JISC Inform 18
Featuring an interview with Professor Drummond Bone of Universities UK, a look at the East London Theatre Archive and an exploration of what online conferencing has to offer.
New heights: Supporting excellence in learning, teaching and research
Contents
From stage to screen
Important theatre resources are being preserved and made widely available through a unique collaboration, writes Rachel Pitman
From musical halls to burlesque, youth theatre to alternative comedy - London's East End has played a long and colourful role in UK theatre history. Now thanks to a new JISCfunded digitisation project researchers and students will be able to access some 15,000 rare and historic resources documenting the area's influential contribution to theatre.
The East London Theatre Archive, funded under the Digitisation programme, will create an invaluable database of resources, capturing and preserving unique and endangered artefacts and collections - including images, playbills, press cuttings and recordings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries - held by a number of theatres and theatre bodies that have made a significant contribution to the development of theatre studies and performing arts around the world.
The project is being led by the University of East London (UEL) to develop the archive over the next two years, with partner institutions and contributors including the Hackney Empire, Victoria and Albert Theatre Collections, the Half Moon Young People's Theatre, the Arts and Humanities Data Service, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Hoxton Hall, and Wilton's Music Hall.
More than 100 guests from the worlds of showbusiness and education gathered to celebrate the launch of the archive at UEL. Amongst those who attended the event were Lord Rix - the former actor-manager Brian Rix, now Chancellor of the University of East London.
'Without the history of the theatre', he says, 'it's very difficult for people to know where they're coming from. Unless you know, for instance, where farce has come from - from Feydeau, Molière and, earlier, the Greeks - you can appreciate it as theatre, but you can't appreciate its history. 
You think you've invented something when you haven't.'
The archive aims to celebrate the influence of East London theatre as well as to preserve its legacy, and plans to allow access not only to academics, but to all lovers of theatre.
Professor Andrew McDonald said the project would make accessible otherwise inaccessible resources and facilitate research in the subject area: 'We're confident that the digital archive will become a resource of national and international significance and will make this vital part of our shared heritage available to all.'
East London Theatre Archive
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inbrief
New report highlights challenges of data
The data deluge is upon us, and now is the right time to be taking action to ensure that we are not overwhelmed.
This is the message of a new report - Dealing with Data - that aims to help all stakeholders plan the next steps in data curation.
The report reviews the variety of data and arrangements for its curation and use across disciplines. The work of funders, national data centres, institutional repositories, learned societies and the Digital Curation Centre are all documented, with a view to identifying the roles, rights, responsibilities and relationships that are emerging as important.
Dealing with Data
JISC reviews its services to the Arts and Humanities community
Following the Arts and Humanities Research Council's decision to cease funding the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) from 31 March 2008, JISC has announced it is unable to continue to fund the service alone and will therefore cease its own funding on the same date.
Chair of JISC, Professor Sir Ron Cooke, paid tribute to the AHDS as a centre of expertise and excellence within the Arts and Humanities community, and praised staff for their hard work and dedication over the service's 11-year history.
JISC and its partners are now exploring alternative approaches to maintaining support for the Arts and Humanities research community beyond next year.
RSCs to advise Work Based Learning sector
The role of the nine JISC Regional Support Centres (RSCs) in England has been expanded to include the Work Based Learning (WBL) sector. This is part of the ongoing strategy of the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) to extend e-learning across all of the post-16 sectors. The RSCs will work closely with national partners and will provide regional signposting of LSC and partners' initiatives, projects and outputs.
JISC has appointed a national coordinator for these activities, and the English RSCs are each recruiting a Work Based e-Learning adviser to meet the needs of the RSCs' new clients.
RoMEO reaches landmark on publisher policies
Publisher policies on self-archiving listed by the Rights Metadata for Open archiving (RoMEO) service reached 300 in June. The service, funded by JISC and the Wellcome Trust, allows users to verify whether publishers' copyright policies in relation to self-archiving comply with the funding regulations of agencies that insist on open access archiving of research.
With the number of citations of openly accessible articles in institutional and other repositories rising beyond those published in journals, RoMEO has become an essential resource for many in the open access community.
RoMEO
TechD
is highlights groundbreaking work in specialist colleges
A new publication from TechDis, the UK's leading educational advisers on inclusion and accessibility, highlights how independent specialist colleges are progressing opportunities for disabled people in higher, further and adult education.
Specialist Colleges: Specialists in Innovation details the highly successful outcomes of Innovation Fund projects funded by JISC. A total of 27 projects across 22 colleges were funded, ranging from the use of interactive whiteboards to wireless networking in a rural college.
Special Colleges: Specialists in Innovation
Research reveals disparity in penalties for plagiarism
Regulations on plagiarism penalties among higher education institutions (HEIs) vary substantially throughout the UK, according to research published by JISCPAS, the national plagiarism advisory service.
The report, which analysed 153 HEIs, found that almost a third use guidelines that fail to advise academic staff on appropriate penalties, and reveals inconsistency across institutions. Academic penalties, such as failing assessments, were typical, but some institutions also allowed for expulsion and fines of up to £1,000.
JISC Plagiarism Advisory Service
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A window to the world
As institutional repositories are established and developed across the country to make research and other digital resources available, Professor Drummond Bone – President of Universities UK and Vice Chancellor of the University of Liverpool – speaks to JISC inform about the benefits of repositories, both to institutions and to the country as a whole 
The development of repositories is crucial not only for universities individually but for the UK economy as a whole. So said Professor Drummond Bone, President of Universities UK, at a major conference held in Manchester in June.
