I thought I would bring together a few tools or sites that I had played with over the last year:

• QR codes
• Cartoons
• Animoto
  
• Crosswords
• Quizzes

QR codes

The basics of these have already been covered by Sam. I have been following examples of use, from US studies of their potential, to commercial uses such as Google’s ‘Favorite Places’. I also tried things out using my work mobile phone, and was impressed at how easy it was. You just have to download some software to your phone if it isn’t already on there (I used QuickMark software but I have also heard good things about the Kaywa Reader). Then you can point your phone camera at QR codes and in a fraction of a second the code is deciphered and displayed on the screen. You can make your own (e.g. try here or here), or point at the code below.

How might libraries use QR codes? Below are a few ideas:

• QR code on textbooks in the library – scan to get a subject guide to resources that area (e.g. catering), including classmarks to look at, core texts, useful magazines, websites etc.
• Fiction collections – scan the code to get the e-book version, e.g. from
  Project Gutenberg if it is a classic text.
• Reference collection book – scan the code to go through to a reference
  website on that subject (e.g. online dictionary or style guide), or the library’s own virtual reference collection.
• Posters linking to the relevant web pages. Or notice boards could have
  QR codes next to headlines, which when scanned take the user through to a blog entry on that subject.
• Used as part of induction, for an innovative quiz where there are blocks of QR code information around the library, with a sort of treasure hunt following QR code clues on signs and hidden in some books. Students would be lent a phone if they don’t have their own. The hunt would involve using library resources such as the OPAC, and only if things are done in the correct order will they get the correct final code (which might open a safe; be a classmark for a book with a voucher in; it could be a map reference; or something more imaginative).
• Library cards could have QR codes with user information on, or to take the user to their library account on their phone so they can renew books etc (after some other form of authentication too, of course).
• Other uses for QR codes on a physical item, enabling users to see the
  catalogue record, reviews, similar items etc.
• On the OPAC so users can get locations, classmarks and item details onto their phone for finding item on shelves, or adding to bibliographies. This was done at Aberystwyth University as one of the mobile phone enhancements (the OPAC also has the ability to send an SMS with item details to a mobile phone). To view the QR code function, search the OPAC then click on the “QR code” link in the “Availability” section when viewing a record.
• To provide context specific help and information in the library, as
  at Huddersfield University.

Will any of this be commonplace in LRCs in 5 years? Let me know if you are
using them yourself!

Update 27 April 2010: I have just become aware of this article by Andrew Walsh, ‘Quick response codes and libraries’ (2009).

Cartoons

Librarians are always looking for ways to get information across to users. Pictorial methods are attractive, but not many of us have any artistic talent. That is where sites like Bitstrips come in, since with Bitstrips it is easy and quick to create a cartoon. You can design your own characters to appear in it, or use the hundreds that are provided on the site already. The system is easy to use – pose the figure, choose a facial expression, stick some props in the background, and add a text or speech bubble; then tweak until you are happy with it. The end result is that you can link to the cartoon on Bitstrips, or download it as an image to use in newsletters and on notice boards. Bitstrips are obviously aware of educational uses, since they have recently launched ‘Bitstrips for Schools‘.

I created a few for my RSC Wales job, see the RSC Wales LR Netvibes account. Also in my other role at Aberystwyth University, to promote our federated search tool. The fact that it is so easy to edit the cartoons means it is simple to go back in and create a Welsh version.

Animoto

I have always been a fan of Animoto. It is a site that lets you upload images and select music, and they get mixed together into a video slideshow which can then be viewed online, embedded on a webpage, or downloaded. In the early days you had to add words to an image yourself if you wanted text, but nowadays there are options to include titles and subtitles, and even to incorporate video clips. The basic version which creates short 60 second clips is free to use; however I took out a subscription so that I can create videos of any length.

I have used Animoto in various ways.

• Sometimes when I am doing a teaching session I like to have looped music and video playing as people come in and settle down: to help create an informal atmosphere, act as a border between the ‘outside world’ and the session proper, and possibly to raise some questions in advance of the session. This is an example I used in a session I ran on using multimedia resources.
• An attractive way of getting a simple message across.
• To promote a new service (ac yn Saesneg)
• As an ‘attract mode’ running on a laptop when you are on a stall e.g. a recent stall I ran demonstrating e-book readers had this animation playing to pull people over.
• A fun way of introducing people with photos and names.
• For your own projects outside of work e.g. presenting a poem, holiday snapshots.

Crosswords

LRCs often like to offer quizzes as ways of summarising information or reinforcing it later. Crosswords are an easy way to do this, something some users might enjoy (though they shouldn’t be over-used, and many students will hate them – it is just an alternative way of giving information). Creating a crossword by hand is a daunting task, and thankfully unnecessary! Lots of software is available. My favourite is Eclipse Crossword, which is free and simple to use, yet powerful and fast. If you haven’t tried it before, why not incorporate a quick crossword into one of your information literacy sessions, leaflets, inductions or competitions, or use one as part of a promotion of resources and services?

