We’ve just missed Valentine’s Day, but we have a special present for everyone nevertheless in the shape of our national Accessibility e-Olympics event. This is a major 2-day training event which is open to every college in Scotland and supported by both Scottish RSCs, working alongside the two major accessibility support organisations, BRITE and TechDis. In addition, we have news of recent e-learning resource developments, and a new resource from JISC to deal with the complex and growing problem of plagiarism. Flummoxed by the difference between Flickr and Folksonomies? We can help you! And you can help SQA by responding to their online assessment survey. Finally, you can check out what’s being offered as this year’s conference schedule gets under way. As always, we welcome feedback on NewsFeed (or any RSC service you may have used) through the RSC website.
How can we ensure that e-learning materials are accessible to all our learners, when the needs of individuals can vary so widely? The Disability Discrimination Act has helped to focus attention on this area, but what is available – in practical terms – to help practitioners grapple with these issues? Mark the 21 st and 22 nd of March 2005 in your diaries, and join colleagues from across Scotland at the Accessibility e-Olympics to find out! Following on the success of the original e-Olympics held in Edinburgh in September last year, this event is being organized by both Scottish RSCs, working in collaboration with the JISC accessibility advisory service TechDis, and the BRITE centre, which acts as the Scottish focus for accessibility issues.
The Accessibility e-Olympics is a major event, spread over two days at the e-Science Institute in Edinburgh, which will take participants through the stages of planning, resourcing and producing an e-learning sequence while placing accessibility issues at the heart of the whole process. The event is supported through the Scottish Executive’s eMerge project, which enables the RSCs to offer one subsidised place to every College. Attendance at BOTH days of the event will only cost £50 and traveling expenses will be met by the two RSCs. For those who need it, overnight accommodation in central Edinburgh will be available on the evening of the 21 st (taking the total cost of the event to £99). For all those involved in accessibility issues, this is a special opportunity to meet others working in the same area, and to learn about some of the latest developments in this complex and challenging field. Don’t miss it!!
To register interest in the Accessibility e-Olympics, go the RSC Scotland North & East’s accessibility webpage, for full details of the event and a booking form.
Agreements for 2005 have been secured with nine major international publishers via NESLi2, the national electronic journals initiative for Higher and Further Education, funded by JISC. In addition to the renewal of significant agreements with Blackwell Publishing and Oxford University Press, brand new agreements have been concluded with AAAS for Science Online, The American Chemical Society, The British Psychological Society, BMJ Publishing Group, Cell Press, The Institute of Physics and Sage. These agreements will mean considerable savings for the education and research communities through the lower cost of journals secured through national negotiations. The 2004 agreements with publishers saved the higher and further education community over £3m and over 4,600 online journals are now available to subscribing institutions in the UK academic community as a result of NESLi2 agreements Further details on the new arrangements are available on the JISC website.
Microsoft have added a new ‘Personalised Learning Case Study’ option to their Education UK site. This offers users the ability to search for and view video case studies of how schools have used ICT to personalize learning and to modernise their teaching approach. The site has five search categories : learning styles and multiple intelligences ; subject area ; modernization ‘theme’ (e.g. accessibility, e-portfolios etc.) ; type of organization ; and products and solutions. The products featured are, of course, all by Microsoft, and the site is limited to the schools sector at the moment, but the resource has some interesting information nonetheless.
Langside College is featured in a recent JISC Case Study into the effective use of wireless technology. Their innovative 'class in a box' project has used wireless technology to overcome classroom limitations, and deliver online learning across the college. Read all about it in JISC’s Case Study Report.
JISC infoNet has released its latest infoKit, entitled 'The Effective Use of VLEs'. This extensive online resource is intended for all those involved in the deployment of a VLE and can either be used individually by a tutor or by a staff developer who is supporting tutors to get online through their institution's VLE. A series of tailored pathways take users through the sections relevant to their role, and there are sections which will also be of interest to administrators who support learners and/or tutors, and to managers with responsibility for e-learning. The new infoKit can be found at the JISC infoNet website.
