For me I see the greatest improvements in learners when they develop their own digital abilities and they are able to control their own use of technology.

As part of National Colleges Week I thought it might be useful to share with you a little about how we have not only improved our learners’ digital literacy, but how us as teachers have also benefited too.

As teachers we were keen to break down barriers and increase access to IT and digital devices.  We wanted to open up IT and not only help our students develop skills to benefit them in the future, but also to help us as educators develop new digital skills and understanding.

Having looked at some options the ‘In-folio’ project at JISC TechDis appeared to be the ideal vehicle for channeling a digital literacy project.  ‘In-folio’ is an e-portfolio developed specifically for students with learning needs; it was clear, adaptable and allowed significant flexibility in how it could be used.

For us it was important ‘in-folio’ fulfilled the needs of both our curriculum team and the students.  When we were looking at this we were also introducing online Personal Learning Plans (PLP) across the college.  In-folio allowed each learner to have their own PLP which could be a shared by the tutors, so ‘student goals’ could be identified and progress monitored during termly meetings.

The ‘in-folio’ system is now in use and over 150 student profiles are loaded onto tutor pages ready for rollout across a whole group of colleges in Wales who we have been working with.   The students each create a personal profile with photographs and update information about their hobbies and interests.  They create other tabs as their course requires and build up image collections, a ‘scrap book’ of images and photographs which they can then add to.

Another development is that our students now also work together with other colleges on a joint newsletter and create file which are uploaded to their ‘in-folio’ as evidence of their participation.

I’ve found it incredibly rewarding working together, contributing and using technology independently and creatively.  Feedback in these early stages is very positive with ease of use highlighted again and again.  This system removes barriers and allows students to own their development and develop their skills through this ownership – ultimately with some excellent results!

I hope you’ve found this helpful and if you are interested in running a similar project in your college I would suggest contacting your local JISC’s Regional Support Centre for more information.

I intend to give a view across the sector, pulling together changes in research and in teaching from our colleagues in the field, and showing how the ‘“Wikipedia” way’ supports those emerging trends in practice.  For example, JISC has already been involved in improving Wikipedia entries by getting academics and Wikipedians together – as you can see from this blog post by my colleague Sarah Fahmy.

easel.ly

Martin Poulter, who is organising the conference, told me: “This is the first Eduwiki conference and hopefully the first of many.  We see immense mutual benefits in working with educators and academics and really welcome the involvement of the Jisc community.”
I’m keen to widen the circle, too.  Some key questions that we’re looking at to help lead institutions through the changing scholarly process include:

How can students and researchers make best use of Wikipedia?  And importantly, how do they verify and cite their reading?
What’s different about the way people approach the scholarship on Wikipedia?
How can universities and colleges use that platform to raise the profile of their work?
How does the Wikipedia approach to openness impact on the way people are doing their research and reading online?

I’d welcome your thoughts.

For those of us who saw Blackboard’s aggressive acquisition of commercial competitors WebCT and Angel, and have seen the patent litigation they unleashed against Desire 2 Learn, the idea of Blackboard pledging to be a good open source citizen may seem a bit … unsettling, if not 1984ish.

But it has been clear for a while that Blackboard’s old strategy of ‘owning the market’ just wasn’t going to work. Whatever the unique features are that Blackboard has over Moodle and Sakai, they aren’t enough to convince every institution to pay for the license. Choosing between VLEs is largely about price and service, not functionality. Even for those Blackboard institutions where price and service are not an issue, many departments persist with some other VLE, for all sorts of not entirely functional reasons .

In other words, the VLE had become a commodity. Everyone needs one, they are fairly predictable in their functionality, and there is not that much between them, much as I’ve outlined in the past.

So it seems Blackboard have wisely decided to switch focus from charging for IP to becoming a provider of learning tool services. As Blackboard’s George Kroner noted, “It does kinda feel like @Blackboard is becoming a services company a la IBM under Gerstner.”

And just as IBM has become quite a champion of Open Source Software, there is no reason to believe that Blackboard will be any different. If only because the projects will not go away, whatever Blackboard does with the support companies they have just taken over. Besides, ‘open’ matters to the education sector.

