JISC SIS Landscape Study

Sarah Lewthwaite

What is your background and what are you doing at present?
Following a first degree in English, a spell in industry and an MA in Research Methods, I’m now in the 3rd year of my PhD at the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Nottingham. My research is supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council and focuses on the ways in which the Internet-based technologies of ‘Web 2.0’ are changing and perpetuating experiences of disability. I’m a member of the Society for Disability Studies (SDS) and the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) and participate in the Sheffield Hallam Disability Research Forum.

How did you first get into using Web 2.0?
I think it started in a way when I was an undergraduate. We’d had internet access in college, but in 1999 I was given my university email account (Pine!) and joined discussion groups that augmented a lot of campus social activity. We had computers in our rooms but they weren’t generally networked; on the advice of friends from Computer Science I got a dial-up modem in my first vacation. I can see how things have changed, but even then we had things like Amazon, eBay and Yahoo Groups, so I feel the seeds of Web 2.0 readiness were sown early. After email, I moved into SMS. I think I started using MySpace around 2004 or 2005. I was doing some music writing and MySpace increasingly dominated that scene. Blogging came later, as did things like Wikipedia.

What are you using at the moment?
The three classic things for me are Twitter, Facebook and my blog.

I have a WordPress blog – this has a lot of things rolled into it. My blog timeline goes back a while. I had friends who were writers who had blogs, so I started one too. The first one – using LiveJournal – was purely social. I began a new blog on Typepad in conjunction with my PhD, I wanted to use it for cataloguing resources I’d discovered and as a learning space and somewhere to build up a personal Web presence. In March 2009 I moved my blog to WordPress; by this time I had a greater sense of what was needed in terms of developing a more professional identity and research profile. I do think there is a tension between the blog and my PhD in terms of what I post. My PhD thesis demands a previously unpublished piece of research, so I don’t feel I can discuss my research for IPR reasons, but I still rate it as a useful place to reflect and connect with others.

I moved to WordPress for its functionality – I find it a better product than other blogging sites. It is versatile in design terms and has benefited from open source development. As with other blog services I can draw in other tools, so for example I have embedded a couple of news feeds on technology and disability news from the BBC. However, WordPress allows other services to integrate much more easily and I find it stronger in terms of meeting Web standards. It also has a very strong statistical element, this means I can track backwards to a source if someone has linked to an article I’ve written. Within the blog I use delicious and Twitter widgets, alongside automated podcasting service Odiogo, which will read blog posts aloud to visitors. This makes the blog more accessible and I’ve had lots of positive feedback about this, particularly from readers for whom English is a second language. I used to use Talkr to do this in 2008 (and liked it slightly better in fact) but the service disappeared – along with all the content. That unfortunately is a risk with this type of service. Finally, I also use Feedburner. My blog feed runs into it to provide for anyone who wants to subscribe.  Google Alerts also notify me if anyone uses my name or blog title on the web.

Twitter is the most recent acquisition; I’ve been on it for a couple of months but it’s only in the last few weeks that my use of it has shot up. The tipping point was a conference in Southampton. At the start the organiser gave out the event hashtag for anyone who was intending to tweet. I hadn’t thought much about it prior to the sessions but tried some ‘live’ Tweeting in earnest. A connection immediately responded asking where I was – I reported back that questions were being invited and did he want me to ask a question on his behalf? It was so immediate, and that’s when I realised its value.

My use of Facebook is rather different; I’m investigating it as part of my research so I know a lot about its functionality and have a far more critical understanding of it.

What else are you using?
I use Delicious to keep track of blogs, websites, documents, portals and resources that I find useful; this is signposted from the blog. This is much more effective for me than bookmarking to a browser. It sits in my Mozilla toolbar and is great for quickly tagging, highlighting and navigating recent references which are easy to lose track of when dealing with huge literature reviews. I’ve also benefited from access to the delicious profiles of other students, researchers and academics.

What is the most useful Web 2.0 you’re using at the moment?
A couple of weeks ago I’d have said my WordPress blog. It’s a big part of my online life. But Twitter is becoming increasingly important, as I’ve realised how much it helps me to keep in close touch with a variety of people. I also find myself stumbling over streams of interest that I might not have found otherwise. I like the fact it’s a broadly accessible service (and Accessible Twitter even more so), and I think the fact that it strongly supports mobile networks is a great strength, encouraging more ‘real world’ input from people on the go  – it’s a very immediate form of communication. Twitter also demands less time. I’m increasingly focussed on writing up, so it offers a quick fix. I also think Twitter is a ‘my age group’ tool compared to MySpace and Facebook.

