On Thursday (14th May) Pamela Agar, Head of Digital Media and Marketing from Imperial College, and I ran a seminar for CASE Europe. Our aim was to move people on from ‘wouldn’t it be nice’ discussions around Web 2.0 to showing practical examples from Universities that have benefited taking a different approach to content delivery.
“Beyond the hype: getting the most from your web presence” featured a range of presentations from Jeremy Speller (UCL) talking about iTunes U to Jane Van de Ban (Birkbeck) dispelling some of the myths regarding writing for the web. The day was really interesting and some of the presentations insightful. As a co-chair my ability to take notes (and fully engage) was somewhat limited but I did note down a few observations and things that I’d like to investigate further.
5 things I learnt / hadn’t considered:
- It takes users a millisecond to make a judgement in your website
- Duke University (US) gave away iPods to all students in 2004 – 5 years ago and we’re still talking about it now!
- Warwick are creating a system whereby you upload a video and the branding is added automatically and the video is then published. – A real step on for ‘quick and professional video’.
- Imperial hand pick related articles for ALL news stories – this keeps people engaged for a lot longer.
- Using web stats to inform international office about potential new markets / trends (via @jamesmellor).
A few things I want to investigate further:
- iTunes U (and iTunes U private) – Until Thursday I wasn’t aware of iTunes U (Private) and love the way UCL are using this to store lectures (via Moodle)
- Google Insights – via @picklejar
- Capturing more video content for our website
If you’re interesting in knowing more have a look at the twitter conversation.
Posted in: communication, events
As of this time last year, the University Academic Year Charts have been generated in HTML, PDF and iCalendar formats from Excel spreadsheets. Previously there were only PDFs for download but we thought that providing versions to view live on the web and a version people could add to their own calendar software would be useful.
To take the burden out of maintaining all these different formats by hand we used some short Ruby scripts to do this (using libraries such as roo, pdf-writer, and icalendar).
Within Web Services we use the calendar plugin of our wiki to schedule who handles our frontline support on a daily basis (and then get it deliverd to us over instant messenger, as we’ve blogged about before) but it didn’t show the University holidays, meaning that the support was somtimes unfairly balanced.
A screenshot of our support schedule plus University holidays
Yesterday we remembered that one of the year charts we generate just contains dates relevant to staff, without all the teaching days and student holidays marked in, and like all the others, we generate an iCalendar file for it, which the calendar plugin can read. So, a few clicks later and now our support schedule contains the University holiday dates as well as our custom-added events.
This means our calendar has an iCalendar input (the holidays) for human usage when we’re updating the schedule as well as an iCalendar output (our support schedule) for robot usage when delivering our schedule directly to us! We’ve had to do comparatively little to enable this, neither of them have to be maintained by hand, and this is only a tiny fraction of the things that are possible, and all enabled because we use software which generates and consumes standard, open formats (and thanks to Tom Natt for making sure we did it!).
Posted in: communication, development, team
