Cloudbusting - MmIT National Conference - Less than Two Weeks to go!

The CILIP MultiMedia and Information Technology Group's national conference on the Cloud for library and information professionals is less than two weeks away and there's still time to book. With over a dozen expert speakers covering a wide range of topics on the Cloud at an affordable price, there's not much not to like.

The programme has been finalised and we're really excited as this conference is looking even better than last year's

Have a look below to see what we're going to be talking about in the Cloud.

More details and booking here:
http://lanyrd.com/2013/mmit2013/

Programme

9:30 - registration and morning coffee Richard Roberts Foyer

10:00 – Introduction and welcome – Chris Sexton, University of Sheffield, Leo Appleton, MmIT Richard Roberts Auditorium

10:15 -11:00 – Keynote presentation by Karen Blakeman, RBA Information Services “Searching in the cloud” Richard Roberts Auditorium

11:00 -11.50 – Parallel workshops sessions 1

·         Gurdish Sandu & Adjoa Boateng (University of East London) “The UEL Library: Entering the Cloud” Room A84

·         Lise Robinson (OCLC) “Something good is going to happen” : an overview of developing a cloud based solution” Room A85

·         Emily Goodhand (University of Reading) Cloud(y) Law: unpacking the issues for library & information professionals Room A87

11.50 - 12.10 – Break Richard Roberts Foyer

12.10-13:00 - Parallel workshops sessions 2

·         Andy Tattersall & Claire Beecroft (University of Sheffield) “CloudMe – Being an Effective LIS Professional without Touching Terra Firma” Room A84

·         Andrew Cox (University of Sheffield) “Research data management – what is the library’s role?” Room A85

·         Paul Walk (UKOLN) “Bring your own Cloud” Room A87

13.00 – 13:45 – Lunch Richard Roberts Foyer

13:45 – 14:30 – Rapid fire sessions Richard Roberts Auditorium 

14.30 – 15:20 - Parallel workshops sessions 3

·         Dave Parkes (University of Staffordshire) “Implementing the Koha Library Management System” Room A84

·         Anthony Beal (JISC) "Collaborating to create ebooks in the cloud: media rich resources for teaching, learning and assessment" Room A85

·         Bethan Ruddock (MIMAS) “Opening up – bibliographic data-sharing and interoperability” Room A87

15:20 – 16:00 – Panel Q&A – Dave Parkes, Anthony Beal, Bethan Ruddock, Karen Blakeman, Paul Walk, Emily Goodhand Richard Roberts Auditorium

16:00 Close

Open Access Library - a new search engine for scholars

Open Access Library (OALIB) is working on a new search engine for all scholars worldwide with the ultimate aim of promoting academic exchange and advancement.

“Open Access Library search engine features free access to 263,388 academic articles. And this number is estimated to increase in the near future. Our mission is to provide free research articles to scholars around the world”

Photo by ell brown

No registration is required, so you can start using OALIB straight away. There is no advanced search feature but the interface is nonetheless easy to use and navigate.

OALIB can be searched using the following fields: title, keyword, abstract, author, all. Results appear to be ranked in order of relevance and can be limited by year – handy if you’re only interested in recently published research.

A free text search for “health utility value” in all fields gives 44801 results. The top result is an article by Steve Goodacre from the Health Services Research section of ScHARR (amongst other authors).

Unsurprisingly, OALIB is not sufficient for thorough and systematic research, but could be a good first port of call if you need to do some background research or require instant access to scholarly articles.

Voices for the Library - Tweets for a week

Starting on Monday I will be taking over at the helm for the Voices for the Library Twitter account. If you don't know what Voices for the Library is, then it's quite simple, they're here to give a collected voice for libraries.

The purpose of Voices for the Library Tweets via a different library and information person each week is to find out about their thoughts, experiences and ideas - all in 140 wonderful characters.

Why am I doing this?

I would like to Tweet for Voices of the Library as I don’t always feel I engage with the library community as much as I should, and that I think this is an interesting opportunity to spend a few days making more of an effort to do so. I think like so many of us, whether it be librarian, cataloguer, information specialist, database manager – colleagues think they know what we do, but they’re usually far off the mark – I hope this will go some way to readdress that.

