Social and Multimedia – the Guardian Way

It was a rare treat to spend last Thursday at the Guardian offices on an “Insight to journalism” course run by the Guardian Education Centre, and hear firsthand how they are using social and multimedia.

During a busy day we heard from a range of journalists, reporters, correspondents, producers and editors about the internal workings of the Guardian and how it is increasingly using social and multimedia. Margaret Holborn, Head of Guardian News and Media Education Centre, introduced the day with an overview of the paper’s history and constitution. Since moving to the new offices at King’s Place the Guardian now takes an integrated approach to its journalism with joint teams producing the printed paper and the web site, she said.

Next, Nell Boase Managing Editor with responsibility for the web site outlined some of the daily challenges of running the web presence and discussed some of the ways in which reader generated content was used on the site. The issue of payment for reader submitted photos came up in discussion, and Nell said that if the photo made front page news the reader would be paid at normal space rates.

Laurence Topham, Video Producer, introduced the art of making videos for the site and showed a film he’d made of a Tea Party meeting in Nevada. Interestingly, the Guardian is training journalists to be able to produce their own videos while on location. We picked up some interesting tips, like always use an external microphone. Later in the day we also got to do some of our own video editing (with iMovie) using footage from a project the paper is running in Katine Uganda.

Guardian.co.uk is an increasingly complex set of web sites, and Celine Bijleveld, Network Production Editor described how the sites cater for three types of users, those looking for a single story, those looking for the general news that day, and those that want both specialist news and breadth. With over 200 requests from editors each day for front page space, the web team need to balance the content of the front page, updating it continually. A number of different layouts are available including “special” and “nuclear” when a story, like the 2010 general election, is the most important news of the day.

Community Co-ordinators Laura Oliver (News) and Hannah Freeman (Culture) described how the Guardian is working with the community using social media tools like twitter and facebook. These tools offer speed and reach particularly during breaking news events, like the unrest in Egypt, but are also challenging in terms of verifying the facts. The team are using tools like AudioBoo to capture sound recordings of events as they happen. Hannah described how culture – film, books and arts – has a slightly different and dedicated audience who follow the interviews and features on the site. A new children’s books section of the site, where books are reviewed by children, represents a new venture in terms of reader generated content. This mutualism, building up the relationship the Guardian has with its readers in a number of ways, is a key strategy for the paper.

Podcasts have been produced at the Guardian since 2006, and Science Correspondent Alok Jha described how they were using podcasting in increasingly creative ways. Through the Science Weekly podcast Alok and his team aim to explain science in an understandable way, often interviewing famous scientists when they are in town. Not being a radio show meant that the Guardian podcasts could be less strict about content and style, he said.

A highlight for me was Guardian news reporter Adam Gabbatt describing live blogging from the recent student protests over tuition fee rises. He told how he creates minute by minute commentary by getting information from a number of sources including reporters on the scene, tweets from people in the crowd, and some audio and video. A video uploaded by reader had become a front page news story when the Metropolitan Police denied that mounted officers had charged the crowd, and the video showed otherwise, he said. The Guardian will run 2-3 live blogs per day.

John Stuttle, Systems editor gave a 10 minute tutorial on setting up a blog site on WordPress, and how to include images and embed video. John gave us lots of tips and advice on getting a blog started.

Looking to the future Tom Happold, Head of Multimedia said that multimedia at the Guardian would continue to be driven by what new technologies become available in the next 10 years. But with falling sales in newspapers the need to make money would become increasingly important he said. The Guardian would continue to focus on what it does well, journalism, and there was a training programme in place for staff to improve their video and audio production skills, he said.

At the end of the day David Marsh Production Editor judged the headline competition. We’d been asked to write two headlines on the death of Elizabeth Taylor, one for the paper and one for the web. Going through the entries, David shared some wisdom on what makes a good headline for each medium, where space was limited for print, but could be more creative especially if linked to a photo, compared with the web where the subject is vital to pull in readers via search engines, but there is often more space for longer headline. (I was ridiculously pleased to come third).

Finally Laurence returned to show us his brilliant Katine video, produced with some of the footage we had played with. Even the professionals need to get feedback on what they produce, and he had reordered the clips in response to feedback from his colleagues, he said.

A fascinating and thought provoking day I would definitely recommend, thanks to Margaret and the team.

