Foundation degrees are becoming highly significant post-18 qualifications in Wales. In a recent written statement Leighton Andrews, Minster for Children, Education and Lifelong Learning in the Welsh Assembly Government, identified Foundation degrees (Fds) as an important outcome of ‘For our Future’, and a way of providing HE that is ‘inclusive, accessible and responsive to the needs of Wales’.  HEFCW (Higher Education Further Funding Council for Wales) subsequently presented its policy on Fds and announced specific funding via the ‘One Wales’ initiative.
Fds are a key aspect of  the provision of the new UHOVI, with Further Education Institutions (FEIs) playing an important role. Fds are certainly a significant component of Coleg Llandrillo’s HE provision as I observed whilst attending their internal Higher Education (HE) conference at which I had been invited to speak. The number of Fds already offered by the college is well into double figures, and expected to rise over the next few years.  Subjects covered range from health to engineering, giving a good illustration of the way in which this type of qualification links scholarly activity to the workplace. The degrees are currently run in collaboration with HEIs, but Coleg Llandrillo is aiming to award its own Fds in the near future.

What is the role of learning technology in the foundation degree programme? As in any other teaching and learning scenario, technology can enhance the learning experience by opening doors to an array of resources and new ways of learning. Technology can also provide solutions to specific problems: for example, the Deaf Studies Fd programme at Coleg Llandrillo successfully bid for funding from the HEAT (Higher Education Assistive Technologies) scheme (funds provided by the HEA and promoted via JISC Techdis and RSC Wales) to explore the use of internet video facilities to aid communication between students and tutors. JISC funding may impact on other Fds in wales, for example withon a UWIC work-based learning project.

From the point of view of a student embarking on a Fd, learning technologies can make a real difference. Good online resources such as e-journals are a key source of subject-specific information, and VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments) may be vital for students who need access to both FEI and HEI course information and resources, and who may additionally have limited opportunity to use library resources due to being part-time and/or geographically remote. Information literacy skills are essential to make best use of online resources, and tutorial packages such as Internet Detective (also available in Welsh) may be very helpful for Fd students.
VLEs such as Moodle and Blackboard are not just repositories for information: they can also provide avenues for communication (eg. forums), reflection (eg. blogs), collaboration (eg. wikis) and formative assessment (eg. quizzes). E-portfolios can also be used for these activities, and they can additionally support course schedules, assessment etc. A wide range of evidence types – text, audio, video for example – can be uploaded to e-portfolios, making them potentially much more versatile than traditional paper-based portfolios and giving the option of internal/ external assessment and peer review. Technologies which capture different forms evidence are becoming increasingly cheap and easy to use, and mobile technologies such as digital video cameras can play a worthwhile role in the sort of ‘non-classroom’ situations frequently encountered in Fds.
Social networking tools - whether within VLEs and e-portfolios or used independently – can give learners significant opportunities for communication and collaboration. They can aid inclusion and give learner groups greater coherence. Tools such as forums can also provide opportunities for tutor feedback and communication – a particularly valued aspect of both HE and FE.
Technology can have a highly positive impact on the learning experience, and in the context of HE, can help meet the expectations of learners who need to be confident both within academia and the world of work. JISC RSC Wales can advise on all aspects of technology for teaching and learning, and can also give pointers to funding that may be available for  projects incorporating the use of technology.

As we make the transition between the old academic session and the new, I thought it would be a good moment to reflect on some of the things I’ve been doing in the past month or two. I hope, like earlier Month in a life posts by Karl and Helen, it’ll give you an idea of what we do, and also highlight some of the developments in technology-enhanced learning (TEL) which we come across on our travels.

I’m Higher Education (HE) Coordinator for RSC Wales, which means I have special responsibility for liaising with, and ensuring services are delivered to, the HE sector. Though our remit has so far covered only HE-in-FE and smaller HEIs as direct customers, we also have a role to involve all the HE sector in general services like events, so at some level we work with every university during the year.  My role is incredibly varied, so there’s really no such thing as a ‘typical’ month. But as I look back over the last month or so, there is one constant: life is never quiet! 