In recent years I have rediscovered the power of the local library through my little girl who is an avid reader and we have both come to appreciate the ‘local’ in our libraries, for me a second time round. I feel that in this ever-changing world that libraries should be heralded as hubs of the community, they are informative, grounding, inspirational and contain much more knowledge than just books and computers but the people who never tire of helping people.

 If you want to know more about the group, read on...

"If you read the papers, listen to the radio or watch the news you have probably seen or heard people expressing their opinion of what Public Libraries should be, or even whether they should exist at all. Most of these people either don’t use libraries, have an agenda to follow or think the library should only provide what they personally want.

Our agenda is to give people the facts about Public Library Services in the UK, and about the work librarians do, and to save Public Libraries.

We aim to provide a balanced view of the service and the professionals who work there, and to discuss some ideas for the way forward. We don’t want to lose our libraries, and we aim to ensure future generations continue to enjoy access to free unbiased public libraries and librarians.

We are inviting everybody who uses, loves or needs the services UK public libraries and librarians provide to join us, share your stories of why you want to save the services, explain what they mean to you, your friends and your families.

We believe that working together is the best way to create the public libraries we all want to use, providing as wide a range of information, recreational reading and activities supporting learning and literacy as possible. Not just for now, but forever.

We have the following aims:

1. Share positive stories from public libraries and librarians across the country.

2. Provide factual information about library usage in the UK.

3. Provide spokespeople for the media from a variety of different public libraries

4. Be a voice for communities and individuals to speak out about why they value their public libraries.

5. Support local campaigns to save libraries where it is apparent that the local council has not properly considered the impact of cuts to library services."

http://www.voicesforthelibrary.org.uk/wordpress/?p=2962

Latest Take Five Update (March 2013)

Latest Take Five Update

Photo by ingridtaylar

Previous editions of the update can be viewed here

Posted by Kath

Three free ebooks

        

Images from The James Lind Library

Free downloads of three ebooks are available from The James Lind Library.  The titles are:

• Testing Treatments: Better Research for Better Healthcare by Imogen Evans, Hazel Thornton & Iain Chalmers
• Smart Health Choices: Making Sense of Health Advice by Professor Les Irwig, Judy Irwig, Dr Lyndal Trevena, Melissa Sweet
• Know Your Chances: How to see through in medical news, ads, and public service announcements by Steven Woloshin, Lisa M. Schwartz, and H. Gilbert Welch

Please see http://www.jameslindlibrary.org/testing-treatments.html for further details.

Latest Research Funding Update - Projects and Programmes (March 2013)

Latest Research Funding Update: Projects and Programmes

Photo by Matt From London 

Previous editions of the update can be viewed here

Posted by Kath

ScHARR Snack Size - Peer Review of Teaching - Jenny Owen - 19th March - Eric Wilkes Room - 12.30

What's it like to be a MOOC Student?

Image used under a Creative Commons By Attribution Licence  © Claire Beecroft

Time for a bit of reflective practice! Four members of ScHARR (with three of us based at ScHARR Library) have just completed the E-Learning and Digital Cultures MOOC. The course was hosted on the MOOC behemoth Coursera and was facilitated by Jeremy Knox, Siân Bayne, Hamish Macleod, Jen Ross and Christine Sinclair, all from the University of Edinburgh.
The MOOC looked at the contrasting ideas of utopian and dystopian futures, how technology impacts on learning and culture and the concept of what it means to be human in the modern world.
The course was run over five weeks and was a mixture of synchronous content in the form of Google Hangouts by the course tutors reflecting on the previous week’s materials, while most of the content was delivered as asynchronous learning with the idea of students self-directing their learning. This was mostly formed around a core collection of videos and text, with supplementary reading for students wanting to delve deeper into a topic.

The course had over 41,000 students enroll, although evidence seemed to show that about 20% were active participants; 'active' meaning that they had communicated using one of the various social platforms associated with the course. The majority had some form of higher education background and were based in the U.S or Western Europe. Communication by the course hosts and students was predominantly via Social Media, in particular Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. More formal communication by course leaders and students occurred within the Coursera discussion forums for the EDC MOOC.
After five weeks, students were expected to submit a digital artefact that captured an idea or concept from the course materials. The artefact could be anything from text to video, from images to audio, including tools such as YouTube and Prezi as dominant mediums of delivery. Each submission was peer-reviewed by three students, although each student had the option to review more than three artefacts. Each ScHARR participant marked four submissions; the marking system was as follows:
 
0 = does not achieve this, or achieves it only minimally
1 = achieves this in part
2 = achieves this fully or almost fully

Students who got a mark higher than 1.5 received a distinction.


