Dr Rónán O’Beirne’s Weblog

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

A few days ago I visited Harlow Carr the RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) gardens near Harrogate. I was impressed with the library; there were about 4,000 volumes and an excellent range of magazines catering for the general hobbyist and the more specialist interests. The classification scheme used for the print stock was interesting a kind of supplemented Dewey integrated with plant classification schemes. The library, which is open daily, is run by a team of volunteers under the guidance of librarians based at the headquarters of the Lindley Library, in London. The library is currently housed in the Study Centre within the gardens.

However work has already started on a new building to facilitate the library collections and to extend the learning activity. The new building sounds incredibly exciting, having a zero carbon footprint it will be the greenest library in the UK. At a cost of £3m the facility will have a massive impact on learning; providing opportunities to schoolchildren and adults to understand the link between themselves and the natural world through horticulture.

From the Harlow Carr website “The learning centre will increase our capacity for free school visits more than threefold, enabling the garden to welcome more than 10,000 schoolchildren a year. It will also provide a base to expand our outreach programmes locally and in the wider region, to engage with hard-to-reach communities and schools. The project will also allow for a broader programme of educational workshops for all gardeners and visitors to Harlow Carr.”

I shall be following with interest the development of this new building. I picked up some seeds for my allotment from the very well-stocked shop – which, incidentally has an excellent book section particularly strong on botanical art books which included the recently published The Wild & Garden Plants of Ireland illustrated with 99 watercolour prints by the brilliant E Charles Nelson and Wendy F Walsh (2009 Thames & Hudson £25) which I regret not having purchased – but which would have certainly led to dreams of walks in Connemara and the Wicklow mountains – maybe next time!

On Thursday I attended the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering & Technology Annual Conference in London. The UKRC is located in Bradford and has close links with Bradford College.

Lord Drayson, Minister for State for Science & Innovation was one of the keynotes and he spoke well despite being interrupted by the fire alarm. He managed, just, to win over his audience with a mixture of personal anecdote and political insight despite appearing slightly uncomfortable with the gender imbalance of the audience. His passionate call for “more modern women science heroines” was greeted enthusiastically. I assume he meant more as in a “heightened awareness of” rather than more modern.

Dr. Wendy Schulz Director of Infinite Futures: Foresight Research, Training and Facilitation impressed me greatly not just with some of her inspired views of what the future holds but also her ability to pose the right questions. Her blog is available through www.ukrc4setwomen.org

Dr. Maggie Aderin-Pocock, possibly the most enthusiastic astronomer ever, launched the “She is an Astronomer” International Year of Astronomy 2009

The highlight of the day for me however was the workshop event “Visions for 2030”. What impressed me hugely was one of the speakers Emily Cummins 21 years of age from Keighley, West Yorkshire and a part-time student at Leeds University. Her creative achievements however are remarkable she has won:

Merchant Adventurers Award for Enterprise Winner, 2006
Technology Women Of The Future, 2006
Female Innovator of the Year , 2007
Diamond Award for Exceptional Creativity, 2007
Appointed ‘Girls make your Mark Ambassador’ , 2007
Appointed ‘Women of Achievement Ambassador’ – 2007-2008
Cosmopolitan Magazine featured her as Ultimate Woman of the Year in its December 2008 issue.

Emily who has some interesting views on the education system has offered to come and give her talk at Bradford College – an offer I will certainly be taking up.

Maggie Philbin from the telly chaired the over-subscribed event with great skill and the venue, the Hotel Andaz, Liverpool Street, was architecturally quite stunning.

If you have ever wondered what exactly the semantic web is or thought that it was just the latest fad then a great place to begin to understand the semantic web and all that it promises is here.

The Semantic Web in Action Corporate applications are well under way, and consumer uses are emerging. By Lee Feigenbaum, Ivan Herman, Tonya Hongsermeier, Eric Neumann and Susie Stephen.
In Scientific American January 2009.

Author Nicholas Carr asks an important question; Is Google making us Stupid – important for the academic and for the learner – more and more people are googling and as well as the obvious information literacy implications Carr suggests there may be a more fundamental impact he writes “Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.” See his full article first published in The Atlantic July/August 2008, here

We were given a wonderful welcome when we arrived at the Bharati Vidyapeeth University ( BVU). The staff and students made a really big effort to make us feel well-looked-after and we certainly did. Having been received by Prof. Dr. Shivajirao Kadam the VC of BVU and shown an impressive outline of the University’s achievements we were taken on a wonderful tour of the campus.

On Thursday morning we toured the Shri Shiv Chhatrapati Sports City, Balewadi sports complex used for the 2008 Youth Commonwealth Games. On Thursday evening we were joined by Member of Parliament Suresh Kalmadi.

Arriving in Mumbai was a wonderful experience. Have visited Whistling Woods at Filmcity; The Juice Academy and today Bharati Vidyapeeth University where we sign a Memorandum of Understanding there this evening.

I was thrilled to receive this Outstanding Leadership Award at the Bradford College Staff Awards for Excellence 2008 held Wednesday. Presented to me by College Principal Michele Sutton OBE for driving change in Learning Resources by drawing together the libraries, media and IT services.

On accepting the award I said:  “I’m absolutely thrilled to receive this award.  I put all of this success down to my team, who have really contributed a lot during the last year. I look forward to making further contributions to the College in the next year.”

It was a great evening, great food with great performances and entertainment from students.

More information go here

Are we, at Bradford College, the only College in the country providing Asus eee’s for loan?

Through our Trinity Green Learning Development Centre we have 150 of these little gems in a range of tasteful colours, available for our learners to use innovatively. And, what’s even more exciting and unique is that we are issuing them for loan using RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) – that’s right we’ve tagged them all!

Initial feedback is good – but watch this space for a full evaluation coming soon.

On the 16th of October I was presented by Cilip President Bruce Madge with the award of Fellowship of the Chartered Institute of Librarians and Information Professionals. One of the proudest moments of my life.

“Fellowship is the highest level of professional qualification awarded by the Chartered Institute that recognises a high level of personal commitment and achievement.

It allows you to add the letters FCLIP after your name. This stands for Chartered Fellow of CILIP (CILIP Byelaws, Section 3, Professional Qualifications, No.15)” From the Cilip Website.