A new academic year

By Erik Hekman on 7 September 2010

The start of the new academic year (last week) at the university of applied sciences Utrecht went considerably smooth. A few minor glitches such as classrooms double booked or too small for 35+ students. But considering the additional students from the rather-new-but-extremely-popular Communication and Media Design (around 240 new students) the building is holding up. And as long as the wireless network is working I’m a happy camper. Comes to show that I’m easily pleased when it comes to services within the university. I don’t mind the long queues at the canteen, coffee machines or the printers but don’t take away my Internet.

This will be my sixth year (!) working at the university of applied sciences Utrecht and I have seen some many changes and initiatives in organizational sense and in education. The latter changed enormously due to the explosion of Web 2.0 services. I‘m still not sure if we should use the term Web 2.0 but it immediately clarifies that I’m talking about Delicious, Digg, Twine, Facebook, YouTube et cetera. Due to these services (and faster internet connection) we experiment with the following:

• Lectures being recorded (speaker and slides) and directly distributed on the university’s intranet.
• On top of being solely broadcasted, students can annotate these lectures while they take place in order to create bookmarks.
• Community pages that are created on LinkedIn (and others) for alumni and courses to connect students, lectures and businesses.
• Lectures make 5 minute video presentations where they explain a chapter in a book and post these on YouTube in the hope to seduce the students to read the actual books.
• There is a abundance of videos and high quality photos ‘borrowed’ from YouTube and Flickr in order to spice up ones presentation.

These initiatives still have to be explored in length. Creating or using external services gives rise to a series of questions.

Which service should we use? It is hard to commit to a single service. Even if we were to use service X extensively (discarding service Y) chances are that another, more useful (service Y) service could pop up forcing me to switch to that one. Should we import everything from service X or Y to Z or should we combine (mashup) them? Migration would seem bothersome at this point. One could imagine that switching once is not a big deal but if another, more useful service would present itself, the whole migration starts once again rendering us to be a digital nomads.

What if a service would cease to exist? More and more new services are being launched every day but, on the other hand, a lot of these services will cease to exist in the near future. What would happen if the service we use, for e.g. share research notes and links, would stop? We could lose everything. A possible solution would be to use the feeds to publish and store everything in a database (3). Doing so our ‘valuable’ data would be secure against bankrupting services. Plus it would protect us against those inconvenient moments where the service would be down for a small amount of time, like Twitter likes to do from time to time.

Using external services to experiment is a good thing and I hope to see more of it the coming years. But I hope we will, instead of relaying on them too much that we simply implement the functionalities we come to love from these services into our own intranet.

tagged with: services, education, social media

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