Dr Rónán O’Beirne’s Weblog

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

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.

Whistling Woods is an excellent venture providing full media and film production training for the industry most obviously the local Bollywood scene. I have done some good work with Chaityana CC to develop a Moodle solution for their student group which numbers about 400. I discussed the strategic approach to e-learning with John Lee Dean of WWI and our Principal Michele Sutton OBE, from this it became clear that further joint ventures might be possible. For instance Baljit Panesar and Trevor Griffiths from our Arts and Creative Media department are working on a student exchange programme.

After a very interesting tour of the facilities and some lunch we sat down and talked about the best way to deploy the solutions. The staff here at WWI used the Mac version and apart from some small LDAP issues which were soon overcome, the setting up of Moodle was pretty much hassle-free.

I look forward to seeing their progress in the coming months.

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

My best moment of 2008 was seeing Leonard Cohen at the O2 Arena in London in July. A wonderful performer with a voice like a double Bushmills in a smokey bar. He was blatantly honest about his motives for getting back on the stage after 15 years; filling the arena he told us quite simply he needed the money. His accountant had pulled a few tricks and left the poet and songwriter pretty desolate after a lifetime of entertaining. The size of the audience the price of the tickets and the number of gigs he did will mean he can spend a few more nights in a Chelsea hotel room. His song Hallelujah which was the UK Christmas number 1 hit, should generate some royalties too. A good year for Leonard.

A recent report by the Research Information Network RIN advocates the strong role libraries play in supporting high level research.

To quote their website:
“Ensuring a bright future for research libraries: a guide for vice-chancellors and senior institutional managers which aims to inform this audience on how to ensure library and information services keep pace with the evolving needs of researchers.
Good library and information services are an essential underpinning for research, just as they are for successful teaching and learning. Success in research, at both national and institutional levels, depends critically on the quality of the information services to which researchers have access.”

In the week that sees the publication of the RAE it would be interesting to see how the assessment correlates with the strength of their library provision; whether it is well resourced, staff by well qualified librarians and if this linkage is understood by leaders at the top of the organisation.

The full report can be found here http://www.rin.ac.uk/bright-futures-libraries

The Mac Book is a slick piece of kit – upon which I am writing this post. I have got one for evaluation purposes from the nice people in the Digital Media Services part of Learning Resources; already I’m more than impressed. The ergonmics and aesthetics of the design are faultless. The functionality I have yet to explore but again it looks good; for example it found the home wireless router and was surf-ready within 32 minutes of entering my home. My 12 year-old guitar-playing son has already authored some pretty funky tunes on the Garageband app which seemed second nature to him. So looks good and may become standard issue for Art & design staff over the coming 12 months.

I attended the JISC RSC YH Event “Exploring e-Portfolios” at York St. John University on Friday 12th Dec. The event was well organised and featured in the morning session an interesting debate on the use of e-portfolios that centred on whether this use was to the learners’ benefit or whether it was more to the institutions benefit. Four speakers who supported either side of the debate were entertaining and raised some interesting points. The audience were given the opportunity to participate by txt message during the debate presentations and also to ask questions from the floor – this added an enjoyable interactive dimension.
The debate really focused on what I’m calling the “control aspect” of the deployment of e-portfolios; on the one hand an institutionally sponsored e-portfolio solution might provide highly structured function typically within the, what one of the speakers Neil Currant – University of Bradford – called a safe environment. On the other hand there is an unstructured non-institution sponsored approach that relies heavily on the use of Web 2.0 tools such as flick and Google docs to allow the learner to develop their own portfolio – Kevin Campbell-Wright spoke to this theme with much passion and made the profound point that for today’s learners the world is the classroom. I came away from the debate not convinced by either argument – or perhaps not convinced that there needed to be a choice made between the two – could both approaches not work in the same institution?

At Bradford College Malcolm Smith (who was also running a workshop at the York event ) is using Mahara while we also have staff using other systems e.g. ELGG. This for me then is a key aspect; in short do I need to advocate a particular approach to e-portfolios or even prescribe one particular e-portfolio product or do I provide a set of guiding principles to ensure teachers (and learners) have a range of options to choose from.

I have recently passed the half-way point in writing this book. It now appears as pre-publication on Amazon, my publishers Chandos Oxford Ltd tell me that there are already a number of orders. I promised to keep this blog updated with progress but have failed to do so, suffice to say I’m halfway there and very much enjoying the writing experience. One challenge is the scope of the public library which I have to constantly redefine so that I can cope. The other challenge is the speed at which technology is developing within public libraries nationally and internationally.