Dr Rónán O’Beirne’s Weblog

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

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.

The latest and excellent VLE – Moodle newsletter is available from this link:
http://moodle.bradfordcollege.ac.uk/MarchOnMoodle.pdf

Well done to the VLE team!

I attended the JISC RSC YH event at Doncaster entitled “e-Learning in HE: Strategy and Planning” on Wednesday. The day opened with a thought-provoking presentation from Seb Schmoller from The Association for Learning Technology; he spoke mainly about technology and its impact on learning giving a wide range of examples, his website is here.

Both the workshop presentations I attended were excellent – Phil Badger (University of Huddersfield) talked about an interactive learning resource “The Ethics Game” used in various settings and developed in MS Powerpoint. I was surprised at the amount of interactivity Phil had built into the game. It was based on the philosophy of ethics and presented the learner with ethical choices the consequences of which formed a learning point.

A stimulating presentation from Dr. Kelly Smith, (University of Huddersfield) “Using Web 2.0 technologies to promote student and graduate business start-up – enhancing employability” forced me to consider the world of the Twitter, something I had been vaguely avoiding for a while. I was pleasantly surprised at the “serious” use to which Kelly had put her seemingly well advanced twittering skills and there was no disputing the success she had. It did strike me that the instantaneous and immediacy of the medium , she gave an example of the plane landing on the Hudson being common knowledge in the twitter world within minutes, that twitter was a kind of 21^st Century H.G Wells World Brain albeit with a rather short attention span and perhaps no medium or long-term memory.

My own workshop presentation “Moodle – a virtual research environment” seemed very well received and raised some interesting questions. One was about the use by learners of their own technology devices to engage with learning. The other question was concerned with motivating researchers to use the VRE while still remaining independent in their research endeavour. The conclusion was that the minor administrative overhead to researchers should be paid back by the obvious benefits of the VRE.

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.