Easter is less than four weeks away now and the session is going by fast, despite some bizarre weather and the lack of any real Spring warmth. To help you make it through to the holidays, we’ve got a sunny mix of news, resources and events, starting with an important announcement of a star speaker for our Accessibility E-Olympics. As you’ve come to expect, we have some new online resources for you to try out, and news of interesting conferences and training events relevant to e-learning. We also revisit the great Search Engine and Open Source debates and offer you the chance to win a £30 book token with Artifact, or bid for £3.5 million of funding from JISC! Finally, we flag up the next phase of the Image Engine project, giving you the chance to get on board before it leaves the station at Easter time.
As always, we welcome feedback on NewsFeed (or any RSC service you may have used) through the RSC website.
Jamie Andrew, the acclaimed Scottish mountaineer and author, has been confirmed as the guest speaker at the Accessibility e-Olympics which are being held in Edinburgh’s e-Science Institute on March 21 st and 22 nd. This joint training event is organised by both Scottish RSCs and aims to guide delegates through the process of constructing an online learning sequence while making sure that it is accessible to learners with disabilities. Advice on accessibility will be available from TechDis and BRITE representatives throughout the event, and there is a place reserved for each Scottish college with financial support being provided through the eMerge project. Full details of the event are available from the special Accessibility e-Olympics website.
The English Maze is a commercial website which offers interactive online English training to individuals and businesses. There are six sections in the ‘Individual’ training area, from Beginners to Advanced, each with six activity areas. Most of the materials are only available to subscribers, but each section has one free area where the material can be tested out, and there is some nice interactive game and exercise ideas to try.
DubIt is a free software download from TechSmith which allows the user to record, import or edit sound files in conjunction with images, and thus quickly add audio annotations to both still and moving images. The resulting combination is saved as an AVI file, which is readily played back on most systems (although, since no audio compression is used, the resultant file sizes can be quite large). DubIt is available to download at http://www.techsmith.com/products/dubit/default.asp
A new service from the Resource Discovery Network’s GEsource, accessible from its Natural Hazards pages, now has up-to-date information on all earthquakes around the world, easily accessible from a global graphic interface, on which all recent activity is pinpointed. As well as an interactive map, leading to detailed information on the majority of recorded events, you can also find out where the strongest quakes of recent history have taken place, and see events listed in order of magnitude. The Natural Hazards pages also provide links and resources on other natural disaster categories, such as tsunamis, drought, volcanoes and storms. To see the new resources, go to http://www.gesource.ac.uk/ and click on the ‘Natural Hazards’ option.
Commercial eLearning software has done little to improve teaching and learning, according to an interesting article by Christopher Coppola in the current issue of Campus Technology. It costs too much to buy and maintain, leaving too little for the ‘creative exploration’ needed to embed software into the educational process properly, and the standardisation demanded by mass market economics means that it’s often too inflexible to adapt to the differing needs of curriculum areas or institutional culture. Coppola sees Open Source (OS) software as the answer to these problems, and his article makes a strong case for the educational benefits of Linux, Moodle, Apache and other OS ‘stars’. Read what he has to say at http://www.campus-technology.com/news_article.asp?id=10299& .
The quiet revolution in academic publishing took another small step this week in Southampton, with a proposal from Professor Steven Harnad of Southampton University that researchers should ‘self-archive’ their work, in addition to having it published in a commercial journal in the normal way. His ‘keystroke strategy’ envisages a situation in which authors can make a decision on whether to make their own work widely available through their institution’s own servers or not, depending on the attitude of their publishers. Since over 90% of publishers accept such self-archiving, this initiative could revolutionise access to academic research overnight if it was widely implemented. Hot stuff - or hot air? Make your own mind up by going to http://tinyurl.com/4o93b .
If you can’t see past Google, don’t know your Teoma from your Yahoo, and suspect that the whole subject might be a large Dogpile – then you need to look at The Guardian Online’s recent review of search engines and remind yourself of who does what and where. This is an easy-to-read explanation of what’s available to help with internet searching. It also provides a useful reminder that the whole field is changing rapidly - new search techniques such as ‘clustering’ are evolving, and new information sources such as blogs are being drawn into the search net. For a general overview of the current situation, go to http://tinyurl.com/42vom .Stay ahead of the game and brush up on the options available by going to http://tinyurl.com/3pxmy
Perceptive readers of the last article will have noticed that the two URLs provided for the Guardian articles do not contain the name of the paper at all, but seem instead to point to a resource called ‘tinyurl’. The Editor decided that since the full URLs for the links each came to more than 60 characters, it would be easier for the reader if these were shortened and made more user-friendly. Fortunately, there is a website devoted to this very need! Tiny URL allows users to enter a long URL string and have a drastically shortened alternative returned in its place. Go to http://tinyurl.com/ to see how easy this is for yourself.
Artifact is the resource gateway for the arts and creative industries, and is available from the Resource Discovery Network page at http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ . They are looking for feedback from users on how the service is operating, and have an online questionnaire at http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~krlmeyer/artifact-ttt.htm which they are asking users to complete before March 25 th to help shape how the service will operate in future. In return, they are offering the chance to be entered into a prize draw for a £30 book token.
The 2005 JISC conference will focus on the themes of Impact and integration, and is being held at the International Convention Centre in Birmingham on 12 th April. The keynote speech is being delivered by Roger McClure, Joint Chief Executive of the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Councils, and a mixture of presentations and workshops will cover a wide range of e-learning topics including voice-over IP, digital repositories, text mining and wireless networking. Details of the conference are on the JISC website at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/conf2005 and the full conference programme is available at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=conf_2005_prog . details are available at the JANET website.
JiscLegal, the specialist JISC advisory service for legal matters linked to information technology, are holding a briefing day on Privacy Technology and the Law in London on 7 th April. The workshop plans to focus on the practical steps which colleges and universities need to take in order to reduce their exposure to the risks of infringing privacy legislation. Key legal experts and sector professionals will identify and clarify the legal risks for institutions and provide guidance on avoiding infringement of the law of privacy, ranging across topics which include the implications of the possible introduction of identity cards and the integrity of educational ‘identity’. Details of the Briefing Day are available from the JISC Legal website at http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/events/privacyapril05.htm .
Phase Three of RSC Scotland North & East’s Image Engine project is due to run after Easter, starting on April 4 th and running through to June 24 th. This offers teaching staff the opportunity to learn all about creating, manipulating and using digital images in teaching and learning in a structured and practical manner. The project is funded through the FE Funding Council’s eMerge initiative, which provides money to allow one participant from each college in the RSC’s area to be released from their teaching commitments for one day a week throughout the duration of the course. A golden opportunity to get a clearer view of digital imaging and how it can help your teaching work!
For further information on The Image Engine and how to apply for a place for Phase Three, go to RSC North & East’s Image Engine website.
JISC have a major funding initiative underway to support FE and HE projects in setting up digital repositories, and investigating how such repositories might interact with one another both nationally and internationally. Between £3.5 and £4 million is being made available over two years for these projects, with individual projects expected to receive funding of £25 – 200,000. The deadline for proposals is 7 th April : full details can be found at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=funding_circular3_05 .
This JISC Legal workshop will deal directly with the issues of copyright and related rights which arise in the development and delivery of eLearning materials and other online content. This day workshop is a mix of presentations and case studies and looks at the issues surrounding copyright, focusing on eLearning materials .
These courses and others are listed on the Scotfeict website which also lists other staff development opportunities for FE staff within Scotland.
Nationwide training opportunities are available on the NLN events database.
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