RAE: UK research funding results visualised

Joss Winn / / Mashups

Yesterday, the results of the funding allocation for research in UK Higher Education were announced and published on the Times Higher Education website.

Successive RAEs have concentrated research cash in the hands of the elite. This time around, the pie has been shared more widely.

The full spreadsheet of results being available, I thought this was a good opportunity for someone to visualise the data, so I published the data on Google Docs as a CSV file, which Tony Hirst fed into IBM’s Many Eyes wiki and now we can really see how the pie has been shared. Click on the images to view the interactive visualisations.

A pie…

RAE Funding Pie
Funding allocation by university group

Some bubbles…

FTE staff submitted to RAE by institution and coloured by group
FTE staff submitted to RAE by institution and coloured by group

A bar chart…

% change in total recurrent research funding
% change in total recurrent research funding by group

and a matrix…

Cash change in funding by institution and group
Cash change in funding by institution and group

You can read about the University of Lincoln’s 628% increase in funding, here and here.

BuddyPress: A university’s social network

Joss Winn / / Web

To cut to the chase, this post is about using WordPress MU and BuddyPress with enterprise authentication (LDAP) to create an internal/private social network while leaving the blogs, by default, public.

Since May 2008, I’ve been running WordPress MU on the Learning Lab, a Linux server I maintain at the University of Lincoln, for experimenting, trialling and evaluating software that may enhance and support research, teaching and learning. It’s a great job 😉

Of all the software we’ve looked at over the last few months, ‘WordPress Multi-User’, has clearly shown the most potential for use by staff and students at the university. It’s a mature, well maintained, very popular open source blogging platform. In fact, it’s more than that. It’s a web content management system that runs 5 million blogs on wordpress.com and 280,000 blogs on edublogs.org. While evaluating WPMU on the Learning Lab, 65 blogs were registered by 123 users. I didn’t advertise the service at all during this period, preferring to work with individuals on specific projects and get their (informal) feedback. The feedback has been positive. People initially need support but once they’re set up and running, they only tended to contact me when they wanted to push WordPress to do more for them through plugins and custom themes.

During this period, I’ve been watching and doing my best to help with the progress made on BuddyPress, a set of plugins for WordPress MU, developed by Automattic, the company behind WordPress. It’s been interesting trying to get everything to work together at times but over the last few weeks it’s all come together.

BuddyPress Profile

Automattic also develop open source forum software which integrates with Buddypress, too. Jim Groom at the University of Mary Washington pioneered the integration of all three products and I’ve had it working here at the University of Lincoln quite nicely. However, bbPress is still beta software and I’d like to be able to offer privacy options on forums, too, which is currently unsupported (there are some plugins, but they’re not mature enough for our use yet). So currently, we’re running WordPressMU, BuddyPress, an LDAP plugin for WPMU and a privacy plugin that’s commonly used on WPMU installations. It works really well.

I’ve documented some of the set up on our wiki. It’s not been difficult. For the time-being, while BuddyPress matures, I’ve chosen to stick with the default home and members themes, changing just the logo. Forums are, as mentioned above, turned off for now. I wonder if we’ll ever turn them on as the ‘Wire’ (similar to the Facebook Wall) is available and people are used to using services like Twitter and the Facebook Wall to communicate these days. We’ll see what demand there is for forums.

The final set up is really quite sweet. A member of the university goes to https://blogs.lincoln.ac.uk for the first time and logs in with their usual credentials. The first time they login, they are signed up. That’s it. No sign up page needed. It’s as if they were already a member of the social network, which, being members of the university, they are of course. From there, they see the BuddyPress home pages, can join groups, change their profiles and, when they’re ready, create or join a blog.

I’ve finally finished setting it up for general use today. The few people that know about it and have already joined, instantly see the benefits of having the social networking layer on top of the blogs. I’m excited to see how this works out over time. It’s not something we’re going to launch in a big way just yet (it’s only me supporting it at the moment), but I’m guessing that it will spread quite quickly through word-of-mouth.