Interoperability

Blackboard had already abandoned extreme lock-in by investing quite a bit in open interoperability standards, mostly through the IMS specifications. That is, users of the latest versions of Blackboard can get their data, content and external tool connections out more easily than in the past- it’s no longer as much of a reason to stick with them.

Providing services across the vast majority of VLEs (outside of continental Europe at least) means that Blackboard has even more of an incentive to make interoperability work across them all. Dr Chuck Severance’s appointment also strongly hints at that.

This might need a bit of watching. Even though the very different codebases, and a vested interest in openness, means that Blackboard sponsored interoperability solutions – whether arrived at through IMS or not – are likely to be applicable to other tools, this is not guaranteed. There might be a temptation to cut corners to make things work quickly between just Blackboard Learn, Angel, Moodle 1.9/2.x and Sakai 2.x.

On the other hand, the more pressing interoperability problems are not so much between the commodified VLEs anymore, they are between VLEs and external learning tools and administrative systems. And making that work may just have become much easier.

This post originally appeared on the JISC CETIS website

In short, the University of Lincoln undertook a four month project for JISC called ‘Linking You’, which surveyed 40 different websites across the .ac.uk domain – ten from each university group – and compared the similarities between the URLs (location addresses) of those websites. The project found there was a lot of inconsistency in the representation of information for graduates and undergraduates. However, there were also good conventions that have emerged across the sector and out of all this, the ‘Linking You’ project proposed a common set of URL syntaxes that could be used in principle across multiple corporate institutional websites:

http://lncn.eu/toolkit/model

Before you get upset and think that we are suggesting you change your current URL structures, you should know that we are NOT suggesting anything of the sort! Rather we are suggesting that via a transparent mapping exercise (using 303 or 301 redirects) you can mint all the suggested URLs that the ‘Linking You’ project proposes and then link them to the actual URLs that have grown up as part of your organic system. For example,

If you use: http://foo.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses

You could follow the ‘linking you’ recommendations and mint a new URL that points to the above URL using HTTP code 303 or 301 to:

http://foo.ac.uk/courses/

In short, you’re just mapping what we hope will become a common URI structure (the compact sequence of characters that identifies an abstract or physical resource) to your current link architecture, which means you can continue to change and add more links to your architecture as the organisation changes and you would just continue to redirect the ‘common’ link as recommend by ‘linking you’ to the underlying link. This process need not affect the design or apparent structure of your website.

So why should you mint the suggested set of ‘linking you’ URLs for your institution? We recognise this work of minting and maintaining the redirects would be ‘yet another thing to deal with’ across your complex and growing .ac.uk websites, however we think there is potential value both in time savings and value add we could all communally benefit from in considering these URL conventions.

Below we list ten reasons that we think will result if we can get multiple institutions to start adopting this syntax and vocabulary:

1. Better search engine optimisation: As a sector we can go to Google and say, “Hi we are the University sector and we think you should give priority to these URLs when people are searching for things like courses.”

2. robot.txt: If a group of Universities started adopting these URL syntaxes, we could save time and money by generating a common robot.txt for all of us so to use so we don’t have to each write a robot.tx file, this would also make doing analytics across the sector enhanced as we could understand patters of clicking across all .ac.uk websites.

3. A simple mapping tool: An apache mod_rewrite (or IIS, nginx, etc. equivalent) tool that will do most of this work for you that could be written once and support many!

4. Improve discovery: Clear human-readable URLs are now integral to browser search and lookup technology and becoming essential if you want to enable ease by a student experiencing your website.

5. Predictable, consistent, aggregations: It will be easier to build tools on behalf of the entire sector because people will know where to go for the data. See the below reasons (no. 6, 7, 8 ) for immediate experimentation JISC is already undertaking and just think what else could be leveraged if we could bring our data together:

6. A course catalogue: As many of you know JISC is actively encouraging universities to create XCRI feeds for their courses. If everyone producing an XCRI feed put it at the following URL foo.ac.uk/courses/xcri we’d lay the groundwork for persistent, structured course data that developers (many of them students) could use to build new and engaging apps and websites that we could all benefit from.

7. A news feed: If we all knew where all the corporate news feeds were e.g. http://foo.ac.uk/news/rss we could create a University News App where the sector could have their news published on demand, let alone text mining goodness and other filters for highlight key news developments across all higher and further education institutions.

