Digital Communications team update – February 2023
Latest updates from the Digital Communications team at University of St Andrews for February 2023.
Welcome new members of the team
New colleagues started with us in January. Read a little more about them on the Digital Communications team blog.
- Beth Andrews as Senior Web Content Editor
- Dinorah Imrie as Web Content Editor
- Josh Crofts as Web Content Editor and Trainer
- Mike Berry as Web Developer
Plans for February and March
With the arrival of four new team members, we can start to work on several projects.
We are working on moving Accommodation, Conferences and Events (ACE) content from WordPress into TerminalFour. While doing this, we are discussing how to improve the ways that information about catering is presented online.
We are working on consolidating and improving information about student accommodation. To do this, we are collating and reviewing accommodation content held across the University site. This work will streamline the online content and increase discoverability for students.
The University website must also comply with government accessibility legislation, and we continue to audit and develop the pages to meet the regulations.
Search improvements
We are currently in the process of rolling-out an update to make it easier for users to search from a web page. This new enhancement will allow you to select from popular searches, suggested key words or a sample of the most popular search results when using the search in the website header. You can also now search the website using your voice.
The aim of this update is to reduce the number of clicks required to find what you are looking for. We hope to expand on this update in the future by adding more features to the search.
Latest from the blog
Updating people pages
All our web pages for academic Schools have pages that display people profile information. These web pages are automatically generated by combining data from multiple sources. Members of staff looking to update their information can find advice in this blog post.
Articles and resources: Artificial Intelligence special
With the launch of the chatbot ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a hot topic across many different sectors including academia.
The Digital Communications team have been investigating different AI-powered tools and their potential uses. These tools can be very creative and fun to use, especially the image and video creators. They also have practical applications and can help to provide quick answers or writing prompts. However, there are potential dangers and some institutions and publishers have banned them from being used in academic work and papers.
Some of the tools:
- ChatGPT – chatbot that answers questions, writes prose, poetry, song, and code
- ChatSonic – AI chatbot, alternative to ChatGPT
- Bard – Google’s AI chatbot in the works
- QuillBot – paraphrasing tool
- Descript – video and podcasts
- DALL-E – image generator
- Midjourney – “exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species”
- GPTZero – tool to test whether text has been generated by AI
Some of the discussion:
- How ChatGPT has changed SEO forever…[Is Google going to die?] YouTube video by Matt Diggity
- ChatGPT: our study shows AI can produce academic papers good enough for journals – just as some ban it. An article from The Conversation
- A college student created an app that can tell whether AI wrote an essay. An article from npr.org
- Top French university bans use of ChatGPT to prevent plagiarism. An article from Reuters
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