Monday, October 1st, 2007

Part of my job is working for Evidence Base, who do research and information gathering for libraries and the public sector. Mostly it involves building online surveys and an exicting new community of practice site.

However, next week they’re running a conference on Web 2.0, Libraries and Teenagers called Inspiring the iGeneration. I’ll be speaking about the perils and possibilities of modern web applications, which’ll be a bit about my own experiences with online communities and a bit about web best practices. Ideally it’ll show that you can’t just slap a gradient on something, call it a blog or wiki and expect people to engage, or at least that’s the plan. I’ll let you know when I finish the slides… Hopefully it won’t involve too much buzzword bingo.

So anyway, as I plan my slides, it occured to me to ask you folks out in blog land what you consider to be the archetypal perils and pitfalls in the modern web world? Not so much in a development way, but in a process and social dynamics way. I have my own ideas from a few years of supporting staff in e-learning and how we encourage freshers to use that system, but I’d be interested to hear other tales.

So, if you were going to give people a map of web 2.0, which areas would you mark with “Danger!”

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Monday, April 30th, 2007

So, I’ve been busy of late. Lots of my time has been highjacked, pleasantly it must be said, by putting together promotional blogs for work. I figured I’d mention a few of the projects here.

One of the lecturers in English, Jackie Gay, is aiming to be on the Paralympic Sailing Team for Great Britain. So I put together a site in Wordpress for her. I’m quite pleased with the results, though I’ve just noticed there’s still a problem with the CSS in Safari. Sigh. Will have to fix that tomorrow.

Given that it’s for a paralympic bid is has to look nice to attract sponsors and be accessible. It’s pretty much a heavily modified (hat tip to Bruce’s nice summary) Wordpress install.

Interesting side note. I was just testing if the tab order and the hidden skip nav in Safari. How annoying is it that you have to enable tabbing through page elements in Safari’s preferences before it’ll work.

Similarly, the School of Property, Construction and Planning is celebrating 50 years of teaching planning in Birmingham. As part of those celebrations, we’ve put together a fun archive site with all kinds of nostalgia, photos and archives.

Called, unsurprisingly, Planning is 50. Mainly interesting if you’re into Planning education, but some of the historic pictures of Birmingham’s postwar reconstruction are worth a look for local interest.

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