The university web team are supportive and are sending staff and whole departments my way when they want a web site. The IT support team have been trained to use WordPress, should they get enquiries their way. We’ve got a few projects that have been waiting patiently for the new home of the blogs and a number of the Learning Lab blog users are migrating across already. The potential for supporting personalised and group online learning is now better than it’s ever been and the social networking element only helps bring peers together for collaboration and discussion.

Many thanks to Jim Groom and D’Arcy Norman who have been working on WordPressMU at their universities in ways which I hope we can emulate and contribute to here at the University of Lincoln.

How the world has changed…

Joss Winn / / IPR, Open Source, Software

“When I learned electronics, we soldered together discrete components to make a product. Today, we combine copyrighted units of other people’s intellectual property to make a product. And we don’t really have the tools to carry out that task properly.”

A comment by Bruce Perens, the creator of the Open Source Definition, the manifesto of Open Source and the criterion for Open Source software licensing. Perens represented Open Source at the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society, at the request of the United Nations Development Program.

Storytlr: Make your social networking tell a story

Joss Winn / / Web

Storytlr is a relatively new ‘lifestreaming’ service that allows you to aggregate your activity on a growing number of social networking sites  (and other sites that provide RSS feeds) into one single stream that can then be manipulated to create visual narratives within a given time period.  There are other lifestreaming and aggregation services. FriendFeed is one. I use the WordPress Lifestream plugin on another blog, too.

There are several things I especially like about Storytlr that are worth highlighting here:

  • Manipulate the stream: You can edit the title, text content, date and time of each item in the stream, make items private or the entire stream private.
  • Visual Narratives: Create ‘stories’ from isolated feeds within a certain time frame. For example, I might go to a conference and use this blog to report back to my colleagues. However, using Storytlr, I might include Twitter, Flickr and YouTube posts to create a narrative over two or three days. However, I’m probably also using Twitter to keep in touch with other conference participants; things like what time to meet up for a beer or to ask where a presentation is when I have forgotten the room number. Stuff that I wouldn’t necessarily want to include in my report of the conference. Storytlr will allow me to create this conference report selecting specific items from the Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and blog feeds. You can see how this could also be used by students (or staff) who want to tell the story of a project they are working on, or a field trip they’re away on. Several people could share and post to the same account.
  • Some feeds are pulled in realtime: Storytlr uses GNIP to import updates from Twitter, Digg, Delicious and Seesmic in realtime. Increasingly, there’s an expectation that our online activity will show in realtime. RSS/Pull is being replaced by XMPP/Push architectures such as GNIP. No more waiting for RSS feeds to refresh! Watch for news sites like the BBC to start offering realtime news updates using GNIP or similar.
  • Backup to plain text: You can backup/download each of your feeds in their entirety at any time as CSV files.
  • Custom CSS and domain names: It’s your story so why not host it under your domain name in a theme that you have designed?
  • You can share stories on external sites: Once you’ve created a story or aggregated your lifestream, you can then embed it on other sites using Storytlr widgets.
  • Edit, archive, search and republish your lifestream: I use Delicious and Google Reader’s Shared Items to bookmark web pages that I want to share or, more often, bookmark to read at a later date. Storytlr provides a way to aggregate these items, archive them by month and search through them. Nice.
  • Support for Laconica microblogging sites: They support my personal installation of Laconica. It’s the first time I’ve seen this. Support for Identica is growing but it’s nice to see support for other Laconica installations. It’s a distributed microblogging application after all!
  • Forthcoming: It’s early days. They have plans for lots of other features, which users can vote for. Their blog is worth reading, too.

A few issues

  • Login is not secure: There’s no https or lock icon in my browser when I log in and there’s only two of us voting for this feature to be implemented!
  • Home-made: It’s self-financed and being developed by two blokes in their spare time from the living room.
  • Speed: It’s a bit slow. A search through your feeds can take a while. However, the good news is that they’re moving to new servers at this end of January, which should resolve this.

Interested? Here are links to my lifestream and a test story of notes from my christmas break.

