I recently attended a two day Netskills workshop on “Improving Your Online Presence” at the Hilton Hotel, Edinburgh on the 1st and 2nd of July 2009. I thought this workshop would be especially useful to the work I’m currently doing for the two #UKOER projects I’m currently involved with (one of the key factors of Open Educational Resources is that they should be easily discoverable).
Although the workshop was perhaps more focussed to entire websites (as most of the participants were web editors and managers of their institutions website), the basic principles could be still be applied to Open Educational Resources. The workshop was split into six main sections:
The Importance of Structure
The section focussed on getting the basics right, ensuring that HTML content is marked up using heading <h1> </h1> <h2> </h2>… and paragraph <p> </p> tags appropriately. Search engines give preference to keywords in the headings so please do not use paragraph tags using style to make them look like headings.
When writing for the web it is important to consider how users read your webpages (they tend to scan, jumping from page to page). It is therefore advisable to front-load content. I.e. give the conclusion first, explore the content then give further details to ensure key information is not missed. This is at odds with traditional print based writing of introduction, details and then conclusion
Give your pages, directories and sub-directories descriptive titles to generate meaningful URLs. Ensure the URLs are persistent to allow deep linking to your resources.
Total Accessibility of Content
When discussing the term “accessibility” on the web, it is most commonly associated with the concept of being usable by users of any ability or disability. This section of the workshop explored that concept and expanded it. Therefore a website should also be accessible by different browsers/devices, easy to navigate and therefore easy to access and download speeds should be acceptable.
Content Integrity
Day one was wrapped up with a session on content integrity. Key factors from this session were, consistency, spelling and grammar and branding. The OER projects hope that their content will be re-used by others, which may be limited by strong branding (the not invented here syndrome). However, knowing the reputation of the content provider through branding may improve the integrity of the content. Integrity is also about the right people, getting the right information at the right time (it is pointless having a high hit rate on your site if there is an equally high bounce rate. This session demonstrated tools such as Google analytics that can analyse the visitors to your site, allowing a better of the target audience.
Metadata
Day two of the workshop started with a session on metadata. Metadata is data about data and many search engines use this data to rank results. Basic information can be put in the HTML meta tags, such as title and authors but more complex metadata such as Dublin Core can enhance this information.
Semantic Web
This session discussed the semantic web and how search engines like wolfram alpha used this semantic information to give compute answers to user generated questions. A video, demonstrating a device which uses semantic information, was shown to the workshop. The video could have been taken from a science fiction movie, and although some of the applications could be thought of as an invasion of privacy, others were quite amazing at demonstrating the potential power of semantics.
Promotion
The final session of the workshop was delivered by Brian Kelly of UKOLN and was entitled “Pimp Up Your Stuff! Using the Social Web”. This session demonstrated examples of using the social web to promote your resources/project/institution/yourselves. This session focussed on wikis, blogs, twitter, Institutional Repositories, RSS Feeds, social networks, video sharing sites, slide sharing sites. Pick the sites you use carefully, i.e. select sites that are most appropriate for your content, don’t try to have a presence on them all. Quoting from Brian’s slides:
“The social web can be used to enhance access to digital resources, real world resources and ideas and concepts. Ignoring the potential may mean you lose out to your peers, competitors or rivals”.
For more information on this workshop, please visit the SCASEO Netvibes page which contains bookmarks, images, videos and tweets from the event.
