JISC Inform 7
This issue includes an interview with Mark Haysom (Learning and Skills Council), transforming online reference provision, and using assistive software across the curriculum.
Moving ahead: Providing tools for a lifetime of learning
Contents
Chemical reactions JISC deal with Royal Society of Chemistry
Work in progress digital libraries in the classroom
Leading the way an interview with Mark Haysom
Pictures and conversations the power of digital images
Happy birthday JANET JANET 20 years old this year
JANET in facts and figures
A telescope as big as the world JANET and other networks are transforming astronomy
An astronomer’s view through the telescope what are we looking for?
e-Books for all transforming online reference provision
Full speed ahead e-Learning and Pedogogy programme
See what I mean? using assistive software across the curriculum
From fieldwork to desktop using new 'Virtual Walkabout' tool
Keeping on track using technology to inspire
Chemical reactions
A new JISC agreement has the potential to transform the study of Chemistry, writes Brian Mitchell.
"It is not the technology that brings enriched learning experiences, but the use to which such technology is put." So wrote Mark Russell, e-tutor of the year, in the last issue of JISC inform. There is perhaps no better illustration of this than the Royal Society of Chemistry digital archive, which a JISC agreement has now made available free for further and higher education, except for a limited access fee.
The Archive, covering the years 1841 to 1996, contains more than 200,000 articles, all fully searchable, in some 1.2 million pages. It covers many of the most significant discoveries in the history of chemistry, including articles that directly rewarded its authors with Nobel prizes. The entire archive was recently digitised and the response to the suggestion that JISC might purchase it proved to be enormously enthusiastic.
Liam Earney, JISC Collections Manager, who negotiated the agreement on behalf of JISC, explains the thinking behind the agreement: "This is an immensely valuable resource but up to now it wouldn't have been available to many institutions in our community because of financial pressures on university resources. This resource would normally cost £25,000 but at a stroke this agreement makes all this material available to all who want and need to use it."
Diana Leitch, Deputy Librarian at John Rylands University Manchester, has supported use of this resource in the past. But this agreement, she says, means that "staff and students can access more than 150 years of essential research at their fingertips."
The archive can also be used in teaching contexts. Dr Leitch explains: "There are many ways in which institutions can exploit the archive to discover innovative ways for bringing teaching and learning activities to life". She cites examples of using text and images in presentations, handouts, study guides and virtual learning environments (VLEs).
But do our students and researchers need such "historic" research in a subject area that moves forward so quickly? Louise Gill, former editor of Chemical Communications (one of the titles included in the archive), refutes this suggestion: "How many laboratory hours have been wasted in characterising a 'novel' compound that was actually published 30 or 40 years ago? Modern literature searches can often give the false impression that research in the chemical sciences started about 20 years ago. Problems continue when our literature search finally finds a 'missing synthesis' in a paper published 20 to 30 years ago only to discover that to read the paper requires an excursion to some remote book stack or, increasingly, that there is no library."
Now that JISC has purchased a perpetual license for it, this extraordinary and historic resource is now available to all - and all a mouse click away.
Work in progress
Digital Libraries in the Classroom is a programme run jointly by JISC and the US National Science Foundation. One of its key aims is to make online resources more applicable to learning and teaching. Pat Leon reports on what the programme has achieved so far.
Walk into any library and the temptation is to browse. Luckily, libraries are orderly affairs. Someone somewhere has done the spadework. The user simply plucks what he or she wants off the shelf to study at leisure.
But what happens when libraries go digital? With technology becoming more interactive, will the divisions between author, librarian and users break down? Anyone with the right training and access permission can create, change and challenge content. But do they learn more?
Digital Libraries in the Classroom is a five-year programme, funded by JISC and the US National Science Foundation, that looks at the benefits of digital resources in key subject areas for university learning and teaching. Four US-UK projects in the fields of anthropology, engineering, geography and the humanities will receive £6 million to build, develop, use and monitor specialist digital libraries. Teams of academics, technologists, librarians and educationists are working together, with the US focusing mainly on research and the UK on practical applications.
Now in their second year, the projects are starting to see results. This is good news for Diana Laurillard, head of the DfES's e-learning Strategy Unit and member of the programme peer review group. She sees digital libraries as a key plank of the government's e-learning strategy, to be launched later this year.
But she warns that digital libraries "are nothing until they are embedded appropriately in a pedagogical or research context." For this, they need to be "flexible learning environments that allow users to build exercises, activities and tools for exploration and manipulation. These might be environments for teachers to plan student use of the materials, or they might be creative tools for learners to do some manipulation themselves," she adds.
