At Australian universities, indigenous student enrolments have increased markedly in the last 10 years.

Andrew Norton points to flaws in the THES ranking of universities — is ANU really a better university than Stanford?

MIT’s Open CourseWare initiative reached a milestone recently: two subjects, physics and linear algebra, have each attracted more than a million visits to their web pages.

New Zealand’s national broadcaster, TVNZ, launched its on-demand broadband service 18 months ago. The online service now outpaces conventional TV viewing, with 30,000 hours of programs watched online each month.

Judah Phillips suggests some ways to build your skills in the emerging professional field of web analytics.

The US Association of Research Libraries has produced a free resource kit for designing technology-enhanced classroom and library spaces.

It’s a not-always-obvious truth that “Publishers provide many useful services, but they do not provide peer review. It is the peers themselves who do that essential work.” Paul Courant follows this idea to its logical conclusion: “Given that publication in the literal sense (making public) is now easy and cheap in the technical sense, it seems almost certain that informal review will grow relative to formal review.”

How much does intellectual property theft cost the law-abiding nation? The US Customs and Border Patrol office says 750,000 jobs are lost because of IP piracy, and other government agencies claim up to US$250 billion is lost to the US economy each year. In fact, says Julian Sanchez, “Try to follow the thread of citations to their source, and you encounter a fractal tangle of recursive reference that resembles nothing so much as the children’s game known, in less-PC times, as “Chinese whispers’ …”.

UK universities are handing out a new booklet telling chancellors what’s expected of them — and with good reason. “The traditional role of university chancellors, who count Oliver Cromwell and Winston Churchill among them, is to act as cheerleaders by promoting their institutions far and wide. And while some chancellors in Europe still wield power, their UK counterparts are unpaid figureheads, who give their time and experience for free. Universities are increasingly picking chancellors with celebrity caché to boost their profiles.” The booklet, Beyond Ceremony, is available online (PDF 1.7 Mb).

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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.”

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If you’re interested in the broad field of scholarly information, or if your focus is on information architecture, user experience or customer service, there’s about three hours of entertainment and intellectual challenge in this post (assuming you follow all the links below). Enjoy :-)

During the Information Futures Commission’s consultation process we found anthropologist Michael Wesch’s videos were a terrific way to introduce the topics we were trying to tackle, about how digital technology is changing the scholarly communication process and the way people interact with each other in broader society.

Wesch made a splash in the online world last year when he released Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us. In this short video, Wesch explores the different ways in which people are now interacting with digital information and technologies.

In an interview with John Battelle, Wesch observed that “…if we don’t understand our digital technology and its effects, it can actually make humans and human needs even more invisible than ever before. But the technology also creates a remarkable opportunity for us to make a profound difference in the world.”

To date, the first and revised versions of The Machine is Us/ing Us have been viewed more than 5 million times on YouTube.com.

Wesch followed this success later in 2007 with two further videos. In Information R/evolution, he explores “the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.”

In collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University, Wesch’s third video — A Vision of Students Today — identifies some typical characteristics of today’s university students: “how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.”

Wesch gave an hour-long illustrated talk at the US Library of Congress in June 2008, an anthropological introduction to YouTube. It’s packed with challenging ideas about identity, authenticity, social cohesion — and joy, lots of joy.

(Wesch video found via Laurel Papworth’s silkcharm blog)

Two examples of the joy: Blimvisible’s “Us”…

… and Gary Brolsma’s “New Numa” dance.

There’s yet more Wesch goodness from the University of Manitoba, which has streaming video of his lecture about using social media for teaching. If anybody could make Twitter, Google Apps or Facebook into a useful part of the learning process, you’d think it would be Wesch and his students. In fact, some social media work well and some don’t work at all (in an educational context).

Finally, a slight change of direction. The Medieval Help Desk sketch, from a Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation TV show, reminds us that even the most helpful scholarly technologies can be daunting and confusing when we first encounter them.

OK, that’s yer lot (as Peter Cundall used to say). Marvellous.

[Postal provenance: this is a slightly reworked version of two posts from the Information Futures Commission blog. The original posts were dated January and July 2008.]

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The aim was to show how well-known IA techniques can be applied to a different type of project, in this case a strategy development project.

There had been some discussion in earlier sessions about how to get started in an information architecture career, and about developing a strategic approach to doing IA work. My presentation, towards end of the second day, seemed an apt time to suggest that a solid set of IA skills can take you in new career directions.

Many thanks to Roger Hudson for the generous loan of his computer.

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The University of Western Australia will adopt the Bologna model for its degree programs: five 3-year bachelor degrees will replace the current 70-odd courses and a range of professional postgrad degrees will provide specialised and vocational training. The undergrad degrees cover a slightly different range of disciplines from those at Melbourne University, which implemented the Bologna model this year. UWA will also offer a four-year undergraduate degree, the research-intensive BPhil.

Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig wants to change the US political system. In this 1-hour lecture he discusses political corruption, the negative influence of private interest groups, the influence of money on academia and the systemic factors that prevent moral and fact-based decision-making in Washington DC.

How to make corporate web sites more accessible: practical advice for web staff. You might be stuck with Vignette, you may never get 100 per cent valid code and your colleagues might insist on using Microsoft Word to create their content — but you can make a positive difference with a few relatively simple strategies.

Via Michael Geist, we learn that Senator Kim Carr is advocating Open Access:

“We are and will remain a net importer of knowledge, so it is in our interest to promote the freest possible flow of information domestically and globally. The arguments for stepping out first on open access are the same as the arguments for stepping out first on emissions trading - the more willing we are to show leadership on this, we more chance we have of persuading other countries to reciprocate. And if we want the rest of the world to act, we have to do our bit at home.”

