Dr Rónán O’Beirne’s Weblog

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

Bradford College has secured capital funding through a joint collaboration between the Vocational & Community Education and Learning Resources Departments at Bradford College,to procure new I.T equipment for a number of community and voluntary organisations. The new equipment will play a major part in improving the lives of thousands of people across the region by enhancing employment prospects and strengthening communities.

Voluntary and community organisations from across the region were invited to attend a formal presentation ceremony in a bid to learn more about the latest in new technology secured through the funding. Ronan O’Beirne, Assistant Director for Learning Development and Julie Hinchliffe, Assistant Director for Vocational & Community Education were delighted to present attendees with a variety of I.T equipment, including: laptops, data projectors, digital cameras, netbooks and desk top personal computers. This will replace out of date equipment, which often malfunctioned and hindered classes from taking place. The new equipment will also provide opportunities to reach small, remote communities, making learning accessible.

A full time member of staff John Davies has been appointed to develop a community VLE (virtual learning environment) and provide technical support on visits to out centres. This will help community staff maximise the potential of the new technology.

Elaborating further on how learners will benefit from the equipment, Julie Hinchliffe concluded: “I’m delighted that the funding has secured the equipment here today. It will promote inclusive practices and enable learners in extremely deprived areas to have equality of access to similar resources to those who attend mainstream provision.”

The funding secured supports government strategies relating to adult learning, increasing the number of computers accessible and helping to improve skills and knowledge using ICT on a variety of courses.

Yesterday I delivered a keynote to the JISC RSC Pedagogy and e-Learning in HE: Strategy and Practice conference held in The Source at Sheffield. My presentation, entitled ‘Are we there yet?’was well received.
A summary abstract of what I talked about is outlined below and I think the presentation is on the JISC YH RSC website or available here:

This paper outlines the journey made by Bradford College to reach its current point of in the use of learning technology to enhance the learning and teaching experience. From a strategic perspective it explores the key drivers that directed the journey from the ad-hoc use of tools evident 3 years ago to a trategically embedded provision of technology support. The approach to managing this “wider deployment” will be explored together with a qualitiative evaluation of its success based upon the observations of key players. Having formed the basis of and provided the content infrastructure for two externally funded projects, the Bradford College Moodle is interesting because it has served a range of pedagogies and has been exploited in different ways. While the substance of this paper gives a first-hand account of developing a virtual learning environment, wider considerations of technology use in the future are discussed. It looks at the challenges now facing the college and its strategy for learning, teaching and assessment and considers what constitutes a strategic approach given the trend towards learner generated content and contexts. It poses questions around the use of physical and virtual spaces in the light of changing learner expectations of formal education settings. It concludes with some comments about the future of learning approaches.

An interesting piece of film art with a bookish theme that made me smile

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

To end the decade I give you this, Gary Hayes realtime social media, mobile phone and gaming counter – for those who may have thought it was a passing fad!

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.