Common threads, such as developing toolkits for non-technical staff or issues around copyright, run through all the projects. But each has its own distinct flavour.
Teamwork defines DIDET, the engineering design project partnering Strathclyde University with the Stanford University design centre. While Stanford is building a video repository, Strathclyde has run design projects for third-, fourth- and fifth-years. The students are already adding their designs and sketches to the library.
Information literacy has proved a stumbling block. Louise McGill, learning technologist and a former librarian, says: "We cannot assume that students would know how to organise information. In one project - to design a can crusher - they all tended to call their files 'can crusher'. Imagine the impact on five teams sharing information." Students must also learn how to retrieve the exact data they want. "Any student can find 2,000 results, but how do they decide which to use - which is valid and legal? They need to be taught how to critically evaluate, interpret and analyse material," says Louise.
Software compatibility is another issue. The Strathclyde team has developed Laulama, Hawaiian for 'camaraderie', and a version of TikiWiki, an open source groupware system. "We're very conscious that everything needs to connect to other university systems," Louise says.
Measuring the impact on learning can be difficult. "What do you measure it against?" she asks. "Did a team produce a better prototype can crusher because they had the opportunity to share information in a digital repository, or were they simply a team that would use information from any source effectively?"
Fieldwork is the focus of DART, the anthropology project based at the London School of Economics and Columbia University in the US. Students get an online taste of fieldwork in remote locations through a mix of videos, photographs, interactive maps, music and weblinks, alongside traditional teaching.
Evaluations by first-year students and a group of sixth-formers at a British Museum anthropology study day were positive. Caroline Ingram, UK project coordinator, says: "The main problem for lecturing staff has been the classroom hardware." While technical staff have worked together to build the digital library, academic staff agreed to work independently for the first year because of the transatlantic differences in teaching anthropology.
Dialog Plus, the geography project, has had similar experiences. The project draws together data collections, such as censuses and surveys, for use in human geography, geographical information science, geomorphology and earth observation. The project partners are universities with established research links: Southampton and Leeds in the UK, and Pennsylvania and Santa Barbara in the US.
Hugh Davis, UK project leader, says: "When we got American and English geographers together, they didn't entirely agree over what teaching geography was about." However, as the library is a collection of 'nuggets' of reusable learning activities, they can slot into courses in a variety of ways, according to teaching styles and programmes. Hugh says interoperability "is not such a big challenge, as we could be talking about a web page. The main issue is access to original data. Many universities do not allow unregistered users to cruise and use their databases." A central certification body to establish a registered users' list could solve this, he believes.
Sustainability is the driving force behind Glasgow Caledonian's work on the Spoken Word project, which includes Michigan State and Northwestern universities working with the BBC and National Archives and Records Administration. UK project manager David Donald says: "There is a wealth of material, but much of it still needs to be digitised for the web. Our big resource is the BBC sound archives, which date back to the 1920s. The BBC has millions of hours of recordings and receives about a thousand requests a day."
Copyright is a major challenge, particularly for post-1950 sound recordings. "We have to get clearance from people in particular programmes but, when you contact them, they can't remember what they said, never mind whether they agree with it now."
For cataloguing, the project will rely on the selections and annotations of an ever-expanding band of users in much the same way as the Oxford English Dictionary used reading volunteers. Such a building-block approach avoids the danger of information overload inherent in all the projects. As Strathclyde's Louise McGill asks: "We have to think: who's the information for? Next year's students? Then, what's the impact on their education? The end point is not just a digital repository that people will want to use, but the process and what we can learn from it."
Project websites
For further information
Digital Libraries in the Classroom programme
Leading the way
An interview with Mark Haysom
The Learning and Skills Council (LSC) is one of JISC's principal funders with a remit to fund and plan education and training for over 16-year-olds in England. Mark Haysom, formerly Managing Director of the Trinity Mirror Group, has been Chief Executive of the LSC since last year. JISC Inform interviewed Mark Haysom and asked him about the place of ICT in his plans for the post-16 education sector.
JI: I wonder if you could start by telling us what Information and Communications Technology has meant to you both as a learner and in your working life.
MH: I come from a background where technology has had a tremendous impact on almost every aspect of the business. As a former journalist and then as Managing Director of the Trinity Mirror Group I know first hand that technology has, quite literally, transformed that industry - benefiting the business, and the individual. The benefits of investing in new technology go beyond just the money and time saved. The benefits also help ensure that you have a workforce able to compete with the best in the world.
