Just when we thought Spring had arrived and the thermal longjohns could be packed away for another year the wind has shifted into the North, the skies have gone slate grey and Scotland has disappeared under a blanket of snow. Transport is disrupted, the trains are running late, airports are closed and snail mail is even slower than normal. It’s reassuring then to sit down by the fire with your laptop, throw on another log and read the latest edition of NewsFeed which this week contains nuggets of information on everything from a major Scottish conference on transformation to an online gardening course. Ne'er cast a clout…
As always, we welcome feedback on NewsFeed (or any Regional Support Centre service you may have used) through the RSC website.
The two Scottish Regional Support Centres wish to announce The Learner Driver, a major conference about the transformation of learning in Scottish Further and Higher Education. Not a refresher course in the Highway Code but a conference which reflects the fast pace of change within the educational landscape - will examine the transformational effect of new technologies and methods on the learner experience, and how learners themselves are central to the change.
The Learner Driver takes place at Edinburgh Conference Centre, Heriot-Watt University on 31st May 2006 . Confirmed keynote speakers include:
The conference will be of interest to practitioners, e-learning coordinators and managers in FE and HE, researchers, staff developers and learning technologists. Places at The Learner Driver are FREE to delegates (though the RSCs reserve the right to charge £50 in the event of a no-show). Put the date in your diary now and, to be certain of your place, register your interest in attending this major conference at The Learner Driver website.
The two Scottish JISC Regional Support Centres in conjunction with the Brite Centre and TechDis, the JISC Advisory Service on Accessibility, are delighted to announce the second Scottish Accessibility e-Olympics. This event, open to all FE staff in Scotland, is designed to lead delegates through the complex process of creating an online learning sequence from design stage to working prototype. But at this event the focus is firmly on the key area of accessibility. How do we use the simple tools at our disposal and some key design guidelines to make sure that our learning materials are accessible to the greatest possible number of students?
This event is one of a highly successful series of e-Olympics events which have been hosted across Scotland and it's designed to deliver an intensive learning experience which is practical, inspirational and above all fun. The two days comprise a careful mix of expert presentations and serious workshop sessions and delegates at the first such event in 2005 rated it an overwhelming success. We're working hard to make the 2006 version even better.
We'll be lighting the e-Olympic flame in Glasgow at the end of March. If you'd like to join us in raising the bar and exploring accessibility in online learning then don't delay. Get off the blocks now! Places at the Accessibility e-Olympics are free but limited . Secure yours by racing the online booking form. We look forward to meeting you on the starting line in Glasgow! Location map.
In early summer 2005, JISC Legal held a very successful two day workshop on the Legal Aspects of Online Learning Environments. This one day event is the distillation of the best of that workshop, looking at copyright issues, data protection, liability, accessibility obligations and e-commerce. Seating is limited, so please do book early.
The draft programme in now online and you can book online for The Warwick conference now.
Here at the Scottish RSCs we feel there is likely to be a strong demand for a workshop like this one but based in Scotland . If you would be interested in attending such an event, please take a moment to go the RSC website and let us know.
Newsfilm Online is set to be one of the most exciting resources to be offered to Higher and Further Education in the UK . Some 3,000 hours of television news and cinema newsreels, taken from the huge collection of the ITN/Reuters archive, is being made available online in high quality format for teaching, learning and research. Part of the £10m JISC digitisation programme, Newsfilm Online will be a gateway of unmatched richness to nearly a century of news, from the early nineteen hundreds to the present day. Get a sneak preview on the JISC web site.
The latest edition of the British Universities Film & Video Council News Online has just been released containing information on:
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) invites tenders for the design and development of the NewsFilm Online graphic user interface to be hosted and served from a JISC national data centre. Funding of up to £100,000 is available for this work and proposals should be submitted no later than 1300 hours on Monday 3 April 2006 . Further information, including the full Invitation to Tender, can be found on the JISC web site.