View of Gregynog Hall

WHELF-HEWIT Gregynog Colloquium 2010

In the summer particularly, participating in conferences (our own and other people’s) is a big part of the job. I try to go to as many as I can (funds permitting) because it’s a very efficient way of keeping in touch with what’s going on at the coal-face. In June I made my annual visit to Gregynog for the WHELF-HEWIT Colloquium, which sounds rather grand but is, in fact, a very informal and friendly affair where staff from Welsh HE library and information services (LIS) for a week of discussions and networking. The organisers make a point of attracting, and giving a platform to, new professionals and innovative projects. Traditionally it’s been “library” stuff on Monday and Tuesday, “IT” on Thursday and Friday, with Wednesday as a kind of ‘crossover’ day. At one time, learning technologists and technology-enhanced learning (TEL) themes tended to be bunched together on the ‘crossover’ day but they’re now in evidence throughout the week, which says something about the changing roles of staff and the way TEL is becoming a ‘normal’ part of everyday life, not just for the few. I make a point of attending as much of Gregynog as I can, both for monitoring developments in the HE sector and for my own professional development. The beauty of Gregynog only adds to its attractions as a space to meet innovative and enthusiastic people, get new ideas and recharge your mental batteries.

Chris Hall introducing Gwella

 The programme gives you an idea of the breadth of the conference. All of it was interesting, so it’s hard to pick just a few to report on. However I should highlight firstly the session on Emerging Technologies. It was a bit daunting for me, chairing the opening session of the day: would anyone turn up at 9.15 or would they still be recovering from the thrills of the previous evening’s Murder Mystery? I needn’t have worried, as we had a good audience. The session kicked off with a well-pitched introduction by Chris Hall and David Lewis to the Gwella enhancement programme. They looked mainly at the TEL projects running at Swansea and Glamorgan universities, but it was also good to have a reminder too of Gwella work going on at Aberystwyth (which you can find out about on their excellent Nexus site). 

Andrew Brown of Swansea University

Next, Mark Hughes and Paul Johnson of Swansea University talked about two electronic library projects. Mark talked about the implementation of RFID (radio-frequency identification) as part of the South West Wales Higher Education Partnership. The RFID project has essentially been about improving management of physical library stock through a sophisticated form of electronic tagging, and it has enabled self service borrowing, freeing up both staff time and space to develop new services. Mark’s slides were notable for their homage to the printed page in the form of images from Awful Library Books. Paul’s talk was about the creation of a portal to cross-search library catalogues and other e-resources using the open source software VUFind. One of the things that came across from both speakers was the importance of robust project management and effective collaboration. Another speaker from Swansea University, Andrew Brown, spoke persuasively about the importance of usability in web design, underlining a recurring theme of the conference: people must come before the technology.

In general I felt Twitter gave an added dimension to the event, offering additional resources and intelligent  comment on discussions which could be shared with participants near and far. Skimming back over the tweets here are just a couple of points that sprang out for me:

Sharing ideas for Information Literacy case studies

• keep things simple for the user
• open source software…it’s time has come
• the tipping point is near/here for HE in a web 2.0 world
• LIS staff in Wales are good at collaborating. This will stand us in good stead as we ‘dig for victory’ in financially-challenged times ahead

Among the other highlights in an incredibly rich programme were emerging technologies in careers (Chris Cardew, South West Wales Higher Education Partnership) and a great information literacy strand in which we captured ideas for information literacy case studies in a cracking 20 minutes. Last but not least I should give a mention to Chris West, our soon-to-retire Director of LIS at Swansea University, who shared his ’Confessions of a Co-operator”: a reminder to me that we have in Wales some excellent examples of collaboration, resource-sharing and cross-sector working, which we can be proud of, and shouldn’t be taken for granted.

All in all it was a great Colloquium which, in times of austerity for CPD budgets, provides fantastic value for money. Not only does it provide great staff development for people who, by their very roles, are potential change agents in their organisations; it also builds capacity for shared service development which will be vital in the years ahead. 

Gregynog gardens in full bloom

 This Colloquium was a model of efficient and imaginative conference management: hats off to the staff of UWIC for all their hard work, and good luck to University of Glamorgan as they prepare to take up the baton in 2011 – see you there!

You can find some of my photos from Gregynog on flickr.