Speaking to around 200 delegates, he cited the OECD recommendation made in 2005, which urges member countries to develop policies and good practice to support the accessibility and management of research data – ‘not just for academic purposes, but for economic purposes too.’
Speaking privately to JISC inform after his presentation, he developed the argument further, suggesting that with the UK producing 9% of the world’s scientific publications and 12% of citations – despite representing just 1% of its population – repositories can help maintain its global standing through the enhanced visibility of its research and ‘bring significant benefits to UK plc’.
'Repositories can help maintain the UK's global standing through the enhanced visibility of its research and bring significant benefits to UK plc'
Science and innovation
It’s the changing nature of science, suggests Professor Bone, that provides the starting point for major changes in scholarly communications of which the development of repositories is a central element – ‘part of a worldwide movement’, he says, ‘to support higher education in the 21st century’.
‘There’s now much greater interdisciplinary research,’ he continues, ‘more collaboration, more data, small and large datasets being shared. We’ve now reached a stage in a lot of scientific enquiry where the benefits of serendipity are widely recognised. So huge amounts of data are being shared, with high throughput of new materials in pharmaceuticals discovery, for example, where the core of research is streaming vast quantities of data to see where you might get connections.’
Repositories are a key part of the research infrastructure, claims Professor Bone, because the accessibility they offer accords with the ways in which research is undertaken in the digital age: ‘They can enable researchers to switch between different sets of data very much more easily than traditional storage mechanisms. They can accommodate the vastly increased volumes of data and provide access to scientific data and related files. So there is the need for an infrastructure to look for workflow benefits, to allow data to be reused and for the university to put in place effective management and IPR controls.’
Institutional benefits provide a resounding case for repositories, not just in terms of the management of vital intellectual assets, but also in terms of a university’s prestige. As Vice Chancellor of the University of Liverpool as well as President of Universities UK, it is naturally enough an argument close to Professor Bone’s heart.
‘To represent one’s work effectively is an important component of carrying out research. It’s important, for example, for universities as they seek to recruit staff. A repository can represent a university in a wide-ranging way; if you bundle materials together in a repository and show the scale of the materials together, that’s a very good way of putting in a window the work of a university.’
Challenges
But there is still a debate to be conducted and hearts and minds to win over, he continues. ‘There are worries about academic identity, compatibility of systems and about coherence across the country,’ says Professor Bone.
‘A lot of these worries are perceptual and about the natural reluctance of all of us to change. But there is nothing fundamentally new about repositories conceptually. It’s merely that they seem new from the way in which data has been stored in libraries in the past. And that produces a sense of worry.’
Equally, he suggests, concerns over peer review – that repositories bypass the ways in which scholarly outputs have traditionally been reviewed for publication in journals – are misplaced: ‘There’s absolutely no reason why peer review mechanisms cannot be built into these systems. It’s not an either/or scenario. You can see elements of the new systems alongside repositories. Obviously peer review is key to this; no one wants to navigate through a universe of data without some signposts and quality markers.’
Learning and teaching
As a researcher with an international reputation in literature and linguistics, Professor Bone is quick, however, to counter the suggestion that it is only research in STM subjects (science, technology and medicine) that will benefit from repositories and, equally, that it is only research data that can find a home in them.
‘Repositories have important implications for all subjects, for lifelong learning and life-wide learning,’ he says. ‘This is sometimes missed. Both teachers and learners have the increasing need to manage and reuse materials. It’s much easier to adapt resources and modify teaching materials that you may want to exchange and repositories make this easier.’
And what of his own groundbreaking research in Romantic studies and, particularly, Byron? Would it have benefited from access to a pervasive network of institutional and subject repositories as is currently being developed? ‘It would have made access to material and to understand what material exists much easier,’ he replies. ‘It takes a long time to travel from one library to another, to scroll through catalogues if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Connections can be so much quicker and you can find related materials quicker, provided the repository has been constructed properly.’
Talk of standards and the building of repositories that can engage researchers enough to make them want to deposit their research leads to some frank advice from Professor Bone: ‘We are going to have to look at the further role and linkages between repositories and we’re going to have to look, in particular, at user evidence.
‘Sometimes repositories can be led by the technician and not the user and we’ve got to make sure this is user driven and the way to do this is to look at how they are used and how people want to use them. So we have to ensure that there are effective partnerships between technicians, users, librarians and researchers.’
JISC and Universities UK
'Universities UK supports the principle that publicly funded research should be made available with as few barriers as possible'
Professor Bone praises JISC’s work to establish repositories across the UK, saying that Universities UK is ‘firmly behind the JISC repositories initiative – £3m between 2005 and this year and another £14m over the next three years… Universities UK supports the principle that publicly funded research should be made available with as few barriers as possible. We issued a position statement in 2005 and we reaffirmed this recently.’ Optimistic about the future of UK research and the part that repositories will play in that future, Professor Bone says that open access ‘is becoming increasingly accepted across the sector. There are over 80 institutional and subject-based repositories in the UK. We all support the moves by some funders who now require their researchers to deposit their research in repositories. Find out more about the Universities UK policy statement on open access
‘All this favours open access since simultaneous deposit in repositories with peer review can offer the same and greater benefits [than publication in a journal without deposit]. Elements of the current system can offer greater choice. Anything that improves the coherence of a university’s research has got to be a good thing.’
