From tomorrow we can Hang Out

It's been a quiet few days - last week I went to help colleagues at another University review their IT strategy, which as always was very interesting. This week so far its mainly been preparing presentations for a couple of conferences coming up that I've been asked to speak at, and a strategic liaison meeting with our Faculty of Medicine and Health.

Tomorrow we are making Google + available to all of our staff and students - It isn't part of the apps for education suite but a consumer product, so it's an opt in service, and we've announced it on our latest monthly newsletter.  We'll be watching to see how much use is made of it.  There's quite a lot of interest in using the "hangouts" for desktop video conferencing. I've tried it a couple of times and am quite impressed with the quality and the fact that you can talk to 10 people at once.

We've also started to redesign our web pages, and the Google+ ones are just the start.

A few weeks ago I posted about our use of social media, including twitter, a blog for our news page, and a newly launched Facebook page. I was therefore interested to see this article today, which a colleague alerted me to via twitter, which apparently showed that the University came bottom in a list of Russell Group Universities in terms of its presence on social media sites. As I know we're not the only department engaging with social media, I found this a bit difficult to understand. So, I tried to look a little more closely at what they'd actually been measuring, and it got a bit harder - there's not a lot of information about what data they collected, how it was collected, or how it was analysed. Still, I suppose if we'd been top, I wouldn't be interested....