Business and Community Engagement

After Gregynog I was off London on the 6.58am train with colleague Alyson Dacey to find out about Business and Community Engagement. So what’s that? Well, Business and Community Engagement (shortened to BCE) is a JISC programme that is seeking ways for technology to support HE and FE “engagement with the wider community”, otherwise known as Third Mission, Knowledge Transfer, Outreach, Innovation and Engagement, etc. (Innovation and Engagement has recently superseded Third Mission in the HEFCW lexicon). Innovation and engagement are set to take on more importance in Wales given the way For Our Future  emphasises HE’s role in social justice and economic regeneration.

This BCE event, run by JISC Netskills, was specially for RSCs across the UK and also staff of JISC Advance services which are heavily involved in delivering the BCE Programme. If you’d like to see what we did, you can get the presentations from the day on the BCE Programme blog. RSCs need a good basic knowledge of JISC programmes so that we can help customers use their evidence and lessons learned to find solutions to their own business problems: in the case of BCE for example, there’s the Embedding BCE infokit, a free resource which institutions can use to help map and develop their provision. In our RSC we try and use opportunities to feed through to Programmes our knowledge of Welsh sector needs and policies. This BCE day was a good chance to learn and influence, not to mention renew vital professional contacts with our peers in other parts of the UK.

An added benefit of the BCE day was learning a few new tips about good project management, in particular how to evidence impact in innovative ways. It was good to see that RSC Wales is already doing many things right: for example we’ve started to make more use of photography and video to capture the effects of the work we do (see our photostream on Flickr).

Internal teaching and learning conferences

Back to Wales for the next event. One of the highlights of RSC life is being able to visit institutions’ internal learning and teaching conferences. I can’t go to all of them, but I do try and attend one or two every year. It’s important for me because they help us locate good practice which we can then share with other supported providers. When we’re running our own conferences, we’re usually too busy organising things to listen to all the sessions we’re interested in! There’s another benefit in attending internal conferences: whereas the big UK or international conferences tend to focus on the exceptional and the cutting-edge, internal conferences tell you what’s happening on the ground, with less emphasis on self-promotion and more honesty about what works (or more to the point, doesn’t). And even at the coalface, some gems can be found as I’d already discovered back in March when I attended the Cardiff University Technology-Enhanced Education Conference.

Richard Noss at Newport Nexus 2010

So in early July I was back on that 6.58am train to Caerleon for the Newport Nexus conference 2010. Among many sessions I attended, I enjoyed hearing from Margaret Davies on E-working, agile working practices and training needs in the public sector : a clear-eyed appraisal of the major staff-development  needs which have to met if we are to enable agile working, not just in terms of technology basics, but also things like time management and leadership.  Another good session was Mike Reddy’s on Putting the Play into Plagiarism: making games as assessment for learning. Some sessions are interesting not just because of what the speaker says, but also for the responses of the audience and the questions they ask. Newport staff seemed to respond well to Mike’s suggestions, and we all worked in pairs to come up with ideas for games to teach ‘difficult’ topics (referencing was a popular one…). A highlight of the day for me was a superb closing keynote by Richard Noss, Director of the TEL phase of the ESRC/EPSRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme and co-Director of the London Knowledge Lab. Richard challenged us with the notion that we have not even begun to see the transformative possibilities of technology in education, because we are still bound up in 19th century pedagogy. I also liked the idea that we need to build a cumulative body of research about the value of technology in education (though it’s important not to let this desire for ‘evidence’ blind us to genuine opportunities where they exist). If you’d like to read up on the conference, selected papers and abstracts and papers are available online (sadly I can’t see Richard Noss’s presentation online, but I was pleased to track down this Youtube clip of him at last year’s ALT-C, which is a good substitute).

Heads of the Valleys

Contrary to the impression you might have got so far, not all RSC life is about going to conferences. Through the year, much of my work goes on in committees and working groups both within institutions and at a cross-Wales level. While these are by their nature rather a slow way of doing things, they are an important part of collaborative working, and converting policy into practice. Within Wales there are a number of groups involved in developing technology enhanced learning, but because they tend to have a specific remit their paths do not necessarily cross. The RSC is in a fortunate position of being able to move between these groups, and where it is useful to do so, raise awareness of what others are doing, put people in touch with new contacts, and where possibly contribute our own knowledge.