Much has been achieved to improve the dissemination and access to research outcomes, bringing significant benefits to universities, researchers and students and indeed to the UK as a whole, he claims, returning to an insistent theme. ‘The full value of the wide variety of the information can only be realised by appropriate policies, practices and support systems,’ he says. ‘The development of repositories – while not the whole answer – is central to this’.
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Put it in the Depot!
All researchers and academic authors in the UK now have a repository in which to deposit their research papers under terms of open access. The Depot , a national JISC-funded repository based at EDINA in the University of Edinburgh, was launched last month to provide a range of services to support the self-archiving of research papers.
‘The principal purpose of the Depot,’ says Peter Burnhill, director of EDINA, is ‘to allow all UK academics to share in the benefits of open access. If they have an institutional repository, that’s to the good. But up to now they’ve been excluded unless they have an institutional or access to a subject repository.’
The Depot was first conceived solely as a national repository for those authors who did not yet have access to an institutional repository. But, as Peter Burnhill continues, while the Depot does include this function, the thinking developed to something altogether more ambitious: ‘The way we’ve designed the Depot at the reception area is that there’s a redirect service so that if there’s somebody from an institution which has an institutional repository we can redirect them to its front page, so they can take the necessary steps. So it generates content for all institutional repositories.’
This, he says, is the ‘Repository Junction’, a facility within the Depot that allows not only the re-routing of submissions of academic papers and journal articles (e-prints) but also of other educational and research content.
‘A dataset might go the Data Archive,’ says Peter Burnhill, ‘a learning object might go to Jorum, and so on… So we’ll be developing the Repository Junction, talking to others who have a repository or services to offer and providing that as part of the Depot.’
Although there are, he says ‘lots of actors in the field’, Peter Burnhill is clear about who will be the principal beneficiary of the Depot: ‘Institutions want themselves to be well represented, funding councils want to ensure their money is well spent.
‘But what we’ve done with the Depot is to gear this for the researcher, the academic author who is now persuaded that open access is the way to go… After all, authors want people to read what they write; what they want is recognition. They want to be read, they write to be read and to be recognised.’
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The coffee is virtual, but the welcome is real
We conduct many day-to-day activities online – from studying in virtual libraries to holding virtual auctions on eBay. Yet many of us still hesitate over a virtual conference. Ros Smith reports on how online conferencing is beginning to prove its worth 
A large scale conference should be a lively, interactive and even exhilarating experience, with opportunities to question eminent speakers, keep up to date with the latest trends, catch up with old acquaintances, and even make new ones over a cup of coffee. How can a virtual conference compete?
In June, the JISC online conference, Innovating e-Learning 2007, took up the challenge for the second year, bringing together over 300 UK and international delegates and presenters to discuss the impact of e-learning on institutional transformation and lifelong learning. The programme – designed for further and higher education – was wide ranging. Keynotes and main sessions were supported by papers submitted under an open call, plus an exhibition space and areas for resource-sharing, discussion and socialising. In fact, everything you would expect from a face-to-event and even a session held in the virtual world, Second Life®.
Delegates registered online and were issued with a user name, password and instructions by email – nothing unusual there. At this point, however, the experience of an online conference became somewhat different to its face-to-face equivalent.
Taking part in an online conference can in fact be an astonishingly rich – and transformative – experience
Innovating e-Learning 2007 opened for reading one week before the start date, enabling delegates to preview the content and familiarise themselves with the web-based format of the conference. Presenters frequently included audio files with their presentations, so that the immediacy of hearing presenters ‘speak’ was not lost.
Once the conference opened for postings, in a marked difference to face-to-face events, delegates could add comments and ask questions asynchronously at times convenient to them. They could also catch up with discussions they missed in the final phase of the conference – a four week reading period, when it was possible to reflect, download and pass on the outcomes.
The evidence in fact points to increased participation, rather than less. Despite some delegates never having previously attended an online conference, there was an air of excited anticipation and energy throughout Innovating e-Learning 2007.
‘The surprise of the conference for me was the sheer amount of real interest and useful conversation in the social forum,’ was the feedback from one delegate, in which nearly 14,000 postings were made in the main discussion areas alone. ‘I really liked the way it gave people the time to compose intelligent questions, incorporate links and participate in multiple in-depth discussions. What a great way to create and share knowledge!’ said another delegate.
And not participating directly – or ‘lurking’ – does not prevent non-contributing delegates finding value in the content and ideas posted by others.
Taking part in an online conference can in fact be an astonishingly rich – and transformative – experience. Without doubt, online conferences are here to stay!
Ros Smith
JISC e-Learning programme
Breaking new ground
New web technologies are changing the nature of learning and teaching. In this special investigation Mark Chillingworth discovers they offer opportunities and real challenges to learners, teachers and institutions
When the internet really came into academia in the mid to late 1990s, it was a simple extension of publishing; each website had a publisher. The publisher was a person of responsibility within the organisation such as a university. Communication between reader and writer was via email, which is not directly on the website itself, or alternatively on forums, again often a separate site.