8. A sector wide directory: Common information such as institutional policies, contact information, news, about, events, etc. could be aggregated into a searchable directory; useful to both the public and higher education institution data geeks.

9. Know your assets: Your .ac.uk addresses can be understood as your ‘virtual real estate’. Adopting a well-formed, widely understood and persistent ‘portfolio’ of core web addresses will help web managers manage these increasingly valuable assets.

10. Cool URLs: Simple, stable, manageable URLs make sense. They are recommended by the worldwide web consortium or W3C, to make web managers’ lives easier and keep users happy, too.

Those are some of the reasons we can think of and we think there are many more if even a little imagination is implied. We’re convinced that if we all worked together as university web managers we could achieve more than the sum of our parts by producing this URL structure for each institution.

What kind of idea do you think you could achieve by adopting the ‘Linking You’ toolkit? We’re thinking of funding a several short projects to review and standardise the toolkit, put it into practice and then write up your case study for the sector on how it worked for you and what value you see in doing this work. Are you interested? What are your thoughts on all of this?

Prompted by a recent JISC mobile infrastructure for libraries funding call, I wanted to outline some of the challenges for institutions, and in particular academic libraries, in coming to terms with ‘mobile’:

Re-conceptualisation of services

Hardly a day passes where we’re not confronted by yet another paradigm breaking technology or event.  Yet, mobile offers organisations, and academic libraries in particular, an opportunity to re-conceptualise services,. Not just taking existing services and relationships to make them accessible on mobile devices but how new services can be built specifically with the mobile device in mind.

Mobile helps to refocus the potential inherent in the physical space, services, systems and collections of the library, and to transform relationships away from purely service delivery to a more social context.  The librarian and library become facilitator and enabler: providing personalised information at the right time and in the right place.

Changing our relationship to space

Mobile services and devices force a reconsideration of concepts like ‘library’ and more interestingly ‘digital library’.  There is an obvious impact on the physical nature of the library, but one that has yet to be fully thought through: the re-prioritisation of space, with a move away from the physical and static (books, desktops, desks) to the mobile, interactive and social.  A library in your pocket.

For a long time the ‘library’ has transgressed beyond the physical boundaries of the buildings within an institution.  But the digital library hasn’t, in general, had a fundamental impact on the design, focus or existence of those buildings.  Mobile, it might be argued, will necessitate the re-examination of physical space.

Similarly, the digital space of the library will need re-examining.  There is no longer a separation between the physical and the digital; rather the two bleed into each other and the boundaries between the two are constantly exceeded.  What does the inherent functionality of the device bring to the discoverability and accessibility of content and services? Augmented reality (where a view of the physical environment is modified by a computer) and near field communication (transactions at a touch: such as barcodes and QR codes) are just two examples of how mobile is challenging the user’s relationship to information and services.

Changing institutional support strategy
The implications for institutions supporting hardware and software that is not owned or managed by the university or its library has huge implications.  Mobile devices are owned by and managed by the user.  How do institutions manage the support expectations of users who have a problem with their personal device?  What role will libraries or departments play in the loaning of devices to ensure equality of access?

This change requires a radically different support policy; the intensely personal and one-to-one nature of most mobile devices has significant ramifications.

Legal implications
The implications of confidentiality and privacy lurk in the background of any discussion around the institutional management of mobile hardware and software.  A major challenge for institutions is the confidentiality and privacy of the user.  The implications of data breaches and privacy make institutionally owned and managed devices less attractive; it is difficult to loan such hyper-personalised hardware and software.

Recent policy briefings from organisations such as Educause in the US on Data Privacy Legislation and the EU’s exploration of data breach rules highlight the significance of these challenges.

Not waving, but drowning
In a field as rapidly evolving as mobile, not having a clear focus and direction is likely to result in mobile provision being caught in a maelstrom of new developments and competing devices.  To realise the potential and ensure sustainability it is essential that institutional investment is ‘built upon a commonly-understood foundation and within the scope of a wider digital strategy’ (Mobile and Wireless Technologies Review).

The implementation of mobile services currently suffer from a fractured and ad hoc roll-out  within many academic institutions.  While there will undoubtedly be pockets of excellence across universities and within departments, there is rarely a coherent institutional strategy when it comes to mobile.