As Chief Executive of the LSC, I want technology to have a similar, transformational role in education and skills. It should allow the further education sector to create opportunities, raise standards and help ensure that it responds to the needs of both employers and learners. ICT has the flexibility and creativity to make learning much more accessible to more people. It can remove barriers and pioneer innovative programmes that can inspire students and teachers alike. The challenge is to use it properly and ensure it delivers what both employers and individuals want.
JI: JISC's remit was widened some four years ago to include the further education colleges, all supported by the JISC Regional Support Centres. What do you feel has been the main effects of the FE sector's growing engagement with technology?
MH: e-Learning will not replace traditional learning, but it does add value to existing practices. Evaluation of e-Learning by the National Learning Network (NLN) shows some very encouraging results are coming through. I'll give one example. Sheffield College runs a GCSE English course entirely based on e-learning. Last year, every student completing the course achieved grade C or above. That's impressive, especially as it included young people who were not involved in mainstream learning. Across FE generally, take up is mixed. There are many examples of e-learning being used successfully in schools and colleges, but others need to rise to the challenge, quickly, if they are to benefit from the opportunities ICT provides.
JI: What do you feel are the biggest challenges the sector is facing in terms of improving ICT skills and ensuring the potential of technology is harnessed for the benefit of all our learners and teachers?
MH: We want all providers to promote e-learning. Take up can be improved by effective leadership and staff development and the LSC and DfES see an important role for the new Centre of Excellence in Leadership to support managers and leaders to help drive it forward. Staff also need to take advantage of the potential of ICT. Different parts of the learning and skills sector are at different levels of maturity. We want to see school sixth forms using all the learning materials about 900 hours in total that are currently available in FE and sixth form colleges. Plans for adult and community learning and specialist colleges are being implemented and the next big challenge is work based learning. The NLN is putting together a team to identify the requirements of this area, probably followed by a three-year implementation plan. There are very significant gains to be won by introducing ICT to this area of workforce skills.
JISC's Regional Support Centres have an important role to play in helping providers roll out ICT and ensure e-learning is well-established within colleges for example, to support the growing use of Virtual Learning Environments for integrated, online learning.
JI: It's possible that we're looking at a future divide between those who have ICT skills and those who don't. What do you feel the sector's role is in bridging that divide?
MH: Young people are growing up with computers, the Internet and other new technology and we know they are well motivated to use ICT. Some other sections of society, manual workers aged 35-55, for instance, are less likely to have ICT skills, mainly because they do not realise the benefits to their daily lives or work. Research shows, though, that 90 per cent of all new jobs require ICT skills at some level, so it's essential the divide is closed and more people are inspired to use e-learning tools.
The sector's role is to work together to ensure that what we deliver truly helps those we are here to serve. One example of sector collaboration is the new NVQ qualification in information technology called ITQ. Working with partners, the LSC has ensured that the first ICT qualification designed specifically for the workplace is being rolled out.
JI: Greater progression from further education to the higher education sector has become a major political goal and a key objective for both the LSC and HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England). JISC is taking elements of this agenda forward with its Distributed e-Learning programme announced this summer. What will be the key benefits of this area of work, and how can technology help further these wider goals?
MH: Progression from FE to higher education is an important part of the work of the LSC and JISC. The Distributed e-Learning programme encourages links between schools, colleges and universities and employers to support progression into HE. That is very much in line with what the LSC is doing getting the different strands of education and training working effectively together. ICT is a very flexible way to support these links and it should be fully exploited. The extension of JANET to new communities is a good example of what is happening.
JI: Do you think therefore that technology and the uses to which it can be put are transforming the notion of the lifelong learner?
MH: The LSC and partners like JISC are responding to the growing demand for people to continue learning and to acquire new skills, either to improve their career choices or simply for personal satisfaction and fulfilment. So, more people want learning at times and in places that fit their individual requirements. ICT is particularly useful for people who cannot or do not want to attend a traditional classroom; it improves access and removes barriers for people in remote areas with poor transport links, for instance, for people with disabilities or learning difficulties and those who are perhaps disenchanted with mainstream learning. So, ICT is crucial to lifelong learning.
JI: The sector is making great strides in providing 24/7 services to learners. What implications are there for the use of ICT with this form of service provision?
MH: ICT offers the flexibility to continue learning outside college, school or university, in the home, the workplace or through learndirect, for example. Really, it provides learning any time, any place. ICT in education and training is developing rapidly and new techniques are coming through all the time. For instance, we are funding a pilot project on cable TV that allows users to play interactive 'games' that in fact are designed to improve their basic skills. Viewers who get something out of taking part will be encouraged to contact learndirect and sign up for other courses. The project is designed to encourage young people and adults who use computers for games to use the technology to develop new skills.
