Gigapixel, taggable graduation images are here

This week is Graduation Week - I always enjoy it, and try to get to as many ceremonies as I can. Makes me realise why we are all here!

This year we've introduced two new things which hopefully will be popular with the students and their families. We're the first UK University to take high definition images of the hall just before the start of the ceremony.  These "gigapixel" images, which are normally reserved for high profile events such as the Royal Wedding, are being taken by one of our own students, Edward Miller, who will be graduating at one of the ceremonies he will be photographing. Ed won the Sheffield University Business Planning Competition earlier this year, and is setting up his own business Re-Axive. Building on our use of  social media, the pictures will be taggable through Facebook. You'll be able to see them here from Tuesday 17 July. We're also going to use Ed's skills to take some interactive 360degree photos of the campus.

The other thing we're doing this year is streaming all of the ceremonies live. We've experimented in the past with web cams, but this is the proper stuff.  You can watch them here, at  0930, 1200 and 1530 all this week. Each one last about an hour. I particularly like the bit where the students stand up and applaud their parents and friends. Not a dry eye in the house!  If you're watching on Thursday lunchtime, you should get to see Martin Fry get his honorary degree.

And we've got another press release out - that's three this year :-)

You put your whole self in...

Still busy at the moment with the Planning Round - the annual exercise where we all set out our targets and strategies..  I posted last week that we had draft planning statement, which sits above our operational plans, and that we would be taking it out to the five faculties so that we can make sure we're responding to what they want to do, and that they're aware of ours. We've had three meetings so far, two more to go next week, then we can work on the final plan. Alongside this we're working on our financial forecasts for next year and our projected out-turn for this.  It's certainly keeping us busy!

Today I had an interesting discussion about our departmental use of social media. We have a Twitter account and a Facebook page, which are both becoming increasingly popular, and we're obviously reviewing and learning from what we do. Today we were chatting about how we capture faults, problems, issues etc reported though social media so that we don't lose the information, and it's included in our logging and reporting mechanisms. We also talked about how to balance the informative nature of our tweets, ie communicating with our customers, and the internal "chat" that sometimes happens. I think sometimes people forget that @CiCS is actually a person, and not a generic account! 

Finally, tonight I walked back from  meeting to my office, to find a coupe of hundred students doing the Okey-Kokey (is that how you spell it?) on the concourse - presumably to celebrate the end of the elections for the new student sabbatical officers. It was a great sight!

Social Media in CiCS

Had a good meeting today discussing how we as a department use social media, and how we might use it to engage more with students and staff.  Blogging is something some individual members of the department do. Some, like me, use commercial products like Blogger or Wordpress and have them hosted off-site, some use our in-house blogging software, uSpace, based on a Jive product. Some blog regularly, some less often.  What we haven't had before is a departmental blog, so we've changed what used to be a static news page on our web pages into a blog. So much better - it's easy to update, we can include pictures, links and videos, and, more importantly we can collect feedback in the comments field.

We've been using Twitter in the department for a few years, and have learned a lot of lessons. We've gone from just posting status updates, to being much more interactive - asking questions, looking for feedback and responding to comments. We're now considering whether we should have a separate feed for the status updates or not. Our intention is to make the main CiCS account much more interactive. 

Whilst Twitter is extremely popular, the main social network used by students is still Facebook, and we've finally taken the plunge and set up a page. Early days, and we haven't formally launched or advertised it yet, but are optimistic that this will prove to be another good channel to interact with students. A few years ago we felt that students were quite protective of their social space and didn't want us to invade it, but the evidence now is that if it is carefully handled and targeted - and the change to "liking" pages rather than having to be "friends" or in a group has made a big difference here - then students will engage. The University made a lot of use of Facebook for our new intake of students this year, and it was very successful - it was good to see a peer network developing as students helped each other, and that's what we want to encourage.

Of course, I'm really supportive of all of this and think it's definitely the way to go, but there are issues we'll have to deal with -  how do we log and collect feedback, especially if faults etc are raised with us,  how do we link it to our problem analysis, and how do we resource it? We also have to be acutely aware that everything we post is available to the world. None of this is insurmountable, especially with the good teamwork we have here.

And then of course there's Google + on the horizon.....

Facebook and Twitter use in Universities

There's been a couple of interesting posts recently about use of social networking in Universities. First one I saw was Brian Kelly's post about the institutional use of Twitter in Russell Group Universities. Some interesting metrics, and Brian suggests some good practices that Universities should adopt. There's a fairly lively discussion in the comments as well, with most people finding the data useful.

Then a couple of days later, another post about the use of Facebook in the same group of Universities and some more discussion, particularly on whether in a big University students are more likely to feel an affiliation with their department, school or course rather than the institution.

