Bookmark - Courtesy of SecretLondon123 on Flickr

I’m often finding I need to collect some good web resources on a topic to share. Whilst we have been using delicious to collect and share our bookmarks, sometimes that doesn’t quite seem to do them justice. Delicious has the following great “pros”:

• Quick and simple to bookmark, particularly with the integrated browser toolbars and buttons
• Tags are powerful and flexible
• RSS feed of tags allows you to embed your bookmarks in the VLE or anywhere else you need to display them
• Graphical display of tag cloud can be a good visual aid
• Others can subscribe to your RSS feed (or any combination of tags) to keep up with what you are bookmarking

It also has a few “cons”, mostly on the display side:

• Not much space to add your own comments to a link (1000 characters) and no formatting e.g. you cannot include another URL in a comment. (This is something I feel quite strongly about as a user/student – don’t just give me a list of resources, tell me why they are important!)
• It’s not pretty: very basic display with no images or graphics to make it look nicer.
• Limited control with RSS feed or delicious to order how your links are displayed e.g. you cannot choose how to prioritize them

So I have been investigating a few social bookmarking tools which add a bit more functionality. This may be of use to LRC staff or teachers who need to show their students a collection of web resources with some added guidance notes. Some of the resources below can also be embedded in a VLE or website quite easily. They provide a more controlled and graphical way to peruse a collection of web resources without having to repeatedly open new windows or tabs. Some of this could be accomplished by the Intute Informs tool. This resource is currently limited to UK HE and FE but is soon moving to a subscription model. Here I have limited my search to free, open tools. I only had a fairly quick chance to look through some of these but here are some I tried earlier:

1) Diigo has social bookmarking and more. You can bookmark a site, tag it, add it to a list, highlight areas of a webpage, add sticky notes to the web page, collaborate on it, share your collection, display it as a “webslide”. All rich, good functionality with a pleasing interface plus a powerful Firefox Toolbar (presumably other browsers too). I like the Webslides (Short example: http://slides.diigo.com/list/rscsam/Using-Maps-in-Education) but am struggling to get any notes to appear. The one at the beginning is dominated by adverts. You can only add public notes once you are a “trusted user” to avoid spam. Requires more homework for me! It is still in beta.

2) LiveBinders – a way to collect things in web “binders”. This not only includes bookmarking websites but you can also add other content such as documents/images. There is a good blog post on how it could be used in education, even as a free portfolio tool if privacy and reliability (it’s a 3^rd party tool after all) aren’t too much of an issue. I have to say I find the interface very clunky indeed and it displays like an old-school Powerpoint, but the basic functionality is good. You can see a short example here: http://livebinders.com/play/present?id=18332.  There is the option to embed the Binder in another website too.

3) JogtheWeb is another site in beta but it has a very good, clean interface. I had a few teething troubles getting my account going and also it didn’t seem to like my Netvibes page so I had to take that out, but otherwise it seems to work very well. Here’s a very short example: http://www.jogtheweb.com/run/BWbNivxOG8Xn/RSC-Wales-Learning-Resources.

4) Back to Delicious which now has a beta option to “Browse these Bookmarks”.

Screenshot from Delicious

This means you can stepthrough the websites one by one. However you do not get to see any added description or text and there is no control of the sequence other than the order in which they were added (most recent first) so it is really quite limited. You can save a link to a presentation but it is not obvious. You do have the option to save to your own delicious quite easily if browsing someone else’s bookmarks so this is more of an enhancement to using Delicious for resource discovery. A useful option but not so much a tool in its own right. Try it here with RSC Wales’ Media Literacy Resources: http://delicious.com/browsebar/user/rscwales/media_literacy#id=5802f3c4a627d1da9c9dc30035139efe-0

These are just a handful of sites that I have tried and there are plenty more out there. The fact that several of them are in beta means it is probably not a good idea to put all your resource eggs in one basket until they have become truly established players in the social bookmarking world. Even so, it is good to experiment with new methods of displaying useful resources which may entice more students to take notice.