JI: The LSC has seen the sector it is responsible for grow over the last two or three years. Part-funded by the LSC, JISC has of course correspondingly seen its remit widen to include specialist colleges and Adult and Community Learning (ACL). What can technology offer to the new groups coming under our widening areas of responsibilities?
MH: If you look at students with disabilities or learning difficulties at specialist colleges, they need skills for life, for independent living, as well as vocational and academic skills. ICT is very beneficial for them and many of these colleges are taking advantage of it. Thirty of the 65 specialist institutions we fund now have a connection to the JANET network, for instance. It is estimated that one in every ten students in FE and sixth form colleges has some kind of disability or learning difficulty.
JI: Finally, would you like to offer us a vision of where you think the post-16 education sector will be in ten years' time, and what contribution it will be making to the wider life of the country?
MH: The LSC's mission is to transform the scale and quality of post-16 education and skills training, widen participation and deliver what employers need. Our vision is that five or six years from now young people and adults will have knowledge and productive skills matching the best in the world. We have a crucial leadership role to help the sector achieve these ambitions. The LSC is developing as a new kind of public sector body we are leaner, faster and more decisive in responding to the needs of the people we are here to serve.
We are building strong partnerships to drive quality and ensure learners get world-class teaching in world-class buildings. ICT has a big part to play in realising these ambitions. It has a central role in the Success for All reform strategy for FE and in the Skills Strategy, to tackle the nation's skills deficits and improve our economic performance. So, in the future, I want to say that the LSC, working with partners, has given more young people and adults opportunities for high quality education and training; that vocational education is valued in our country; and that we have a workforce to match the best in the world.
See the full text of this interview
Pictures and conversations...
Hugh Dailly explores the power of digital images and their enormous potential in education
'I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.' - Mahatma Gandhi
'What is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?' - Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)
Making good-quality, interactive online-learning materials is often difficult, expensive and possibly illegal. Transferring lecture notes and teaching materials from paper-based to online format is easy, cheap but boring by comparison. What is the use of a web page, we might ask, to paraphrase Alice, without pictures? How do we break with the 'paper behind the screen' mentality that characterises poor-quality learning materials?
Pictures are one means of moving beyond text. But although illustrations are easy to find in the bazaar of the modern Internet, using them without permission crosses the increasingly fraught boundary of intellectual property rights (IPR). Neither is picture quality guaranteed. This helps to explain JISC's decision to enter into an agreement with Getty Images to make 50,000 of the most striking images of the past century available to further and higher education.
The fruits of this initiative arrived earlier this year in the shape of the Educational Image Gallery. The gallery represents a fraction of the Getty Images' vast collection but includes highlights from the Hulton Archive and Getty Images News Service.
This subscription service provides access to copyright-cleared images for use in universities and colleges. Access itself, however, will not give the whole answer. Gratuitous use of images can be almost as harmful as the lack of them and the ability to illustrate needs to be used sparingly. Here specialist JISC services such as the Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) and AHDS Visual Arts have an important training role to play.
Images, used well, have the power to open the 'conversations' Alice is searching for at the beginning of Carroll's great work. This is best illustrated by an example. Look at the picture at the bottom of this page. Considering it for a moment, opening a conversation, who are these people and what are they doing? Are they in any way connected? Are they sharing something?
... But the picture is cropped and the full image (available from the Education Image Gallery) would show a horrific glimpse of racism in America in the 1930s, a lynching in the Deep South, an image made more shocking by the sheer banality and ordinariness of the cropped picture.
Have another look at the picture. What better way of opening up a 'conversation' about the power of racism to infect 'normal' society, to question our own assumptions and preconceptions, or to begin to explore the history or the literature of the period?
This article opens with a quotation from Gandhi and a search in the Educational Image Gallery yields 48 thumbnail images illustrating his journey from the westernised lawyer of his early years to iconic father of Indian independence and inspiration to other struggles for freedom. As Alice would say: pictures and conversations...
The Education Image Gallery looks set to become an important tool for use in the classroom - to inspire, to provoke discussion and to nurture the kind of creative understanding that only images can.
Hugh Dailly (Curriculum Advisor)
RSC Scotland North & East
Film service continues to grow
New additions have recently increased the scope of Education Media Online, the film and video download service. In June the first films from Amber Films and Open University Worldwide were added.
