has been employed at UKOLN, a national centre of expertise in digital information management based at the University of Bath. Brian gives many presentations on Web technologies and organises the annual Institutional Web Management Workshop series aimed at sharing best practices for the institutional Web management community.
If you have met Brian, he invites you to add him to your FOAF file, and he will do likewise. If you have not yet heard of FOAF, Brian will be only too happy to explain the potential of this emerging Semantic Web technology.
Paul Shabajee is a Research Fellow based in the Institute
for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol. He has wide ranging
interests focused around the meaningful application of new and evolving technologies
to support learning, research and community development.
His current research project is the SWARA (Semantic Web And Repurposing Applications) project, investigating how evolving Semantic Web and related technologies can support and enrich the use of Web-based information sources and services. The SWARA project is funded by Hewlett Packard Labs and Paul works alongside the HP Labs Semantic Web research group.
Of particular interest in relation to this seminar is the HP Labs work as part of the SWAD (Semantic Web Advanced Development) Europe project (see http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/), in the development of 'Semantic Blogging' and Community Portals (SWED) demonstration systems. In 2003 Paul wrote an article for the Times Higher entitled "'Hot' or Not? Welcome to real-time peer review", describing his experiences at the WWW2003 conference where the informal use of IRC at the conference opened his eyes to the wider applicability (and issues) of such technologies.
Derek Morrison has been involved with information and communications technologies in teaching and learning since studying for his first honours degree in education in 1979.
Derek worked mainly in the Health Services with, sometimes, extensive periods of secondment to the higher education sector. He completed a Masters degree at the University of Surrey in Interactive Systems Analysis (aka Multimedia Learning Systems) and, in 1993, he took up his first post at the University of Bath where he was very involved in a number of distance learning initiatives both in the UK and overseas. Because he crossed both technology and education boundaries Derek was asked to set up a Multimedia Learning Unit which later matured into what is now the CDNTL (Centre for the Development of New Technologies in Learning) at the University of Bath. Derek is the Director of CDNTL.
CDNTL is associated with the design and development of a number of prestigious e-learning resources and initiatives including: Decision Making in the European Union (a Socrates project), Comparative Social Policy (a Tempus and Erasmus project, and winner of the European Academic Award in 2000), Project GOLD (a TLTP Phase 3 project), a BCS award winning series of Medical Updates for Doctors (case-based multimedia CD-ROMs and supporting web resources) which has now 'spun-out' to become the Royal College of General Practitioners Learning Unit, and EuroLaw (a PHARE project designed to help former Soviet states adjust to western legal systems).
CDNTL also supports the University of Bath's e-learning activities and the Centre's focus here is capability building within Departments. At the end of January of this year, Derek launched 'Auricle' (see http://www.bath.ac.uk/e-learning/auricle.htm) a multi-author weblog for those interested in issues and perspectives in e-learning and learning technologies. Auricle has been very successful and is now approaching ~200,000 accesses since launch.
During the workshop a number of participants used Wikis, instant messaging and Blogs to give their views on the event. Access to the comments is available from the links given below.
A draft Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) for the workshop is available.
The workshop will provide a valuable opportunity for delegates to evaluate the potential of networked devices to support conferences, workshops, etc. The lessons learnt should prove useful if you are planning on providing WiFi networks at conferences in your own institutions. In order to ensure that delegates can make make effective use of the technologies you are asked to read the further information about the technologies and, if possible, install software in advance of the workshop. Note that information about the Wiki for annotating pages on the Web site is available.
The following software applications will be mentioned at the workshop and possibly used during the workshop. You may find it useful to install the software prior to the workshop in order to gain experience or the software and possibly make use of the software at ther workshop.
If you would like to experiment with a Wiki, see the Wiki test pages.