Claire Beecroft @beakybeecroft

I really enjoyed the MOOC and it appealed to the way I like to learn - it was largely video-based and the workload was as heavy or light as you wanted it to be. I aimed to do all the ‘core’ activities, but didn’t manage much of the optional stuff, such as participating in forums and blogging, though I did use the Twitter hashtag and found this very useful - one evening while scanning the tweets I noticed a just-tweeted tweet about a programme starting on BBC4 about ‘Google and the World Brain’- I tuned into iPlayer just as the programme started and watched all 1.5 hours of it - it was so interesting and eye-opening and frankly, worrying. I’d have never heard about it without that tweet.

I was a little surprised at the initial reaction of many students who complained about feeling ‘overwhelmed’ by the volume and diversity of content being generated by the MOOC - we knew that 40,000 had registered, so I wasn’t really surprised at all - I was happy to take a random/scatty approach and to stick to key platforms (mainly Google+ and Twitter) that I use regularly and like.

I would have like to have hung-out at the Hangouts, but these were timed just as I usually start the Friday-night scramble to get to nursery and after-school club.
Although I did watch a little of them on the recording, I think watching live and being able to participate (or at least try to) would have been much more fun.

What I liked the most was that the course really emphasised theoretical perspectives around e-Learning - anyone hoping to learn ‘skills’ would have been disappointed, but that’s not what I need - I wanted to be forced to use my tired, lazy brain- and I was! I also felt they did a good job of hinting and guiding us towards the links between the videos/readings and online learning, but never spelt them out - that was our job and the ‘digital artefact’ task was our chance to provide some proof that we’d gotten our heads around the theme of the MOOC. I also liked the very loose format of the assessed work, and for me the peer-marking system worked well and seemed reasonably fair- having 3 markers gave most of us a fair hearing from our peers I think (but then I got a 2, so I would say that...).

There is lots that we can learn from how they ran their MOOC, from their canny approach in ‘curating’ rather than ‘creating’ content (they didn’t give away any of their own materials as such, just signposted us to existing web-based resources authored or produced by others), to their assessment methods. I also think they were actually pretty brave to stick their head above the parapet and take on a properly Massive, Open and Online Course - the incident at Georgia Tech, just days after the MOOC started, shows just how wrong a MOOC can go, and how immediate and public the consequences can be.

I worked mostly in the evenings, and almost entirely on my new iPad (I had a problem with my iPad-produced Prezi so I fell at the final hurdle of doing the MOOC entirely on it, dang!) and although it was hard to fit it all in, I’ve signed up for 2 more Coursera MOOCs and I’ve got my eye on an edX one too - I just wish the OU would hurry up and launch Futurelearn- something to look forward to...

 



Chris Blackmore @chrisblackmore
The size of the cohort was an interesting factor - as a learner, I felt rather anonymous, and unconnected to fellow learners. I made very few postings to the discussion forum, and there was little or no sense of community from the forums, in my experience (there was more of a community from the twitter hashtag #edcmooc). This may have been exacerbated by the fact that I wasn’t able to attend the scheduled Google Hangouts. Notably, a group of us set up and attended our own Hangouts to reflect on the course.
The assessment task was to create a digital artefact, which was a wide brief and gave sufficient leeway to create a submission at the last minute! My submission wasn’t as closely related to course materials as it might be, and that was probably a reflection of insufficient time devoted to watching videos and reading texts - I did find it difficult to put in the requisite amount of time to my studies. This is a reflection of the fact that I was primarily doing the MOOC out of curiosity, to see what doing a MOOC felt like, and that I was fitting it in around work and family life.
The peer assessment seemed to work quite well - my own feedback was interesting and informative, and hopefully the feedback I gave was useful. I did find myself being quite generous in my assessments of peers’ submissions.
It was nice to receive confirmation that I had “passed” the MOOC and would receive some kind of official confirmation of this; on reflection, I am not convinced my low level of participation merited a pass, and I presumably wouldn’t have passed a credit-bearing University module with this level of participation. So there are question marks for me on how to monitor the engagement level of students in a valid way and give appropriate feedback and credit.