All of that said, I do feel an identity conflict when I use some things. My closest friends are on Twitter but I’m increasingly using it for work – so do I need a separate work account? It’s a bit more ‘off the cuff’ whereas blogs need to be rather more conservative and considered. I do like the serendipity of Twitter and I haven’t felt as overwhelmed as I expected it would feel trying to keep abreast of the new tweets on my research themes. But do my colleagues in education need to hear my thoughts on the Tour de France?

What about the things you don’t use so much?
My social networking space used to be Facebook but I don’t use it so much now. I use LinkedIn professionally, but it doesn’t yet have the scope I‘d hope for – not enough of my professional colleagues are on it so it feels more like an address book.

I’ve used Scribd to share some of my writing. I’ve not used GoogleDocs though I do have an iGoogle profile and use some of their development tools (but only for outside of work interests). I’ve used SlideShare to view other people’s presentations, but it’s not for me. Doodle provides a great way to determine group supervision meetings.

There are a few things I’ve dipped into but haven’t become must-haves. I’ve tried Second Life (a virtual world) and I’ve toyed with IBMs Many Eyes data visualisation tools. And purely for entertainment purposes I use Blip.fm (create your own personal play-lists by streaming music) but have found its sources variable; there also seem to be copyright issue difficulties.

Are you currently thinking of trying something else?
I’d love to print my thesis using a web-based book publisher like Blurb rather than traditional University channels. The idea of typesetting my thesis and submitting in full colour really appeals to me, and I imagine it would appeal to others working with visual data. I’m expecting to use a Creative Commons licence in my final thesis and to (hopefully) publish online, maybe using Scribd alongside alternative formats and the usual university channels. It would be great to take full advantage of hyper-media in conjunction with a web-based thesis without loosing the ‘book’ feel.

In terms of broader developments, I can see myself upgrading my phone and looking for more mobile functionality soon, I’m sure this would alter how I view and use the web.

I’ve heard about services like GoogleWave – but I’m not convinced as yet. That’s probably because I’m not sure what it does yet or what it could do for me. It seems to be partly a writing space and partly a communication channel. On both these fronts I have reservations about moving to GW. I’ve used wikis for group writing (with both UK and overseas-based colleagues) but found it quite challenging – joint writing in a wiki requires a lot of discipline, editorial and structure, so it depends how the affordances of GW compares in practice. And for communication – well, I’ve got a university email account (which also provides an academic identity) as well as Skype, which I can video conference and SMS through, so do I want to sign up to yet another service? I’m a bit concerned about how much I’ve got scattered around the Internet already and to what extent I should tie all my personal information into one company.

How do you judge what’s good and what’s not in the Web 2.0 world?
I look for technical answers and expertise; I’ve also found more advanced research methods training helpful (for example the ESRC/Goldsmiths’ Live Sociology course). I have a couple of friends in the technical press – so if they are using something I tend to take notice. I do research things quite carefully. For example, with my blog I was asking myself ‘is it straightforward?‘ and ‘what does it let (or better still) help me do?’. I am prepared to ditch something if it’s not doing what I want or if the rules of conduct, ownership or privacy change – but I’m aware, despite a political urge towards open-source, that I also hanker after the iPhone.

Is there anything else you’d like to mention?
I’ve noticed that sometimes I’ll start using something for social and personal reasons and then discover uses in my work and professional life. I don’t think this is unusual.  I also tend to judge services on their apparent attitude to users.  I find that some companies are closed to their users and not transparent – I find that off-putting. I also like the open source elements in, for example, WordPress – they’re happy for people to develop extra functionality and share success, they don’t keep it all closed off. This approach also has clear benefits in terms of accessibility and inclusion – even if there are some losses for interoperability.

Using these sorts of services you have to take the risk of losing content. To minimise this I tend to go for the bigger services (on the basis they are less likely to go under) and try and keep information in more than one place. I have backed up my blog.

And your final thoughts?
I do have some anxieties. So much is online now, so how do you filter the good from the bad? I’m doing it, but it takes effort. And I’m also concerned about how much information individual services have about you; if Google/Microsoft develop the silver bullet and consolidate everything tomorrow, I’m still not sure I’d want to cross that threshold, I’m a UK national, not a Google National. Ultimately I imagine the next big change will relate to machine-readable content, hopefully the internet will become more transparent and efficient as a result.