Inside Out: What do current Web trends tell us about the future of ICT provision for learners and researchers?

British Library, London, Thursday 8th May 2008

Speaker details

Larry Johnson

The Horizon Project at five years

After five editions of the Horizon Report, seven patterns in the recent evolution of emerging technology have emerged that can only be seen over time. While the technologies and practices highlighted in this series have converged, morphed, and shifted over the years, it seems clear they are evolving in ways that continue to keep them in our sights. Some have already become quite commonplace and are integrated into our everyday activities; others while clearly still with us, have seen their current form influenced by parallel developments that are pushing them in one direction or another. While the currents and eddies of emerging technology are complex, it is clear that the Horizon Report has been following at least seven metatrends with some regularity. Join project director Larry Johnson as he outlines the pathways of innovation and technological evolution that he believes will profoundly impact the practice of teaching, learning and creative expression.

Laurence F. Johnson, Ph.D. is Chief Executive Officer of the New Media Consortium (NMC), an international consortium of more than 200 world-class universities, colleges, museums, research centers, and technology companies dedicated to using new technologies to inspire, energize, stimulate, and support learning and creative expression. He is an acknowledged expert on the effective application of new media in many contexts, and has worked extensively to build common ground among museums and universities across North America and in more than a dozen other countries. 

http://www.nmc.org
http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki 
http://sl.snmc.org 
http://virtualworlds.nmc.org

Bobbie Johnson

How Web 2.0 has changed things at the Guardian

Thanks to the internet, the Guardian is shifting from being a newspaper to being a news organisation which also produces printed products. This is a fundamental change in outlook caused by web technologies, but has been identified as a crucial move for the long-term survival of the publication. How has it happened? Why has it happened? And what are the challenges of doing this?

Bobbie Johnson has written about the internet for the Guardian since 2001, and became it's primary technology reporter in 2005. During his time at the organisation, he has interviewed luminaries including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Sir Tim Berners-Lee. His primary interests are the social impact of new technologies and how people react to the process of change.

Jeremy Stone, BBC

Jem Stone is the Portfolio Executive for social media in the BBC’s Internet Group. He runs a team developing products that support the BBC’s forums, blogs, and community sites. He develops strategy and guidance for the BBC’s increasing activity away from bbc.co.uk, and aligns or at least tries to, the BBC’s overall development in this space. He has over ten years experience producing web sites and services. He launched the BBC’s first pre-school sites for Cbeebies and Teletubbies. In a distant life he was a BBC radio producer and a feature of his about Star Trek fans speaking klingon was once played on Pick of the Week. He has 3 children and supports Brighton and Hove Albion FC.

Geoffrey Bilder

Sausages, coffee, chickens and the web: Establishing new trust metrics for scholarly communication

There was a time when we didn't want to know who picked our coffee or where our Sunday roast chicken once lived or who made our trainers, but now all of this information is becoming much more important to consumers. It turns out that we actually *want* to know how the sausage is made. What does this shift in consumer values tell us about creating effective trust metrics for the next generation of scholarly communication systems?

Geoffrey Bilder is Director of Strategic Initiatives at CrossRef, and has over 15 years experience as a technical leader in scholarly technology. He co-founded Brown University's Scholarly Technology Group in 1993, providing the Brown academic community with advanced technology consulting in support of their research, teaching and scholarly communication. He was subsequently head of IT R&D at Monitor Group, a global management consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 2002 to 2005, Geoffrey was Chief Technology Officer of scholarly publishing firm Ingenta, and just prior to joining CrossRef, he was a Publishing Technology Consultant at Scholarly Information Strategies, where he consulted extensively with publishers and librarians on emerging social software technologies and how they may affect scholarly and professional researchers.

CrossTech: http://www.crossref.org/CrossTech/
Louche Cannon: http://www.gbilder.com/blog

Chris Adie

Web 2.0: Managing the Risks

This talk will outline some of the risks which institutions need to take into account when considering the use of externally-hosted Web 2.0 services. Questions of security, confidentiality, reliability, integration and other challenges will be described. How should institutions think about and manage these issues? How can we ensure that users and decision-makers across the institution understand the possible consequences of their use of Web 2.0? Should institutions run their own Web 2.0 services, and if so, which? Finally, what general strategies might allow the benefits of these technologies to be realised while respecting the risks involved?

Dr Chris Adie is currently Academic Liaison Director for the College of Science and Engineering and the Information Services group in the University of Edinburgh. He provides a key strategic link between the College and Information Services, and is tasked with adding value to the relationship between IS and the College. His background includes management of academic IT services and of the interaction between academic IT services and the commercial software world. He has been involved with software companies in Silicon Valley, and has a background in software development. At Edinburgh, he recently led the development of guidelines for the use of external Web 2.0 services.