Site of The Works at Ebbw Vale, part of the Heads of the Valleys programme

One group that I have enjoyed working with recently, along with my colleague Esther Barrett, is the Heads of the Valleys E-learning Group. This cross sectoral group has been developing strategic approaches to e-learning in the region, and we are able to contribute for example our knowledge of useful guidance (eg JISC Techdis) and in return extend our knowledge of cross-sector issues, particularly those relating to schools. Our work with The Heads of the Valleys programme initially brought us into contact with two projects namely The Works (Ebbw Vale) and the Merthyr Learning Quarter. More recently, it is has brought us into contact with the Universities Heads of the Valleys Institute (UHOVI). You can find useful summaries of the Heads of the Valleys and UHOVI developments on the websites of University of Wales Newport and University of Glamorgan, and there’s also a dedicated website for UHoVI at http://www.uhovi.ac.uk/.

 Heads of the Valleys E-learning Group is just one forum I’ve met this year; others include the Blackboard Wales User Group, the Welsh Medium E-learning/Blended Learning Group, the Welsh for Adults E-learning Group and project groups on topics as diverse as text messaging and workforce development. My aim is to contribute something useful to each meeting I attend, whether it’s researching the answer to a problem, supplying a contact, or recommending a resource. Sometimes we can get more involved, perhaps helping to plan a staff development event with the group. Meetings can be face to face, but we may also use Skype to save time and carbon footprint.

Learning in a Digital Wales

LDW was our big RSC Wales conference this year, on 30 June. My role in this was relatively small as we had a core team doing the bulk of the work. However I was able to make suggestions for HE-related themes, speakers and marketing, and on the day I combined the job of  ’duty tweeter’ with that of making short video interviews with participants. Sometimes the job feels a bit like that of a journalist (though without the long expense-account lunches). At LDW, it was refreshing for me to be involved with a big cross-sectoral event rather than a solely HE conference. There seem to be a growing number of staff in Welsh HE who like opportunities to engage with FE, ACL, WBL and schools on TEL issues. Those who like to operate at the interface between sectors are, I find, often the ones who are quick to see new opportunities and are good communicators across role boundaries. Searching for a word to describe what defines this group of people, I came across the term “frontiersmanship”, defined by Wiktionary as the ’skill [...] of succeeding in settling a frontier”. It strikes me that exponents of frontiersmanship – men and women - will be increasingly key to the transformation of Welsh education, and the more of these staff that we can collaborate with, the better.

Events organisation

This year I’ve been closely involved in running two interesting, with a lot of help from other team members. The first was back in April – Smarter Greener Learning – but in the weeks since the event I have continued to be busy adding material to the event resources on Moodle, as well as following up various queries from the event. To those attending, events may seem just a one-off, over and done with in a day. In fact, they can take several months in the planning, and involve quite a lot of work afterwards too (if they are successful that is!).

The Swansea studio at our Funding event

On July 9th we held an event on JISC funding, which was unusual in that it was delivered via three locations simulataneously using videoconferencing. Although it wasn’t a large event in terms of delegate numbers, it took a lot of careful planning but with an enthusiastic and engaged audience it turned out to be a big success. You can see resources from the event here. Using technology in events to bring together participants from diverse locations seems the way to go; it reduces costs and carbon footprint, and it widens access. Yet virtual meetings can’t completely replace face to face. Videoconferencing using the WVN-supported studios gave us the best of both worlds: distributed delivery but with small groups at each location. Within our RSC we’ve also been experimenting this year with Elluminate (a type of webinar software). I think it’s fair to say that we’re still experimenting and ironing out some issues to ensure that when we do events online, they meet the standards we set for ourselves with our face to face events. As a student participant in webinars (I’m currently a Welsh learner with the Open University) I’ve been conscious this term of both the benefits and occasional frustrations that come with webinar technology in its present state of development. In connection with this I’ve been interested to read discussions about online meeting software on Graham Atwell’s blog (see also follow up comment). 