Quizzes

At the end of a teaching session it is good to include some way of reviewing the content. Institutions with voting systems or interactive whiteboards can use those, but there are many other options for running a quiz. One of my favourites at the moment is ‘Multiple Choice Quiz Creator‘, which resembles ‘Who Want To Be A Millionaire?’ in format and sounds. I like the fact that you only need a laptop/PC, speakers, and (ideally) a projector. Sometimes I get a student to take part, helped by the rest of the people at the session; sometimes I get people to call out answers; other times I put the lecturer on the hotspot (depending on the vibe of the session and how relaxed people are!) It has proven to be a fun way to finish off with a laugh, with a prize of some sort for the winner (e.g. a USB memory stick or some pens). The quizzes are free to play (since the display software has no limits), but the quiz creator programme itself is only free for thirty days. You can download sample quizzes here if you want to try it out.

With Devolve Me, a student can upload a photo and see themself as they might have looked millions of years ago. It is a good example of the many small, single-function teaching and learning sources that can tie into a lesson whilst also being fun for the students.

In the interests of research I had a go myself, moving backwards through time. I am sure H.G. Wells would approve.

Homo heidelbergensis (500,000 years ago):

Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago):

Homo habilis (2.2 million years ago):

Australopithecus afarensis (3.7 million years ago):

An exciting new, free JISC-funded resource launched last week, relevant to many subjects. A Vision of Britain Through Time gives access to over two centuries’ worth of acts, figures, surveys, maps, election results and travel writing, showing how 15,000 UK places have changed.

Project director, Dr Humphrey Southall, of the University of Portsmouth, says:

Through the site we are offering an unprecedented amount of information detailing how Britain has changed over many centuries. Simply keying in a place-name or postcode unlocks a vast treasury of facts, figures, images and descriptions – from mediaeval boundaries to what the 2001 Census uncovered via, perhaps, a town’s appearance on a 19th century map, a comment by a touring agitator, a crop report from the 1930s and more. The range and depth of the information makes it a terrific resource for professional and amateur historians who want a complete picture of what a place was like at a particular point in history, but the site isn’t only a way to look back. The content is already in demand from researchers and forecasters watching for changes and trends of relevance now or in the future.

JISC digitisation programme manager, Alastair Dunning, added:

This new site is an excellent example of what JISC is enabling, and why. By helping the project to improve its historic boundary maps and add new, fully cross-indexed, content, JISC is making it easier for scholars across all disciplines, to access data. While also granting free access to researchers from other sectors, including healthcare planners, local government, climatologists and the ever growing number of people who are interested in
local and family history.

Read more about JISC’s digitisation programme.

I decided to put it to the test, so spent an hour exploring the site with my nephew. We compared facts and figures for Aberystwyth and Manchester, and discussed the implications of some of the graphs and statistics.

The negatives:

• Sometimes we got a bit lost, for example not all the maps had an explanatory key; or it would be unclear as to the differences between some sets of data.
• The site contains Google Ads (possibly a first for a JISC-funded project, and hopefully not the start of a trend), and the commercial advertising makes it look less like a quality academic resource. I do a lot of information literacy work to do with website evaluation, and one of the areas relates to bias/website purpose and includes looking out for advertising as one of the potential criteria for evaluation. I was running a session on this recently so the advertising seemed to stand out.

The positives:

• The site includes a wealth of valuable material, especially if you are willing to dig around and explore.
• The site led us to lots of discussion points.
• The four e-learning tutorials were a useful way in to navigate some of the themes.

I just wanted to plug an e-resource for the more academic end of the spectrum – there is a collection called ” which is free to FE and HE (forever). You can read about it here – probably most useful to history and media studies courses, but with relevance to many other areas. That page includes a link to the form so that you can sign up for it and set up access. It is just one of the databases made available for free as part of ‘The JISC Collections UK National Academic Archive‘.

It is one of the deals listed on our Delicious account under free e-resources. There is also some great stuff coming out of the JISC Digitisation Programme that librarians should be aware of. It includes many free resources, some already launched and some to come – let’s make the most of them by promoting them within colleges.