The University of Wolverhampton has launched a free online glossary of technical sign language terms for deaf students of science, engineering and the built environment. Created after two years of work with academics and professionals, the sites feature nearly 2,500 separate signs, each displayed as a short video clip using either Quicktime or Windows Media Player. There are two sites, each with online keyword, subject and A-Z search facilities. Go to Engineering Signs, for terms dealing with engineering and the built environment, or to Science Signs, for terms in science education.
The national Serials Union Catalogue (SUNCAT) has been launched this week by EDINA at the University of Edinburgh. The serials and journals held by educational institutions are a major information resource but up until now it has been very difficult to search for this information across institutions. The SUNCAT project (which is funded by JISC) has been working in this area since 2003, and has now catalogued over 3.5 million records. These have been drawn from national libraries, the largest UK academic library collections and international databases, such as the ISSN World Serials database and CONSER, the database of MARC21 serials records available from the Library of Congress. SUNCAT will also give librarians the ability to update the records for their own institution by accessing a standardised, high-quality bibliographic database. Background information on SUNCAT and its development is on the JISC website. The pilot SUNCAT service itself is available from the EDINA website.
The increasing numbers of students in FE & HE, and the increasing pressures on them, are leading to more instances of plagiarism, according to new JISC guidelines issued this week. The guidelines were written because of widely expressed concerns that “student plagiarism in the UK is common and is probably becoming more so.” They argue that … a coordinated, institution-wide approach” to plagiarism is needed rather than one focused on “detecting and dealing with offenders.”
The guidelines - “Deterring, Detecting and Dealing with Student Plagiarism” - have been written by a panel of experts and sent to senior managers and key operational staff within all further and higher institutions by JISC’s Plagiarism Advisory Service. An overview of the issue can be found on the JISC website, which also contains a downloadable copy of the full document. The Advisory service also offers a comprehensive plagiarism roadmap, to help guide institutions through the process of developing a coherent response to the problem.
How do you make sense of the sea of continually changing data that is the Internet? One answer to this question (a ‘bottom-up’ approach) is provided by Google, with its hierarchical method of ranking web pages by the amount of other pages which link to them. An alternative, ‘top-down’ approach is to develop descriptive vocabularies or ‘taxonomies’ which are so fine and exact that they can uniquely identify every item in a database (metadata tagging exemplifies this approach).
An example of the bottom-up approach which is attracting a lot of attention is the photo organising and sharing service Flickr, which allows participants to upload, store, organise and distribute digital images across the Internet. Users can label or ‘tag’ their images with descriptors which they generate themselves. These can be private or restricted tags, enabling images to be kept to the user or shared with friends, but the real interest is being generated by ‘open’ tagging, where images are freely shared with any participant. Popular tags attract more image submissions to that area, which then develop over time or are amended and refined in the light of other tag submissions, and the result is a dynamic system of ‘user-created metadata’ which – it’s argued – is the most efficient way to organise the amorphous mass of material in the Internet. Such user-developed taxonomies are termed ‘folksonomies’ to distinguish them from the top-down taxonomies usually involved with metadata tagging. There are similarities here with the collaborative method underlying Wikis and Wikipedia, and with the Understanding VORN Image generator (featured in the first NewsFeed of 2005) which is based on random image generation from the Flickr database using tags beginning with one of the four letters V, O, R or N.
For an interesting background report on Flickr, see the recent ‘Tag Team’ article in The Guardian. A good introduction to the Folksonomy concept is available from Wikipedia. A more detailed academic examination of the concept is provided by Adam Mathes, which is harder going but still worth reading.
The Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) is presently considering the type of material that colleges might require to support their use of computer-assisted assessment. To help with this, they have created an online survey which they are keen for as many practitioners as possible to complete. The survey should take no more than 5 minutes to complete, and the results will help to determine the nature of the support material that SQA produces.
In the last 18months, Google has launched more than a dozen new search-based initiatives, including Google Scholar and Google Local, all of which potentially threaten the traditional role of the library as a repository of information. Don’t despair, though - Stephen Abram, the President of the Canadian Library Association, has a plan of action to tackle the onslaught! His article The Google Opportunity sets out 10 ways for libraries to begin the fight back and regain their position.