Established in 1968 in the north-east of England, the Amber Film Collective was one of the first independent, regional cooperatives deliberately set up to operate outside the mainstream, London-centred film industry and is one of the few survivors of the workshop movement still producing films today. Amber Films cover shipbuilding, mining and miners' strike, local and national politics, issues relating to nuclear energy, and fishing.
See further information, including news about new collections, on Education Media Online's website
Happy birthday JANET!
JANET is 20 years old this year. The network linking UK education and research has grown in size, scope and speed over those years to become the national institution it is today. Over the following pages we look at JANET's history, its benefits to its ever-widening community of users, and how one remarkable application of high-speed networks such as JANET is transforming astronomy.
JANET came into being in 1984, bringing together several networking organisations in the UK. With funding from the then Department of Education and Science, the main aim of the network was to provide a communications infrastructure for users based on common standards.
It initially served universities and research councils while polytechnics had to fund their own connections. The polytechnics were funded to connect to the network in the early 1990s.
By then JANET had been upgraded to allow site access at 2Mbit/s and the backbone (the core network) was sized accordingly. Then in 1994 SuperJANET came into being with hugely increased speeds - from 10Mbit/s to 155Mbit/s, a fifteen-fold increase. By this time the higher education colleges were now also linked to JANET, and further expansion took place in 1999 when further education colleges came within JISC's remit.
Since 2003 the network has widened further to include the specialist colleges and the Adult and Community Learning (ACL) sector, both funded by the Learning and Skills Council (LSC). JANET is now also used to connect schools in England through the Regional Broadband Consortia (RBC) interconnects. In Scotland and Wales JANET has been expanded to include schools, through connection to the Scottish Schools Digital Network (SSDN) and the Lifelong Learning Network for Wales, respectively.
The last twenty years have also seen a growth in the provision of international access, with important collaborative projects with international partners in Europe, North America and China. The article on pages 15 16 shows how such international partnerships are bringing continued benefits to users in this country.
Twenty years on and JANET along with it associated services continues to be a national success story, providing reliable, secure and high-speed connectivity for an ever-widening group of users and organisations and to an ever-burgeoning collection of high-quality and innovative content.
Happy birthday JANET. Here's to the next 20 years!
Shirley Wood
UKERNA
JANET in facts and figures
| 191 higher education connections to JANET |
| 34 specialist colleges connected to JANET |
| 'Twenty years on and JANET continues to be a national success story, providing reliable, secure and high speed connectivity' |
| 6 million users in further and higher education |
| 517 further education colleges connected to JANET |
| 10 Gigabits per second in the JANET 'backbone' |
| 16 million users connected through further and higher education, research, adult and community learning (ACL) and schools (via Regional Broadband Consortia) by 2007 |
| 35 connections to Research Council sites 34 different services provided by UKERNA |
| 2 million metres of network |
| 'With current traffic volumes, and if the backbone had not increased in bandwidth since 1984, it would take six and a half years to transfer one day's worth of data now.' |
| 14,200 Terabytes of total traffic recorded in and out of institutions on JANET in 2003/4 13,200 Terabytes of total international traffic to and from JANET in 2003/4 |
A telescope as big as the world
Steve Parsley reports on how high-speed networks such as JANET are transforming astronomy
In April this year, using JANET and several similar networks across Europe, astronomers successfully linked together telescopes in the UK, Sweden and The Netherlands to create, in effect, a single giant telescope. This super-telescope can now be used to create very detailed images of the radio emission from stars in our own galaxy and in the centres of other galaxies. It will enable radio astronomers to distinguish objects separated by about 1 milliarcsecond. That's the equivalent of seeing individual astronauts on the moon from the Earth - 50 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope.
Since the 1980s astronomers have used a technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), in which an array of physically independent radio telescopes, such as the UK's at Jodrell Bank, observe simultaneously in order to yield high-resolution images of cosmic radio sources. The traditional system for performing these observations, still being used up to now, uses magnetic tape to physically transport data from telescopes to data processor. This has been the only practical way of moving the huge amounts of data involved. A specialised super-computer known as a correlator is then used to perform the mathematical transformations needed to extract an image from the many tera-bytes (1 Tera-byte = 1 million Megabytes) of data collected in each experiment.
The European VLBI Network (EVN) is an array of sensitive radio telescopes located across Europe, and extending to China and South Africa, that carries out these kinds of observations in three sessions per year for a total of around 90 days. Data from these observations are correlated in a central processor at the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) located in the Netherlands.
