This month Cardiff played host to a roadshow about research data management, one in a series organised by the JISC-funded Digital Curation Centre. The aim of the events is to “allow every institution in the UK to prepare for effective research data management and understand more about how the DCC can help.”  The event was attended by several Welsh universities as well as staff from further afield. Perhaps appropriately for a topic that includes preservation, we met in the historic surroundings of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama‘s Anthony Hopkins Centre. It soon became clear from the presentations that good research data management is about much more than simply preservation of data. It also has much to do with management and communication of research, and so needs to engage with the whole research lifecycle.

Most of the day focussed on case studies from Cardiff, Bristol and Swansea Universities, showing how they were tackling various challenges relating to research data management, often making use of free resources developed by the DCC. While the DCC has been around for some time, its role has shifted away from tools development to focus more on capacity building and advocacy, working closely with the research community. The leadership and support that it offers must be invaluable to support staff in institutions who can often find themselves working in isolation and have to combine research liaison with other responsibilities.

The most useful presentations for me were both about data curation in the humanities. Sarah Phillips, Records Manager at Cardiff University, gave a really interesting talk about how she has been working with Dr Steve Mills archaeology to ensure the longevity of his important data relating to historic sites in Southern Romania. As one of the projects was a community engagement project it was important that the data should be available for public access as well as for more purely academic purposes, and better curation could help minimise the many risks attached when academics are working on data in different locations. Making access to research data easier also saves academics time in the long run.

Later, after a session from Caroline Gardiner of Bristol University on storing data securely, Stephen Gray talked about data.bris, a JISC project. Stephen has an exciting-sounding role as a digital support officer, working with academics in the humanities to navigate the technology needed to support their research, not least so they can demonstrate maximum research impact in the REF (Research Excellence Framework) come 2014. Such was the original role of subject librarians a generation ago, and although their role in many universities has since become much more focussed on teaching, there seems to be a need for staff who can offer a ‘translation service”, combining digital or information fluency with research capability.

Martyn Guest of ARCCA (Advanced Research Computing @ Cardiff) focussed on the topic of High Performance Computing and whilst I did not grasp all the technical detail I did learn the meaning of a terabyte (1000 gigabytes), petabyte (1000 terabytes) and exabyte (one quintillion bytes). I also gained a better understanding of  High Performance Computing Wales . This involves £40m worth of supercomputing capacity, research institute and skills academy that aim to bring academia and industry together. In simple terms, as I understood it, it will be possible to move data around and work on it wherever there is most capacity. This will help the current “data tsunami” situation where apparently it is easier to send large quantities of data via Fedex rather than over networks!

For me, some of the most interesting discussion points during the day were around the need for better communication across departments (eg subject researchers and IT staff; records managers and archives) and the need for advocacy with senior management. IT services are critical to universities’ business engagement and the public dissemination of research that is required for economic prosperity as well as research quality. Yet research data are often still managed within faculties.

Apologies to Liz Lyon and Alex Roberts for not including reference to their presentations which unfortunately I missed! It was a pity that train problems made it difficult to attend the whole day. Not for the first time, I did wonder whether it would be helpful for events organisers to consider running ‘taster’ webinars alongside the face to face event programme. These could act as a ‘trailer’ or ‘taster’ for the big event and could widen the audience particularly at times of year where travel is particularly hard. Face to face contact is important though: the value of bonding over a spot of food and drink can be underrated, and the social element is also key to building cross-disciplinary relationships, especially in relatively new fields of endeavour.

The DCC website provides links to a wide range of resources and tools on research data management. For those wanting help with advocacy or just an overview, I can recommend their short briefing paper Making the case for RDM (research data management). You can also follow @digitalcuration on Twitter. Thanks to Janet Peters at Cardiff University and the staff of DCC for making the effort to bring the roadshow to Wales!

All the presentations from the event are now available here.

Over the summer months a couple of publications have appeared which will be important reading not only for those engaged in technology innovation or the enhancement of learning and teaching in Higher Education, but also for those who need to engage with the HE sector. We’ve also seen the launch of a number of JISC-funded programmes, several of which hold opportunities for direct participation by Wales.

