A warm weather welcome to another edition of the NewsFeed - all the news that is news in Education in Scotland.
Any feedback on NewsFeed? Anything you’d like to contribute? Please contact us through the RSC website.
Miss it, miss out: We've had a tremendous response to this major conference at the end of this month and we're now looking to finalise the numbers. So stop putting it off and book your place right now! Aimed at managers and practitioners in FE and HE, the conference will examine the potential positive transformational effect that new technology and methodologies can have on the learner experience, and how learners themselves are central to the change. Keynote speakers include:
In addition, we have a range of stimulating workshops and discussions where your perceptions of educational transformation will be challenged and broadened. The conference is on Wednesday 31st May 2006 at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh. There is no charge for attending the Learner Driver Conference, but remember places are going fast, book today!
As many readers will be aware, a series of hugely successful staff training events, under the banner of the e-Olympics, has been held across the country reaching over 600 staff in individual colleges and at national events. The idea of the e-Olympics is to gently use the Olympic Games metaphor to lead staff painlessly (well almost painlessly) through the complex process of planning and developing interactive online learning materials. And it works. The training was first developed as part of the Scottish Funding Council’s innovative eMerge programme and in order to capture the essential elements of the e-Olympics RSC Scotland North & East has now produced a do-it-yourself manual aimed at Staff Development Officerds, to provide colleges with all the necessary know-how and resources to run the whole event. The RSCs are still delighted to come to your College and light the flame but everything you need to know to deliver the training is contained in this booklet, supported by detailed information on the RSC website.
Request a hard copy or download a PDF version of the e-Olympics Train-the-Trainer Guide (PDF document: 6.31 MB).
JISC is pleased to announce a pre-conference workshop as part of the International World Wide Web Conference 2006 being held in Edinburgh from the 23 - 26 May. The workshop, on Monday 22 May, will highlight JISC's work as part of the Information Environment and in particular its Digital Repositories programme. Digital repositories enable universities and colleges to share and manage their intellectual outputs, making existing work easier, more effective and efficient, and supporting innovative teaching, learning and research practice. The aim of the workshop is to deepen the shared understanding of repositories within the education community. The target audience is researchers, teachers, managers and administrators who have an interest in sharing or managing the intellectual output of universities. For further information go to: JISC web site.
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) are proud to announce: The Sixth JISC/ CNI Meeting to be held at the Park Inn York on 6-7 July 2006 This meeting will bring together experts from the United States and the United Kingdom. Parallel sessions will explore and contrast major developments on both sides of the Atlantic. It will be of interest to all senior managers of information systems in the education community and those responsible for delivering digital services and resources for learning, teaching and research.
Further information about the meeting, including a full programme and registration details, is available on the JISC/CNI Meeting web site. If you've any questions email the events team on:events@ukoln.ac.uk
JISC Legal produce a range of advice papers to satisfy the needs of differing readerships. ‘Essentials’ papers are around 1000 words in length and provide a quick introduction to a topic. ‘Overview’ papers are around 2500 words in length, and provide a fuller briefing for those working with the topic area more regularly. Now you know the jargon we can reveal that two new papers have recently been published.
The latest JISC Legal newsletter reports that a well-known commercial image gallery is known to be trawling FE & HE websites in order to find unlicensed images to which it owns the copyright. A number of institutions have already received invoices from the US-based gallery asking for four-figure payments as back-royalties for use of the images. UK institutions are advised to ensure that images are not used online without copyright clearance.
WWW tools for education gathers together tools for education and saving you the hassle of searching through mountains of materials on the Web. Here you’ll find information, resources and articles from across the educational spectrum, each one related to an aspect of web-based teaching and learning.
'Evalued' is a new toolkit designed to help HE and FE library staff looking for support in the evaluation of electronic information services (EIS). The toolkit, which has recently been updated and relaunched, has information and resources to help you if you are:
New sections include:
Take a look at the resources available, including an evaluation planner and custom tools facility by going to www.evalued.uce.ac.uk
TASI has launched a blog – the TASI Lightbox - to provide the latest news and a forum for discussion on all aspects of using digital images. Staff at TASI, the JISC-funded Technical Advisory Service for Images, have been keeping an eye on developments in digital imaging for many years, and since January have been using the blog to keep track of current news. The blog has now been made public and topics covered include digital cameras, images in teaching and learning, scanners, image resources and repositories, software, and copyright.
'Sphere It', a new blog search engine, has a supercool feature: a Flash timeline with sliders to select the first and last days for the search to cover. The 'Sphere It!' Bookmarklet is a free bookmarklet that makes it easy to find blog posts that relate to what you're reading on the Web. It may change your life. Go to one of your favourite websites and click on an article that interests you. Let's say you're reading an article on CNN.com about Global Warming, and you're wondering what bloggers have to say about that topic. Click the ‘Sphere It!’ icon and in seconds, you'll land on a search results page with links to blog posts along with additional news articles that match the subject of the article you were reading. ‘Sphere It’ finds blog posts related to the content of the page you're reading, instead of just using links, so it works best on a page that discusses a single story, such as a news article, rather than a page that contains fragments of many different stories.
Demand for visitor network access at JANET connected organisations has grown in recent years and will continue to do so. This is adding to the administrative burden faced by local IT staff in setting up guest accounts and is causing inconvenience for visitors. The need has therefore arisen for an infrastructure to reduce this burden and to provide hassle free guest access for visitors. The JANET Roaming Service provides just such a solution and will in turn promote effective collaboration on research and academic projects.
So, what is it and what does it provide? JANET Roaming Service (JRS) has developed from Location Independent Networking (LIN) which is a concept that provides an infrastructure for guest users to use their home network unique credentials to gain authenticated independent network access at visited JANET connected organisations, without any administrative burden or added complexities - both for the user and the local IT staff. The guest user can then use whatever remote access facilities are provided by their own organisation and whatever facilities are offered by the visited organisation. Best of all, there is no charge at the point of use.
This four day online conference is aimed at staff responsible for using and implementing learning platforms/VLEs, in HE and FE, ACL, schools. The conference will focus on teaching and learning aspects of using learning platforms and the keynote presenter is Martin Dougiemas, creator of open source course management system, Moodle.
VLEs: Pedagogy and implementation online conference
SketchUp is a simple but powerful tool for quickly and easily creating, viewing and modifying your 3D ideas. Perfect for models of house extensions, decks and woodwork projects. Easy to use just click on a shape and push or pull it to create your desired 3D geometry. Experiment with colour, glass and texture directly on your model. Select from thousands of pre-drawn components to save time drawing. A powerful tool for staff and students alike. The software is gratis and can be downloaded along with tutorials. Download Google SketchUp (free).
A pilot service providing subject resource discovery across a variety of digital repositories of interest to the engineering learning and research communities has been released by the JISC–funded PerX Project. Although the repositories included in the pilot are relevant to engineering, the cross-searching methods and interface used, plus the range of repository types included, should be of interest to many as a demonstrator of one method of resource discovery across multiple digital repositories. To see the possible future go to:www.engineering.ac.uk.
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