The Benefits of Open Standards at JISC11

CETIS has been promoting and supporting the use of open standards and specifications in higher and further education for over 13 years. At the JISC conference yesterday we ran a session titled “The Benefits of Open Standards” to highlight some of the ways in which institutions are using standards behind the scenes to make life easier.

Paul Hollins, co-director of CETIS opened the session with the statement “Standards are the glue that hold systems together”. The aim of the session was to provide “real examples of how standards were being used” he said.

Wilbert Kraan followed with the “case for open standards” elaborating on the seven key roles that standards can play (as outlined in the 2009 briefing paper he wrote with Adam Cooper “Assessing the Business Case for Standards”

• Reduction in re-keying
• Reduced maintenance cost and disruption
• Durability of data
• Avoidance of lock-in
• Easier development paths
• Platform for collaboration
• Whole system economies

Wilbert concluded that the role of standards and specifications is to “codify the boring so that the exciting can happen on top of them”.

The first institutional example was presented by Patrick O’Reilly the IT Director at the University of Bolton. He described how he’d been persuaded to consider standards after sharing an office with CETIS for some years. The time to consider standards is often when systems need updating or changing, he said. He illustrated the point by describing how they had used the eXchanging Course Related Information (XCRI-CAP) specification when redesigning the Bolton Course database. Patrick described how during the role out of the new database the processes for producing the database were also updated so that the course prospectus is now produced from the new database directly, rather than being produced separately. This is lead to a significant reduction in re-keying of information into databases across the university. The second example was in migrating from WebCT to Moodle last year. Patrick explained that using existing standards for IMS content packaging and QTI meant that content was easy to migrate, saving staff time. Looking to the future Patrick stressed that there were further benefits for using standards, particularly in the university application process if UCAS adopts the XCRI-CAP standard.

Gary Wills and Bill Warburton, senior lecturers at Southampton, discussed how the IMS Question and Test Interoperability specification is being used at their institution. Gary opened with a brief overview of how QTI had developed and said it was a “good example of an open standard” because it had been developed by academics who understood the assessment process. Over a number of years Southampton has run JISC funded projects to develop QTI tools and pilot their use. The EASiHE project has used these tools with two student groups, higher surgical trainees and foundation and first year engineering maths students. Academics have been able to pool the questions they write and it has meant that they are not locked into any one assessment application. Bill Warburton discussed some of the problems of open standards, describing the process as a “three legged race” between system developers, standard developers and users, each having to wait for a response from the other before moving forward.

An open discussion followed for participants to question the speakers about the practicalities of using standards. This is a brief summary of some of the points raised. The first question was about the about the lack of standards for Cloud Computing, and whether Amazon and Microsoft would ever be persuaded to use Cloud standards. Referring to his earlier statement Wilbert replied that the problem was that the “Cloud is still too exciting”. When asked about how best to prepare developers for using standards, two different views emerged. At Southampton a top down approach of mandating the use of standards had been effective, whereas at Bolton persuading developers through examples elsewhere was more effective. Another question arose around adopting not only standards but standardised structures and frameworks and ways to integrate systems. These examples could help to build up a body of knowledge of standard implementations in the sector. One delegate questioned the competitive advantage to institutions in running their own email and learning environment systems, and suggested these might be areas to standardise or out source, but that standardising questions went to the heart of the teaching and learning process so institutions would be less likely to share. Gary Wills said that was true for some higher level courses, but not at entry level and probably not for formative assessment. The final comment in the discussion came from Brian Kelly from UKOLN who warned of the dangers of mandating standards and that the landscape of “open standards” was complex and not all standards can be considered truly “open”.

In summarising the session Paul Hollins said that when standards work “they become invisible”. Ten years ago work on the IMS enterprise spec had lead to its wide scale adoption in MIS systems, we don’t talk about it anymore because “it just works”, he said.

Feedback during the session was gather with the #cetisbos tag, Below are a few of the tweets:

bparsia:
#cetisbos #jisc11 QTI seems quite nice for representing assessment (only seen elevator pitch)

Cathfenn:
Open standards: business models of large scale suppliers huge barrier #jisc11 #cetisbos

cathfenn:
Open standards become useful when they just work! (you don’t have to keep peeking under bonnet) #cetisbos

The discussion highlighted some of the draw backs of standards and specifications, but there are clearly situations in universities and colleges where they can be very useful and effective. We hope this session helped to encourage people to look again at using open standards.