Don’t forget that we add to our del.icio.us social bookmarking account regularly! It can be viewed here, or you can subscribe to the RSS feed – http://feeds.delicious.com/rss/rscwales.

Below is an image of the tags used in the account (click to enlarge) – as you can tell, there are a lot of subjects covered!

I thought it would be useful to create a summary post – to give an idea of some of the things I have been looking into recently (in no particular order), mostly with regard to learning resource use and the e-learning agenda. The breadth of subjects shows how wide-ranging the area of learning resources is, and how much a librarian needs to know! If you want to know more about any of the topics below then please get in touch with me.

Voting systems

Our Optivote voting system was used in some sessions by Coleg Gwent recently, which were apparently well received. I am thinking of collecting a few case studies on the use of voting systems in FE – please let me know if you would be interested in discussing their use in your college! (This may lead on to perhaps collecting case studies on other aspects of resource use in the future). Our RSC Wales Del.icio.us account has links to voting system suppliers.

[Optivote handsets and receiver]

Information literacy

As you may know, CyMAL has given the FE Learning Resources Managers’ network a sum of money to run more information literacy events, and RSC Wales is helping to organise them. Strand 1 – ‘Skills for success’ will be comprised of two events, one in North Wales (Deeside college, Wed 28th November) and one in South Wales (Swansea College, Fri 14 December). This will be followed by Strand 2 ‘Strategies for Success’, a one-day course aimed at managers and run by Sharon Markless (Thursday 24th January at the University of Wales College Newport Caerleon campus). For the Strand 1 events we want to have a couple of short examples of what librarians are doing to increase the success/impact of information literacy or induction sessions. It might be something online, it might be a classroom based activity, it might be marketing – anything really, as long as you have something achievable that you can show or describe in an enthusiastic way! If you are interested in perhaps talking about something from your college then please let me know. It would also be a chance to disseminate your work across the professional community in Wales. I often hear of interesting innovations (e.g. this September Coleg Powys used the Cephalonian method in their LRC inductions), and it is good to get those messages out to a wider audience.

I am also working on a Moodle module about Information Literacy (currently looking at what other UK RSCs have done) and need to get on with it, but other things have been taking precedence… As the Pet Shop Boys would have said, it is always on my mind…

Our RSC Wales Del.icio.us account has a ‘bundle’ (yes, that is the technical term) set up for information literacy.

Second Life

See my blog entry below. Zombie Greenwood lives! There are many possibilities here. If any FE librarians want to test it out as a communication medium then just let me know and I will teleport over!

Federated Access Management [FAM]

One Welsh FE college has expressed an interest in moving from Athens to FAM, and we are looking into it.

It is possible that there could be a UC&R Wales event on this in Spring 2008.

See the RSC Wales Del.icio.us account Access Management bundle for more information.

RSC Wales Del.icio.us account

You may have spotted the mentions of this above! I have been tidying, removing dead links, repairing broken URLs, updating, re-tagging, adding new categories, merging others etc. If anybody wants to suggest links or changes then just let me know. Hopefully it will be a useful resource. I have a few more routine updates to do when I get the chance. View it here – then feel free to bookmark it!

Welsh Heritage User Group

I had been involved in talks on the future of this group. Ian Cockrill (Swansea College) then did a survey of all Heritage users in Wales to gauge support, but due to the small number of reponses it was decided that, at this point in time, establishing a Wales Heritage User group appears non-viable. However Ian will continue to represent the FE/HE sector and Wales at the national user group, which Heritage users can join, and he offered to raise issues at that forum. There may be an option of a library management system event in the future – something that is under consideration.

RSC Wales website

The RSC Wales website has been updated recently. I have been updating some of the useful documents originally created by Samantha Edwards, and will be making them available on the website as soon as the new access arrangements are finalised. In the meantime subscribers to FE-LRC-WALES will have received some of them (free e-resources etc.)

[The new-look RSC Wales website]

College queries

Obviously these go on all the time, from queries about LMS bids to requests for copyright-cleared image sources.