What a pity he chose to adopt the unfortunate term “Venturous Australia” to describe the desired outcome of investment in innovation. Is he too young to remember the painful years of “Incentivation“?

Here’s one for the designers among us: test your color hue perception with this drag’n'drop chart. I scored 29 (lower is better).

Your staff directory is an important part of your web site or intranet. Make it even more useful by linking staff data from other parts of the organisation.

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Most Australian universities have an online repository of their research papers, articles and theses. Some have adopted a policy of requiring academics to add their finished documents to these repositories (copyright and publishers’ contracts permitting, of course).

Striking an attitude of well-meaning befuddlement, Lane identifies an opportunity for institutions that are keen to improve the public impact of their research. In general, I agree with him; Australian universities don’t do much to promote their eprints repositories as sources of free learning. Thus far, we’ve tended to leave the repositories in the hands of librarians, computer programmers and occasionally to the advocates of so-called e-research.

By recognising eprints as valuable information assets, and treating them as we would other business assets, we could substantially improve the levels of public awareness of, and access to, the brilliant research being done across the country.

It ain’t rocket surgery. For starters it would be relatively simple to:

• provide a link from the main university home page
• provide a link (or even a search box!) from the university library’s home page
• feature new Open Access publications in the “news and events” section of the institutional web site
• include repository contents in results from the university search engine
• link repository records to the online staff directory and to the web pages that profile individual staff members
• as Melbourne University has done, link the repository records to the “find an expert” list that’s produced mainly for the benefit of journalists and prospective PhD researchers
• track and publish statistics on the finding and usage of those Open Access documents

What else could you suggest? How could your institution make more use of its eprints?

If you work in a large company, could you find a similar use for the articles, white papers and other documents your people produce?

How could you link people and systems to streamline the procedures for collecting and using this kind of information?

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Submissions to the Inquiry are now available online.

I’m reasonably pleased with the Melbourne University document (PDF 1.2 Mb). M’colleague Sally and I were able to gather some useful input from well-informed people on very short notice — observe, if you will, the lengthy list of acknowledgements at the back of the document.

More than one of the contributors raised a wry grin when I told them we couldn’t publish the University’s submission on the University’s web site — we were obliged by the Inquiry’s terms of reference to wait until the official version was published on the Parliament web site. (This was an inquiry about access to *public* information, after all!)

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David Donathan observes that, “Unfortunately, there are always those who just don’t get it. You know — those who think organizations need to adapt to remain competitive, that change is good and results in greater efficiencies, that failure to adapt to ‘modernalities’ is evil and counterproductive. Since they usually mean well and truly believe they are trying to improve our situation, we don’t want to cull them from the herd…” Donathan offers 10 steps for dealing with change agents before they ruin everything.

At BBC Radio Labs, information architect and web developer Michael Smethurst is using Ruby on Rails to create a semantic online database of 113 years of Proms concert information. Smethurst describes his first steps and foreshadows future developments, including linking the Proms records to external sources of information; keep an eye on the Radio Labs blog to find out what happens next.

CERN’s LHC Computing Grid will transfer, store and process the largest datasets ever produced. Its success relies partly on an “open-source middleware platform called Globus… designed to gather that information seamlessly as though it’s sitting in a folder on one’s own desktop PC… [In the future, a similar system could enable] home computers to provide instant weather forecasts by accessing information from nearby environmental sensors. Or it might help sift through a life’s accumulation of personal medical records or years of home video footage looking for dimly remembered events. Ironically, CERN’s next great contribution to the Internet could be all but transparent to the end user.”

Microsoft’s US$300 million Vista advertising campaign was doomed before it hit the airwaves: a sad case of yesterday’s guys selling last century’s ideas.

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Peter Merholz observes that conferences are increasingly popular as revenue-earners for design consultancy and media companies. The TED Talks have set a new standard for such events, both in the immediate face-to-face experience they offer and in the way they make content freely available online after the event. On 22 November 2008 the University of British Columbia will hold its first Terry Talks event, modelled on TED but with students as the speakers.

Yale University Press has published a commentable version of The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It by Jonathan L Zittrain. The online version of the book caught my attention for two reasons:

1. The web site organises comments by linking them to the relevant paragraph in the book’s text; the ‘comments box’ moves down the page as you scroll through the book’s text, keeping pace as you read and enabling you to flip easily between the original text and the comments. I saw a prototype of a similar comments system earlier this year: the Zittrain book is the first time I’ve seen it ‘in production’ on a professional publisher’s web site.
2. The ability to relate a comment to a specific paragraph could be remarkably valuable for the author, for without the Internet it can be hard to get such detailed feedback on a draft manuscript.

The UK government decided a couple of years ago to streamline its hundreds of departmental web sites. The aim was to create just three sites that would deliver the full range of egovernment services and information in a user-friendly, accessible manner. If Guardian columnist Michael Cross’s experience is typical, it seems the strategy is successful.

A consultant’s case study about the Sabre airline reservations company’s intranet implies that it’s the semi-casual ’social networking’ vibe that makes the intranet so successful as a knowledge-sharing forum. While agreeing that the vibe is important, I’d wager it’s actually the ‘relevance engine’ that they can’t do without. No matter how pretty or user-friendly your web interface, if staff can’t find what they’re looking for (with a minimum of fuss) then they’ll abandon the intranet and find another workaround.

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