I’m currently in Aberdeen at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2008 conference, blogging this during a presentation by someone at JISC. Because you can do that at a geeky conference without it looking rude!
There are currently about 30 delegates (including one of the joint chairs of the conference) sitting in front of their PC laptops, Macs and mobile devices checking e-mail, Twittering (you can read all the #iwmw2008-referenced tweets at http://twemes.com/iwmw2008), adding content to the conference Ning social-network site: http://iwmw2008.ning.com/ and probably a bunch of other stuff.
Eduroam
I’m just delighted to have connected to the Web via Eduroam, which allows users from participating institutions to connect to the network on another participating institution’s network.
So because Aberdeen and St Andrews both use Eduroam I am now able to connect to the Aberdeen WiFi connection using my St Andrews username and password. It’s a great system and I’m delighted that it works.
Mind you I had to install a piece of software from St Andrews that automatically configured my networking settings before it would work properly, and I was relieved that I’d been long-sighted enough to have saved that application to my flash drive just in case I ever needed it.
Today I needed it.
- Install.
- Reboot.
- Connect.
- Happy user.
Glorious Aberdeen
The weather is glorious! Too hot for me, I must admit … is it always like this in Aberdeen? I thought “Aberdeen … cold!” so I packed two jumpers and a couple of coats. It looks like I’ve come for a month, to the land of the Polar Bears.
I’ve been in shorts (and kilt) since I arrived.
Workshop presentation
Yesterday my colleague and I gave a 90 minutes workshop presentation entitled “Mind Mapping for effective content management” which introduced the concept of mind maps, showed why it was a good tool for use with Web projects and then gave a case study on how we used it in our university project to migrate 3,000+ Web pages into a new information architecture.
The slides are now available online at SlideShare: Mind Mapping for effective content management (and embedded above).
The workshop was really well attended, we had nearly 30 people packed into a small, stiflingly-hot tutorial room, and we both enjoyed sharing our experience and getting great feedback and questions from folks. But then it’s quite easy talking about something that you love doing and are passionate about.
On reflection, both during and after, we realised that we could have presented some of the concepts much more clearly, or at least in a more step-by-step fashion. Particularly when we made the leap from auditing a website structure using mind maps to auditing the content of a Web page.
However, with only 90 minutes to play with I think we managed to pack in as much as we could, as well as we could. We even finished bang on time, not a second before or after.
And then we could relax and enjoy the rest of the conference.
Update: You can see Mike Whyment’s photo taken during our session on Flickr.