As the magnetic tape technology approaches the end its useful life, astronomers are looking for alternative ways of getting their data to the correlator. This is where the new generation of high-speed national continued over... networks, such as JANET comes in. Available now in most European countries, these high-bandwidth networks connect to a growing number of telescopes, including Jodrell Bank. Via GÉANT, the pan-European research network, and the Dutch academic network SURFnet, connected telescopes can send data directly to the EVN Data Processor at JIVE.
The April experiment was part of a project supported by GÉANT, UKERNA and a number of other National Research and Education Networks, with the aim of connecting up to six European telescopes directly and simultaneously to the JIVE data processor. The project is exploring the feasibility of achieving real-time "eVLBI" - that is, real-time observations without having to transport magnetic tapes across distant physical locations.
This will bring a host of advantages. The most important is an improvement in reliability. In a real-time system, faults can be diagnosed online and rectified immediately. Real-time processing may also be more economical. The current operation generates hundreds of tapes per session, requiring a specialised infrastructure and dedicated staff working in shifts all year-round. None of this will be needed in a real-time or eVLBI system. The possibilities for future research are, therefore, thanks to our high-speed national networks, enormously exciting.
An astronomer's view through the telescope
What are we looking for?
Among the most popular targets for VLBI observations are the nuclei of quasars. The quasar nuclei house the central engines which power these extremely active and luminous distant galaxies, and often eject material which has been accelerated to speeds very close to the speed of light. The central engines themselves are small in diameter in spite of the enormous energy they produce and therefore probably contain supermassive black holes.
With VLBI it is possible to probe structures on scales of just a few light years in sources at the edge of the observable universe. It is even possible to see within a few Swarzschild radii of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own galaxy (the Swarzschild radius is the radius of a black hole from within which no light can escape).
e-Books for all
Caren Milloy reports on how a new agreement has given college reference provision a huge boost
Colleges like e-books. They like them for their ease and convenience. But the problem has been up to now that there is still not a large and affordable enough collection of them tailored to the needs of FE students and staff. A new agreement, however, between JISC and publishers Thomson Gale is set to change this.
The agreement means that every college in the UK will be able to gain access to the free content of 21 top electronic reference titles. The titles included in the Gale Virtual Reference Library include classic titles such as the Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology, the Worldmark Encyclopedia of the Nations, the six-volume Encyclopedia of Science and a host of others. Each has been specially chosen by representatives of the FE community for their quality and their relevance to the curriculum.
These titles will at a stroke add more than 31,800 pages and many thousands of reference entries to colleges' reference resources. Colleges have the option to access the resource via Gale's servers for an annual fee of just £65 or colleges can host the content (bought in perpetuity by JISC on behalf of the FE community) themselves for free. Accessing the titles via Gale's server will provide an easy to use interface and enable the user greater flexibility in the use of the titles.
Users of the resource can carry out a full text search across one title or the full collection, email sections of text or save searches on an electronic bookmark to create a personalised library or reading list. Extracts of the resource can be incorporated into teaching packs, course packs and student project work and all of it can be accessed without additional plug-ins.
But what will this resource really mean to colleges? Karen Burton is the Team Leader for Library Services at Braintree College, which is already using the resource. Karen is already realising its impact at her college; she says: "There are a number of subject areas where this resource will be particularly important for our college, Child Care, Psychology and Textiles are the areas which will most clearly benefit, but there will obviously be others."
As well as working with members of the community to build this resource, JISC has also worked closely with publishers Thomson Gale. Jill Jones from Gale emphasises the importance of widening access to high quality information in colleges: "Now every student, teacher, LRC staff and librarian in the FE community can access primary reference material online to support course work and projects."
And what is the initial reaction from those already using this new resource? Karen Burton says that the most enthusiastic reception has been from teachers: "The feedback we've already had from teaching staff is that it could have tremendous application in the classroom."
Full speed ahead
A new programme the e-Learning and Pedagogy programme will bring a number of benefits, including a range of case studies. Pat Leon reports on the start of this programme, and opposite, a case study from the programme illustrates how new technologies can support a wider range of learners.
The first results from JISC's four-year e-learning initiative are beginning to come online. Last month (August 2004) saw the web publication of case studies illustrating ten very different but effective uses of e-learning technology in sixth form colleges, further education colleges and universities, ranging from a course in a sixth form to a master's degree at a top-rank university. Two further sets of ten case studies will follow, as well as several reviews of the state of e-learning pedagogy in the UK.