The Commoncraft Show is a good example of the latter – they are simple breakdowns of technical subjects, often related to Web 2.0, but because they are US-based they don’t always fit perfectly into a UK/Wales setting. However they can be used as inspiration for ways of explaining things in a language that non-librarians can understand. Take the following example where Commoncraft give some concise tips on improving search strategies, which has obvious implications for information skills teaching:

Commoncraft are popular with me because they are also unafraid to tackle pressing issues of the day:

So as sources of inspiration, as well as things to use in teaching, it is worth becoming familiar with sources of video clips. (One big tip – if you are going to use one in a teaching session it is best to download it in advance if possible, in case there are network problems on the day, so that you don’t stand at the front of a class saying “Well it worked last night…”)

If you want to make your own videos there are many commercial options, however with a bit of lateral thinking even photo-slideshow tools like Animoto can be used for getting a simple message across. When teaching I sometimes make one that is themed to the session and let it play in the background while distributing handouts and getting people logged into PCs. Or you can use them to promote a service or resource – this is an Animoto video I created in my ‘other job’ to promote Aberystwyth University’s federated search tool, then uploaded to YouTube (Welsh version here):

You can see an FE LRC-themed Animoto video in the top right of the Netvibes account Sam and I share.

In terms of creating your own – also see Sam’s blog post and Moodle areas on screencasting; and the first comment below (by Christine) for some other software you can use.

It has obvious implications for students on courses that include elements of history, anthropology, life science, photography and the environment, so is worth adding to resource lists for courses that cover those subjects, as well as promoting it to the staff and students on those courses.

The resource is likely to grow over time – my favourite two images so far are reproduced below.

Bothy the dog in his polar gear

Jeans frozen into a standing position

Visit the site at http://www.freezeframe.ac.uk/.

Press Release: 150 years of polar expedition photos available online

Today, 4th March 2009, sees more than 20,000 photos from 150 years of polar expeditions available online. These images have been made accessible by the Scott Polar Research Institute, thanks to a digitisation programme funded by JISC.

As part of the preservation programme, negatives, daguerreotypes and lantern slides, which form part of a rich but fragile archive held by the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, are now available to scientists, researchers, scholars and members of the public.

As well as being able to view a range of images, including Herbert Ponting’s glass plate negatives from the 1910-13 British Antarctic Expedition, that are so fragile  they will never be on public display, visitors to the website will also be able to read extracts from diaries, expedition reports, letters and other personal papers of expedition members.

Polar Explorer Pen Hadow, who is currently leading the Catlin Arctic Survey which will determine the likely meltdown date of the ice cap, said: “The Freeze Frame archive is invaluable in charting changes in the polar regions. Making the material available to all will help with further research into scientific studies around global warming and climate change.”

Heather Lane, Librarian and Keeper of Collections at the Scott Polar Research Institute, said: “The digitisation of these historic photographs allows the Scott Polar Research Institute’s resources to reach a wider learning community than ever before. Without this JISC-funded project we risked losing some of the most fragile of items forever and certainly wouldn’t be able to give so many people access to otherwise hidden collections that can further the study of polar environments.”

Alistair Dunning, Digitisation Programme Manager at JISC, added: “This is one of over a dozen JISC-funded projects which aim to take valuable content that is not easily accessible by scholars or other interested parties and make it available to all. Freeze Frame will provide an unparalleled record of the living conditions and scientific findings of the explorers which can be used by learners today studying everything from photography and nutrition to global warming and glaciology.”

A new exhibition, Face to Face, featuring some of the historic photographic portraits discovered during the Freeze Frame project, is currently on a UK tour and opens at Discovery Point, Dundee on 7th March.

For additional information visit www.jisc.ac.uk or the Freeze Frame archive.

An RSC Wales colleague brought this to my attention – the 2008/9 Wikipedia Schools Selection is

“a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia, targeted around the UK National Curriculum and useful for much of the English speaking world. It has about 5500 articles [...] and is about the size of a twenty volume encyclopaedia (34,000 images and 20 million words)”.

The element that makes this particuarly useful to FE is that all the content has been fully checked by SOS Children UK and the Wikimedia Foundation.

How the content was selected and checked

From the website:

“Topics were chosen for interest to children, by relevance to the National Curriculum and including much of the very best of Wikipedia. The selection is vast, and covers core subjects but does not try to be uniformly detailed: for example it has more depth on Llandudno, which is featured in the curriculum, than other similar places.

Articles were chosen from a list ranked by importance and quality generated by project members. This list of articles was then manually sorted for relevance to children, and adult topics were removed. Compared to the 2007 version some six hundred articles were removed and two thousand more relevant articles (of now adequate quality) were added. SOS Children volunteers then checked and tidied up the contents, first by selecting historical versions of articles free from vandalism and then by removing unsuitable sections. External links and references are also not included since it was infeasible to check all of these.”

Online access

As well as the option of downloading the content it is possible to access it online as a separate collection from the main Wikipedia site, by two methods:

• An illustrated subject index
• A title word index

Have a look and feel free to use the comments facility on our blog to share what you think about this Wikipedia project. Useful to FE or not?

Please see the TASI press release below for details of a new guide to finding digital images – possibly useful to ourselves and teaching staff, as well as our users!