David Harrison

Universities and social networking: making sense out of nonsense

The nature of technology initiated disruption exemplified in Web 2.0 is explored, identifying some of its consequences as well as examining some of the effects and implications for service provision. It is suggested that a modified approach to service provision and management must be adopted in order to accommodate social networking and move to capitalise upon its benefits. Fundamental to achieving this will be adopting a philosophy of enablement through partnership at all levels of the organisation to harness better ways of staying abreast of and responsive to the potential value of emerging technologies. Central to achieving this will be adopting new ways of communicating and working with staff, students, the wider organisation and others outside the organisation with the aim being that the University remains confident about the governance that is in place.

David Harrison is Chair of the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (www.ucisa.ac.uk), the body that represents the whole of higher education, and increasingly further education, in the provision and development of academic, management and administrative information systems providing a network of contacts and a powerful lobbying voice. He is Assistant Director of Information Services at Cardiff University with responsibility for Innovation, Futures (including Strategy) and User Enablement. He is also CEO of Welsh Networking (www.wnl.net). In his role with UCISA he is committed to putting leadership at the top of the agenda and in working to ensure that the current and next generation of ICT leaders are ready and prepared to take on business aligned roles within their institution. At the same time through his involvement in Cardiff University's ambitious Modern IT Working Environment programme he is exploring how emerging technologies present both opportunities and challenges to the provision of Information Services within the enterprise.

http://diharrison.wordpress.com
http://twitter.com/DIHarrison

Gráinne Conole

Disruptive technologies or new pedagogical opportunities?

The term disruptive technologies has been around a long time, but is a particularly apt description in terms of what is currently happening within education - as institutional control and IT systems come head to head with the loosely coupled, user-centred, personalised power of web 2.0 technologies. Just as educational institutions were beginning to feel they were getting to grips with mainstreaming technologies and developing coherent strategies which assumed that technologies were core to all aspects of institutional business (and not simply peripheral innovations relevant to early adopters), along came a tidal wave of web 2.0 technologies which raised a whole set of new questions and issues:

• If excellent tools for managing information and facilitating different forms of communication are now available free (GoogleDocs, GMail, free wiki and blog software, twitter, etc) is there a need to replicate this with an institutional VLE that arguably has a more limited functionality?
• What are the implications for teaching of exciting and immersive virtual 3D worlds such as SecondLife?
• International research evidence shows that students are increasingly digital in all aspects of their lives – what are the likely demands on institutions of this born-digital generation?
• As both students and teachers are more and more migrating to enveloping themselves in their own personalised environment of tools, how does this relate to and integrate with institutional tools?
• As students, as a whole, become ever more digitally literate is the digital divide smaller but deeper for those who can’t or won’t use technologies?
• Although generally digitally literate, what is the evidence that the students know how to appropriate these technologies for academic purposes?
• Many argue that to ‘get’ web 2.0 you need to do it - is there a widening chasm within our institutional of those who ‘get’ it and those who don’t?

This ‘clash’ between institutional systems and web 2.0 has profound implications across all aspects of work within educational institutions – from future directions for policy and strategy, to the design of appropriate support infrastructures for students, to the way in which we design and deliver courses. The talk will consider the disjuncture inherent in the questions raised above, through a series of illustrations from current international research. It will describe some of the exciting work, which is been done to try and harness these technologies for educational purposes and bridge the gap between a world of institutional control vs. user-centred and loosely-coupled systems. It will consider in particular the pedagogical models that might be appropriate to describe this new, more messy and decentralised world and provide suggestions for how these issues can be addressed at both a strategic level and at the level of support and guidance for individual teachers.

Gráinne Conole is Professor of E-Learning in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK. Previously she was Professor of Educational Innovation in Post-Compulsory Education at the University of Southampton and before that Director of the Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the University of Bristol. Her research interests include the use, integration and evaluation of Information and Communication Technologies and e-learning and the impact of technologies on organisational change. Two of her current areas of interest are focusing on the evaluation of students’ experiences of and perceptions of technologies and how learning design can help in creating more engaging learning activities. Updates on current research and reflections on e-learning research generally can be found on her blog www.e4innovation.com. She has extensive research, development and project management experience across the educational and technical domains; funding sources have included the EU, HEFCE, ESRC, JISC and commercial sponsors). She serves on and chairs a number of national and international advisory boards, steering groups, committees and international conference programmes. She has published and presented over 300 conference proceedings, workshops and articles, including over 50 journal publications on a range of topics, including the use and evaluation of learning technologies. She is co-editor of the recently published RoutledgeFalmer book ‘Contemporary perspectives on e-learning research’.

http://www.e4innovation.com