Welcome to the latest edition of Newsfeed, designed to bring you up-to-date information on the current issues relating to the use of ICT for teaching and learning. As always, we welcome feedback on NewsFeed (or any RSC service you may have used) through the RSC website.
Following awards amounting to an extra £80m of capital funding over two years, JISC has announced plans to invest further in a range of activities to support UK education and research from 2006 to 2008. The funds, awarded by HEFCE, will significantly enhance the UK's digital infrastructure and bring a wide range of benefits to the higher education and research sectors. What will the money be spent on?
This Invitation To Tender invites proposals to undertake a scoping study on version identification in relation to content in academic repositories on behalf of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). The study is being commissioned through JISC's Scholarly Communications Group. Deadline for proposals is 13:00 hours on Friday 18th November 2005and the study is expected to last 3 months. The successful bidder should expect to commence work by the beginning of December 2005 at the latest and complete work by 28th February 2006
Further information, including the full Invitation to tender can be found at on the JISC website.
A new and free publication - The Think Tank: Making Lifelong Learning a Reality - published by JISC infoNet, one of JISC’s advisory services, and ALT (the Association for Learning Technology), looks at the many organisational and cultural aspects of this issue, using real-life cases as examples. The book, already proving extremely popular, includes summaries and reflections on sessions from an event held in Birmingham earlier this year.
The publication is available, free of charge, from JISC infoNet. You can obtain copies of this and other publications at infoNet publication.
JISC has commissioned a series of five exemplars which demonstrate how FE practitioners can use content found in online resources to support their teaching. The FE exemplars cover a wide range of scenarios including how a practitioner might use film to support History students studying the Vietnam War; how text from InfoTrac can be used to create tasks for home based study; how practitioners can use an image from the Education Image Gallery as the focus for a discussion activity.
There are five Exemplars covering History / Leisure / Hairdressing / Business & Skills for Life. All the exemplars are available online.
This "TechDis User Preferences Toolbar" has been designed to provide students and teachers with a simple way of imposing their accessibility preferences onto potentially any web page. A section of high contrast and pale colour schemes have been provided along with a choice of serif and non-serif font. The toolbar also offers a handy zoom function that magnifies the page. The tool bar is available to download.
This catalogue highlights the range of online resources JISC has licensed for the UK further education sector. You can download the complete version of the catalogue or if you’re interested in a particular subject area you can download and view the appropriate sections:
This collection of online resources provides a rich variety of material – databases, film, images, video clips, animations, dictionaries, historical records, biographies, maps – and a wealth of other electronic teaching and learning materials.
This is a free on-line to-do list management service. It has a great interface which might be easy for both staff and students to use to organise and prioritise time and tasks effectively. As well as sending out email or MSN reminders, you can set it to receive text messages as reminders which might be handy for reminding students about assignment due dates etc. www.rememberthemilk.com
This report is an update to the previous JISC TechWatch report on mobile technologies (2004). The report reviews the predictions made in the previous report, discusses developments that have occurred in the intervening year and outlines some further trends and predictions. The paper was presented at the Handheld Learning 2005 symposium, Goldsmiths College, London in mid-October. The report by Paul Anderson is available online.
Blackboard and WebCT,leading providers of VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) software and services to the education industry have announced plans to merge. The announcement was made on October 12th at 4 pm EST in a press release posted on PR News wire.
Just the Facts: Closing expected in late 2005 or early 2006. Company will remain under the Blackboard brand. Both Blackboard and WebCT product lines will remain intact and supported.Over time, Blackboard will incorporate the best features and usability characteristics from the two product lines into a new standards-based product set. Combined company will have more than 3,700 clients. Approximately 800 employees. 7 offices around the US and abroad.
Excellence in e-learning was truly recognized and celebrated on Thursday 13th October at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington, London at the inaugural 'E-learning awards 2005'. Staged by e.learning age magazine supported by the eLearning Network these awards are set to be an annual celebration of e-learning excellence. For more information, details of how to apply for 2006 and to see this year’s winners go to the e.learning awards website.
Many colleges have invested in Interactive Whiteboards which enable teaching practitioners to use new ways to engage learners and the emphasis of this workshop will be on teaching methods.
Participants will be shown interesting and innovative ideas for engaging learners that exploit the features of the equipment. Further details on RSC Scotland South & West's web site.
Linux Moodle Course - 3 November 2005. This course prepares delegates for installing and running a Moodle server based on Linux. On completion of the course the delegate will be able to: evaluate and choose a Linux distribution; install and configure a Linux server system; install and configure software from source and binary packages; describe the basic concepts used on a Moodle server; install a Moodle server along with associated software (web and database servers); perform the initial configuration of a Moodle system; administer users and courses on Moodle; customise the style and content of Moodle pages; backup data from a Moodle server; describe the Moodle upgrade process. Further details on RSC Scotland South & West's web site.
Literature Online (LION) is the world's largest cross-searchable database of English literature and criticism.
KnowUK is the most comprehensive online resource of its kind, offering a complete library of UK information.
European Sources Online, does a similar job in a European context.
Further details on RSC Scotland North & East's web site.
Well not exactly 101 but near enough! MS Word and Excel contain a number of features that can help support learners. From creating Macros, Word-Banks and interactive and engaging spreadsheets MS Office can be a powerful learning tool. This is a fun-packed course which is based around practical and hands-on sessions.Further details on RSC Scotland North & East's web site
The Boardroom, Kelvin Conference Centre - Glasgow - 2 November 2005. This free 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).
UKERNA are holding an event on the 16th November at the Lakeside Centre, Aston University. The event is aimed at network and telecoms staff involved in the development and/or provision of VoIP. Presentations will cover a wide range of topics relating to VoIP, including the results of the JANET Voice Survey, case study presentations from the JANET community, and a commercial view on VoIP. Further information and booking details on the JANET web site.
This conference is a professional development and networking opportunity for e-learning practitioners in the learning and skills sector.The theme of the conference is 'Making intelligent use of ICT'' and keynote speakers from the learning and skills sector will address current issues, review progress and consider future challenges. This two-day event will also offer a range of high-quality interactive workshops, discussion sessions and an exhibition.
Online booking for workshops at the Post-16 E-learning Conference 2005 is now live. Visit the website to pre-book your choices from over 60 workshops that show how ICT is being used, what’s new and what’s coming up - Further information on the event and booking details are available on the BECTA website.
A national event, the GeoForum, will take place in York on 4th November to inform the academic community about a range of current geo-related activities and to gather views on where priorities for further development should lie. The GeoForum is open to all members of the UK FE and HE community but is primarily aimed at staff who support research and teaching. There is no charge for the event but you need to register. If you're interested in geography teaching or research, please vistit the EDINA web site to obtain further details.
JISC Plagiarism Advisory Service announces its second annual conference to be held at the Sage Gateshead, Tyne & Wear, on 19 to 21 June 2006. The themes of the conference are as follows: Managing change in institutional plagiarism practice and policy; Embedding plagiarism detection software into practice and policies; Addressing plagiarism in academic practice; Plagiarism and institutional risk management; Ethics in teaching learning and assessment. If you'd like to stay informed about issues related to this conference, please register your interest with the JISC Plagiarism Advisory Service by mailing sam.davidson@northumbria.ac.uk.
The full list of all workshops currently run by both RSCs in Scotland is available at:
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