Now a new crop of web-based services exists – for simplicity purposes grouped together under the banner ‘Web 2.0’ – communication between a site's publisher and its users all happens on the same page, and is therefore public and open for all to see. This represents a dynamic change in web behaviour and has created a buzz around Web 2.0 services.
Both the site publisher and its readers (users) now generate content in a metronomic flow of information passing back and forth. In academic circles this is a significant cultural change. One-to-one communication between the expert information holder and the learner has been a central part of the learning experience.
Now web technology is challenging this pillar of the academic world. Comments on blog postings, setting up personal virtual spaces in a social computing site like Facebook and editing Wiki texts are just three examples of what has been termed user generated content (see box right). In academia users are students, and they now have the ability to create as much content on a specialist subject as a senior lecturer.
‘Learning used to be a very passive thing, Web 2.0 taps into the more active pedagogy being developed, which is a good thing,’ says Gaynor Backhouse, project manager of the JISC-funded TechWatch service. 'Web 2.0 taps into the more active pedagogy being developed, which is a good thing'
Dave White, senior development manager for Technology Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL) at Oxford University, believes niche subjects will benefit the most from the increased ability to communicate. ‘Rather than having to go to conferences to find people with the same academic interests, you can join or organise a community on the web. Some disciplines rely on cross-institutional communication and this can now be done via Web 2.0 services.’
New technology is often regarded as an annoyance on arrival, but Paul Anderson, author of What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education, a JISC report, argues (see box right) ‘blogs are particularly useful for allowing students to follow stories over a period of time and reviewing the changing nature of how they are commented on by various voices.’ White agrees, believing social computing does create communities: ‘When you teach face-to-face you want a class to become a community, to talk and generate knowledge between themselves’. He adds: ‘The blogging community is very useful for generating and furthering knowledge.’
According to Anderson, blogging is being under-utilised by research communities, despite its ability to promote communications and community. Holding back the adoption of blogging could be the traditional importance of publishing research in a peer reviewed journal. But communities are growing: ‘There has also been a trend towards collective blogs such as ScienceBlogs and RealClimate, in which working scientists communicate with each other and the public,’ reports Anderson.
Beyond blogging, White at TALL believes education can adopt some good practices from social computing services such as MySpace and Facebook. ‘In a face-toface course you can take your notes away with you when you complete the course, but with an online course you lose them.’ White is researching how to extend the principles of paper notebooks on to the web. ‘Rather than invent something ourselves, we want to merge with a technology that already exists.’
Like television before it, Web 2.0 sites, especially encyclopaedia phenomenon Wikipedia, have been accused of dumbing down academia, in particular students using it as a primary source of reference rather than traditional books and texts. ‘It doesn't dumb down things and it doesn't facilitate dumbing down, it is not the technology, it’s the users,’ says White. He adds: ‘a new paradigm comes along, and people blame it for the woes of society. But those woes are already there.’
But academia has a right to be concerned about Wikipedia. Popular as the site is, it has been blighted by inaccuracies and bias introduced by public contributors who do not have to identify themselves. White though is more accepting of Wikipedia, despite its failings, ‘For a lot of people Wikipedia is the first point of reference. We need to accept that and have to educate people on how to critically research on Wikipedia.’
Backhouse is not completely dismissive of Wikipedia, describing it as an interesting ‘experiment’, and she is keen to point out that this is connected to another phenomenon – ‘the wisdom of the crowd’. ‘This is a bit like 'Ask the Audience' on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The quality of the answer depends on the number of people taking part.’
White defends Wikipedia: ‘The information that is not of high quality is about popular culture and therefore gets a high profile.’ A fact backed up by scientific journal Nature, which analysed and found in December 2005 the scientific information on Wikipedia is as accurate as the venerated Encyclopaedia Britannica. White believes a ‘long tail’ effect exists on Wikipedia where the quality information is accurate, but it is niche and therefore gets no coverage.
White and TALL have carried out research, which shows that Wikipedia is not a service purely used by youths. ‘It is popular with all age ranges, and on a percentage basis, those with a PhD using the service is very high.’
White is positive though: ‘Students have more of a choice of where their resources come from. Over the last five years we have found that courses are lighter on content provision, as there is so much good content out there on the web. We have numerous courses where the content is actually from the Victoria and Albert Museum, other universities and the BBC. They are respectable institutions.’
Backhouse is seeing academia refocus on the provenance of information; good citation skills are coming back in favour, she says. White agrees: ‘Understanding the creation process of academic work is not very explicit at present. Now that you come across so much information through a browser, that understanding is becoming important.’
Academia has not ignored the internet, the last decade having seen significant investment by universities into e-learning systems. But some quarters are witnessing radical changes in user behaviour. Anderson reports a lecturer who joined a Facebook discussion on coursework because it was easier than encouraging them to use the institutional Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
Backhouse says a debate is growing: ‘It’s VLE versus the “public learning environment”, but it’s not about where students want to go. It is really about where lecturers can place their learning material because of the restrictions of copyright.’
Backhouse is also concerned that technology closes off routes to learners and educators: ‘It's hard for people who are not up to date with new technology, which makes the overall learning curve so much steeper.‘ She also believes Web 2.0 technology does not benefit shy students: ‘On an institutional wiki you are still putting yourself on the line, you cannot do it anonymously.’
It is always important to step back and White agrees and points to some problems educators can face: ‘If you made Facebook mandatory you are asking people to have a skills set that not everyone has.’
