Foreword – Rachel Bruce, Acting Director of e-Infrastructure, JISC
ʻSurvive or Thriveʼ is an opportunity for experts across the higher education and public sectors to reflect on the changes brought about by the web and digital technologies and on how these apply to the sharing and re-use of content for research and learning. Our key question is how can we better meet the needs of users.
Significant changes in the way in which information is created, distributed and used have evolved over the past decade. These offer new ways to provide content, as shown by the Open Educational Resources movement through which content that would never have been shared before is made available on the open web. However, as reflected in the conference programme, there are not only new ways to provide content, but also emerging technologies that help to add context and meaning to resources and thereby enhance service provision; for example semantic analysis, use data and location information.
Another huge change is in the scale at which we can now work; the web allows us to work across organisations and in a global environment, which raises significant questions. When should content and the related services be delivered at a local, even a personal level, and when is operation at ʻweb scaleʼ appropriate? What are the business and organisational models required to deliver at different levels? What underlying planning, policy and skills challenges need to be borne in mind?
We hope the conference will help to elucidate the issues and to demonstrate how a range of approaches can be used to add value to content and services, more fully exploiting assets that are produced and used as part of learning and research. For example, linked data and crowd sourcing have gained a lot of attention recently and they certainly offer new opportunities, but our discussion might focus on how these work alongside other technologies such as text mining or geo-tagging in a coherent service offer.
This discussion paper, prepared by David Kay and Paul Miller, identifies six interwoven themes, from open approaches, working at both scale and depth, to leveraging user data and real time information. Our conference discussion will be captured, adding shared understanding and identifying both opportunities and threats. As a result we will produce a position paper that will inform strategy and enable content service providers to take best advantage of technologies to meet the needs of end users.
The paper is available for download and printing as a PDF or as an online version allowing comments.