Sarah Knight, who manages the programme, says the case studies and other research were designed with the Department for Education and Skills' e-learning strategy consultation in mind. This is JISC's first research programme into what makes effective e-learning. "There are pockets of excellence in e-learning everywhere and much that is truly innovative," says Knight, "but we still need to research more into the pedagogy involved; therefore we have to rely on sharing our knowledge about what's worked and what hasn't."
A group of experts from higher, further, adult and community education and related agencies is helping JISC keep abreast of developments in their communities in order to identify what is driving e-learning. Pedagogy is one of four strands in the JISC e-learning initiative, launched last December. The other three are: technical frameworks and tools, innovation, and distributed e-learning.
Netskills compiled the first ten case studies, which will form the basis of a guidebook, Effective Practice in e-Learning, to be published this autumn. The guide includes video clips on CD-ROM by Xube, in which teaching staff and learners paint a full picture of their e-learning experiences.
The second set of case studies, led by Andrew Ravenscroft of London Metropolitan University, will look at how e-learning theory maps to actual practice. The third, headed by Agnes Kukulska-Hulme of the Open University and Nora Mogey of the University of Edinburgh, will look at how staff and students are using wireless and mobile technologies, as well as their effects on the use of space in classrooms and elsewhere.
Two other studies are also coming to fruition. One, led by Professor Chris Fowler of the University of Essex's Chimera Institute of Socio-technical Innovation and Research, has produced guidance on effective e-learning practice. The other, under Dr Martin Oliver, involving researchers from University College London and the Institute of Education, is looking at what teaching staff need in terms of resources, tools and support services to develop their e-learning skills.
Helen Beetham, consultant to the programme, who is looking at models of e-learning, says case studies are central to her research. She explains: "The value of having 30 case studies is what we can learn from them. They are all different, but they can help us compile common terms to describe what is happening so that people can easily locate examples to match their needs." Helen's work also involves consultations with teaching staff, and evaluating new tools that will help them design learning activities for themselves. She adds: "We have done so much in the first six months, but it is all interconnected. People will start to see some really strong evidence of what works in e-learning."
For further information see the e-Learning Pedagogy programme
See what I mean?
Ellen Lessner, of Abingdon and Witney College, presents a case study illustrating how learners there are using assistive software across the curriculum.
Graphical ways of representing ideas and information can make abstract ideas visible and concrete. Mindmapping software such as Inspiration® allows learners to plan, amend and extend their initial thoughts on a topic, using visual techniques to develop their cognitive and learning ability. Equally, software such as TextHELP Read & Write can support faster and more accurate writing.
At Abingdon and Witney College, we use these applications not just for learners with disabilities, such as dyslexia, but view them as a fundamental right for all learners. Where disability exists, Read & Write offers a readback facility with customisable voices, allowing writers to hear what they have written. Speech-enabled word prediction and dictionary facilities can also help learners find the right way of expressing themselves. However, this software can also support learners of all abilities by offering phonetic spellchecking, identification of easily confused words and sample sentences to enable selection of the right spelling. Read & Write operates through Windows and has proved an invaluable tool for learners at all stages and levels.
Our aim is to make these tools a normal part of college experience. Spelling difficulties are not just an issue for the few, yet the stigma attached to study support can prevent learners from seeking help. The solution has been to embed the use of assistive software throughout the college, making these applications as widely available as possible, including on staffroom computers.
Learners are introduced to the software through the tutorial programme as a routine part of induction. Individual subject tutors can then call on the study support team to team-teach classes when the first assignments are set, helping to build an effective relationship with those who might later require additional one-to-one support.
Empowering all learners to see what they mean, and write what they mean to say, requires college-wide access to assistive software. Doing this gives learners the added benefit of exploring how they as individuals learn best.
Our experience has been that placing visual and auditory learning options alongside standard wordprocessing software has enabled a wider range of learners to progress further than they previously thought possible. And when they discover what they can achieve, they often do.
Ellen Lessner (ILT Development Co-ordinator)
Abingdon and Witney College
For further information see the e-Learning Pedagogy programme
From fieldwork to desktop
How do you bring the results of fieldwork to the virtual environment of the desktop? A new tool allows students, teachers and researchers to do this with minimal technical knowledge, writes William Kilbride.
Fieldwork is at the core of many disciplines. Understanding the processes behind historical and natural landscapes is a constant challenge: like an exercise book that you fill in every time you walk down a road or look at a building.