But overall, students will benefit from a move towards Web 2.0 in academia: ‘New tools give students the ability to manage their own learning in a way that didn't exist before. There is a lot to be said though for using a hybrid of services that already exists out there, as well as Web 2.0.’
The social computing culture makes it an ideal learning space according to White: ‘Web 2.0 is used for fun, study and work; it has a multi-usage aspect.’ ‘Web 2.0 is used for fun, study and work; it has a multi-usage aspect.’
Backhouse though thinks the fun side of Web 2.0 culture could damage its abilities to be an effective learning space: ‘Many students love using these tools, but they are mainly social tools, and there are a lot of students who don't like working in that way. Also, as soon as you incorporate fun stuff into learning then they often go off using that system.’
White thinks the fun and social side of Web 2.0 behaviour is difficult for institutions to engage with because it is so informal, he says. ‘It’s almost too fluid and moving too quickly.’ Backhouse says that academia needs ‘some good reasons for take-up, because these services are not unproblematic.’
‘Anyone who sits at a computer for their job has integrated Web 2.0 activities into their practices,‘ thus Web 2.0 is already part of academia, according to White. Backhouse disagrees: ‘There is not a lot of evidence of Web 2.0 affecting the process of education.’
Instead, Backhouse cites overall concern about technological adoption: ‘Lecturers perhaps are more confused about this sort of technology. They often feel intimidated.’ Backing up her feelings, she recalls one lecturer she met: ‘One lecturer had a bad computer experience ten years ago, so now they always print out a hard copy.‘
White though thinks it is an ‘oversimplification to suggest it is only young learners that are engaging with this technology.’ One of the reasons that Web 2.0 has caused so much interest is that anyone can contribute to the canon of knowledge, whether through blogging or wiki editing.
Backhouse has already expressed concerns about how an expert knowledge holder is attributed with their rightful place as an expert, and she is also concerned that the inclusiveness and fluidity of Web 2.0 will negatively affect education: ‘There are many larger issues at play. It is not as simple as asking what do students want to do and delivering it. Students are students; they are at the beginning of the learning experience.’
What is Web 2.0 ?
User generated content is the term that has become part of the academic lexicon, but just what is it?
Web 2.0 technology breaks down the barriers to producing content that book publishing, media organisations and even the first generation of websites placed. This has created the user generated content phenomena, where the general public and students have the ability to create and contribute to information resources.
The advent of Web 2.0 technologies and its content has been driven by the widespread adoption of broadband internet connectivity and the low cost of Web 2.0 publishing technology, as well as media creation devices such as digital cameras.
Examples of user generated content include blogging (web logging), digital photography sharing and publishing; podcasting and most importantly to academia, editing wiki resources. The most prominent user generated content sites include Flickr, a photosharing library that is free to search and view; YouTube a video sharing equivalent to Flickr; MySpace a social networking site where users create personal pages from templates and connect to the MySpace sites of friends and subjects of interest, and Wikipedia the online encyclopedia written and edited by its readers.
Although often talked of in negatives tones, user generated content has been harnessed by the BBC, which set up a user generated team back in 2005, which came into its own during the 7 July London bombings and the Buncefield oil depot fire.
Web 2.0 – its implications for education
It is always important to step back and assess whether a technology is really beneficial to you and those you communicate to, writes Mark Chillingworth. What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education is a report from the JISC-funded TechWatch service, and it does a sterling job of standing back and looking at the wider picture in terms of the education sector.
Paul Anderson of Intelligent Content, who recently won the Computer Science Writer of the Year award, penned the paper and successfully aims it at the broad church of academia. Readers will draw some useful technical insight, whilst the completely technology illiterate can equally gather an instant insight into the technology and its meaning.
There are entries on all the major technologies and standards, including Ajax, SOAP and Open APIs. Chapter three is where the meat is really added to the technological bones, titled ‘The big ideas behind Web 2.0’, it breaks down user generated content, power of the crowd and network effects in accessible language.
This report will clarify what the technology is, for your organisation it will inform you what you can and can't do with it. A balanced approach means the positives of using this technology share equal billing with some very serious real-world concerns. As a result, any reader will be able to decide personally what level of Web 2.0 involvement suits their needs and not feel threatened.
What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education
Mark Chillingworth
Editor, Information World Review
Fast forward to the future
JISC Chairman, Professor Sir Ron Cooke assesses the current state of the higher education sector as it continues its engagement with ICT
Over the past decade and more, ICT has moved to the heart of education and research in the UK. No longer the preserve of the early adopter or the expert, it has become not only an integral part of our working lives as learners, teachers, researchers, librarians and administrators, but also a central strand of institutional and national provision. 
One has only to think of some of the key online resources that have become available in the past few years and compare their accessibility and ease of use with the challenges faced by those of us from an earlier generation to understand the transformation that continues to shape the ways in which we learn, teach and undertake research. It is no exaggeration to say that universities have led the way in this country, not only in the adoption of online resources but in a variety of other ICT-related spheres, giving the UK a crucial international edge.
Much of this is due to the innovation and far-sightedness of universities as they develop or adopt new solutions to familiar challenges. But the rapid progress being made in higher education's use of ICT has also been made possible by the sector's willingness to look for national solutions to those challenges where it makes sense. We have learnt that innovation in ICT is not cheap and that advantages are not easily realised. This means that the economies of scale attained by JISC and others are of real value.
