Dr Rónán O’Beirne’s Weblog

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

On Friday I travelled to London to attend the GuildHE Research Network meeting at Worburn House, Tavistock Square. It was my first meeting as Bradford College has only recently joined the Guild. We discussed draft responses to a range of policy documents amongst them: HEFCE’s consultation on the REF (Research Excellence Framework) which is replacing the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) and Vitae’s – Research Development Framework. There was a good level of discussion and we seemed to have covered a lot of ground. Planning is now in train for a research network symposium in Spring 2010.

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.