A compelling reason to weed out old content from your web site, or at least mark it clearly as outdated.
A tag cloud of more than 1000 university home pages. See also the snapshot data showing how many universities mention blogs on their home page, or use jscript, CSS for print, various coding standards, iTunes and other features.
Ben Eltham summarises key points from the Cutler Review of the National Innovation System (PDF 3 Mb). The review addressed a complex problem: our national productivity has stalled and our innovation activities have flatlined since the early 2000s. Why, how and what’s to be done? Predictably, Cutler calls for increased funding to support innovation — but not necessarily focused on the areas of science and technology.
David Weinberger ponders whether the Internet is improving democracy and concludes that it’s impossible to know — yet. “When all you can see of yourself is what the sanitised mass media show you and what you can see around you in your physical environs, the differences the Net makes visible unsettle us profoundly.”
The Digital Media and Learning Competition will provide a total of US$2 million in grants for “pioneers who use new technologies to envision the future of participatory learning.” This year’s theme is “participatory learning” and there’s a junior category for 18-25-year-olds. The 2008 competition is open to non-US institutions and individuals.
Now in her fifth year at university, Mary Kate Hurley finally feels like a proper medievalist: “all too often I’ve felt like the only difference between being a medievalist and being a twentieth century-ist is that my texts aren’t in Modern English. But this is different, somehow. This foray into the world of manuscripts feels older, somehow. And yet, to access this knowledge, to learn how to decode these old texts, I’m not really confronting the things themselves… I’m still getting my input, so to speak, through a technological medium. My first thought is — what is lost by transcribing from a virtual manuscript, a picture on an internet site? But even as I write that question I realize that the question that’s more interesting is the one that reminds me that medieval manuscripts themselves… [are] forms of technology, if in many cases less ’shiny’ than my computer screen.”
Writing in Educause Review, Carole Goble and David de Roure assert, “We have an increasing understanding of the practices of data curation, but we should not neglect the curation and cataloguing of the processes that we use to work with the data… an absence of curated processes leads to ignorance of availability and creates obstacles to adoption. Active curation of these resources with accurate and flexible descriptions to check their availability, reliability, and general quality of service is required.”
Tags: user experience, university, benchmarking, innovation, public policy, Cutler Review
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