Eclectic as ever, this issue of NewsFeed manages to cover a range of technology-related issues from web accessibility standards to washing machines. We feature new online history resources, and a major new set of online law resources. We also touch on developments in internet structure and digital information management.
As always, we welcome feedback on NewsFeed (or any RSC service you may have used) through the RSC website.
The JISC Collections Team is looking for feedback on a major new potential online resource for history teaching. The History eBook Project is a collaborative venture between publishers, librarians and learned history societies at the University of Michigan which provides full online access to more than 1,000 history titles. For details of the resource, and the opportunity to respond to the consultation, go to the JISC website.
The University of Bristol is hosting a free one-day workshop on the online history resources which are available to the FE sector. The event will showcase the JISC FE Curriculum Exemplar for History, part of a suite of CDs available across a range of subjects for practitioners to use. Free to all UK further education staff, the event will be of interest to teachers and lecturers, curriculum advisors and learning resources staff with an interest or specialism in history. For full details see the JISC website.
The Resource Discovery Network’s Humanities Hub (HUMBUL) has a section devoted to online history resources, covering more than 1,000 primary and secondary resource locations, as well as more than 500 teaching & learning-related weblinks. An annotated selection of the best of these has recently been collected into a separate publication, 'Internet Resources for History'.
Visit the HUMBUL History page. or download the 'Internet Resources for History Booklet'.
The NLN Materials Team have announced that Round Three learning materials in History, Basic Skills and Construction which had been withdrawn for amendment have now been re-released. Download a list of the released materials (Microsoft Word document), the materials themselves are available from the NLN website. The team advise colleges to download these materials once again to ensure that they have the full functionality provided by the amendments.
JISC and BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) have announced the Open Law project. Thousands of core legal judgments and law reports will be digitised, making more than 40,000 pages of legal text freely and openly available electronically for the first time. Access to case reports and legislation is central to the teaching of law and the development of legal skills, so Open Law will include around 200 of the most cited judgments in each of the core areas of the law course syllabus. Other non-core areas will also be covered to benefit staff and students dealing with legal issues on non-law courses such as accounting and business, environmental management, planning and social work. Full details of this major online resource development are available on the JISC website.
The Scottish Further Education Unit has developed a series of new materials for The Information Gateway, its directory of electronic learning resources available through the Web. More than 1500 new entries for the Gateway have been developed by a team of 18 subject specialists to support the delivery of the revised HN unit framework. In addition, a series of Learner Guides have been created to support the delivery of specific elements within units, based on websites selected from the Gateway's list of resources. SFEU are launching the updated Gateway through a series of eight free dissemination events, each linked to a specific curriculum area within the new HN framework. To find out more details on these, go to the SFEU website and enter 'June 2005' to specify the search for the particular events.
Digital information is pretty resilient stuff, as anyone who has followed the progression from vinyl to CD to iPod will know. Not only is the information 'robust’, but the impact of compression technologies such as JPEG and MPEG mean that 'losing' information is largely a matter of choice rather than accident. Largely - but not totally. Digital material is being renewed at an increasing rate and a surprising amount of digital information is being lost through the failure to preserve and manage material systematically. This topic is tackled in the current issue of the online magazine Ariadne, which has three articles on digital preservation and e-archiving.
In addition, a searchable gateway to The UK Web Archive has recently come online. This Archive claims to be "the first systematic attempt to create an archive of social, historic and culturally significant web-based material from the UK domain". Read the background to the Archive online and visit the Archive.
The University of Dundee is seeking an innovative and supportive eLearning Research Fellow to play a key role in the development of the JISC eLearning Framework. This post offers the opportunity to be involved in the development of a new Institute for Learning Technology within the University's Faculty of Education and Social Work led by Professor Allison Littlejohn. The institute comprises academic staff with expertise in the educational research and practice across all sectors of education. Full details of the post are available from the recruitment section of the University of Dundee's website.
