The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is almost upon us, the leaves are turning and the smell of woodsmoke is in the air. Mid term/tattie week looms. Meanwhile the world keeps turning and the virtual world buzzes with information and opportunities. We’ve tried as ever in Newsfeed to harvest the pick of the crop. As always, we welcome feedback on NewsFeed (or any RSC service you may have used) through the RSC website.
The long-awaited marriage between the Higher and Further education Funding Councils finally took place last week. The Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council (SFC) was formally established on 3 October 2005. The new Council creates a single body providing a strategic overview of tertiary education in Scotland and will secure a more coherent system of high-quality learning and research. A new website celebrates the establishment of the SFC.
The linking together of all Scotland's schools comes a step closer with news that the Scottish Executive has sealed a multi-million pound deal to create what is said to be the world's first national school intranet. The £39.5 million contract to develop the ground-breaking system was awarded to the RM company and the system is due to go live in early 2007. The digital network will serve some 800,000 potential users, around 3,000 schools and 32 local education authorities giving pupils and teachers access to e-learning resources from school or at home, along with a range of communication, collaboration and conferencing tools. More news on the Scottish Schools Digital Network.
A conference to explore the next generation of JISC security and access management tools is scheduled for the 20th October in Edinburgh. JISC Core Middleware: Developments within Security and Access Management will be held at National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh. Within the past year there have been significant developments in both areas and it is important that these communities work together to provide the best solutions for users. This workshop, with leading speakers from both the interest areas, will examine these developments and look for a harmonised way forward.
To register for this free event go on the National e-Science Centre.
JISC is seeking to recruit a Programme Director and seven Programme Managers to oversee four new innovative, leading edge multi-million pound three-year ICT programmes. The Programme Director for e-Research will lead strategic planning for JISC's e- research and e-infrastructure activities. The seven Programme Managers will oversee programmes in: e- learning (two posts), user environments (one post), e- research (two posts) and repositories (two posts). They will be responsible for programme co-ordination, monitoring and support, the organisation of events and meetings, programme dissemination and evaluation of these four new HEFCE- funded programmes. Further details on the JISC website.
CETIS are holding two days of meetings in Manchester on Tuesday 18th & Wednesday 19th Oct. The first day is a joint Enterprise SIG & Pedagogy Forum meeting with the theme "Connecting Teachers & Technologists", and the second day is a meeting of the ELF (eFramework) Developers' Forum. All welcome, meetings free, lunch provided. Agendas and registration forms at www.cetis.ac.uk.
The JISC-funded TechDis service has published a comprehensive set of training resources which explore making e-learning accessible. Copies have been posted to key staff in Colleges and are also available on-line, and on CD. Topics covered include:
For more information see the TechDis website.
(4th October) JISC today announced a new agreement to make SCRAN's resources available to further and higher education for a further three years which will come into effect on the 1st November 2005. SCRAN combines an extensive educational archive of over 300,000 high-quality copyright- cleared images, all with extensive accompanying text, thousands of video-clips and sound files and over a million text records to support teaching, learning and research. For details visit the SCRAN website.
The Education Image Gallery is a key JISC resource for accessing images some of which date from the very beginning of the art of photography. Now the collection is being updated on a monthly basis, with a batch of approximately 200 of the latest Getty news and sport images from around the world in a variety of subjects being added every month.
Knowing what to do in an emergency might just save a life and a new service from the St. John Ambulance delivers basic First Aid techniques online. You may need to use them at any time at home, at school or work or even while you're travelling. Information is available through text files or through a spoken commentary both of which can be downloaded from the St John Ambulance website.
Hidden Lives Revealed has been awarded the Phillimore Prize for 2005, for the 'best educational' website explaining the work of The Waifs and Strays Society across England and Wales between 1881 and 1918. Across nearly 40 years about 22,500 of the nation's poorest and most vulnerable children, in rural areas as well as in cities, were taken into care. The website provides a virtual archive of the cases of children in care during this period.
Even more resources for the geography cupboard. Climate experts at The Weather Channel have created weatherclassroom.com as a resource for educators, students and parents. Here you'll find a comprehensive collection of weather-related content, including lesson plans, an interactive weather forecast for students and a weather word glossary and storm encyclopedia for parents.
In these days of stringent health and safety regulations - and tightened budgets - some classic chemistry experiments are rarely performed in the lab. Now you can access the next best thing through a series of short chemistry movie clips from the Journal of Chemical education. Light the Bunsen burner at The Journal of Chemical Education website.
Google and Sun Microsystems have joined forces to challenge the dominance of Microsoft's Office software. Google aims to "explore opportunities to promote" Sun's Open Office software. Those downloading Sun's Java program will be offered Google's toolbar.
Friday 14th October 2005 1.30pm - 4.30pm University of Strathclyde James Weir Teaching Cluster, Level 4, James Weir Building (map)
Professor Jim Boyle, Head of Mechanical Engineering and VLE Academic Champion for the University of Strathclyde will be discussing the approach to teaching and learning that has been adopted in Mechanical Engineering, where WebCT is one of several types of technologies used to support Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT for short) - a teaching and learning strategy based on the interaction between web-based study assignments and an active learner classroom.
Book now at the CelticWebCT website.
The Boardroom, Kelvin Conference Centre - Glasgow - 2 November 2005 This seminar will provide an overview of the PebblePAD e-portfolio system, developed through a Partnership of Pebble Learning and the University of Wolverhampton. PebblePAD is being used in two JISC funded projects to provide ePortfolio facilities for students across school, FE and HE sectors.
Further information available from on the The RSC Scotland South and West (word document).
If you've gone beyond the basics of blogging then this guide to the blogger's art might be right up your virtual street. Billed as a 'Comprehensive Guide to Blogging' here you can find all the information you need to polish those web offerings to the world. For more information download the Blog Guide (pdf).
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