Attending Scottish Web Folk conference in Dundee
Many of our team attended a mini-conference recently, organised by colleagues at the University of Dundee. We all have personal highlights arising from a busy day of presentations and networking.
About the conference
Scottish Web Folk is a subgroup of the Institutional Web Managers Workshop, an annual conference that ran from the 1990s until the pandemic. Scottish web managers have long been a sociable group, taking turns to host meetups. But this one-day conference format is new, thanks to the enthusiasm and energy of colleagues in Dundee.
The event was free for Scottish universities, and very cheap for other UK universities to attend thanks to vendor sponsorship and the community contributing talks. We saw talks on publishing technology, sustainability, user experience, content management and social media amongst others.
Team highlights
Neil Allison
Top talk: Content Design Training for the Real World – Nick Daniels. A slightly biased choice as Nick and I used to work together, and he’s now responsible for training Edinburgh web publishers as I once was. But it was great to hear how his experimental and iterative approach was evolving how his team approached raising standards in content design and management.
Key takeaway: Listening to Stephen Evans from St Andrews talking about their new approach to managing degree programme information, combined with talks earlier in the day from Andrew Millar (Dundee) and Stratos Filalithis (Edinburgh) about sustainability has set me thinking about how we might bring together a community of teams responsible for managing their institution’s provision of degree information online. It’s a bit niche, but a common challenge we all face with aspects of technology, content management, content design, editorial workflow, user experience, marketing and organisational culture involved.
Jen Doyle
Top talk: Tied! The talk by Stephen Evans from St Andrews went right to the heart of my day-to-day concerns – it was reassuring to know how funneling input from a variety of stakeholders and subject matter experts is a universal challenge, and to see an innovative way of dealing with it. But the presentation on the changing landscape of prospectuses also was really impactful. In the current digital world, what is the place of a ‘print prospectus’ – and how does that resonate with our sustainability ambitions as an institution?
Key takeaway: In many ways, we’re a very privileged institution. We have big teams, lots of knowledge, and lots of colleagues to draw on when we find ourselves facing issues. However, I also spoke a lot to ‘teams of one’ today in the networking spaces, and I think it’s important to think about how we can share our knowledge (and missteps!) externally. We’ve all got challenges to face, but they’re much more challenging when we’re trying to face those alone.
Lauren Tormey
Top talk: I most enjoyed the talk by Stephen Evans from St Andrews on the new system and workflow they have put in place for proofing course pages. As someone who has spent the last few years designing a new degree finder CMS, I was fascinated to learn of St Andrews’ approach to avoid giving school editors access to the backend of their CMS. Instead, they’ve used various tools to give editors access to what looks like the front-end of the site, where they only have access to edit the few fields they are allowed to change. It made me think of how we might have approached development of our new degree finder differently, in terms of the school editor experience.
Key takeaway: Not work related, but I did enjoy the speaker from cues.ai’s 15-minute tangent on politics where I learned that the new US government department Elon Musk is set to lead, the Department of Government Efficiency, is abbreviated DOGE. Doge is also short for dogecoin, the cryptopcurrency Elon is a fan of. So this whole department is one big joke. (Not a funny one, though.) Politics aside, I also learned from that same talk how most paid-for advertisements in higher ed (minus paid search) do not lead to prospects going to course pages.
Louis Mackenzie
Top talk: Content Design Training for the Real World – Nick Daniels. Working within a content operations team, we deal with many web publishers across the university; naturally, I found Nick’s talk very relatable. Nick is responsible for training web publishers. It was interesting to hear about the different methods employed to keep editors of varying abilities engaged and the aftercare his team provides following the initial training session.
Key takeaway: Apart from the delicious cheesecake at lunch, the second most memorable thing from the day was the focus on sustainability, especially the talks at the start of the day. It’s not something I’ve given enough thought to with regard to web publishing. I found the sessions by The University of Dundee/Manifesto, and Stratos Filalithis and Osh Doherty from the University of Edinburgh very informative.
Cathy Naughton
Top talk: Oxytocin, Dopamine and Endorphins: The Chemistry for Engaging with Students (so that they give a Sh*t) – Jonny Harper, CTO of Vepple. As much as I enjoyed the talk’s provocative title, I was inspired by Jonny’s overview of how we can apply a neuromarketing approach to our prospective student web content. The demonstration of the different types of interactive web content that can create a “feel-good” experience for the end user was engaging, and it got me thinking about ways that we could potentially make our prospective student content more interactive.
Key takeaway: There’s a lot that we’re already doing well! Conversations with other attendees reminded me that many smaller higher ed institutions often have nowhere near the same level of resources dedicated to content operations and improvements as we do. It can sometimes feel like we have a lot on our plates in our team, but connecting with colleagues at other institutions reminds me that we’re achieving a lot of success in our work; it’s encouraging to know that others in the sector are keen to learn from our content design and operations experience.
