Templates vs. Free Pages

We’ve finished our initial research on the current status of University profiles. Issues of templates and standardisation versus a free hand in creating one’s own web page have raised some interesting questions. Templates - as you would expect produce a standardised and uniform look which has the stamp of authority, but which often fall short in terms of interesting and personal content. Web pages where users are free to communicate what they value feel more friendly and open. These pages invite dialogue and present academics as people with passions and interests that a list of publications can’t communicate.

There is an underlying problem though, templates offer a way onto the web for those who don’t have the technical expertise to write their own html. It’s no surprise that most departments using the ‘free page’ system are science and technology focused.

So what’s the answer for more engaging and professional profiles? I think it's probably a synthesis of the accessibility and professionalism of templates but with the freedom offered by free pages (how we achieve this is another matter). We need to allow and encourage people to post more often, with more options for personalisation and the space to write more creatively. One idea might be to replace the titles of boxes on templates with questions. So instead of a box called ‘research interests’ we would write ‘describe your research interests and your current work’ or even ‘ Imagine that you’ve met a new person at a conference - they’re not familiar with your area of work, how would you describe it?’ Titles on text boxes encourage users to write lists of keywords separated by commas. This provides a useful string of metadata but it tells us nothing of that person's motivation, their journey through their work or their passion for their subject.

Profiles need to be easy to use and quick to update to encourage academics to use them, but the more fundamental problem is in making people care about their digital identity - why would they care about their online profile? Who is the profile for anyway? These are questions that we hope to address through surveys and more in-depth interviews with academic staff. Esther Dingley, co-founder of Graduate Junction and current Arcadia fellow at the UL has a really great post on her blog about the importance of legitimising the time spent on creating and maintaining digital identities.