The session presentations are available on the JISC 11 site

The CETIS white paper summarising the Future of Interoperability Standards event is also available on the CETIS website.

A Pre-release briefing paper is also available on the IMS QTI v2.1 specification

Information on XCRI-CAP is available on the XCRI site.

CETIS sessions at JISC conference

Registration for this year’s JISC Conference on the 14th and 15th of March in Liverpool is now open. This year JISC CETIS is running two sessions. Wilbert Kraan and Phil Beauvoir will be Introducing Archi in a demonstration session on the evening of the 14th. Wilbert and Phil will introduce the Archi modelling tool and describe how it can be used to help understand organisational enterprise architecture.

On the 15th Paul Hollins and Wilbert Kraan are hosting a one hour symposium on The benefits of open standards. This session builds our briefing paper Assessing the Business Case for Standards highlighting the key roles standards can play in institutional IT strategies. There will be presentations from Patrick O’Reilly from the University of Bolton on the standards underpinning a move from WebCT to Moodle, and Gary Wills from the University of Southampton on developing assessment systems based on QTI.

We will also be running an exhibition standard with colleagues from the other Innovation Support Centres, UKOLN and OSS Watch, the theme will be supporting innovation. The JISC conference is a great networking opportunity so we hope to catch up with many colleagues there.

Cloud Culture report published

Last week Counterpoint, the British Council think tank, published the “Cloud Culture, the future of global cultural relations” pamphlet by Charles Leadbeater. In it Charles charts the cultural impact that the web has had in the last 15 years and looks ahead to how cloud computing will influence cultural developments over the coming decades.

“We have the potential to make available more culture and ideas in more forms to more people than ever: a digitally enabled, cultural cornucopia…..

…Yet this possibility, a vastly enhanced global space for cultural expression, is threatened by intransigent vested interests, hungry new monopolists and governments intent on reasserting control over the unruly web.”

Charles outlines the following threats to a truly open cloud:

* Censorship and the Power of Government
* Copyright:Old Media Seeks Protection from the Storm
* Cloud Capitalists
* Unequal Access to the Cloud

A thought provoking report and well worth reading.

Ten years of Technology

This week Bobbie Johnson at the Guardian is blogging about the technology developments in each of the last ten years of the noughties. Today he’s up to 2002, with the rise and rise of Google and the rise and fall of Napster.

Similarly the BBC are looking back over the noughties and this morning I caught on radio 4 Defining the decade which today focussed on Google and the impact of the internet (the other two themes being climate change and terrorism).

Anyone fancy doing a post on the last ten years of technology in education?

Barriers to Innovation

As a JISC Innovation Support Centre we often discuss the conditions needed to foster innovation, at local as well as national levels. So I was interested to come across this Futurelab literature review on Overcoming the Barriers to Educational Innovation by Kieron Kirkland and Dan Sutch.

Although the report focusses on innovation in schools, there is a lot that is directly applicable to universities and colleges. The authors group barriers into the following key themes:

“1. Innovation
2. Informal and social support structures
3. Formal environment
4. Risk aversion
5. Leadership
6. Shared vision
7. Change management”

I was particularly interested on the findings in the risk aversion theme:

“Core findings under risk-taking include:

* Innovation inherently engages in some degree of risk which can make individuals reluctant to innovate.

* Iterative change management cycles can mitigate some fears which impede innovation, such as fear of failure.

* To overcome risk aversion there needs to be motivation to innovate – this can be internal motivations, such as teachers wishing to improve the learning experience for pupils, or external motivations, such as pressure from above.

* Management style is core to supporting risk-taking behaviours, through encouragement and creating a sense of permission to engage in appropriate risktaking. This can be applied on a local level or on a wider national level.

* Institutional level practices have an important role in mitigating risk-taking, e.g. running pilot programmes and sound evaluation procedures.

* National level funding has a significant impact of risktaking behaviour.”

The last point is particularly relevant to the work of JISC emphasises “taking the risks that institutions would not normally take themselves” (JISC Draft Strategy 2010-2012).

However you could argue that it is actually individual projects who are taking the “risks”, and they will be under pressure both internally (from their management who endorsed their project) and externally (from JISC) to succeed.