And in my spare time…

Any time not taken up by events (preparing, attending, following up) and meetings is easily filled by my efforts to keep on top of policy developments, news from Welsh Higher Education institutions, the Academy and the rest of JISC. Whilst news used to come in mainly via email (and much of it still does), it’s increasingly handled via blogs and Twitter (I try and keep Facebook for more social stuff). It’s been a year when Higher Education in Wales has had much media coverage, and keeping up with announcements from WAG and HEFCW has kept me on the ball. I can’t read everything but I aim to keep on top of the main issues and pass on relevant information to the rest of our team as well as customers.

Usually, I find some time each week to keep in touch with the world of library and information services, and information literacy, whether by scanning journals or following people on Twitter. And whenever possible I try and practise my Welsh, which I’m learning with the Open University, partly in order to gain experience of things like online forums and online assessment from a student perspective. Thank goodness for my recently-acquired iPhone which helps me multi-task while I’m on my travels around Wales.

Being Appreciative

Christine and Paul, two of the team who help me with our HE work, at our Appreciative Inquiry day

Like all Regional Support Centres, we’re required to subject our services to regular evaluation, so every July we undertake a critical Self Evaluation Review, which feeds into our planning for service improvement. This year we were given the rare opportunity to review the method we used to conduct this exercise, and we hit on an approach that had been used in our host institution Swansea University as well as on the JISC e-learning programme. The approach is called Appreciative Inquiry and recently we’ve been using it to help identify the strengths of our service, as well as areas that we’d like to develop or improve. We’ve found it a challenging and creative approach and it’s been great for helping us think and plan across traditional sector and role boundaries, something that we will surely need to continue to do, given the way Welsh education is evolving. The process also underlined for me the fact that although I have a certain set of HE-focussed skills and responsibilities, I operate as part of a closely-connected band of people to deliver an integrated service.

To sum up, as one of our team said to me recently, “working for the RSC is liking being on a never-ending course”. I think what she meant was that we’re constantly learning new things - about technologies but also about the people who use them – and are constantly exposed to new ways of working. We’re lucky to have access to expertise and to technology that mean we’re able to share what we learn with a wide range of staff (for some time we’ve called them ‘customers’, but perhaps a better word these days is ‘collaborators’?).

On the road over the Brecon Beacons near Hirwaun

Well, that’s just a month or so in the life of an RSC Wales HE Coordinator. As I said at the start, every month is unique, and there are new challenges on the road ahead as we enter the 2010/2011 academic session. As I write this, we are busy putting together our services for the coming year. If you’d like to know more about our HE services, email me at e.j.parcell@swansea.ac.uk.

When I reported last month on the JISC conference I was feeling very excited about the possibilities for crowdsourcing and the way technology could be used to open up the world of research to the community. So it was good to hear the news that Coleg Harlech is among the successful bidders to a recent JISC call for projects around the theme of Developing Community Content. The Galeri Cymru project will open up an image collection created within art and design, allowing community learners to evaluate the work and share ideas about cultural identity.

The projects in the wider programme cover a diverse range of research fields including local history, historial maps and climate change. For full details see the JISC website.

The idea of finding new ways to open up the world of university and college to those outside, to mutual benefit, certainly seems to be closely in line with priorities of the Welsh education sector for widening participation and economic regeneration. Congratulations to all the projects and good luck!

It’s not often that I trek up to London, spend a sunny day inside a conference centre and wish I could have stayed longer, but with #jisc10 I could happily have kept going for a few more hours at least. Here are some personal highlights of my day, and some pointers  to some of the things that caught my eye. For lots more info, visit http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2010/04/jisc10.aspx for a Virtual Goody Bag of presentations, social network and video recordings coming soon.

My first impression was the sheer size of the event – I haven’t been to the JISC conference for a few years and it has become HUGE. Wish I had done a bit more preparation beforehand and arrived earlier to get my bearings… Oh well, straight into the rousing opening session by Prof Sir Tim O’Shea, who spoke proudly of the value that JISC represents for the educational community, giving institutions access to facilities they could not achieve alone. The theme of collaboration in order to survive (and maybe even thrive) was to be a thread running through the day.