The remorseless pace of change calls for real vision and ears close to the ground
The world-class JANET network may be the best example of such an approach, but there are many others that have placed the UK ahead of much of the world in the use of ICT: open-access digital repositories are beginning to help universities make their research outputs more visible and maximise their investment in research; the digitisation of major scholarly resources is making available important but otherwise inaccessible resources; virtual research environments are increasingly showing how researchers can collaborate across institutional and even national boundaries.
But for all our achievements, challenges remain. How are we to ensure, for example, that IT systems can support each institution in achieving its goals? How are we to harness technology to ensure that the UK's world-leading innovations in research can be translated into commercial applications? How can we reach every practitioner so that each is in a position to judge the value of what ICT has to offer? And what of the international dimension to these questions?
For us at JISC, these challenges are neither institutional, national nor, indeed, international. Rather they are challenges that we should meet – and are meeting – together, in collaboration.
The remorseless pace of change calls for real vision and ears close to the ground to ensure that we maintain progress. As a sector, we have come a long way in a short time but, in an increasingly competitive world, much still remains to be done.
This article is an edited version of an article printed in the Times Higher Education Supplement. Reproduced by kind permission of TSL Education Ltd.
Times Higher Education Supplement
Managing the business of education
More adaptable and interactive technologies are not only changing learning and teaching, but transforming the management and administrative functions of education institutions. Steve Bailey looks at the challenges
The phrases ‘rapid change’ and ‘information technology’ seem to have been synonymous for the past 20 years or more. But interestingly technical developments that can truly be described as paradigm-shifts are surprisingly few and far between.
Think back a decade and the basic picture was very similar. Then, as now, most institutions had a centrally planned hierarchical structure based on a client-server architecture providing access to office applications and storage space. Email was being used extensively and the internet was well established as a source of information. Are we now on the cusp of a new era in IT and user behaviour, which could fundamentally change the way in which information is created, used and managed?
But are we now on the cusp of a new era in IT and user behaviour, which could fundamentally change the way in which information is created, used and managed?
All institutions now have staff writing their own blogs and making use of wikis, but this is only the beginning. Users are beginning to shun the institution’s email system in favour of Instant Messenger or Skype and there are even reports of staff preferring to use social software such as Facebook to communicate with students, rather than the university’s Virtual Learning Environment.
Such examples demonstrate how the edges are now blurring between institutional processes and the use of externally hosted consumer web applications to achieve them. Staff are now just as likely to place photographic teaching resources on Flickr as they are to store them in a formally recognised university system.
The ultimate expression of this may be the rise of externally hosted web-based applications, a trend known as ‘Office 2.0’. Those in the vanguard of this movement foresee the day when a user’s PC need hold nothing more than a web browser.
Word processing applications, spreadsheet software, email packages and storage space will be hosted externally and accessed from any PC with a network connection. This may seem far fetched but the technology exists and increasing numbers are beginning to see the attraction of ‘anytime, any place, anywhere’ access to the totality of their information.
But all the advantages to the user of convenience, informality, personalisation and lack of constraint raise significant issues for those charged with ensuring the appropriate management and governance of the institution’s information. There have already been examples of institutions struggling to balance the academic’s traditional freedom of speech with the need to protect the reputation of the university following comments made on blogs.
Looking further ahead institutions need to start addressing the implications of staff relying on externally provided applications and services, beginning with a definition of the technical and social boundaries of what is considered acceptable use.
Reliance on external providers also raises obvious questions regarding security and privacy issues and of course the potential ramifications should the company in question suddenly withdraw its service. Institutions should also ensure that they have fully considered the intellectual property implications of storing content with third parties.
Finally, just because the content is no longer physically held by the institution does not mean they’re no longer responsible for it. All the same issues regarding compliance with legislation such as the Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts still apply, but are likely to be far harder to address in this de-centralised, de-regulated model.
This is the challenge that the records and information management profession in particular must adapt itself to meet. Imposing any degree of centralised control has already proved difficult to achieve with attempts to introduce specialist corporate-wide records management systems meeting with only limited success.
As the way in which institutions create and use information fragments still further we must now seek innovative methods to address their management issues. Such approaches should seek to work with and even take advantage of these new technologies, rather than simply try to prevent their use or pretend they don’t exist. Perhaps what is required is a completely new approach, something which might rather predictably be described as – ‘Records Management 2.0’?
Steve Bailey
JISC infoNet
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Four major challenges for administrators in a Web 2.0 world
Resource discovery How will you find related information stored between several separate hosted services?
Intellectual Property Rights Are your users aware of who owns the copyright to content stored with hosted services? Could you inadvertently be losing ownership of valuable intellectual assets?
Access What happens to your content if your service host disappears overnight? Or when the user in whose account it is stored leaves the institution?
‘The smoking gun’ The language of the web is often more free, frank and informal. This fact when combined with the near infinite, permanent storage offered by most hosted services is a potentially explosive mix in these days of accountability and FOI.