If you're not completely satisfied with Google's ability to provide a direct and prompt answer to all your needs, you may like the array of integrated search facilities and information mining tools that the new Ask.com search engine has recently launched. The newly revamped search engine, has gone ahead of its competitors by integrating a very simple but highly efficient interface that changes and adapts to the different types of search you need to perform. Over 18 different information seeking areas are brought together under the new search interface from standard web searches to movies, maps and locations, white pages, dictionary, stocks, and a lot more. Drive the engine at Ask.com.
A recent survey conducted by Google shows that the average Briton now spends more time surfing the web than watching television. The average Briton spends around 164 minutes online every day, compared with 148 minutes watching television, equivalent to 41 days a year. Only sleeping and working take up more time. Surfers in London and Scotland are the country's heaviest web users, spending more than three hours a day online - around 40 minutes more than those in the lowest category, the north-west of England . More information...
The Learning and Skills Web is a unique service for busy education and training practitioners working in all areas of the learning and skills community. It offers a convenient point of access to existing online resources, information and news:
Register online at learningandskillsweb. (The first 2,000 to complete and return a brief feedback form get a free 128mb USB memory stick.)
What does 'sustainability' mean if you're running an open source software development project or if your business is built around open source software? How do different models of sustainability affect your investment if you are a strategic funder of open source development? And what will all this mean for senior IT decision-makers at UK colleges and universities? These questions and many more will be explored at Open Source and Sustainability in Oxford , 10-12 April.
Full programme details and online booking on the OSS Watch site.
Sheffield North City Learning Centre and the IWBNet are staging an international conference on Interactive Whiteboards and schooling on 6, 7 and 8 April 2006 . The focus of the conference will be highly proficient IWB users showing others from across the world what impacts these technologies can have on teaching and learning and what can be done to take teaching and learning to a higher plane. For further information visit the conference website.
Content from the BBC's Natural History Unit has been made available free of charge over the internet. The Open Earth Archive will include previously unseen clips from new wildlife series Planet Earth. Footage can be viewed, downloaded and edited into personal projects as part of the Creative Archive Licence. That scheme, which released the BBC's news archives earlier this year, allows the material to be used for non-profit programme-making in the UK . For full information hack your way through the jungle to the Open Earth archive.
If you've got a PC down the potting shed and broadband among the broccoli then this could be exactly the course for you. Perhaps setting out to prove that no field of human endeavour can't be adapted for a virtual environment, the Workers' Education Authority (WEA) are offering online gardening courses this spring. To begin to plan your online window box or your virtual hanging basket or simply to admire an imaginative course delivered using the open source Moodle learning management system then go to CGFL.
The Scottish Distributed Digital Library contains collections of texts, images, and sounds in digital format, distributed over the World Wide Web, with Scottish themes. All items in the collections are easy to access and do not require passwords. Items include: Scanned images of pages, and digital transcriptions, of printed books, and documents created on computers; Digital photographs and scanned images of photographs; Scanned images of paintings and drawings; Web sites.
Scottish Distributed Digital Library
What exactly is a podcast? Is an MP3 file some form of audio file? Do I have to have an iPod to access these things? And for heaven's sake, what is this MP4 format? This article by Nick Luft explains all.
e-Portfolios are currently generating a lot of heat and light in the educational world but what do we mean by the term? Is this simply a fancy name for yet another flavour of management system or a truly revolutionary product which will allow each individual to secure a presence online and a platform to present their achievements and gifts and the opportunity to share those with others of a like mind? For a concise overview of the subject try the excellent Robin Good's Latest News site.
Becta commissioned 'E-safety: the experience in English educational establishments' in August 2005 to audit the current level and range of activity within English state maintained educational establishments to ensure the safe and effective use of information and communication technologies (ICT). Is your establishment e-safe? Find out by going to becta's website.
New guidelines on how to make websites more user- friendly for disabled people have been developed by the British Standards Institution (BSI). The work was sponsored by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) after an investigation in April 2004. The DRC's report into web accessibility found that more than 80% of sites posed barriers to disabled people. Called PAS (Publicly Available Specification) 78, the new standards are intended for any organisation that has a public-facing website. For fuller details go to BSI web site.
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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