I discovered today that my area of work is in fact ‘a science’! Yes, the BBC’s technology blog reported today on the birth of a new so-called science – ‘web science’.
Wendy Hall, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton and one of the directors at the Web Science Research Initiative, said:
“The web is the elephant in the room – it has transformed our lives, but we never see it. We feel the time has come to study it – to see its benefits and understand its possible dis-benefits.”
“Dis-benefits…?”
On the one hand, I feel slightly uneasy about the word ’science’ being used to describe the study of what the WSRI describe as “the largest human information construct in history” – the internet. However, as someone who sometimes feels like she’s on an accelerating treadmill with no ‘off’ or ‘pause’ buttons, desperately trying to keep up with new technology, I do welcome any attempt to make it appear less scary and more manageable. I’ll be watching these developments with interest…!
So what is the purpose of a careers website in 2008? What do we want it to do? What do students and graduates want it to do? What are the possible pitfalls? A few thoughts and questions…
- How many of our websites are still mainly about providing information or ‘content’? [cont...]
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- How far should we ‘go web2.0′ with our careers websites and start creating online communities with user-generated content like student blogs or enter into the murky world of social networking?
- Do we want to move towards delivering our products and services via the web, developing online applications such as live web chats for e-guidance, CV builders, e-portfolios and mock interview simulators? [Watch this space for more on some of those features.]
- How much should we be creating multimedia like audio, video, media-rich presentations etc? Is this just a distracting gimmick or is it a way of making the site more lively and interesting and addressing different learning styles?
- With all the content ‘out there’, to what extent does it still make sense to continue to try to develop our own content, and how much are we just reinventing the wheel? Should we rather move more towards being ‘knowledge workers’, sourcing relevant, high quality third party content where it already exists and focussing our attention on producing our own resources where we have identified gaps (e.g. local job markets?).
- How far do we try to allow for students to personalise their own content, for example, using feeds or portals?
- And with all of that, how do we still manage to keep tabs on issues like quality control and accessibility?
As usual, I’d love your thoughts on all of the above, those of you who are involved in managing or developing your careers service website. How many of you have a purpose statement for the website to clarify its aims and define its key audience(s)? What criteria have you used to decide what content you want to include?
