The 2nd conference for the Scottish Higher Education Web and Digital community took place a few days ago, hosted by the University of Dundee. This event is extremely popular and relevant with teams across our University, to the point that there was a “special” pile of lanyards with the label “Edinburgh” on top, beside the regular A-Z piles. Here is my takeaways from the day, and, let me tell you, it has been a challenge to pick from so many interesting sessions.

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Since joining the University of Edinburgh, I have been impressed by how open and collaborative the Higher Education community is. In the pre-pandemic times, the annual pilgrimage to the Institution Web Managers’ Workshop (IWMW for those in the know) brought together hundreds of colleagues to discuss all matters web and, more recently, digital. The pandemic created a gap in these gatherings, which took some time to fill. I was really glad as more colleagues engaging digitally via the HE Digital Slack channel. I heartily welcomed the inaugural Scottish Web Folk, as the group of Scottish Universities’ Web and Digital professionals community is known, conference last year. Our colleagues at Dundee University have put the effort to organise, and this year they have repeated this by organising the 2nd Scottish Web Folk conference.

Visit the Scottish Web Folk conference 2024 website for more information and the programme.

Presenting on our sustainability journey, and more of Edinburgh’s contributions

Apart from attending, Osh Doherty, our Green Web Estate intern, and I have presented our approach and progress to understand digital sustainability, using the catchy “The Unbearable Weight of a Massive Web Estate” title. I felt that the presentation was well-received, generated interesting questions and a discussion at the end. I have, for once more, to commend the value of our student internships that have helped accelerate our understanding of digital sustainability, and especially Osh for delivering the outcomes and recommendations of the report so well. Colleagues from other Universities have expressed their interest of how we have managed to make such efficient use of internships.

Download the “The Unbearable Weight of a Massive Web Estate” presentation slide deck [PDF File].

Read our blog posts covering our digital sustainability efforts.

Osh an I, at the beginning of our presentation, sharing some figures to set the context of the size of the University of Edinburgh’s Web Estate.

Furthermore, colleagues from our University took the chance to present on some of the great work happening across our organisation:

• “Beyond the social media post: humanising your brand through tone of voice and community engagement”. Sophie Hawkesford and Nat Green, both from the central Communications and Marketing team, talked about the approaches to optimise engagement via social media.
• “Collaborative usability testing”. Neil Allison, Head of the Prospective Student Content team, shared how his team is ensuring keeping the user in the center of their work.
• “Content design training for the real world”. Nick Daniels, Senior Content Designer with the User Experience Service, detailed the team’s work to review and improve the delivery of training of content design training.

The highlights of the day (a personal view)

From all the non-Edinburgh sessions, here are my top-3 highlights, in no particular order:

Building sustainable websites – University of Dundee

Apart from hosting, our colleagues at Dundee University, collaborating with the digital agency Manifesto, presented an excellent, and very relevant, presentation regarding building sustainable websites. All Universities, as many organisations, nowadays, have an environment-related strategy. This usually covers targets which are more associated to the physical environment, but what that means for digital? The presentation covered an overview of approaches to measure the environmental impact of websites, usually measured in Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions, and tools to do just that.

There are a lot of similarities with our efforts to understand the digital sustainability area, but there are differences, too. One prominent is that we have a wider view to the whole of the University of Edinburgh website estate, instead of just the centrally provided website service. One of things that “stuck” with me from this presentation was the common realization that digital sustainability is another tool in our tool belt for a better and more user-centered website experience, and that we can use it as a trigger to start a “movement” of behavioural change.

A newly launched Student Support Hub – University of Glasgow

The Digital Experience team from the University of Glasgow presented on the launch of a new Student Support hub capability within the University’s Student Portal. Their presentation struck a chord since it’s very timely with our own efforts to plan ahead for what’s next for our student and staff portal, MyEd. The challenges of organic growth of content and integrations over time without necessarily being relevant to student needs, and the reflection of organisation complexity in the user experience, are no stranger to us, too. The approach to first reach a “cleaner” solution, and then add the “pizzazz” has definitely picked up my interest. Glasgow’s new student support hub portal is, indeed, cleaner and uses language more familiar for the users. My team and I will definitely reach out to have more discussions to have a more detailed discussion, and seek for information to help inform our approaches, too.

A reminder that AI is only as good as its sources

Tracy Playle, Chief Content Strategist from the digital agency PickleJar, presented on how to get our fun new colleague, AI, to help inform content workflows. But, more fundamentally, to iterate again that it requires our help to optimise its capabilities. No AI can just be “turned on” and be trusted to meet the, sometimes unreasonable, expectations. Using a very entertaining, but true, example of an 18th taxidermy lion, she supported the key message of “the output will only be as good as its source and parameters”. The challenge of a taxidermist trying to preserve a lion in the 18th century without seeing one, is the same as AI trying to answer complex in 2024 without the appropriate input content and data. When adopting any AI model, the necessary iteration in training it needs to reach the appropriate level of success before launching it as part of any service.

Conclusion, and why bringing the community together is very meaningful

Overall, I believe this has been a very inspiring day, and a very successful conference. A special mention needs to go to the University of Dundee Team, especially to Andrew Millar and Rob Ryder-Richardson, for their continuous support of the community.

The success of the conference is not only measured by numbers (almost 200 attendees) or all of the interesting themes of the presentations. Or even by the fact that many colleagues from England, Wales and Ireland made the trip to Dundee. But, mostly, by the positive, constructive atmosphere, with all of the attendees, both University colleagues and suppliers, contributing, and leads to meaningful networking and discussions that last beyond the conference itself. I will definitely be looking forward to more gatherings like this in the future, and, why not, contribute in organising and hosting them in Edinburgh, too.