New opportunities…
The potential of mobile devices to transform and enhance the student experience has been demonstrated by innovative projects such as Bristol’s Mobile Campus Assistant and Edinburgh’s Walking through Time.

But I think it is now time to fully realise the opportunities that mobile offers to institutions, and ensure that these innovations are embedded in institutional strategies and services.  The mobile infrastructure for libraries funding call is an occasion to realise those opportunities and to put ideas into action.

Photograph (C) Andrew Hewson http://t.co/6g3ENKP

The higher and further education sectors in the UK are fortunate to employ talented and dedicated software developers. Without them, many kinds of technical innovation would be significantly more difficult, more expensive or even impossible. While the patterns of employment of ‘local’ (locally employed) developers varies considerably between higher/further education institutions, it is rare for such institutions to invest strategically in their local development capacity.
Recognising this, the JISC-funded DevCSI project (managed by UKOLN) was introduced to work with local developers, to understand better their potential as an under-utilised resource and to create opportunities for them to network together, sharing resources, ideas, code and solutions. With the network that DevCSI has successfully pioneered, an institution which employs a handful of developers locally gains the benefit of a sector-wide network of peers bringing different perspectives and experiences to bear in a shared context. Beyond the immediate sector, DevCSI has worked with open-source and commercial suppliers who recognise the value in the networked pool of development talent and expertise.

JISC has been consistent in maintaining that the sector needs to continue to innovate if it is to be able to meet the long-term challenges of a radically changing environment. Institutions must be careful to maintain the capacity for technical innovation – indeed a recession is the right time to invest in change and innovation in order to emerge ready to exploit the opportunities of better economic times. In the difficult period ahead, one predictable response will be to outsource some software services, seeking the cost-savings and efficiencies promised by service-delivery paradigms such as Software as a Service. But there are risks associated with outsourcing services entirely, such as the associated reduction in local understanding and expertise, and the loss of capability to adapt to meet particular local requirements.

In the DevCSI project, we are working to establish an understanding of the changing role of the local developer in this likely new landscape with its greater dependency on remote, shared services. While recognising that they have some common requirements, we should not forget that our institutions have their individual ‘flavours’ too (this is surely part of what makes higher education in the UK so attractive internationally). For shared, remote services to be truly effective in a local context, they must be tailored to the needs of the users in that context.

DevCSI is steadily gaining traction in the UK – we have worked with related organisations such as OSSWatch and The Software Sustainability Institute and have organised events at many higher and further education institutions. Our work is even being recognised internationally, and we have been recently invited to help establish a similar initiative in Australia.

Where next for DevCSI? We’ve established a nascent community of developers in the UK and can already point to evidence of the value of this, some of which (such as peer-peer training) is even measurable in pounds, shillings and pence! While maintaining and growing this, we are now considering where best to focus our resources at a sector-wide level. One issue we have identified in the sector is the lack of career options for successful developers – other than to move into less technical management roles. Many of our best developers simply move out of the sector entirely in order to progress in their careers. An idea we are starting to explore is the possible development of a new role in the sector – the Strategic Developer – a developer who has both technical and domain experience, and who can contribute to strategic planning and decision making. Establishing such a role may take time but, as technology is undoubtedly going to play an increasingly important role in the future of further and higher education, so must we ensure that the people who understand the technology stick around long enough to be able to contribute at this level.

For more information, go to the DevCSI blog. Please do email me (p.walk@ukoln.ac.uk) if you have questions about this work. My UKOLN colleague, Mahendra Mahey and I also presented on this work at the JISC Conference, 2011 (slides).

Photograph (C) Andrew Hewson http://t.co/6g3ENKP

For someone choosing to follow a conference remotely, it is rarely now a one-way communication channel. With the benefit of more sophisticated technology and social media, taking part in many conferences online can now be an immensely beneficial and interactive experience.

To help you get the most out of following JISC11 online, I have put together a list of suggestions. We realise we won’t be able to have your full attention for the whole day, with your workload and emails undoubtedly being a major cause of distraction! Nonetheless, I hope this list will help you ensure the time you do spend online with us next week is time well spent.

