1000 mile cycle ride for ISKO UK speaker

Andy Powell, one of our speakers at the forthcoming one-day conference Linked Data: The Future of Knowledge Organization on the Web is cycling the length of Britain to raise money for two charities, St Peter's Hospice in Bristol and Book Aid International.

Andy was prompted to undertake the ride after his close colleague at UKOLN in Bath, Rachel Heery, died in July. Rachel, Deputy Director at UKOLN, was well known in the metadata community and contributed immensely not only to UKOLN, but to kindred organizations such as JISC. Tributes to Rachel from her UKOLN and JISC colleagues have been posted on the web.

Presentations available from Metadata and Digital Repositories SIG meeting

Courtesy of Neil Fegen

The Metadata and Digital Repositories SIG held its first meeting of 2008 on 12th Feberuary at Birkbeck, London. The meeting centred around project updates from the JISC Repositories and preservation programme.

Speakers:

Sarah Currier & Lara Whitela "DC-Education Application Profile: Use Case Gathering Session"

Mike Taylor "Using Standards to Make Vocabularies Available"

Koraljka Golub "EnTag: Enhanced Tagging for Discovery"

Sarah Currier "Easy Desktop Deposit for intraLibrary: and implmentation of SWORD"

Scott Wilson "FeedForward Project"

David Flanders "SOURCE project: A (Repository) Bulk-Migration Service"

Presentations and mp3 are available here.

Study report: "Web 2.0 for Content for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education"

Report of a study into the use of Web 2.0 technologies for content creation for learning and teaching in Higher Education, funded by JISC, and carried out between March and May 2007 - is now available here.

"It draws on existing studies, interviews with staff at universities who have implemented Web 2.0 technologies for learning and teaching, and a week-long web based seminar (webinar) with expert contributions, both from speakers and the audience. The report builds on the briefing documents that were written especially for the webinar and the results of the webinar discussions, many of which can be
found in the Moodle site that was used to support the conference."

In the Conclusion the authors (Tom Franklin and Mark van Harmelen) say:

"Web 2.0 will have profound implications for learners and teachers in formal, informal, work-based and lifelong education. Web 2.0 will affect how universities go about the business of education, from learning,teaching and assessment, through contact with school communities, widening participation, interfacing with industry, and maintaining contact with alumni.

However, it would be a mistake to consider Web 2.0 as the sole driver of these changes; instead Web 2.0 is just one part of the HE ecosystem. Other drivers include, for example, pressures to greater efficiency, changes in student population, and ongoing emphasis on better learning and teaching methods.

Nonetheless, Web 2.0 is, in our view, a technology with profound potentiality for inducing change in the HE sector. In this, the possible realms of learning to be opened up by the catalytic effects of Web 2.0 technologies are attractive, allowing greater student independence and autonomy, greater collaboration, and increased pedagogic efficiency."

Press release: JISC Conference on Digital Repositories

From JISC repositories discussion list:

Excerpts from a summary of the JISC Conference on Digital Repositories held in Manchester 6 June 2007:

'A major conference on digital repositories took place this week in
Manchester, attracting nearly 200 delegates from around the UK...

'Rachel Bruce, JISC programme director [said that] JISC's Digital
Repositories programme... had given significant impetus to repository
development in the UK...

'Andy Powell of the Eduserv Foundation gave the first keynote
presentation on the "Repositories Roadmap"... The vision for
2010... is increasingly "not if, but when" newly published scholarly
outputs [are] made... open access. The situation now might therefore
require us to set a more ambitious target than that of a "high
percentage"... the Web['s] role as a means of discovery and access
need[s] to be emphasised more... [C]onceptualising repositories as
websites forces us to "think about their usability, their information
architectures and their accessibility."

'Dr Keith Jeffrey of the Science and Technology Facilities Council
gave the second keynote address. The benefits of open access
repositories, he claimed, include faster "research turnaround",
improved quality for the originators of research as colleagues were
able review the research more easily, as well as improved quality for
the community in general. They also support innovation, he continued,
improve education and public engagement with science and research
and enhance an institution's standing.'

Further details of the conference, including presentations, will be available shortly.