Dr Rónán O’Beirne’s Weblog

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

This link below to the view of Forster Square, Bradford taken from the superb vantage point of Bradford Cathedral and shows the foundation work that is being carried out in Forster Sq as part of the regenration effort for the city centre. Recently this work seems to have slowed down raising questions about the future of the site in this difficult economic climate . To monitor the site visit the Bradford Cathedral web-cam . The use of webcams can be a  very effective technology in learning

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.

We use Plone to run our College Website – Content Management System. For some reason I find the concept of a World Plone Day amusing and at the same time mildly uplifting. Perhaps this is what days are for – many people have wondered……
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
Philip Larkin – Poet (and Librarian Hull University)

I attended the LinuxLive Expo at the Olympia in London on 24th of October. It was a well arranged event with lots of exhibitors and much to interest. I managed to understand a lot more about Ubuntu, Joomla, Debian and Fedora!

The wider implications and methodology of deploying OpenSource solutions within a College of 23,000 students have yet to be explored in full but the potential in terms of the robustness of these solutions and their growing support base seem to indicate thta this is possible. I was pleased to see some headway had been made in education terms, for example a version of the European Computer Driving License (ECDL) was now available for OpenOffice whereas previously it had only had an MS focus. At Bradford College we use some OpenSource solutions; Plone to power our website albeit rather ineffectively at the moment and of course we use Moodle as our VLE together with ELGG and Mahara as e-portfolio solutions.

I made some excellent contacts so watch this space for more on OpenSource and a trailblazing experiment from Learning Resources!

Mahara the eportfolio and social networking tool is being used at Bradford College by approximately 100 students in Teacher Education. I had a quick demo and chat with Malcolm Smith at McMillan and he was very enthusiastic about the benefits to learning that could be achieved. I was impressed at the speed with which the tool had been deployed and also with the huge take up.

Deborah Judah who is currently e-learning advisor (HE), JISC Regional Support Centre for Yorkshire & Humber has started a new blog that she says will “keep you up to date with anything new in HE and e-learning”. Find it here
http://deborahhe.edublogs.org/

Volume 2., Issue 1. 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:

The Position Statement for Learning Resources is now available from here