1. If you are tweeting, blogging or sharing photos/videos/slides/other materials related to this event, make sure that you use the event hash tag: #jisc11. Following the conference hashtag is a good way of finding and connecting with other people that are either attending in Liverpool or following online.

2. Sign up on to the JISC11 Lanyrd group – you can see who else is actually attending or tracking the conference. Another good way of finding new like-minded people to follow on Twitter.

3. Join the JISC11 LinkedIn group. It is an open group so anyone can join. This is a good way to find people that are also intending on going to the conference, make new professional connections and take part or start discussions. Try introducing yourself, your work and what you are hoping to get out of JISC11.

4. Follow the @JISCEvents Twitter account for updates and announcements live from the conference.

5. You can get to know other participants in advance of the event by following @JISCEvents/delegates, @JISCEvents/remote and @JISCEvents/speakers. Please send a tweet to @JISCEvents to tell us if you are planning to attend in person or follow the event remotely so we can add you to the relevant list.

6. Follow the @JISC Twitter account to make sure you don’t miss any official conference announcements in the run up to the conference.

7. Familiarise yourself with the live streaming interface provided by Mediasite. See how to submit questions and take part in live polls.

8. Don’t suffer in silence – we actively encourage you to let us know directly if there is something we can do to help such as turning the volume up on the live stream or retweeting a useful link.

9. There will be an Online Engagement Team (@JISCEvents) who amongst other responsibilities, will be acting as your voice at the physical conference. We want you to take part in audience Q&A too, so use your voice!

10. Tell us about your experience of following the conference online so that we can continue to make it better in the future.  Sign up to take part in post-conference feedback interviews.

If you are using different platforms to those described above to discuss this event, please let us know so that we can share links where appropriate and ensure that your views are represented.  If you have other tips or suggestions we would love to hear from hear from you. The JISC11 conference is your conference so get involved!

For a full amplification guide for JISC11 participants go to: Amplification Guidance for Participants

Those of you unable to come and see us at the JISC11 conference in Liverpool next week will no doubt be keeping one eye on what is happening throughout the day with the help of your laptop, phone or tablet. As an event organiser I love experimenting with new and interesting ways to amplify events as well as enhance the physical delegate experience.  Sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong. But this is all part of the learning curve and helps us make the ‘online’ experience of the conference better each year.

For those just dipping their toe in the event amplification waters it can be daunting. Here at JISC we have been experimenting for a few years with different ways to ‘amplify’ an event using digital technologies. I’ve come up with a top ten list of things to think about when planning the digital amplification of your event.

1.    Technology should be a means not an end.  Make sure your conference starts with what you want people to get out of it, and with your organisation’s strategy, not with the tools you want to use.

2.    Before you do anything check the broadband and wi-fi capabilities at the venue. There is nothing worse, than putting in all that hard work to amplify the conference and the wifi letting you down on the day and none of your delegates being able to get online or worse still your live streaming cuts out.

3.    Have a plan. Creating a proper plan for why, to who, what, how and when you are amplifying is essential. Ensuring that everyone involved in implementing the plan has seen it and signed it off is also important.

4.    Find your audience, and go to them.  If you are targeting students, use Facebook; if it’s staff you want to attract, try setting up a Linked In profile.  It’s easier and more effective than trying to attract them to a new online community.

5.    Live streaming plenary sessions is an excellent way of allowing online followers to participate in the conference highlights and an easy way to build the online element.

6.    Use social media to help start conversations. For example: set up and use a memorable Twitter hashtag early on (e.g. #jisc11). Use Lanyrd to promote the event to Twitter users. Creating a LinkedIn or Facebook group audience can help delegates and online followers alike network, make new connections and start their own conversations.

7.    Consider having a dedicated microblogger to tweet live as the event unfolds.  This will also ensure that you have succinct notes of the event as a record and the microblogger can act as the physical voice of people following online at the actual event eg. during Q&A sessions.

8.    Inform your speakers.  Make sure you tell all your speakers/presenters/facilitators about any amplification plans so they are prepared and more crucially get their permission – some of them might have sensitive information in their presentations that they may not want broadcast.

9.    Consider accessibility.  Deaf and disabled people should not have to fight for their access needs to be met.  Check out JISC Techdis’ accessibility guide.