Making UKLight of research data
In 2004 JISC commissioned UKLight, an optical network dedicated to transferring large quantities of research data and bypassing the conventional network. The Research Councils funded several projects under the umbrella name of ESLEA (Exploitation of Switched Light-paths for e-Science Applications) to put this fledgling network through its paces. The projects are now finishing, just as UKLight is being incorporated into the JANET network. Here Judy Redfearn takes a look at two projects that have shown how optical networks such as UKLight are transforming the way science is done - and even the science that can be done
One giant radiotelescope
To get the best image of a celestial object, radio astronomers combine data from several widely dispersed telescopes. Typically, this involves agreeing to point their telescopes simultaneously at a particular object, record the data on discs and send the discs by lorry to a central data processing point. It can be weeks or months before the final image is ready.
Now, however, they can obtain images in less than a day thanks to UKLight and similar high-speed networks elsewhere. Such networks enable the transfer of data for immediate processing, thus turning many widely dispersed radiotelescopes into the equivalent of one vast telescope and enabling astronomers to respond in real time to rapidly changing celestial phenomena.
The ESLEA radio astronomy project developed the use of UKLight to transfer data between the Jodrell Bank radiotelescope at the University of Manchester and the Dwingeloo data processing centre in the Netherlands. Six radiotelescopes in the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, Italy and Poland now have the capability to take simultaneous images of celestial objects regularly and send the data to Dwingeloo via linked high speed networks for immediate processing using a technique called electronic very-long-baseline interferometry (eVLBI). Combining data in real time like this produces images of unprecedented detail and sensitivity
Other European radiotelescopes are expected to join them shortly. ‘eVLBI is becoming business as usual,’ says Paul Burgess who works on the data processing side at Jodrell Bank. Combining data in real time like this produces images of unprecedented detail and sensitivity and allows radio astronomers to make adjustments quickly when image quality is poor. It also enables them to respond to rapidly varying phenomena.
One of the first successes with the six linked radiotelescopes was the detection of a flare associated with a binary star system in our galaxy, which probably contains a black hole or neutron star (see image). When material from an orbiting ‘normal’ star falls onto the compact object, a giant fireball or flare is produced. ‘This happens on a time scale of about ten hours and before now disk-recorded VLBI could only image the object weeks after the event,’ says Anthony Rushton, an astronomer at Jodrell Bank.
‘Now astronomers can watch these cosmic events in “near real-time”.’
An image of a microquasar taken under the ELSEA radioastronomy project. It shows a binary star system in our galaxy which probably contains a black hole or neutron star.
Simulating millions of moving atoms to understand materials
By connecting supercomputers across continents, optical networks such as UKLight enable researchers to simulate far more complex molecular systems than would otherwise be possible and so gain valuable insights into the nature and behaviour of materials.
Professor Peter Coveney and colleagues at University College London have performed a number of these simulations in conjunction with the ESLEA project. The latest is of a platelet of clay containing up to 10 million atoms.
Supercomputers on the UK National Grid Service, the US TeraGrid and DEISA (EU Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications) were pressed into service to perform simulations using five models of increasing size and complexity. ‘The amount of data we produce is very large and UKLight is very valuable for getting the data back to us here’
‘UKLight enables us to link these grids together. The amount of data we produce is very large and UKLight is very valuable for getting the data back to us here,’ says Professor Coveney.
Each model simulated accurately the motion and interactions between all the atoms in clay platelets of varying sizes. ‘As we moved from smaller to larger models we began to see collective undulations – the clay platelet sheets wave up and down,’ says Professor Coveney.
This property, which was not known before in clay materials, is on too small a scale to be easily verified by experiment. But it has implications for the properties of clay on an ordinary scale which can be computed and then compared with experiments.
By using distributed high performance computers linked by grids, the UCL team was able to perform all the simulations concurrently. Without such a facility, the time taken to perform the simulations on one supercomputer alone would have been too long to be practicable.
As a next step, they plan to simulate clay platelets embedded in a polymer matrix. Such clay-polymer nanocomposites are under development by the automotive industry as materials for car bodies. Compared with polymers alone, they have far greater mechanical strength, improved fire retardant properties and they make better barriers to the diffusion of gas.
‘These simulations will give us a better understanding of the properties of these new and important materials,’ says Professor Coveney.
ESLEA
Free for all
A university college in Plymouth is the first institution in the country to offer a free laptop to every new undergraduate. Philip Pothen reports on the first year of what is proving to be a groundbreaking initiative
Prominent on the front page of the College of St Mark and St John’s website is a notice to all first year undergraduates that they are entitled to a free laptop. This initially startling news is in fact, it turns out, part of an integrated and far-reaching approach to ICT that is already, according to college staff and students, beginning to pay dividends.
Professor David Baker is the Principal of the College of St Mark and St John. He says that the initiative is ‘part of a total package, part of the college’s wider commitment to both widening participation and e-learning.’ Started as a pilot at the beginning of this academic year, the initiative has seen around 1,000 laptops given to students, with plans now in place to continue the scheme into the next academic year and beyond.
‘It means that everyone has the same basic IT capacity,’ says David Baker. ‘The college is a strong player in the widening participation agenda and, with many of our students from poorer backgrounds, they’re not always able to afford laptops. This initiative means a level playing-field.’
But it also stems from wider plans around learner support and e-learning, he suggests. ‘Over a three-year period it means we have a guaranteed infrastructure that can support our e-learning developments. We’re aiming to transfer all our teaching materials and resources on to Learning Space, our VLE. Within an hour of registering, students can connect to course materials.’
The college is wifi-enabled so that students can access the Web anywhere in the college. One benefit is, says David Baker, that ‘the strain on our IT rooms is much less acute than it was. The students really appreciate it. It means they all have the capacity to engage with our wider plans.’