One interesting query was about accessing electronic copies of articles to store in the institutional VLE. Some of you may be aware of the British Library’s new Higher Education Scanning Service, which could be a really useful resource in Wales, but the HESS service is currently HE only. I have spoken to staff at the British Library who were very helpful and said they would be looking to possibly roll the service out to the FE sector. However there may be some issues that need clearing up with the Copyright Licensing Agency [CLA] first. I have been in touch with the CLA and am awaiting a definitive response on the issue. If I get any news I will inform FE LRC managers.

Open Source Library Management Systems [LMS]

In FE in Wales we have seen proprietary VLEs replaced with the all-conquering Open Source Moodle. Just about every Welsh FE college is using Moodle, or about to, leading to a situation where colleges can easily share resources and be involved in a community-support situation.

Could this happen with Library Management Systems? There are a few possibilities listed on the RSC Wales Del.icio.us account, and a few of our colleges are looking at them. But there are many crystal ball questions: What is the situation elsewhere? Could an Open Source LMS become the de facto standard in FE libraries? Which are the best? What support could RSCs offer? Is the situation similar to what happened with Moodle, or not?

There does seem to be a growth of interest in this area. In the last few weeks I have been in communication with the head of a research consultancy and with a lecturer writing an article, both unrelated conversations, yet both people were interested in the potential for Open Source LMS.

I have raised the issue in the national RSC Forum, and will see what happens, and also what the findings of the lecturer I was in contact with are.

Team meeting

Thursday 27th September was an RSC Wales team meeting in Swansea. A good chance for me to catch up with the rest of the team – and a personal challenge to me, since I have to be up before 5am, and leave the house before 6am to walk into Aberystwyth to catch the X40 bus to Swansea!

Yesterday I visited Barry College with my RSC Wales colleague Hannah Dovey. Hannah was running some staff development sessions, and I helped out a bit. Doing joint sessions like this has a number of advantages: there is more opportunity during the hands-on sections for us to help people one-to-one; there is extra support in terms of making points or giving examples; one person can get away for a bit when somethign is required (e.g. PC speakers); but the main advantage for me was learning things from Hannah’s presentations.

We did two sessions on Web 2.0, including descriptions of various tools and their implications for teaching (I covered social bookmarking); then there was a hands-on session using Blogger, where the teaching staff got to create a blog. There was a lot of thought-provoking discussion, since the lecturers wanted to come up with ways that the tools could be used specifically in their curriculum areas, and many good ideas came out of it – for example one lecturer intended to video various technical aspects to do with his subject area, then make them available to students as examples.

The other two sessions were on mind mapping using VUE – a free mind mapping package. After Hannah’s initial talk we helped the teaching staff to use VUE to create mind maps, and staff seemed to enjoy playing with it. Some very impressive mind maps were created in a short space of time, and there was some good discussion of potential uses. One lecturer, Tony Crothers, created carpentry tool types, then had nodes for individual tools. He was going to bring it up on the interactive whiteboard, and get the students to drag things into the correct category, then vote on if it was placed correctly or not, and discuss why. They could then drag it back if necessary, or to another category. It was an interesting way of combining different technologies to be both interesting and useful for the learners. I learnt a lot from the lecturers we were showing things to!

I was able to visit the Learning Resource centre as well, and spoke to one of the managers, Rupert James, about their services to students.

I can’t resist a section on my adventures with public transport – this time specifically the joys of buses. Since I have been working for RSC Wales I have seen arguments; physical fights; drunks; people being told off for making lewd comments; and many other sights. I am not talking about the conferences, but about the Arriva X40 service. Don’t get me wrong, I love the principle of public transport; I love getting to my destination without being stressed from driving; I enjoy being able to work while I travel. It is just the implementation of public transport by some companies that takes away a bit of the fun. Using that bus to travel to Swansea or Cardiff has its own challenges. Arriva stopped using proper coaches a long time ago. It is now just a normal hard-seated bus, so a 4 hour journey to Cardiff is a torture for your bottom. And your bladder, since there are no toilets – so you dare not drink any water on the bus or for a few hours before, therefore dehydration can be added to discomfort. Thanks, Arriva!