The first plenary speaker was someone I had long waited to hear: Martin Bean, Vice Chancellor of the Open University. An ideal keynote, he managed to inspire, provoke and entertain with his address on The Learning Journey from Informal to Formal Learning. Actually that title is a bit misleading, because what he asked us to consider was a learning journey where the informal and the formal are interwoven rather than a linear route. I won’t try and summarise all Martin’s points, as the slides are all online and a video recording will follow soon. The bits I found particularly interesting were:

- the likely growth of the private sector in HE over the next decade

- in a world where institutions are no longer the sole custodians of academic content, libraries need to focus not just on teaching students about access to content, and retrieval skills, but also the skills to make sense, and to transform information into meaning. Excellent point: though I’d argue that academics need to work with their librarians on this one rather than leave it all to ‘library induction’ Also on the information literacy theme, Martin stressed the importance of trusted content - he sees it as a huge upcoming issue.

- workplace learning – many of the barriers to this are of our own creation, he argued. We need to overcome them if we are to equip students for new kinds of work.

- there is a ‘crisis of relevance’ surrounding the purpose of HE in the UK. We looked at what characterises learners today in terms of their values (eg sharing, authenticity), priorities (eg self-presentation, ), likes (eg stuff friends like) and hates.  Apparently learners hate complexity, bad design, cost and “things that get in the way of expression”. So do most human beings I suspect, but I thought this comment was a useful reminder (and perhaps a consolation) to those who struggle to engage staff and students in the use of new technology.

- not surprisingly there was a mention of the OU’s work on Open Educational Resources, with things like OpenLearn and iTunesU. What I wasn’t aware of, was how Open Educational Resources could be used to enable teacher training in Sub Saharan Africa and maternity care in Ethiopia.

- we were urged to get comfortable with a future in which higher education would be less reliant on classic structures (likened to fixed staircases) and would include ‘ gentler slopes’  and ’smaller milestones’ with accreditation through ‘mentors’ and based on web resources (this informal learning visualised as fluffy clouds…). Perhaps we should have had some questions at this point about where our existing systems of FE, ACL and public libraries fit into this vision?

- I liked the point that technology failure in universities is not down to technology but is because we fail to take account of people and processes. I wondered if this diagnosis might explain why, in this week’s JISC-sponsored Guardian roundtable report, eminent HE leaders appeared to take the view that technology is opposed to human interaction rather than a means to enable and enhance it; or why they seemed to view digital libraries as incompatible with physical libraries. I do hope some of those roundtable participants were at the conference, as they would have been able to see plenty of evidence that such views are somewhat over-simplistic.

Later in the day I attended three workshop sessions.

• What is the place of technology in research-led teaching? .

One of the projects shown here was new to me: Neil Chue-Hong of NeISS talked about JISC-funded work to develop simplified interfaces for complex research computing systems. This means that students can be introduced earlier to interacting with, and getting a better understanding of, real research data, and even members of the public can get involved. One example shown was the UK Snow Map project which used Twitter to get people to report snow in their area. This tied in nicely with a later session on community collections and crowdsourcing (see below).  Neil stressed that research data gathered and presented in this way needs to be Accurate, Appealing, Appropriate and Accessible.

In the same session, I liked Gilly Salmon’s point that if you want staff to engage with new approaches, in HE at least, then targets are not going to work; staff need to see evidence of real benefit. She also reminded us that engaging staff can be a slow process! I was interested to learn that the University of Leicester’s Media Zoo has a lot of new topics coming on stream including ”The Greening of Learning” – something to look out for.

• Next stop was Jam Jar Funding: strategy in a potted economy.

In this session about shared services, I was pleased to hear Helen Workman give an account of SCONUL Access (a collaborative system whereby students have access to libraries other than that of their ‘home’ institution). While it did not develop as a technology-driven project (Helen acknowledged that indeed many issues around “e-access” remain to be resolved) and was not especially driven by cost-saving, it has worked because it has been built up steadily from small beginnings, and with a clear eye on reciprocal benefits for all concerned.

Dan Perry who has recently moved from the private to the public sector, gave a good account of how his organisation, Janet UK, has reviewed its operations to become more agile. His recipe for success:

• know your business, look at the life cycle of products, do they deliver value for money
• know the numbers - something we are not very good at in the public sector
• strive to be trusted, consider your values
• empower the team through delegation and cross-functionality
• don’t be afraid to look over the horizon

Shared services are a big area of interest for Higher Education at present. There was some discussion around the barriers to shared services, and topics such as the pros and cons of dependancy on external and commercial suppliers. Unfortunately no one had any easy answers. It’s clearly a dilemma to work out what an institution can afford to share, and what it should protect as its own unique provision. I felt we  only scratched the surface of a complex topic, but there is wealth of explanatory material in the Virtual Goody Bag which I can now get to grips with.