He is clear too that another reason for the initiative is that the college was keen to establish a ‘unique selling point’ in what its Principal calls ‘the brave new world of market forces and variable fees’. Indeed, the college’s website makes clear that the laptops have been made available ‘due to the extra income received from the "top-up fees" introduced by the Government in 2006–7.’
But what of the capacity of the College’s IT department to handle the inevitable problems?
The college’s head of computing services is David Riggs. His initial concern was, he says, that his staff would be ‘swamped’. ‘But,’ he continues, ‘that’s not the case at all. We made sure we had good quality laptops and the advantage is that we see students all with the same equipment. That makes any problems much easier to resolve.’
‘As I go around the campus it’s wonderful to see the laptops actually being used as a tool in the students’ learning experience’
Ensuring the wireless network was extensive enough and dense enough around access points to meet student demand for college-wide access was the main challenge, he continues, while rolling out wireless access to halls of residence over the summer will complete the coverage.
But the most important effect of the initiative is, he says, ‘the empowerment of students… We’re now delivering access to resources wherever students choose to do their learning. It’s changed the emphasis on what universities should provide, from centralised services to a more client-based outlook. As I go around the campus it’s wonderful to see the laptops actually being used as a tool in the students’ learning experience.’
As one those students, Lisa Tetley would agree. Having come to the end of the first year of a BA Drama with English course, she says her free laptop has been ‘a godsend… I’ve got children and the laptop gives me the flexibility to do coursework in a variety of places, at home, in the library, in campus refectories and on placement. The college’s wifi connections are extensive so connecting to the web is straightforward. I didn’t know anything before but I’ve learnt new skills. I’d like to learn more too.’
Lindsay Thompson is on the same course. She always thought of herself as a ‘technophobe… But,’ she says, ‘it turns out I’m not. I configured the wireless connection on my laptop myself. It’s given me new skills.’ The first time she has owned a laptop, she says she finds it ‘invaluable… It’s fantastic. It means that everyone now has to do their work – there are no excuses!’
So successful has the initiative been that other institutions look set to follow suit. ‘Others are looking to follow our lead,’ says Professor David Baker. ‘Our supplier has had enquiries from a number of institutions, as have we.’
‘We’ll be continuing the initiative,’ he continues. ‘We’re happy with our supplier, the students have given us good feedback and the results have been extremely positive.’
Needless to say, Lisa, Lindsay and around a thousand other students would wholeheartedly agree.
College of St Mark and St John
Mainstreaming technology
With the JISC Regional Support Centres being funded for a further three years from August, Philip Pothen reports on how one RSC is building on its work
The announcement of funding for the JISC Regional Support Centres for a further three years comes as good news to colleges and other learning organisations around the country. Marking an important affirmation of the role that RSCs have played in supporting the post-16 education sector since 2000, the renewal of funding also represents, however, a strengthening of their role as the sector continues to mainstream ICT in all areas of learning and teaching.
Roy Currie is Director of ILT at Bedford College, part of the RSC Eastern region. He says that his RSC has been a ‘trailblazer’ for the region bringing colleges together in ways that have encouraged the sharing of expertise and good practice.
‘Our college has benefited tremendously from the RSC,’ he says. ‘It set up the Eastern Region e-Learning Forum, which has been an important body for the region as a whole. Its e-Learning Fair was one of the first in the country, bringing together more than 100 delegates. It’s one of many workshops and other events they regularly run, part of their strong commitment to making sure representatives from colleges in the region get together and share knowledge. We’re very proud of our RSC.’
For the manager of RSC Eastern, Gerard Hayes, this commitment has been an important element of the RSC’s work, providing a foundation for future developments in what will be their third round of funding. ‘No one can be an expert in everything, but one of our strengths is the contacts we have and the connections we can make. Our starting point is “What is it that you as a customer need and how can we support you?”’
This outlook and this attention to the sector’s needs has seen the RSCs’ remit grow to include the support of HE courses taught in FE and now most recently the work-based learning sector. Over the course of the next three years it will also see a greater emphasis on supporting the strategic development of colleges, says Gerard Hayes.
‘We’ll be continuing to support practitioners, technical and learning resource staff, of course,’ he says, ‘but there will be an increased emphasis on looking at how embedded ICT is in the work of organisations. We’ll be working more closely with senior managers and using a range of techniques – health checks, audits, tools – to measure and encourage e-maturity across the board.’
As one of these senior managers, Roy Currie welcomes these developments and gives an example of how his college is already benefiting from this broader approach. ‘The Learning and Skills Council has invested significantly in recent years in refreshing the FE sector’s buildings with a number of major campus redevelopments taking place’, he says. ‘The RSC has been highly pro-active in supporting senior managers and others in colleges in making sure that all the new buildings are able to support new ways of teaching and learning. They’ve supported us through events, advice, support and access to resources such as the infoKit. They’ve been invaluable.’
But for Gerard Hayes and other RSC managers, the most important aspect of the RSCs’ work over the coming years is their renewed mission to mainstreaming ICT across the post-16 sector. ‘e-Learning is learning,’ he says, ‘and it’s our job to stimulate innovation in learning and encourage its adoption across the sector. Our goal is for ICT to become as embedded as a blackboard and a piece of chalk!’
RSC Eastern
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