Earlier this year, a review was undertaken into the implementation of Enhancing Learning and Teaching through Technology: a Strategy for Higher Education in Wales. When HEFCW published the strategy (as circular W08/12HE) back in April 2008, it was realised that the strategy would need to be reviewed at intervals. A consultancy was commissioned to undertake the first review between March and June 2011, and the results are now published on the HEFCW website as HEFCW Enhancing Learning Through Technology (ELTT) Strategy Implementation Review.  The review includes a number of recommendations to which HEFCW are currently responding. In addition, it provides a very useful overview of the current state of play in the Welsh Higher Education sector as regards innovation through technology, together with valuable survey data and citations of relevant research. Many staff in Wales gave their time and expertise to participate in the review and it is pleasing to see the reviewers state, “We encountered a vibrant and enthusiastic community engaged in technology-enhanced learning who, despite all of the challenges they face, were remarkably optimistic about the future.” We look forward to playing our part in assisting the HE sector in Wales as it continues to build on this strong foundation.

Back in June we saw the publication of the final report and briefings resulting from the Gwella project (see the Gwella blog for details) and over the summer it was confirmed that some continuation work would take place during 2011-2012. Again we look forward to working with the Gwella consultancy team and the institutions in the coming year.

Also published on the HEFCW website over the summer was the Building Capacity Wales programme summary report. Building Capacity funding from JISC enabled institutions to identify a key strategic priority and use JISC or other publicly-funded resources to help them address that priority. More detailed information about many of the projects are available on the JISC Building Capacity Programme page, along with many other projects from England. The project reports and case studies on the site provide good examples of how existing research and project outputs can be used to inform better institutional decision-making. Priorities addressed included e.g. assessment and feedback, staff engagement and employability.

Over the summer many HE institutions have been busy considering bids for JISC funding and it is great to hear when bids from Wales have been successful. New projects, for example PADDLE and Digidol in the Developing Digital Literacies programme, have potential in due course to build capacity not only for the lead institutions and partners, but also across the wider education sector. We’ve also heard that there has been success for Welsh HE in the recent round of bids for the Assessment and Feedback Programme – congratulations to those who are starting those projects.

One of the latest rounds of bids has been the Transformations Programme (it closed on 15 September). Welsh Higher Education institutions have been able to bid for this funding (the Welsh colleges will want to look out for announcements later in the coming months about opportunities for FE participation). This programme will operate on a similar principle to the Building Capacity programme in that it aims to “help institutions move towards organisational change through the application of existing JISC and other resources” in order to ” a. Enhance their student experience; b. Improve the efficiency of their business and become agile in a climate of change; c. Enhance their organisational capability for business and community engagement”. This provides yet further opportunity to aid innovation in the Welsh HE sector.

Image by kenfagerdotcom (Flickr Creative Commons)

If you are starting a new project, do let us know as we are always delighted to do what we can to help technology-related projects (JISC funded or otherwise) to maximise their reach across Wales and beyond. Good luck to all projects running this year!

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).

I recently attended a meeting of the Strategic Content Alliance in Cardiff to find out about the free resources they have recently published to help improve access to digital content for the public sector, including HE and FE and museums. Strategic Content Alliance is a project between JISC and a number of other public bodies which aims to, in the words of their logo, “build bridges to e-content”. The idea is to improve the sharing of digital content by and for the public sector.

The resources they’ve developed are quite diverse (you can get full details on their blog) but the one we focussed on in the session I attended was the Intellectual Property Rights Toolkit . One of the biggest headaches for learning resources/library/e-learning staff is how to sort out copyright clearance for digital works, and the IPR toolkit can help with this, by offering standard letter/email templates which you could use for getting permissions from copyright owners. Other useful sections include advice on Creative Commons and Web 2.0 legal issues. There’s also a colour navigation chart to help you home in on the relevant bit of the toolkit to answer your particular IPR problem.

The toolkit sections are designed to be dipped into and adapted as you see fit for local use. They could be useful for staff development or for briefing senior managers who need to manage the risks surrounding sharing of digital content.

The SCA project team are keen to get feedback on their resources, so if you have a chance to appraise them before 12 August, complete the short survey form on their blog. You could win a £50 Amazon voucher

The law clearly has a long way to go to catch up with the reality of digital content creation and sharing – and until it does, free support like the SCA toolkits should provide some help in ploughing our way through the copyright maze.

The Cardiff event was the first I’ve attended this year which has had its delegate numbers slashed through fears of swine flu. Despite the small numbers, it was a useful event and I can recommend the IPR toolkit to any staff who have responsibilities for legal issues, or who wish to make their own digital content available.