Skilling up for WordPress

Joss Winn / / Web

A post on the WordPress Publisher’s Blog highlights a large increase in the number of new job offerings that include WordPress as a required skill.  The original oDesk report shows that Joomla is clearly the ‘most in demand skill in 2008′, although WordPress has the ‘fastest growing demand.’ WordPress only shows 55% of the demand that Joomla has but the growth is very still very impressive. At that rate, by the end of 2009, WordPress is very likely to be the ‘most in demand skill’ among oDesk’s clients. oDesk is a ‘marketplace for online workteams,’ a ‘a job board for freelance and contract technical jobs‘. Their tagline is ‘Hire, Manage, and Pay remote contractors as if they were in your office.‘

Of course, according to this video we will all be contractors before too long, quoting the US Department of Labour’s estimate that today’s learner will have 10-14 jobs before the age of 38.

Regardless of how the figures might be (mis)interpreted, the report does suggest that the demand for WordPress-related skills, whether they are technical, administrative or just user-side, is increasing significantly.  A 400% increase in demand for WordPress technical skills means that someone’s got to be managing and posting to those WordPress sites at the end of the day.

When advocating the use of WordPress to the university, I argue that learning how to use online web applications such as blogs and wikis is as relevant to today’s graduates as learning how to use word processors and spreadsheets was a few years ago. My last job was not in ‘technology’, but most of my productive work was done using Confluence, enterprise wiki software that was rolled out throughout the organisation.

Of course, universities are not solely responsible for ensuring students have the right IT skills. Note that 157,690 new blog posts have been made by 170, 828 users on wordpress.com alone today with over 10 million published WordPress blogs worldwide. That’s a lot of people learning for themselves. WordPress is probably the best choice of platform if you want to learn how to navigate around a modern, productive Web 2.0 site. It’s free to use, more popular than Blogger and growing faster, too, and unlike Facebook, you can actually get some work done 🙂

You can read more about wordpress.com statistics here.

History of the Internet, PICOL and CC video

Joss Winn / / Commons, Web

Just a couple of videos which I came across by accident. Both demonstrate how well information can be communicated through animated graphics and images. The first, History of the Internet, “is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet.” I read Where Wizards Stay Up Late this year, which is a compelling read about the same subject. I can imagine the video being used as an effective teaching resource in class with the book included on a reading list.

[vimeo 2696386]

The video looks fantastic in HD on my 24″ iMac display 🙂 One of the reasons for this is the use of the PICOL icons, which are an impressive attempt to “find a standard and reduced sign system for electronic communication.” PICOL stands for Pictorial Communication Language and the icons are CC licensed. While reading about the PICOL project, I came across a decent video introducing Creative Commons, which I hadn’t seen before. I think I’ll use it for my Thinking Aloud seminar later this month.

Facebook to the repository via SWORD

Joss Winn / / Open Access, Repositories, Standards & Specs, Web

A post to note that I have successfully deposited a document into our institutional repository from my Facebook account using the Facebook SWORD app, written by Stuart Lewis. 

There’s a few things worth mentioning: It’s a 3.1.1 EPrints IR, hosted at our university and maintained by EPrints Services. EPrints has supported SWORD since v3.1. Originally, the FB app didn’t work for the following reasons:

  • The ‘Depositing on behalf of’ field has to be left empty. I was told by Seb at EPrints Services that this is ‘disabled by default’.
  • The repository URL needs to point at the ‘service document’, not the base URL of the IR. For us, that is http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/sword-app/servicedocument
  • We use LDAP for authentication and the IR configuration needed to be tweaked to account for this when depositing via SWORD.
Once we’d overcome these issues, my ‘test.txt’ doc was successfully deposited from my desktop to the University of Lincoln IR via Facebook:
…with a few caveats:
  • The app announced ‘Item Deposited!’ and gave a URL which resulted in a 404 dead link http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/sword-app/collections/1738/deposit. I don’t know why. I thought it was because I wasn’t logged in to the IR, but even after logging in, the link was dead.
  • The app (maybe it’s defined in the SWORD spec, I haven’t checked), zipped up my metadata and document, which resulted in depositing two items: My test.txt document and the original zip file were both showing in my item list. This could be because of the way our IR is configured to unpack zip folders. I don’t know.

