Dr Rónán O’Beirne’s Weblog

Education; Technology; Digital Transformation; Information & Knowledge Management; Librarianship; Digital Leadership

An interesting piece of film art with a bookish theme that made me smile

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

To end the decade I give you this, Gary Hayes realtime social media, mobile phone and gaming counter – for those who may have thought it was a passing fad!

On Thursday it was my pleasure to give a presentation about the use of e-learning to a Syrian delegation as part of a British Council project. The visitors:
Miss Rania Abdrabeh – British Council , Damascus, Mr Riyad Jebawi – Ministry of Education – responsible for curriculum development and Mrs Mais Kayyali – Director of First Commercial Banking Institute, were interested in the areas of social networking and how we reconciled this with the more ‘serious nature’ of learning. There was a brief discussion of information literacy in the light of the digital natives/digital emigrants scenario. Feddback from their visit to Bradford College has been very positive.

The BAR (Bradford Action Research) conference, held 19th and 20th November, was a great success with some excellent feedback. My thanks go to all staff who helped to organise the event and of course to all the researchers who so enthusiastically gave their time. I believe that this event will have raised the profile of our research activity within the sector.

I was particularly pleased to welcome Nigel Ecclesfield Head of Research from Becta who provided a very interesting insight into his work at Becta. The students from our drama school gave an excellent dance performance Joolz Denby our after-dinner speaker presented her audience of already well-fed researchers with some further food for thought at a great evening event in the National Media Museum. It was all very good fun. A further report follows.

I was pleased to be invited onto the JISC Yorkshire & Humberside Regional Support Centre Steering Group committee as the representative for HE in FE.

I was pleased also having put myself forward to be a member of the national committee of the Library and Information Research Group, to be given the opportunity to sit on this committee.

I was very pleased to take part in a sort of “Librarians go wild in Moodle” workshop on our Training and Planning (TAP) day.

There has been magnificent progress made with providing access to e-resources across all courses with our HE provision being particularly well catered for. At least three different approaches to how Bradford College’s librarians are supporting the VLE were demonstrated to me: subject access to resources embedded in each course, reading lists embedded in the course, and the whole opac embedded in the course (well the search facility at least). I suppose this shows the versatility of Moodle but it also shows the impressive technical skills of the librarians.
Should we have just one way of structuring library and learning resource support within Moodle?

After the demonstrations we discussed further progress and this led to consideration of our wider strategy on the use of a repository. Needless to say we favoured an open access model but this in itself has many intellectual property rights issues with which we will need to grapple in the coming months.

Here is my homespun “rule of the blog”: “The quality and frequency of blog posts is inversely proportional to the workload of the blogger”. What does this mean? Well when I am very busy I have no time to blog but of course it is through being very busy that content for this blog is created.
One of the casualties of this recently was the Joseph Rowntree Foundation bid for research into poverty and community cohesion in Bradford which I was disappointed to have had to pull out of due to unforeseen circumstances.

The first issue of the Bradford College Research Bulletin is now available, see here

It was a historic moment when the Memorandum Of Understanding between the University of Belgrade and Bradford College was signed at the end of the two day conference on “Ethics in Science and Culture” in Belgrade on September 26th 2009.
Prof. Dr. Aleksandra Vranes who visited Bradford College in March 2008 is pleased to formalise the collaboration that has so far been developed between both institutions. It really is something to get excited about with the revamped research agenda at Bradford College the 200 year old University of Belgrade is keen to develop further our approach to ethical research activity. Looking at the opportunities for the future we are hoping to carry out joint activities around the ethics of bibliographic control, citation and metadata – something of huge interest in the wake of the RAE and the introduction of a research evaluation based on citation metrics. Prof. Dr. Markovic vice-dean of the Faculty of Philology, herself no stranger to the UK having studied economics at Cambridge University, offered her support with the programme of co-operation. We are also looking at developing some common approach to the development of moodle within the programme.

My hosts in Belgrade have been wonderful, more photos will follow, for the moment goodbeye from the charming city of Belgrade.

Dovijendja !

It was a great honour to return to Belgrade and attend this important conference on ethical aspects of research. I was warmly welcomed by my colleague Prof. Dr. Aleksandra Vranes organiser of the conference and also by Prof. Dr. Ljiljana Markovic vice-dean of the Faculty of Philology. I was honoured to be asked to chair the Friday afternoon session, having only just arrived from the airport minutes before, this was rather challenging but thanks to the excelent translation skills of the conference team and the wonders of technology, I think I did a good job. The session had its focus on intellectual property rights and copyright generally. Of particular interest was the discussion of Google’s role in the digitisation of materials. The venue – the Hall of Heroes – being a large-scale auditorium made an excellent space for discussion.

On the following day I presented my own paper on the Ethical issues associated with the development of the Bradford College virtual research environment. It was well received and there was a lot of interest in the technology and in the organisation of the research process. A fuller version will be published in the conference proceedings.

Prof. Markovic’s presentation raised some important issues concerning the ethics of recording cultural heritage. The conference was closed by Prof. Vranes who provided an excellent interpretation of the wider ethical implications of increased use of technology, the rising force of globalisation and the perceived diminishing importance of local heritage, she did this through the lens of information literacy and librarianship and received much support from the audience and the closing plenary.

I have learned a lot and there is much to consider from the papers presented.