On 19th October I attended a conference at the Swalec Stadium at Cardiff entitled ‘Engaging Wales’ which show-cased the outputs of the initial phase of the Beacon for Wales projects.
The Beacon for Wales is one of six pilot Beacons for Public Engagement funded by the Higher Education Funding Councils, Research Councils UK and the Wellcome Trust. Beacons for Public Engagement are university-based collaborative centres to help support public engagement work across the UK. The Beacon for Wales is a partnership between Cardiff University, University of Glamorgan, Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum of  Wales, Techniquest, and BBC Cymru Wales, though other Welsh HEIs were also involved. The projects to date have targeted in particular the 14-19 age range, rural communities, health and well-being, and cultural minority groups. The subject areas involved have been very varied covering science, history, and art amongst others.
The use of technology was not an explicit aspect of the projects, and yet I was interested to discover that many of them relied on technology in some way, and participants often picked up important digital skills as a consequence. For example, several projects included digital story-telling and hence the recording of mp3 files. Mp3 files were also important in a project jointly run between the Universities of Glamorgan and Cardiff to produce ‘audio walks’ for participants’ neighbourhoods. Blogs have also been used as an online journal to record participation in an archaeology dig at Cosmeston Mediaeval Village (‘Reclaiming our Past’ project coordinated by Cardiff University ), and video-blogs were used to record young peoples’ experiences at the Amelia Trust farm in a project run by UWIC. A project run by the University of Glamorgan has employed social networking tools like Facebook and YouTube to engage young people in genetics and help them learn about and discuss aspects of a topic which they might otherwise never encounter.

Artwork from the 'On Common Ground' project

The involvement of technology was sometimes covert – for example, in the art-fcussed ‘On Common Ground’ project run by the National Museum of Wales, young mothers had to learn how to operate a digital scanner in order to obtain pictures for a quilting activity. Interestingly, the Project Coordinator, Sarah Greenhalgh, mentioned that these young women had stipulated that they did not want to use IT on their project – does that imply negative experiences of school IT, or a general fear of anything new? The Beacon for Wales projects show, in any case, that previously unengaged  individuals can become enthusiastic learners – of technology and many other subjects – so long as the context is relevant and inspiring.

Recently I was lucky enough to attend a day at Cardiff University’s Trevithick Library on Creating New Learning Spaces, organised by UC&R Wales (a group of CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Librarians and Information Professionals).

The main point of the day for most of the 50-odd participants, I guess, was to see Trevithick’s transformation into a “21st century library”. But first we had an excellent two-hander presentation about the project from Ruth Thornton (Librarian) and Amanda Heal of the Design Research Unit Wales at Cardiff School of Architecture, both of whom had collaborated on the Project Group.

• Trevithick Library serves the Schools of Engineering, Physics, Astronomy and Computer Science, with about 3,000 students 
• Drivers for the redesign included: a 2004 review of space within the University; a realisation that the library was not fit for technical and pedogogical advancements, for example the need for group working; pressure from students who wanted somewhere more comfortable to study; the need for a more environmentally sustainable building.
• The opportunity came with a successful bid to the Wolfson Foundation, augmented by contributions from a number of sponsors and benefactors.

Ruth referred to the “nine commandments” identified by Andrew McDonald for the design of library spaces, included in Michael Dewe’s 2006 book Planning public library buildings (you can see the list on p.219 of the book, which I was pleased to find available via Google Books – follow the link here).

Ruth pointed out that e-resources, whilst they don’t themselves take up physical space, do stimulate demand for study space and they also require space for support services to students and staff.

Amanda gave us a wealth of information about the redesign process from the architect’s viewpoint, including environmental considerations. I was struck by how much of the project time was devoted to planning (out of the eighteen month period January 2007 – January 09, the building work only took up the last 6 months). Particular attention was paid to lighting – and this is where the ‘blue skies’ of the title come in, because Amanda pointed out how they had tried to ensure that users of the library could always “see the sky” from whereever they were working. Another priority for the architects was ‘identity and place’ which sounds rather abstract but which translated into some of the most pleasing features of the building: views in from the outside; clean lines and colourse denoting different areas.

The project group sounds like a model of good practice in the way it brought together all the relevant stakeholders including students – although Ruth admitted it was not always easy getting them involved. In new learning space projects, the students – and the staff who work most closely with them - can often be excluded from the decision-making process and left in the dark about what is going on. Cardiff actually formed a specific subgroup to focus on the student experience, and put a lot of effort into a communications campaign comprising staff-student panels, newsletters, emails, web pages and (most successfully of all) plasma screens located next to the campus restaurant, telling the story of the project.