One of the privileges of teaching is being able to help students do the same, because then you know you have helped someone see a familiar world differently. But fieldwork is a managerial challenge. Inaccessible and fragile locations, expensive recording equipment and burgeoning numbers make it difficult to extend the rich, deep experience on which disciplines like geography, archaeology and ecology depend.
The University of Leicester, in collaboration with the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), has developed a new toolkit to help teach spatial awareness. The 'Virtual Walkabout' is based on the simple premise that photographs of sites and monuments can be connected by their spatial relationship. So, a series of still images of the stone circles at Avebury can be transformed into a simple walking tour of the site.
This could be done with virtual reality, but that would require knowledge of specialist software and access to specialist equipment. By using simple technology, it is possible to have a virtual tour of a site, and to create your own. Armed with a digital camera, students can complete their own field project in little more than an afternoon.
The Virtual Walkabout is the brainchild of Professor Clive Ruggles and colleagues, who created the first walkabouts in the late 1980s and 90s. Recent work by the University of Leicester and the ADS has put it online. Three basic tools exist: exemplars of completed walkabouts; a walkabout generator into which images can be fed; and a tutorial which takes students from start to finish.
University College Winchester is the first institution to use the Virtual Walkabout in its teaching. Dr Nick Thorpe, Head of Undergraduate Archaeology, was very positive about the experiences of his students. "Several undertook individual projects using Virtual Walkabout at historic buildings, archaeological monuments and historic landscapes. These were highly successful, both in terms of the technology and in encouraging a deeper understanding of the place being studied. One of the students also extended the use of Virtual Walkabout beyond our expectations by including engravings of now-destroyed buildings to provide an understanding of why the current view did not seem to 'make sense'. We will certainly be using Virtual Walkabout again next year."
"We wanted to make a toolkit which could be used in a variety of different ways, according to the needs of different institutions," commented Dr Michael Reynier, project leader and formerly of LTSN and the University of Leicester. "Students can create walkabouts of almost any landscape: near or far, contemporary or prehistoric."
Commenting on the technology behind the Virtual Walkabout, Dr Julian Richards, Director of the ADS noted: "Students using the Virtual Walkabout learn a lot about the underlying technology, but it doesn't get in the way. Complex issues like file formats, metadata and image processing are addressed, but they don't deflect from the fieldwork issues."
Keeping on track
Using technology to inspire: A programme begins its second year full of enthusiasm and in close partnership with the JISC Regional Support Centres. Eddie Gulc reports.
More than two-thirds of further education colleges in England are involved in a programme that is equipping teachers with the skills to incorporate e-learning in the classroom. Nearly 300 more licenses for the same programme have been picked up by specialist colleges, Adult and Community Learning providers and small higher education colleges.
The Ferl Practitioners' Programme (FPP) was devised by the Ferl team at Becta to offer in-house training, resources and materials in the effective use of e-learning. Staff at JISC Regional Support Centres have worked closely with Ferl development officers to get the first year of the programme rolling. They offer guidance, make college visits and organise briefing events.
Overcoming teacher scepticism about the role of e-learning in their colleges is one challenge they face. Lesley Brooke is ILT in the Curriculum Coordinator at Bedford College, supported by RSC Eastern. She says that teachers' views changed over their one-year course in Transforming Learning with ILT. "They absolutely love it," she said. "From an initial position of scepticism, they have all embraced the ideas they've been exploring in their classroom sessions."
Lesley's Learning Technologies team at Bedford now provide about ten Technology Innovations Rooms for in-house workshops and other activities. She says that RSC Eastern has "been tremendous, running events for new colleges using the programme, providing online support and a great deal more."
At the national level, this support is also proving invaluable. Clare Killen is the Project Manager at Ferl for the FPP. She puts much of the success of the programme down to collaboration such as this. "The RSCs have been instrumental in the success of the programme," she says. "Key to the programme is the way in which colleges can personalise the model, the resources and materials that we provide and we have had strong support from the RSCs in this."
"What we're seeing is the growth of active communities within colleges," Clare continues. "If someone is having trouble with one particular area of their training, another one can say 'I know about that, I can help'. This has been one of its key successes."
Importantly, accreditation is also available under the programme, which maps to FENTO standards as well as the e-skills UK Skills Framework for an Information Age. Elements of it are now also accredited by the Joint Examining Board. "Practitioners can choose whether to follow the accreditation route or not," Clare explains. "That's entirely up to them. It's an important part of the programme's flexibility."
The new academic year should see further development. "There's a tremendous need for this programme," says Clare Killen. "While we've had a great deal of success over the past year, I feel we've only just started!"
Eddie Gulc (RSC Eastern)
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