• My last workshop was probably the most inspiring of all: Community collections and the power of the crowd. Three different projects provided evidence that technology can bring about co-creation of knowledge by people who would otherwise not have met, and it can also make a real difference to quality of life.
  • We heard about Oxford University’s Great War Archive and the RoCoCo project which will soon be providing training and support for others who would like to develop community collections. I hope they can come to Wales at some point!
  • Galaxy Zoo is a project which has enabled members of the public to get involved in astronomy research.
  • William Perrin talked about how he was inspired to develop an online community as a response to the social and economic decline of his local area. He gave us an entertaining tour of lots of so-called ‘hyperlocal’ sites for small communities both urban and rural, and pointed out how, unlike the local press which strongly resists public archiving, they stand a chance of being digitally conserved by libraries.  I liked William’s analogy that these sites can be a bit like following The Archers! He has a support site here and a personal blog also. I decided my colleagues supporting Adult Community Learning and the Voluntary Sector would find much of interest in this session 

• The closing plenary was Bill St Arnaud talking about about Greening ICT and the responsibility of universities to reduce our carbon footprint. At the close of a very long day I resolved not to risk brain overload by noting all the details, but to review the presentation later online. Bill, a Green-IT consultant from Canada, spoke passionately about how universities in North America are tackling the environmental cost of big data centres (described as the ‘new heavy industry’). The main message he gave was: being more energy efficient, while it can mean financial savings, is not the answer to climate change (you make things more energy efficient, so they become cheaper, and simply get used more). The way to minimise the damage (since it can’t be reversed) is to adopt a zero carbon strategy.  Bill spoke enthusiastically about JISC’s Greening ICT programme and I’ll certainly be referencing his powerful presentation when I’m preparing support materials for our own upcoming  Smarter Greener Learning conference on 29 April (sorry fully booked - but email events@rsc-wales.ac.uk if you’d like to go on the waiting list).

As with most face to face conferences, some of the biggest benefits are the chance encounters with old friends, the cementing of new contacts, and the sense of fellowship and renewed purpose that come from being part of a crowd. Given the high cost (financial, time and environmental) of running and attending face to face events, I feel we do need to keep weighing up the value of physical vs virtual attendance, and I spent some of the long journey home reflecting on this in the light of my experiences at jisc10. I think this question deserves more space and time than we have here, so I’ll return to it another time.

I look forward to the next JISC conference in Liverpool in March 2011, and in the meantime I gather that there will be a JISC research conference in the Autumn which will be worth looking out for. Check here for lots more JISC events that may be of interest to Higher Education (and others).

HEFCW has recently announced that it is providing funding, through JISC, to assist institutions in meeting strategic concerns in enhancing learning and teaching through the use of technology, building on, and learning from, the HEFCW-funded Gwella Programme. Information has been sent to Pro Vice-Chancellors for Learning and Teaching, or their equivalents, in Higher Education institutions. (Source: HEFCW February 2010 Newsletter)

If you are interested in technologies for inclusion you may like to join in the next JISC Techdis online HE update on Friday 19 March at 13.30, repeated on Monday 22 March at 15.00. These JISC Techdis HE updates were originally designed for Regional Support Centres and Academy staff to find out about new tools and tips about inclusive technologies and free Techdis services. They’ve been so useful that they are now open to all interested colleagues.

The events are online, last 30-60 mins, and use the Instant Presenter webinar system which is very straightfoward to join in. During the session you will be able to follow a short presentation and ask questions via online text chat.

Further details are here:

www.instantpresenter.com/techdisonline78

No special software or equipment is required, though a headset will be useful. There is no need to book in advance. Looking forward to seeing some of you online at one of the appointed times!

PS JISC Techdis are also running a series of “Xerte Fridays” – Instant Presenter sessions about the accessible learning object creation tool Xerte, developed at University of Nottingham. These range from introductory to more specialised and you can find out more at http://www.techdis.ac.uk/index.php?p=3_28_3

If you’ve missed earlier sessions (I recommend the Introductory one for complete beginners) then recordings are  available from the above link.