  • The metadata mapping was partially successful. The referreed status didn’t map across at all and the URL reference I gave mapped to the ‘Identification number’ field in EPrints, rather than the ‘Related URLs’ field, which was what I was expecting. Maybe the SWORD app field could be renamed ‘Identification URL/DOI’ or similar? The title, abstract and my name were correctly mapped. It’s a shame that my email address wasn’t autocompleted as it would be if I were depositing through the normal EPrints workflow. 
Despite these issues, it’s good to see this working in principle and I imagine that the above could be rectified quite easily. Perhaps someone can offer their solutions here?

As Stuart notes on his blog, the main value in this kind of app is the ability to broadcast to your Facebook friends that you’ve just deposited something in an IR. My main gripe, however, would be that it doesn’t make the deposit process any easier, which is what interests me about the SWORD protocol. Working this way…

  • I have to use two applications to make my document public, the benefit being that other people are told about what I’ve just done. 
  • The EPrints URL that the app points to, even if it was working, points to a non-public space, so my friends don’t have a direct link to the document from within Facebook. 
  • The metadata fields in the present version of the app, are not configurable which means that I have to add more metadata through the EPrints interface. 
  • Finally, it does seem odd to upload a document from my desktop to Facebook only to send it to another application and finish off the process of deposit there. It would be more useful, if I could deposit files that I already hold in Facebook. I don’t use Facebook enough to really know if there are apps that allow you to create documents within Facebook, but if there were, then perhaps Facebook could be used as a (collaborative?) working space and the SWORD app used to deposit final versions to an IR.

Outsourcing email and data storage case studies

Joss Winn / / Identity, Web

The JISC published four case studies on Friday concerned with ‘outsourcing email and data storage’. They are quick reads and straight to the point. Pulling together all the ‘Lessons Learned’, we are told the following:

  • Handle the beta mentality – expect things to change, ask not how you can control change but how will you respond to it.
  • Web 2.0 is as much an attitude as any technical standard.
  • Ensure that your contractual and procurement processes allow for the provision of a free service. They may be designed for a traditional system of tendering with providers bidding to provide the service, and may not cope with a bidding system based on a ‘free’ service.
  • Ensure that students and staff are aware of the reasons behind the change.
  • Who is a student and who is a member of staff? If you have a high proportion of graduates who undertake various jobs and duties for the University, will they need a staff or a student email account, or both?
  • What emails and data do you need to keep private and confidential?
  • Are you aware of the jurisdiction that any external third party servers are under?

Useful observations. For me though, what the reports didn’t address was why each university was providing an email address to students in the first place. Isn’t the issue less about ’email and data storage’ and more about having a trusted and portable university identity? Providing a GMail or Windows Live hosted account still doesn’t guarantee that the majority of students would use that email address as their primary address (prior to outsourcing at the University of Westminster, “96% of students did not use the University email system”). I’m assuming that the new, third-party managed email addresses are still *.ac.uk accounts – this wasn’t clear to me from the reports. Having a *.ac.uk account is useful, primarily for online identification purposes.

Personally, I think that the benefit of having Google or Microsoft manage a trusted university identity for students, is not the email service itself (yet another address that students wouldn’t necessarily use for messaging), but the additional services that Google provide such as their online office apps, instant messaging, news reader (all accessible from mobiles) and, most importantly, the trusted identity that is used across and beyond those value-added services. Furthermore, as both Google and Microsoft embrace OpenID, that trusted identity will assume even greater ‘value’ beyond their own web services. Email addresses are well established forms of online identity and most people are happy to have that identity managed by a third-party.

I like the URI approach that OpenID currently uses although I think that adoption will be slow if users can’t alternatively use their email address (i.e. johnsmith@gmail.com, rather than http://johnsmith.id.google.com or whatever Google settles on). Some services do allow that option using Email Address to URL Translation, which highlights the value of having an email address, not for the communication of messages but for the communication of one’s identity.

Anyone with any thoughts on this? It’s pretty simple to get a message across these days but harder to manage our online identities.