Dr Rónán O’Beirne’s Weblog

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

Learning Resources are developing a new Digital Creative Learning Lab to help with the push towards more effective use of ILT in the classroom and the greater use of the Virtual Learning Environment. Following a successful bid to Yorkshire Forward for funding this exciting project will begin now and the aim is that we will have the Lab up and running by the end of March. The funding is designed to help build a higher level Skilled Economy through Building Capacity – key aspects of Yorkshire Forwards ambitions for the short-term future. In particular capital funding for technology to support the delivery of foundation degrees.

The focus of the lab will be on creating multi-media learning materials which can be delpoyed within and alongside the VLE. This sort of development would typically be commissioned by a course team leader and delivered through a range of different skills from pedagogic principles through to user acceptance testing. The lab will be a key resource in developing our e-learning strategy for Foundation Degress and other learning offers.

This is the latest piece of equipment I am evaluating, the Eee PC is a Mobile Internet Device that offers many of the advantages of mobile computing.

I am particularly interested in how it might work for our learners. It is easy to setup and learning how to use it takes less than 5 minutes. It has excellent Wi-fi connectivity and this is enhanced by its fast operating system – Linux – (there is also an option to install WindowsXP) and 512mb (DDR2) memory. There is no hard-drive. Instead the Eee uses Solid State Disk storage which comes in 4gb or 8gb – it boots very quickly and is pretty shock-proof (although I’ve not tested this!). The 7inche screen has a built-in webcam, excellent audio and its packed with useful applications.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature though is its price – it retails round the £220 mark. Full testing, as part of a wider exercise, for example by a group of 10 students, is planned – findings will be posted here. My findings so far are very positive – it could be a very useful tool for learning.

As the new building on Trinity Rd. progresses well, plans for the delivery of our open-access library/learning resource centre become more firm. We have chosen the thin client or virtual pc solution. Reasons for this are primarily to do with environmental (heat generation) issues, which are of paramount importance for the overall comfort of the building. The maintenance and administrative overheads associated with running banks of fat client pcs are significantly reduced by thin-client. Expected disadvantages seen recently in a pilot exercise, for example include constrainst on the ability of the thin-client to handle video streaming. Such limitations are expeted to be overcome in the foreseeable future. Additional to the provision of thin-client machines will be the facility to loan laptops to learners. This, again at pilot phase has yielded some interesting results and demand has been consistently high.

    Issue 3 of the international online Journal of Information Literacy, with Ronan O’Beirne as Editor, has recently been published and includes a number of interesting articles and book reviews. To access JIL please follow this link:

JIL Volume 1., Issue 3