University of Glamorgan are hosting the 2nd Annual ESCalate Student Conference on Friday 16 April 2010, and the theme this year is Students as Stakeholders: take an active part in your own learning. Several things about this event look very interesting: firstly it’s excellent value at £30! Secondly it is a student conference with a keynote from Aaron Porter, Vice-President of the NUS (Higher Education) on The Importance of the Learner Voice in 21st Century Higher Education. Thirdly the topics (eg impact of new technologies on the learning process) complement well the work RSC Wales is currently doing to take our free Learner Voice Learner Choice Roadshows round the country (by the way we’re still taking bookings for the dates in Mold and Bangor but hurry, the South Wales dates are already fully booked!).

Anyway, back to the ESCalate conference: it is open to staff and students in all fields of education. RSC Wales have gained great benefit from joining in past ESCalate events and we’ll look forward to attending this conference too. The deadline for bookings is 19 March.

One of the best things about being part of a Regional Support Centre is that if you don’t know something, or can’t get to an event, there is often someone who does know, or has been there, and can pass on the knowledge. I wasn’t able to get to the JISC Techdis/ALT event Rewiring Inclusion recently, but a colleague at Swansea University went along and and kindly sent details of some simulations (a recurring theme this week!) which are being designed  to give the user experience of what it is like to experience difficulties with computer interaction when you have certain disabilities.

The disability awareness tools are being developed by the Accessibility Research Centre at Teesside University.  They are still in progress (apparently a tool based around dyslexia is coming soon) but you can try out the tools for cognitive disabilities, motor disabilities and visual disabilities at http://rime.tees.ac.uk/ARC/simulations/. The project team would welcome your help with completing their questionnaires (available from the home page) so they can further develop the tools.

The recent Higher Education Leadership Summit “Leading the Agile University” saw the launch of a new set of free resources for leaders in UK Higher Education. The resource, entitled JISC Portfolio for Senior Managers: employ technology to support your business goals, covers five areas:

.    Strategies for agile institutions: scenario planning

.         Relationship management and business intelligence

.         Research rigour, accessibility and impact

.         Alternative business models for higher education

.         Enhancing the student and staff experience

The publication is available for download here both as a simple pdf and as an interactive version with video. Alternatively, you can view a summary page with invitations to ‘take three steps’ plus video clips on the JISC website.

Ewart Woodridge CBE, Chief Executive of the Leadership Foundation for Higher
Education, welcomed the publication, commenting that the agile university  required “a strategic and entrepreneurial approach to the use of technology”.

As well as providing food for thought for leaders, this resource provides a clear summary of some of the key tools available from JISC to support university managers, and brings home the importance to the ‘agile university’ of integrating IT strategy across the organisation.

The Simshare project, one of the projects under the HEFCE-funded JISC Academy Open Educational Resources programme, has been looking at bringing together simulation resources and enabling them to be shared. Simshare is based in the UK Centre for Legal Education at Warwick University, and evolved from an earlier project SIMPLE, which focussed on legal education and attracted various awards . Now Simshare has taken this work beyond the field of law to include simulation learning in all subject areas.

The Simshare team, whose partners include University of Glamorgan, are now offering a series of free one-day workshops. One is taking place in Cardiff University on 15 March and is designed for academics in any discipline who are interested in knowing more about simulation learning and how to share resources. You will:

1. Learn about OER (Open Educational Resources), and how you can be a part of it.

2. Have access to a wealth of free resources for teaching.

3. Have help in getting started in using simulation as a form of teaching, learning and assessment.

4. Practise assembling a simulation on paper and have access to online resources to help you do this.

5. Know how to download and upload resources to the OER website.

Full details are available at http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/simshare/workshops.html and the contact for more information is patricia.mckellar@warwick.ac.uk. You can also download an event flyer.

I’m grateful to Karen Counsell at University of Glamorgan Law Department for letting me know about this event (she also put me on to an evaluation which her department carried out for JISC Techdis, of the accessibility benefits of the SIMPLE law simulation in assessment – thank you Karen!