The JISC Draft Strategy 2010-2012 outlines a framework for managing risk at a national level, perhaps projects too need more guidance on managing risk in their projects.

Bid Advice for Learning and Teaching Innovation Grants

Writing a project proposal is a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating process, so how do you maximise your chances of success?

In previous articles I’ve gathered some of the many JISC resources with advice and tips of success.

The current JISC call for Learning and Teaching Innovation Grants is accompanied by a review of the first two calls by Dr Neil Witt at the University of Plymouth. The success rate for the calls is alarmingly low, in Call 1 just 2 out of 82 proposals were funded and in Call 2 only 2 out of 85. So what has been going wrong ?

Dr Witt analysed the collated marks for the bids and found that the vast majoirty were “out of scope”. The criteria for being out of scope are listed below along side the number of bids that failed to compily in brackets.

1. The proposal must not duplicate existing JISC funded work. (Call1: 32%, Call2: 35%)
2. The proposal must not be part of the core institutional remit. (7%, 12%)
3. The proposal must not include the development or purchase
of learning material/learning content. (20%, 21%)
4. The proposal should not include the further development of an existing tool (10%, 6%)
5. The proposal should not include software and equipment purchase (13%, 13%)
6. The proposal must have the support of the lead institution and any partners. (18%, 3%)
7. The proposal must not be a direct resubmission of a previous bid to a JISC funded programme (4%, 2%)
8. Over length (this is an additional issue that will make a proposal Out of Scope)
(6%, 0%)

In the current call the JISC have adapted their documentation to address areas of weakness identified by Dr Witt. Proposers clearly need to set aside significant amounts of time to read the appropriate criteria and ensure that they meet them, so institutional managers clearly need to make space for staff to write bids. My concern is that while academic staff in universities are expected to bid for funding as part of their job, this is not always the case for support staff or staff in further education colleges.

The JISC executive are well aware of these problems and reviews like these as well as bid writing workshops can really help staff write successful proposals.

Can Twitter survive the hype cycle?

An article by BBC’s Maggie Shiels charts the rise and rise of Twitter, but wonders about the viability of the service – which has yet to make any money.

I’m a fan of Twitter (working in a distributed organisation it keeps me in touch with what my colleagues are up to) and Maggie usefully traces the development of the service from humble beginnings to endorsement by Oprah Winfrey.

But questions about how companies like Twitter become profitable remain. And in this new age of “economic austerity” it seems likely that companies won’t have the luxury of such extended profit free beginnings.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8015777.stm

Twitter is fast becoming a part of daily life

I just came across this post by Michael Calore at Wired about how developers are building applications for the home on the back of Twitter.

http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/twitters-hackab.html

The idea is that twitter enabled devices around your home and work can send you messages to tell you when the washing machine has finished the spin cycle – or (my favourite) when your plants need watering.

What would be nice is for my fridge to tell Tesco’s that we’ve nearly out of milk and put in an order for me….

Jim Fanning: The digital panopticon

I came across this article on the Futurelab site in which Jim Fanning, an Assistant Headteacher of a secondary school discusses the use of VLEs in schools. I’ve read a lot about VLEs in HE and FE, but it seems that while VLE use may be on the wane in the tertiary educational sector, it could be on the rise in schools. But there some interesting challenges around using VLEs in our schools.

In the article Jim compares a VLE with a panopticon. If like me you’ve never heard the word before, Jim explains that it’s an idea proposed by the nineteenth century philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, who was interested in prison reform.

A panopticon is:

“a prison building made up of many cells arranged around a central observation platform, from which one warden could supervise numerous prisoners at the same time. The inmates did not know when the wardens were present.”

So how does a panopticon relate to a learning environment?

Jim argues that:

“Despite the potential for learning platforms to herald a paradigm shift in teaching and learning, in the rush to adopt them schools may end up creating their very own digital panopticon, with the technology being used to monitor and control learning, rather than liberate it from the four walls of the classroom.”

One dimension of VLE use in schools that is just not an issue in HE, is that is some cases parents are encouraged to use VLEs to monitor “post lesson and homework tasks”. There is a real danger that pupils will view the learning environment as a monitoring surveillance tool which belongs to the system. Schools will have to be really creative in their use of VLEs to ensure that this doesn’t happen.

http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/publications-reports-articles/web-articles/Web-Article1118