Dr Rónán O’Beirne’s Weblog

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

Ronan O’Beirne, Assistant Director for Learning Development, has won the 2009 National Information Literacy Award. This is awarded to practitioners who raise the profile of information literacy and can demonstrate innovation, initiative and originality, as well as the impact of the programmes they develop. This UK-wide competition recognizes outstanding achievements in innovation within the area of Information Literacy, defined as ‘the ability to recognize when information is needed and to locate, evaluate and use the information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose’. The award carries a prize of a trophy, plus £500 to the winner’s favourite charity and £500 for personal use. More

The link to “Readings” at the top of this blog page takes you to stuff I’m reading – however, so enthused am I by this recent publication, I decided it merited a post of its own. Cloud computing is the biggest new thing that will happen to IT departments in learning institutions for a long while. To get an overview and clear perspective of the issues I recommend The Tower and the Cloud.

The blurb reads:
“The emergence of the networked information economy is unleashing two powerful forces. On one hand, easy access to high-speed networks is empowering individuals. People can now discover and consume information resources and services globally from their homes. Further, new social computing approaches are inviting people to share in the creation and edification of information on the Internet. Empowerment of the individual—or consumerization—is reducing the individual’s reliance on traditional brick-and-mortar institutions in favor of new and emerging virtual ones. Second, ubiquitous access to high-speed networks along with network standards, open standards and content, and techniques for virtualizing hardware, software, and services is making it possible to leverage scale economies in unprecedented ways. What appears to be emerging is industrial-scale computing—a standardized infrastructure for delivering computing power, network bandwidth, data storage and protection, and services. Consumerization and industrialization beg the question “Is this the end of the middle?”; that is, what will be the role of “enterprise” IT in the future? Indeed, the bigger question is what will become of all of our intermediating institutions? This volume examines the impact of IT on higher education and on the IT organization in higher education.”

Read a pdf version of the book HERE

Using the WorldCat citation service the full bibliographic details are:
KATZ, R. N. (2008). The tower and the cloud: higher education in the age of cloud computing. [Boulder, CO], EDUCAUSE.

A recent roundtable discussion about the future of Lifelong Learning in the current economic climate raises some interesting points. Sponsored by the Guardian newspaper the challenge was set out thus:

“With the country in the grip of a recession widely recognised as one of the worst in history, training has never been so important. For those working in lifelong learning and skills development there are big questions to tackle. In an increasingly uncertain economic climate, predicting what kind of training is required, and to what level, is a big challenge. With rising unemployment, should the emphasis lie with re-skilling or up-skilling? And should specific sectors take priority?”

A full report of the debate is available from the Guardian website

Reminds me that in 1997 when asked about his economic policy, Mr T. Blair stated “Education is the best economic policy we can have”.

Here are some podcasts that I have recently listened to which some may find interesting – accessed from the JISC website.

Here Sarah Thomas of University of Oxford and Robert Darnton Harvard University discuss the future of libraries

Here John Crawford and Christine Irving talk about Information Literacy as a ‘democratic right’

This final one, here, is a longer cast where OCLC Vice-President Karen Calhoun talks about the provision of digital content for learning and research.

A few days ago I visited Harlow Carr the RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) gardens near Harrogate. I was impressed with the library; there were about 4,000 volumes and an excellent range of magazines catering for the general hobbyist and the more specialist interests. The classification scheme used for the print stock was interesting a kind of supplemented Dewey integrated with plant classification schemes. The library, which is open daily, is run by a team of volunteers under the guidance of librarians based at the headquarters of the Lindley Library, in London. The library is currently housed in the Study Centre within the gardens.

However work has already started on a new building to facilitate the library collections and to extend the learning activity. The new building sounds incredibly exciting, having a zero carbon footprint it will be the greenest library in the UK. At a cost of £3m the facility will have a massive impact on learning; providing opportunities to schoolchildren and adults to understand the link between themselves and the natural world through horticulture.

From the Harlow Carr website “The learning centre will increase our capacity for free school visits more than threefold, enabling the garden to welcome more than 10,000 schoolchildren a year. It will also provide a base to expand our outreach programmes locally and in the wider region, to engage with hard-to-reach communities and schools. The project will also allow for a broader programme of educational workshops for all gardeners and visitors to Harlow Carr.”

I shall be following with interest the development of this new building. I picked up some seeds for my allotment from the very well-stocked shop – which, incidentally has an excellent book section particularly strong on botanical art books which included the recently published The Wild & Garden Plants of Ireland illustrated with 99 watercolour prints by the brilliant E Charles Nelson and Wendy F Walsh (2009 Thames & Hudson £25) which I regret not having purchased – but which would have certainly led to dreams of walks in Connemara and the Wicklow mountains – maybe next time!

The Yorrkshire and Humber JISC Regional Support Centre has brought out a publication that ties in with their event on March 11th at which I presented a paper about using Moodle as a virtual research envrionment.
“The substance of this paper gives a first-hand account of developing a virtual research environment and how scarce resources are deployed to accommodate a range of approaches while maintaining steady progress towards the realisation of enhanced pedagogy through using learning technology.”
Download the full report here

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.