Slides for a talk on "What if Web 2.0 Really Does Change Everything?" given by Brian Kelly, UKOLN at the UCISA CISG 2009 conference on 18-20 November 2009.
See http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/ucisa-cisg-2009/
1. What if Web 2.0 Really Does Change Everything? Brian Kelly UKOLN University of Bath Bath, UK UKOLN is supported by: This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence (but note caveat) Acceptable Use Policy Recording of this talk, taking photos, discussing the content using Twitter, blogs, etc. is permitted providing distractions to others is minimised. Resources bookmarked using ‘ ucisa-cisg-2009 ’ tag http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/ucisa-cisg-2009/ Email: [email_address] Twitter: http://twitter.com/briankelly/ Blog: http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/
33. External third-party services Central services Virtual Research Environment Managed Research Environment My Working Environment University Who can access the data? Finance management SSO & Shibboleth Room booking Staff recruitment Procurement Payroll Policies & Procedures Staff development Staff sickness & absence Internal Transfers Electronic signatures BO reports Grant applications Publishing e-Prints Research Assessment Exercise Directory of Expertise Information About PhD students Project Management Research skills resources Internal Peer review Library catalogue e-journals Grant proposal archive Fixed-term renewal Social Networking Tools Collaborative authoring Research data management Blogs Collaborative workspace Shared Bookmarks Access to IP restricted resources High Performance Computing Alerts News & Events Cardiff Mail (email & calendaring Presence Awareness & Instant Messaging Discussion lists My Files Wikis Profiles
34. Towards a Culture of Openness http://www.flickr.com/photos/zebble/6080622/sizes/l
35. To Bring Rewards http://www.flickr.com/photos/brittanyg/1469478616/sizes/l
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48. Conclusions The future is exciting - but we will need to engage in managing our use of the Web 2.0 environment Acknowledgments to Michael Edson for the Web Tech Guy and Angry Staff Person
Editor's Notes
Layered over this representation of services is the personal working environment of the learner, teacher and researcher. This diagram is intended to show a holistic and person-centred view of work activities and service use. The slice across the organisation and extending beyond, reveals the complex way in which people are now being exposed to and using both internal and external services. It is this loop that goes outside of the organisation that is most interesting. It’s where people are making increasing use of what’s on offer outside of the university - and in most cases this is completely bypassing internal service providers.
And researchers also have their environment which drawing on services tailored for their work. We’ll look at the researcher’s environment in more detail – and ask ourselves what will the future university contribute? How will we manage the mix services for our researchers? A rationale approach would suggest that we should focus our efforts on central services, because that is where the greatest gains for overall productivity within the organisation are likely to be achieved. What I hope to show is that when a researcher does their work they use services from across all of these different functional areas. They do not work in a compartmentalised way when they access services – their main concern, and what drives them, is their work task. Service providers must be careful not to adopt a blinkered view. A service that is focused solely on the design, development and delivery of technologies – without managing and coordinating this in concert with other non-technology services - will result in poor technology use. We end up focusing our efforts on just making the tool available and NOT on how and why they’re needed. For example, when a researcher does a grant application – which we’ll take a closer look at in a moment – it involves them making use of services from every area.
We all perform many different kinds of work activities: These vary from the ‘frequent and mundane’ – to the ‘occasional and important’ One thing that is often mentioned by staff is their desire to minimise work that is considered to be a ‘chore’. These are mainly tasks associated with the administration and management of their primary work role. On the whole, central university services are intended to try and reduce the time and effort spent doing chore type tasks. Again, a rationale approach would suggest focusing effort on these services because this is where the greatest gains can be achieved for the overall productivity within the organisation.
In contrast, the ‘core’ work activities are what we would like to spend all our time doing. This is what someone would consider to be mainstream and most important to their work. Their primary concern is to maximise their time and effort to achieve this work. In practice, of course, both kinds of tasks have to be performed - but there is a difference in motivation and interest on the part of the person to perform them.
This is just to give some examples of the types of services in each area. Central services – provide things like finance, HR, polices, procedures The Managed Research Environment provides services to enable the effective administration and management of research work for all researchers in the institution The Virtual Research Environment is where services are used that directly enable practices associated the specific types of research work – these will include data and information management tools, and services that enable communication and collaboration And finally, there are the external third-party services – which will increasing provide equivalents to those provided by the university, and much more besides