As usual, it has been added to our delicious account:
http://delicious.com/rscwales and http://delicious.com/rscwales/images (for the contents of the images tag alone).

‘Internet for Image Searching‘ is a new, free-to-use online tutorial to assist staff and students within the education sphere in locating images for use in both teaching and learning.The emphasis of the tutorial is on finding copyright cleared images which are available free; facilitating quick, hassle-free access to a vast range of online photographs and other visual resources.Sharon Waller from the HEA/JISC Collaboration commented on the new tutorial saying “This tutorial is an excellent resource for anyone needing to know more about where and how to find images online.  The fact that it concentrates on copyright cleared images will make it even more valuable for busy learning and teaching professionals, researchers and students alike.  It will also serve to inspire confidence in those needing to use images from the web in their work.”

This tutorial has been created by TASI – the JISC Advisory Service for digital media and Intute as part of the Intute: Virtual Training Suite. The tutorial was funded and supported by the Higher Education Academy / JISC Collaboration Initiative.

My second visit to Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor, but with sunnier weather this time!

[The walk to Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor 1]

[The walk to Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor 2]

My colleague Paul Richardson led heroically on a number of sessions on mind-mapping, and enriching teaching and learning with learning objects.

[Paul directing us to useful resources]

My contribution was a hands-on session on the importance of three things: information literacy, quality learning resources, and close liaison between the teaching staff and the LRC, which ended with evaluating various copyright-free image banks for use in teaching or mindmaps. The attendees were a mix of teaching and library staff, which helped to reinforce my central message of working together. Some of the materials used in the event can be seen here.

‘RSC Wales Annual Conference for Further Education’
Wed 14th and Thu 15th May, Gregynog Hall

[Gregynog Hall - photo by Lis Parcell]

Further details here. This year’s themes were Learning Space Design and Green Computing, and Social Networking and Web 2.0 technologies from both technical and pedagogical angles. I was there for the first day, and in the afternoon I chaired the sessions on ‘Expectations of Space: Comparing Public and FE Libraries’ by Alan Clark, Designing Libraries (Alan was my line manager for many years, so it was an interesting situation to be introducing him!), and on ‘Space Design for Videoconferencing’ by Phil Davison, Manager of the Welsh Video Network. I will pay more attention to the Videoconference Studio the next time I am using one.

[Introducing a session - photo by Lis Parcell]

The final session of the day involved working in groups to design learning resource centres for different college scenarios – then comparing the results with what learners themselves came up with when given the same tasks. It was interesting to note that the learners’ designs were often very similar to the ones designed by library and technical staff. The only real difference was that the student designs were more likely to include ‘chill out’ areas with plasma TVs and a PS3/Wii, or a jacuzzi, or a board-table where the top can be inverted to become a pool table. All of which get my vote.

It was good to meet LRC staff at the conference, my second since joining the RSC, and talk went on until late into the night in the cellar bar. The next morning I was replaced by Sam, ensuring that there was fresh LRC support (so we were a bit like a WWF tag-team but wearing more clothes).

Welsh Libraries Conference
Friday 16th May, Llandrindod Wells

I only attended for the second day of this two-day event, in order to give a talk. The morning sessions were all on the subject of leadership, and gave much useful advice based on the experiences of the speakers (including an illustration of why laptops and water don’t mix well).

I was the last speaker of the day in the HE/FE libraries seminar – the death slot! It was good to have a familiar and friendly face as chair in the form of Donald Mitchell, Coleg Morgannwg, and I enjoyed both previous talks on RFID at Cardiff University and on the Virtual Academic Library project.

My title was ‘Social networking: making it work for you’, intended to encourage people to think about the possibilities and uses of social networking in HE and FE. The talk went well thanks to the responsive audience. I have linked to a form of the presentation below – feel free to contact me if you want clarification on any of the points.

['Social Networking: What is all the fuss about?' - photo by Lis Parcell]

Staff from eligible Welsh organisations (FE, WBL, ACL etc.) can now access the NLN materials via the Post-16 section of NGfL Cymru or directly at http://www.nln.ac.uk/. You will need to register there as a new user to have full access to the material – old logins for the LearnTrain site are not valid here – and full instructions are available on a Word document. You will need an institutional password to register but this can be obtained via a quick email to the site (or from colleagues who have already completed the process). The old LearnTrain website will eventually be closed down so any links to material from there will need to be updated to the new NLN site.

Features of the new interface are the ability to build your own “Collections” of resources which can be made public and shared with students or downloaded in a variety of formats. Future developments will see the Search facility on NGfL Cymru cross-searching the NLN materials as well, making it even easier to locate suitable resources. New material is being added all the time to NGfL Cymru and Karen encouraged use of the “Feedback on this Resource” option to help them improve the catalogue of resources.