By It was a privilege to be able to attend the IWMW 2013 (Institutional Web Management Workshops) conference in Bath this year. The theme of the conference, “What next?”, was apt considering that the funding for UKOLN, who arranged the conference, had been stripped – along with the Budget announcing further cuts, there was an air of uncertainty.
Cable Green from Creative Commons, gave a fantastic talk about how the web is progressing in the area of open licensing. Open/free information brings along both innovation and challenges to organisations, including universities, whose business models need to adapt to this share-alike environment. This theme of openness followed through with Mozilla Open Badges initiative – a way to augment a persons’ credentials through developing evidence of lifelong learning by using Open badges (meta data recording achievements) – a lot of similarities to MyFolio.
Moocs (Massive open online courses) were discussed in a few presentations. These sometimes-free online courses, with all their pros and cons, are causing ripples in higher education. They lie well with many university strategies, but there are pros and cons. There is a good moral reason, but also it threatens traditional universities. We are living in a changing world and need to be adaptive. Fees are becoming more expensive and students are more selective, but can a Moocs replace the transforming nature of a university? (http://futurelearn.com/ and https://www.coursera.org/)
Ranjit Siddhu’s presentation “What the fcuk happened?” – highlighted that we are in a changing environment based on clearing on 16th August 2013 (even Russell Group universities went into clearing). With an increase in tuition fees we need to find better ways to be competitive – being intelligent, targeted and providing value.
Dai Griffiths from Bolton University gave an interesting talk about conflicting pressures of Moocs, open research, KPIs and the double bind that universities may be experiencing.
Paul Wood from UKOLN talked about Working with Developers and the importance of providing career paths for developers in Universities to keep talent as there are few technical people in the higher echelons. Having developers within management areas helps secure the importance of keeping development in-house.
The openness theme continued along with a discussion about how the research landscape is changing. Crowdsourcing, blogging, collaborative texts and networking is making research more participatory – what counts as research is more broad. Open access journals are beginning to prove their credibility and what doesn’t this mean for the traditional publishing journals?
Responsive design was the buzzword. I attended an insightful talk by Cambridge as to the challenges both politically and technically that they encountered in delivering an enviable new website – a fantastic example of pushing forward. They used a supplier design agency and spoke about the discovery they went through in creating their site. David Cornforth (developer from JISC infonet) gave an excellent presentation on why responsive design is the future highlighting the boom in mobile and need to work in an agile way. Creating rapid, iterative prototypes and an increased collaboration helped them deliver their responsive website.
Richard Prowse (Head of Digital at Bath) gave a talk on the birth of the content strategist – he pushed that putting content first is key. It should be the centre of the journey and should inform design and development – it should not be last on the list. We need to consider how content goes beyond our website and how we plan for that.
Jonathan Hassel (Accessibility consultant) gave an excellent presentation on BS 8878, a British Standard code of practice for web accessibility for which he was the lead author. The standard strived to embed accessibility into the culture of a business as opposed to just a project afterthought. It isn’t about guidelines, but about people – accessibility should be a part of the process in which you design a better product, not just a compliant one.
Although there were at times some gloomy discussions (cuts in budgets, competition from Moocs and uncertainty of universities and traditional higher education), Paul Boag’s fiery presentation woke everyone up with a call-to-action to make a change in the often stifling, institutionalised culture. Key aspects he identified were slow committee-based decision-making, department silos and the web team as a service, not integral. Putting the user first is crucial in developing a competitive website: it reduces costs, increases effectiveness/conversion and is inclusive. Defining policies and guidelines help steer directions away from subjective committees. Test and iterate – try, fail fast and move on. Stop moaning and make your job fun!
Neil Denny’s presentation on the “Delicious discomfort of not knowing”, was an apt end to the conference. The future is uncertain, but get comfortable with being uncomfortable, adapt the attitude of an artisan, be creative and work with resistance.