10.  Find a home for the conference outputs.  After the event, collect the materials and online conversations together for people to access after the event and put them in a logical place on  your website – then add to them and ask people to comment on what would be useful next time.  Let the life of the conference extend beyond the day itself.

There’s still time to sign up for this year’s conference – booking deadline is Friday 4 March 2011.

Higher education and research have been well funded over the past decade but are now moving into a new phase which will require a renewed spirit of innovation and collaboration.

As the budget reductions kick in we will all be faced with seemingly impossible tasks. However, situations often appear impossible only because our natural instinct is to assume that the way in which we have acted in the past is right for the future. If we focus on the benefits that our communities require and not the features we think they like, the future may not be so impossible after all. An outcome-based approach combined with free and adventurous thinking surely underpins successful performance in a challenging world. The solution to achieving this is likely not so much to be ‘out there’ in the latest management tome but rather within our own experience. If our own understanding based on experience is harnessed in an innovative way then this could offer the key – organised common sense still has great value and this approach is enshrined in the five factors.

1. Know your business – This sounds obvious but how many of us, when asked what we do, tell them exactly that … what we do! What the enquirer really wants to know is not what we actually do but what we contribute – in management speak, our value proposition. At JANET our occupation is not so much the 1s, 0s, routers, applications or any other technical solution but rather may be described as the way we enable the UK to continue to have a world class research and education community. I recall once doing an exercise where we had to come up with a 15 second sound bite that could be extracted from a one minute answer. It was quite challenging to construct a few words which encapsulated a complex business: however, it did help focus on what was important and what wasn’t. I commend this exercise to you in a quiet moment.

2. Know your numbers – Many people in our organisations instinctively prefer to leave the numbers to the accountants, particularly in a system which has been substantially grant funded and based on annual cash flow profiles. When the going gets tough it is crucial to know the precise nature of the finances. The ‘know your numbers’ factor really seems to resonate with colleagues engaged in the business of research and educational information technology. When the budgets are cut it is essential to know your total cost of ownership, otherwise it is highly unlikely that you will be able to adapt and flex effectively without damaging the quality of provision to those who use the services. It may be a little frightening at first but once the shock is over it will focus thinking on which is really important.

3. Strive to be trusted – Any sales person worth their salt has the ambition to become a ‘trusted advisor’ to their customer. In the new, lean, mean world we will be required increasingly to both collaborate and compete – a sensitive relationship but one which has no chance of success if there is no trust. Our prime pursuit must be to establish trust based on honesty and integrity, even when we disagree – this is an effective and pragmatic route to success.

4. Empower the team – No one person can do it all, however able or driven they may be. Successful leadership is about drawing out the best from all the team but this doesn’t happen by magic. Just as in sport, a good team last year may not necessarily be a good one this year. The game may have changed, circumstances altered or players moved on. As we seek to achieve results in a changing world, team members will be asked to do challenging things. In such circumstances it is important that the team are equipped to complete the task, both as a team and as individuals. Failing to train and empower the team proactively leads to organisational dysfunction and thus failure to achieve targets.

5. See over the horizon – If this could be done 100% accurately we’d have few problems. Just because this is challenging, however, it doesn’t mean giving up. In a fast changing political, economic, societal and technical environment it is essential to explore the likely scenarios that are just over the horizon. The legendary ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky said, “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” We must all seek to be where the action is going to be tomorrow and not just where it is today.

Lord Browne’s recommendations this week remind us that the majority of students (or their parents) will be stumping up an increasing amount for a place at university. It is no surprise then that they want to be 100% sure that their education will be worth the money.

Those of us in the business of delivering and supporting higher education want to enrol students who are well prepared – if students know what they are letting themselves in for they’re more likely to flourish and stay the course.

This is easier said than done. Typically, course publicity, application, selection and enrolment generate an overwhelming amount of information. The trick is making sense of it all.

In the first of a new series of online ‘radio’ programmes – JISC on Air – we explore how digital technologies are helping universities to share reliable and consistent course information and support new students throughout the recruitment process.

Listen now
Episode 1: Successful Student Recruitment (Duration: 18:22)

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More information on this programme: http://jisconair.jiscinvolve.org

Photo by Tom Wills: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomwills/5036718688/in/set-72157625060586946/