Hannah Whaley . com

It has been a busy few weeks, and I thought I would share a couple of recent challenges with you.

I recently spent two weeks in Germany, completing a 2000 mile driving holiday in our Lotus Elise. We spent some time at the Nurburgring - the longest, most challenging and unforgiving racetrack in the world. I chose to drive a lap - a genuinely nerve-wracking experience and not a decision I took lightly given the well documented dangers of the track. Also driving the 13 mile ring was a Lambo, Corvette ZR-1, Ferarri F430 Scuderia, Nissan GTR, and more GT3 RSs than you could shake a stick at - all doing some serious speeds on track. It was an amazing experience, a genuine feeling of accomplishment and I am incredibly glad I chose to tackle it.

This was not the only challenge of the last few weeks. Immediately before I left for Germany I had a job interview, and I have been delighted to accept the position of Assistant Director of the Library and Learning Centre at the University of Dundee, responsible for Research and Systems. I am looking forward to working more closely with the Library and Learning Centre staff to build on existing work and tackle the many challenges being presented within this area - not least the changes in the publishing sector, effective search, integrations, open access repositories and research management initiatives.

This week I am at BbWorld09 in Washington DC and have been presenting on both the challenges with Groupwork Assessment and with effective implementation of content systems for learning and teaching. Common themes from talking to colleagues here have centred on  moving elearning systems forward (the adoption of Bb9) and providing stable, integrated systems that meet our staff and student’s expectations for modern working. It never fails to impress me how much progress there is in the sector year on year, and yet how we feel constantly challenged by the needs and requirements of the university community. I understand how people can feel swamped by this, but it is important to realise just how quickly we can adapt, and how far we have already risen to meet the challenge of achieving 21st century education.

I hope that challenges of all kinds continue to present themselves to me in life, as the biggest challenges tend to bring the best opportunities with them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about academic profiles lately. Partly because writing a blog like this makes you consider your own public profile, but also because of the recent release of Google Profiles. The release of any Google tool should make us all stop to consider why they made it and what the potential impact could be. We’ve seen enough apps from them grow into meaningful entities in their own right to have a right to get excited when something new is released. So what is Google profiles all about and how does it relate to academics?

In short, Profiles is a place to collate all the information held about you on other Google apps so that you can control how you are presented to the outside world. It lets you link out to your blog, twitter, flicker and facebook pages and so becomes your central profile. Nifty features include things like allowing others to email you at your GMail account without giving out your email address, and automatically incorporating data that you enter into other Google services. And the killer hook? The more you populate your profile, the higher up the search ranks it goes. Wham. Google just put themselves at the center of everything you do online - all they need is single sign on to them all and they control the internet. Well, control it more.

Researchers and academics are starting to cotton on to the power of a good internet presence. Open access to publications gives earlier and more citations - citations matter in external assessment exercises. Even without open access publishing, a good web presence will ensure that people who go looking for your articles can find out easy information about your work, research, conference attendance and forthcoming publications. Despite these obvious benefits, it is not commonplace for Universities to provide their staff with the tools, space and training to create online profiles. It is left to the interested few to develop their own techniques and find the ways that work for them. There are hundreds of simple html attempts (of the nature of ‘Jim’s Research Page’) left unattended and not updated on uni servers around the country due to an initial wave of academic enthusiasm for the internet.

So Google Profiles could provide a good solution? It certainly allows people to quickly create and maintain professional profiles. The recognisability of them as Google ones brings benefits, not least the jump in search ranks. However…. it is forcing our academic staff down a very individualistic route - there is nothing that identifies them resolutely as belonging to a particular university. Staff and their work are major assets of any institution, and the ideal solution would be to provide functionality of this kind in house. Interestingly, I was informed recently that Google rankings actually weight University domains highly, meaning that an in-house solution would also achieve a very visible public profile.

The other option would be to see Google expand their system to facilitate Academic Profiles - specifically associating them and their work with an institution, linking to that institution’s repository and other work from the same research groups/schools.

So which is more likely: institutions understanding the intangible benefits of social networking presence and providing a solution, or Google moving to expand its Profiles service into academia, and linking with existing services like Google Scholar, Google Reader and Google Book Search? I’ll let you decide.