Furniture got particular attention because students had raised it as their biggest concern. Interestingly, Ruth recommended looking at design-led companies rather than the “office supplier” type companies which many libraries have traditionally dealt with. Her hot tip for getting furnishings right? ‘Go and sit on some chairs!’

One of the big successes of the project was the amount of commercial sponsorship they attracted (over £50k). Companies were able to sponsor a group study room giving them the chance to have their corporate branding placed on a glass wall (not as intrusive as it sounds, the images were actually very attractive and could be changed in the future). Their corporate colours are echoed in the room’s decor, the company has access to the room for graduate recruitment, and by sponsoring a plasma screen they can have corporate images displayed when the room is not in use.

I was surprised that they didn’t cite other buildings as their inspiration, but this underlies the fact that they started very much from what their users needed and wanted, and worked within the constraints of the space that already existed. Ruth did, however, mention University of Portsmouth as having provided a useful source of ideas for the group rooms and lighting.

The new building still has about the same number of visitors as before, but they are staying longer and borrowing more material. The Library has gone over to RFID (basically, tagging of stock to enable self-issue) and, as in a growing number of libraries, this means that the entrance area does not need to be dominated by an issue desk. It also frees the staff up to do more interesting jobs.

For those contemplating a new library, we were reminded that Aberystwyth University maintains a useful database of library design resources at http://www.designinglibraries.org.uk/.

Later in the day we got to have a good look round the new space. You can see some photos in my Picasa web album. I was left very impressed by what can be achieved within the constraints of an existing building.

The other presentations during the day included an excellent talk on the use of a technology-rich learning space for Inquiry Based Learning at the Information Commons, Sheffield University, by Phil Levy. As I am going to another meeting on this topic shortly I’ll blog about this later. For now here is a link to the CILASS website  for some basic information.

Lastly, Ian Pearshouse of Nottingham University talked about evaluation of learning spaces. It’s the norm for Estates departments to conduct post-occupancy evaluations of any new build, but it seems these don’t look at the impact on teaching and learning. Reports of new builds tend to focus on “justification” and so it’s  difficult to find out if new spaces have failed to meet aspirations.  Furthermore, evaluation reports are often judged to be sensitive and therefore go unpublished. JISC wanted to try and find out what makes for a good evaluation of a new build from a teaching and learning perspective, and so have funded a study which will be reporting soon. I’ll try and blog about it again when it comes out, but for now I’ll just note that this sounds like an important step in trying to improve our understanding of how good learning and teaching can be supported in the future. With the enormous cost of new buildings, we need as much evidence as possible to aid decision making.

Ian predicts that the National Student Survey will in future ask about the quality of space relating to teaching and learning. If he is right, the resulting data should make for some interesting reading!

This week myself and Helen Hodges did a session on ‘Working Smarter’ with a group of staff at Newport Business School, as part of their ‘Creative Thinking’ series of lunchtime workshops. The range of subjects taught in the School is diverse, including Computing and Engineering as well as the usual business subjects, so we had an interesting mix of participants, with one or two from other departments as well.

We used the opportunity to pilot some ideas and materials on the theme of ‘Working smarter in a technology rich environment’, which we thought might have value for our customers and also for ourselves on the RSC Wales team. It was a good opportunity for me to revisit some freely available tools such as Intute and the JISC infoNet Time Management guide, as well as an excuse to delve into some newer resources such as bubbl.us (mindmapping tool) and MindTools.

The group were very engaged and contributed many ideas. We could have spent several days discussing the different themes which ranged across:

• email (!)
• searching the web
• collaboration tools
• web 2.0

Additional topics which emerged in discussion included: working smarter on assessment (eg by using Web PA or Turnitin) and managing student emails.

Throughout the discussion we collected everyone’s tips using the Freemind mindmapping tool, which we selected from the Access Apps collection of portable inclusive technologies assembled by JISC Techdis and the two Scottish Regional Support Centres.

We plan to build on this event to develop a resource on the RSC Wales Moodle site. In the mean time if anyone would like to see the slides they are here and I’ve added a selection of useful links to the RSC Wales delicious.

Some of the most important things I have learned from developing this topic are:

• what works for one person does not always work for another
• the skills to work smarter in a technology-rich environment are not necessarily technology skills; they include self-organisation skills (I found John Caunt’s book Organise Yourself an excellent source of tips)
• whilst a lot of our work habits may be determined by our organisation, there is a fair bit we can do as individuals BUT
• we also need to be able to influence and negotiate with our colleagues, learners and other potential collaborators, in order to get their support and buy-in

Thank you to everyone who kindly suggested their personal ‘working smarter’ tips to me. If you have a working smarter tip to share, please reply to this blog entry!