Accessibility

Web 2.0 and the Law

The LawLast week I attended (and presented) at Web 2.0 Senior Managers Workshop – Liability and Law a JISC Legal event.  The session focused on the legal implications of using Web 2.0 services (e.g. Facebook & YouTube) in teaching and research.  My 5-min overview of Web 2.0 use in HE was followed by scenario-based presentations from Alison Bryce & Gillian Cordall from Maclay Murray & Spens LLP.

The scenarios & presentations touched on a wide range of potential issues including data protection & privacy, intellectual property, discrimination against students with disabilities, liability for content and copyright.  Further details of the issues are available on the JISC Legal website [link to follow].

The main problem identified was not the Web 2.0 services themselves but a lack of understanding about how the services worked and the potential issues.  It was suggested that there are two approaches needed to deal with the legal implications of using Web 2.0: Regulation & Education.

Regulation – institutions should make sure their IT conditions of use for both staff and students encompass Web 2.0 services.  It was suggested that this might include some kind of a “Web 2.0 Project” policy that requires staff to sign an “agreement of understanding” (my phrase!)  if they are going to use external services in their teaching or research.

Education  – the main focus, and the one that interests me, needs to be guidance & support.  As the lawyers pointed out really it’s all about informed decisions.  We need to make staff & students aware of the pitfalls and regularly.  Having a policy is fine but making everyone aware of it and understanding the issues is key. This is quite a challenge… ‘Web 2.0 & the Law’ workshops are unlikely to pack them in, so we need to be more subtle. For me a  key approach is to get staff taking advantage of these services on a personal basis – which would both sell the potential benefits for teaching and allow the issues to be highlighted.  Our Web 2.0 sessions in the Library’s  e-literacy programme already do this but it’s an area we’ll be looking to expand on this year.

Image: http://flickr.com/photos/48745248@N00/225249268/

September 30th, 2008|Conferences, Social Media|Comments Off on Web 2.0 and the Law|

Inaugural Echo 360 users conference, Coventry

Yesterday I attended the first-ever Echo 360 (formerly Apreso) conference which saw 40 or so people gather at Coventry University to look at how they are implementing lecture/event recording systems at their institutions. The day started with a number of presentations and rather than take you through every point I shall highlight some of the more interesting ideas raised during these presentations.

First off was the University of Birmingham who talked about their experience. A couple of things I mentioned that might be useful at LSE was as well as recording an event with Echo 360 it is possible to simultaneously stream this live at a fairly minimal cost. This uses a feature of the standard Echo 360 Osprey capture cards that we previously didn’t know about, called “Simulstream”.

They also showed a rather nifty remote control camera which may be of use at LSE where the lecturer would like to zoom the image rather than use the standard wide-angle shot. This could possibly be integrated into future versions of the LSE standard classroom lectern/media controls available to the teacher.

Newcastle University talked a little bit about evaluation and how they are going to assess the student experience of recorded lectures and pedagogical impacts for lecturers. Newcastle are unusual in the UK in that they are using Lectopia which merged with Apreso to form Echo 360 and they talked a little bit about their implementation. One useful feature of Lectopia they mentioned was that a ‘scheduled’ recording can be started using an audio trigger rather than starting at a set time. This means that there is less likelihood of five minutes of dead time being recorded before the actual lecture starts. this is hopefully something that will make it into a future version of the Echo 360 system. They also talked about the possibility of integrating the lecture recording schedule with their lectures timetable system. From the questions and discussion arising it also looks like the next version of Echo 360 will allow us to connect lectern controls to the lecture recording system which will allow easy operation by teachers if they want to stop or pause their recording.

Jocasta Williams from Echo 360 talked a lot about evaluation, so I think we will have to get back to her regarding our evaluation later this academic year. She also provided a link to some useful evaluation resources (including further research projects on lecture recording).

We were of course shown the next version (2.0) of the Apreso/Echo 360 event recording system and it looks as if they have certainly been listening to our feedback as most of the features/improvements that we’ve previously requested seem to have made it into the new product. We are just about to start beta testing the next version at LSE so we should the able to get our teeth into this pretty soon.

November 20th, 2007|Conferences, Images, Audio & Video|Comments Off on Inaugural Echo 360 users conference, Coventry|

Accessibility guidelines

Very intersting post by Joe Clarke, highly critical of the new web accessibility guidelines.

Here is a taste
“In an effort to be all things to all web content, the fundamentals of WCAG 2 are nearly impossible for a working standards-compliant developer to understand. WCAG 2 backtracks on basics of responsible web development that are well accepted by standardistas.”

and

“The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group is the worst committee, group, company, or organization I’ve ever worked with. Several of my friends and I were variously ignored; threatened with ejection from the group or actually ejected; and actively harassed. The process is stacked in favour of multinationals with expense accounts who can afford to talk on the phone for two hours a week and jet to world capitals for meetings.

The WCAG development process is inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t speak English. More importantly, it’s inaccessible to some people with disabilities, notably anyone with a reading disability…”

May 24th, 2006|Teaching & Learning|Comments Off on Accessibility guidelines|

PAS78

PAS78 is a new web-accessibility specification from the BSI. Not a standard as yet, but may become so over time. Seems to cost £30 though, even if you download it.

Details here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/10/bsi_disability_guidelines/

Available from:
http://www.bsi-global.com/ICT/PAS78/index.xalter

March 10th, 2006|Tools & Technologies|Comments Off on PAS78|