NewsFeed is usually in favour of most kinds of technological innovation, but a line has finally been crossed. The Guardian this week carried the worrying news that a Spanish designer has produced a washing machine which uses computer-enhanced fingerprint recognition to encourage men to wash their own clothes. The Editor feels constitutionally unable to describe this to readers in any more detail, but anyone who might be interested in this travesty of 3,000 years of civilisation can read the full story at the Guardian Online.
'The Semantic Web' is a term coined by internet founder Tim Berners-Lee and used to describe a vision of an 'intelligent' Internet. In this kind of network, the information supplied about each element is rich enough for the web itself to take over a lot of the laborious work of actively understanding the links between elements (rather than simply recognizing them passively from occurrences in the text, as it does at the moment). Through the use of machine-readable 'semantic annotations' to web pages,for example, software agents could be enabled to roam the web, actively seeking out specific information tailored to their users' needs.
This sounds like science fiction at the moment, but the idea of an intelligent Internet was part of how the Web was supposed to function right from the start. Research has continued to develop in this area, and JISC TechWatch have now published a report into the concept of the Semantic Web and its potential impact on FE and HE in the future, focusing on particular areas such as digital libraries, collaborative working and information management and discovery tools. For a glimpse into the future, go to JISC website.
The World Wide Web was not only originally intended to be intelligent, it was also meant to be accessible to everyone, including those with disabilities. Initially, web pages were relatively simple and the early years of the Internet seemed to hold out the hope that disabled people could fully participate in the new information world which the Web was opening up. Things changed quickly, though, and as web pages became more complex and 'designed', so accessibility became more and more of a problem. In 2004, the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) reviewed 1,000 UK websites for compliance with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards and found that 81% of those surveyed failed to comply with even the most basic accessibility guidelines. (The full report is still available online).
The DRC have now commissioned the British Standards Institute (BSI) to produce new guidance for web developers in the form of a Publicly Available Specification on web accessibility. Due for release in the autumn, this will describe the standards that websites should conform to and tackle many of the myths and confusions surrounding the issue. For background details on this development, see the DRC website.
JISC regularly announces opportunities to put forward proposals for funding in designated project areas. Details of current opportunities are available on the JISC website.
MLEs are about joining up systems and processes for the benefit of the learner. The Government e-learning and Lifelong Learning agendas mean that MLE development (regionally as well as within institutions) is a necessity. Some institutions are struggling to link their VLE to essential admin systems while others are a long way down the road of full integration. JISC has produced the 'Creating an MLE infoKit' to highlight the issues and lessons learned to date - experiences from the sector are needed for it to grow and retain currency and the workshop is one way of getting involved with this community of practice.
Do you want to know how using your institution's VLE can help your students achieve the module learning outcomes? Are you using a VLE but want to take your practice to the next stage? Do staff ask you - how can I use a VLE in my teaching? - how can I make the VLE interesting for my students? If you answered 'yes' to any of the above then the 'Effective Use of VLEs' workshop is for you.
This workshop introduces the Effective Use of VLEs infoKit which has been written as a series of sections comprising in-depth resources and case studies drawn from both further and higher education which emphasise the underpinning pedagogy in the use of e-learning.
Does Mobile Learning (m-Learning) have the potential to change education? M-Learning can free learners from the classroom and enable them to study wherever and whenever they choose. Organisations can adapt academic and administrative functions to suit the demands of their new audience: the mobile learner, already comfortable with smart phones, hand-held media devices and Personal Digital Assistants. Many organisations are already implementing mobile technologies to support learning. However, what issues arise from such technologies? How suitable are they pedagogically and practically? This workshop explores the principles and practice of m-Learning. It is for anyone who is interested in using mobile devices in education, or whose organisations already are, or those who simply wish to know more about the emerging technologies.
This workshop is suitable for academics, administrators, businesses and anyone with an interest in learning using mobile technologies.
All the above workshops are supported by the eMerge programme, and are offered to participants at the subsidized rate of £50. Full details of each of these, together with an application to request a place, are available at the RSC Scotland North and East website.
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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