Wednesday 14 April 2010

JISC Conference 2010

In my view - the 2010 JISC Conference was the best so far.

A virtual goody bag of free digital resources was made available.

In a thought-provoking opening speech, Martin Bean said that the digital divide was no longer about haves and have nots in terms of access to IT and ownership of devices."In my mind now the digital divide is much more about those that actually understand how to use and apply technology in their lives and their work as a necessity, rather than simply getting access to the technology per se."

According to Bean the issue leads directly into the need to educate people for new types of work. He told delegates that learning in the workplace needs to become integral."The only way we dig our way out of this economic crisis and recession... is if we recognise that we have got to embed learning for life in the workplace."

Another major challenge is being able to transform information into meaningful knowledge, Bean argued."The day that Google became a verb, and teachers in primary and secondary schools starting looking at Wikipedia as a trusted source of information, we should all have started to think deeply about the notion of how we longer teach people of all ages where to find information and talked instead about how to make sense of that information."

He predicted that trust in content will be one of the big issues in the future. "Our libraries collectively… need to be spending as much time thinking about sense making of information as they do about simple retrieval of information".

The session I found most interesting was Research Data, Cost, benefits, Impact and Planning.

Wednesday 7 April 2010

Interesting SharePoint in Higher Education document

An interesting report entitled: Investigation into the use of Microsoft SharePoint in Higher Education Institutions has been published as part of a project funded by Eduserv. It describes two types of SharePoint implementations: 'Organic' and 'Corporate'. It also considers drivers, critical success factors and SharePoint as a VLE.

Do take a look at the 2-page Executive Summary -
http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/static/5007/SPfinal.pdf - and please leave a comment on the Blog!

Workshop: Institutional Policy and Guidance for Research Data

The second EIDCSR Workshop took place on 29th of March at Rewley House in Oxford. Following policy development work undertaken at the University as part of the project, the event focused on issues around the development and implementation of institutional policy and guidance for research data:
* data management and sharing policy at different levels, such as research council, HEI institutions and research departments;
* in what ways research records and data management policy and guidance can be useful to researchers, and how to involve researchers in their development;
* how to encourage the implementation of institutional policy at a local or departmental level;
* how to encourage across the institution the sharing of best practice in research records and data management.

Details available at: http://eidcsr.oucs.ox.ac.uk/policy_workshop.xml

A particularly interesting contribution was the set of presentations from Melbourne University.