And then I spotted (via a tweet from the Registrar of the University of Nottingham), this study which looks at Twitter and Facebook use in European Universities. I'm not sure adding the number of Facebook and Twitter followers together to create a league table is good science, but it's nice to see Great Britain at the top of a table! Apparently UK Universities are by far outperforming other countries in communicating via social media with more than 60% of all university twitter followers connected to UK institutions.

There's a rather good post on whether these sort of metrics actually tell us anything here. I haven't made my mind up yet. It's great to see Universities engaging with social media, and it should be encouraged. I'm surprised that some Russell Group Universities don't have either a Facebook or Twitter account, but I wonder if it's doing them any harm in communication, reputation or marketing terms. I suppose only time and more research will tell.

Christmas ruined.....

Lots of news around about Facebook changing privacy settings after thousands of people protested that information about transactions they've made were being broadcast to their networks without their express consent. It came to a head when a guy in the US bought an eternity ring for his wife for Christmas - you can read the rest of the story here. I suppose it's a good job it was for his wife!

Another warning to everyone to keep an eye on the electronic footprint we all leave whenever we use the internet.

Staying safe online

Following on from the previous post, we've been thinking about giving students some advice on privacy, especially when using social networking sites such as Facebook, and we've had some preliminary discussions with the Student Union. I do have concerns about the amount of information some people post about themselves and make available to large numbers of people - phone numbers, addresses, dates of birth, when they're going on holiday. More than enough for some form of identity theft to take place, or indeed stalking.

I discovered today that Cardiff University have produced some excellent guidelines:

http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/insrv/it/help/safe/facebook.html

which of course we wouldn't dream of plagiarising...

Leave MySpace alone?

Interesting article in the Guardian about students and social networking:

http://education.guardian.co.uk/students/news/story/0,,2205512,00.html

based on the JISC Learner Experience Project. Most students use a social networking site - Facebook or MySpace - but do they want us to use them? Apparently some very mixed answers, "Students appear to want their cake and eat it," says the project manager, Lawrie Phipps. "They appear to want to keep their online persona private but when you ask them whether they'd like instant communication with tutors or feedback on essays (via Skype or Facebook) the answer is always yes."

In doing some investigation on the JISC website about this project, I came across Lawrie Phipp's blog, again very interesting reading, especially the article about Facebook Friday. Apparently Serena Software have launched this and encourage all employees to spend an hour each Friday updating their Facebook profile and making connections! Just as many other employers are banning it altogether.

Universities are beginning to take the issues seriously - another relevant article about Leeds University and Facebook.

The Great Facebook Debate

Tonight I've been to The Great Facebook Debate, hosted by the British Interactive Media Association, and held at BT's Headquaters in London. It was attended by about 200 people, mainly from the media and marketing industries. Given that Facebook was developed by and for college and university students, I was very surprised that I was the only (as far as I could tell), representative from a University. The first half of the event consisted of 3 speakers giving their opinions of social networking sites. One of them was Hugh MacLeod, a prolific blogger and cartoonist who's premise was that sites like Facebook are basically changing the way we communicate with each other - we should accept this, embrace the change, and get on with life!
Chad Woollen from AOL had some interesting stats about how Facebook has clearly overtaken MySpace in the UK, but interestingly not in the US, and his take on it was how much money there is to be made - either through advertising or developing applications which can then be sold. A good example is "Where I've Been" which was sold earlier this year to TripAdvisor for $3m.

In the second half of the event two motions were debated:

“This House believes that Facebook’s decision to open up its platform to all developers was a mistake”
This was defeated heavily - most people supported Facebook's decision to allow anyone to develop applications. The only arguments against were that there were so many awful applications - vampires, werewolves, zombies being good examples. There were also issues around data being accessed by developers.

“This house believes that friend requests from your boss are best ignored”
This was a very heated debate! As a boss myself I found both sides of the argument interesting - if a little worrying. The main concern was that bosses would use information posted on FB to form opinions of staff which would affect promotions/appraisals. Especially if too many drunken photos were posted. Needless to see this motion was also defeated - but it was close! If there are any members of CiCS reading this - especially those with Facebook accounts - I can assure you that I will be far more worried about you seeing drunken photos of me than the other way round.

Although the whole event was interesting, I was surprised that the Facebook I know through the University network is very different to how it is perceived in the media and marketing industries. They see it totally as a way to make money - there were at least 3 online dating agencies there - and not at all as a collaborative tool which can be used for social networking, but has so many other uses as well.

I will be very interested to see if students - who are by far still the biggest users of Facebook - will leave it in droves if it goes down this route. If any students read this, I'll be very interested to hear your comments.

The nicest thing about meetings in London is that it gives me a chance to see our capital city. I try and walk wherever possible, and tonight stood on the middle of Millenium Bridge (or the wobbly bridge as it's better known), with St Paul's behind me, Tate Modern in front, and the River Thames on both sides - it was stunning. I then walked back to my hotel, and with my fantastic sense of direction managed to do the 25 minute walk in just under an hour!