Networkshop is an annual event organised by UKERNA and hosted each year by a Higher Education Institution (HEI). Aimed at network managers and technical staff from the JANET community, the conference provides a forum for discussion on the latest network technologies and brings together expertise from all the fields of networking. Networkshop (33) wiill take place on 22-24 March 2005 at the University of Manchester. Further details are available at the JANET website.
‘Reflective learning, future thinking’ is the title of the ALT Spring Conference, which is being held on Thursday 31st March 2005 at Dublin Institute of Technology. The conference will cover e-portfolios and lifelong learning records, ‘ubiquitous’ computing, informal learning, adaptive and personalized learning and reflective practice. The booking deadline for the conference is 17th March : the booking form and full details are available at the ALT conference website.
The University of Greenwich is organising its third one day regional conference on eLearning at the Maritime Greenwich Campus, London, on Wednesday, June 15th 2005. The organisers are looking for contributions to the conference, in the form of short case studies that clearly outline how eLearning has been used to extend and enhance traditional forms of learning. Guidelines for proposals, including a case study template, are available from the conference web site. Submitted case studies will also be considered for inclusion in whole or part in a practitioners' guide to eLearning to be published later.
The National Centre for e-Social Science at Manchester University is hosting the first conference on the subject from 22-24th June this year. The call for papers, and further details of the conference itself, are available on the conference webpage .
‘Understanding the Audience’ is a new survey published this month, which takes a wide-ranging look at who uses the internet, how they use information and whether users feel they can trust the information they find there. The survey was undertaken by MORI for the Common Information Environment Group (a collaborative initiative of public sector organizations including the British Library, JISC and the UK e-Science programme). The survey points to a growing “digital divide” between groups of users based on gender, employment, class and educational attainment. It also suggests that use of the Internet declines as people move from education and training (where learning providers supply the means of access for those without ready access elsewhere) into work, a finding with significant implications for the national agendas of lifelong learning and active citizenship. An overview of the report is available on the JISC website, while the CIE website has a report summary as well as the full findings of the report itself (113 pages long, so be careful with that ‘Print’ key!
For further information on these and all the RSC's courses, or to book a place, please go to the RSC websites at http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/training/index.php and http://www.rsc-sw-scotland.ac.uk/events.htm .
There are still places available at the FREE workshop being organised by EDINA at RSC South & West’s brand new training room in Todd Campus. These practical sessions will take participants through the stages of locating and using image resources from both outstanding collections. Go to the South & West website for further details and a booking form.
Are you involved in reviewing your processes? If you’re designing or implementing an MLE, reviewing your Records Management in the light of the Freedom of Information Act, or selecting and implementing new information systems, the answer is ‘Yes’. You may be simply interested in how you can provide a better service to students. These and many other activities can be handled more easily and effectively when a thorough analysis of the related processes is undertaken. This is a one-day workshop offered by the RSC and delivered by JISC infoNet, the Centre of Expertise in the Planning and Implementation of Information Systems. The cost for this event, which is subsidised under the eMerge programme for FE Colleges, is just £50. Staff from Higher Education are also welcome to enroll for this course. See the RSC North & East website for further details or contact the RSC directly.
OASIS (Organisation, Access, Storage, Integration and Sharing of electronic resources) is a new set of e-learning activities funded through the eMerge programme, and run by the two Scottish RSCs and the SFEU. This OASIS workshop is being offered to colleges in February 2005 at special subsidised eMerge rates of £50 per day:
The Learning Object Metadata Application Profile has been developed by the Higher Education Academy for the cataloguing of Learning Objects used in the Higher and Further Education sectors. This two-day training programme, devised by Allegro Training Hampshire, provides an explanation of the profile and its associated cataloguing interface. It provides detailed instruction on the use of the various elements within the profile, and, on the second day, practical sessions using the interface to catalogue selected examples.
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.
Unsubscribe - email support@rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk
Regional Support Centre Scotland North and East
Helpdesk 0131 315 7674
www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk
Regional Support Centre Scotland South and West
Helpdesk 0141 558 4098
www.rsc-sw-scotand.ac.uk