Angie Rees @angiefelangie
When I signed up for this MOOC it sounded interesting and really relevant to me but I wasn’t at all sure that I had the time for it. However I decided to sign up and see how things went and now I’m very glad I did.

From the first week I liked the format of the course - and the Coursera software it was run in. The format of four weekly videos plus some core and optional reading wasn’t too demanding and the content on the whole was relevant, interesting and often entertaining.

One area of the course which I didn’t make the most of was the social networking side of things. I posted just a few times to twitter, didn’t blog and wasn’t able to make any of the hangouts. I signed up for the facebook page but didn’t really use it. I think this was mainly due to time constraints but also the fact that the huge array of tools people where using to communicate was a bit bewildering and I often didn’t know where to start or what was the ‘right’ place to be participating online. That said within the University we got our own mini network of MOOC-ers going and our online Friday google hangouts where a very useful way of staying connected with at least some of the other participants on the course and getting some sort of feedback and peer comment etc.

I had a huge disaster with the final assignment - I had chosen to do an animation using the online tool Xtranormal. Unfortunately some changes I made to it in the last hour before the deadline failed to render in time and the whole thing was lost. With 12 minutes to go before hand in I frantically created a Prezi using the dialogue from my animation and uploaded it.
The peer comments I received were broadly positive which I was pleased about - especially considering how last-minute the whole thing was. I was delighted to get a distinction but feel it was not quite merited in my case. But hey, I’m not complaining.

My participation in the MOOC was as much about trying out a MOOC as it was about actually learning something - and I think I got a lot out of it on both counts. I’m certainly interested in doing more MOOCs and would love to be involved in designing and teaching one.
The bottom line: a really good learning experience and I would love to do more. 
 


Andy Tattersall @andy_tattersall
If someone had asked me what to expect from this MOOC in terms of delivery and communication I would have been wide of the mark. I expected there would be an awful lot of communication using Twitter, especially taking into consideration the course material. I certainly didn’t expect that it would be so self driven, and that there would be so many students enrolled. 41,000 is a tremendous number of students, but then again MOOCs are badged as being massive. Even though only a percentage of students were active it still made for a lot of white noise. In amongst all of the Twitter, Google+ and Facebook chatter, there were the discussion forums, which was at times could feel overwhelming if you allowed it to. Add the hundreds of EDC MOOC specific blogs and posts on other blogs it soon became apparent that even the most efficient and time-rich of students would struggle to stay on top of it all.

Nevertheless, conversations did take place and people did respond and retweet some of my communications and thoughts, whilst I found myself Tweeting at fellow students in the live Google Hangouts - these were moments that broke down the non-stop stream of edc consciousness into useful chunks. These moments brought the whole course back to the human/student perspective as we shared ideas and resources. The blog posts were very useful in that some captured the week’s material and ideas in one succinct piece of writing, the only downside is that you were open to ‘Chinese Whispers’ and could misunderstand what was being delivered on the real EDC platform.

The Google Hangouts were very useful as the five course tutors reflected on the previous week in a very informal and friendly manner. It gave a useful dimension to the course in that you got to see and communicate with the course tutors. It lead the four of us in ScHARR - alongside another colleague in Law, Ian Loasby -  to host our own Google Hangouts to chat about the course, and MOOCs in general.

The assessment was interesting, and I really enjoyed creating my digital artefact as it gave me the opportunity to try a new piece of animation software out. I was able to put in experiences and knowledge of my own alongside what I had learned from the MOOC. The artefact took longer than I would have liked, and it was soon evident some students had put greatly varying amounts of time to make their artefact, which again reflects the nature of the course. Unlike a paid for traditional course, there was no obligation to create a large piece of work or any kind of work for that matter, with some creating outstanding artefacts and others not so. The peer review process was interesting and the guidelines to the review process fairly easy to follow, so those who had never assessed academic work were aided somewhat. I was impressed not by what my reviewers had said of my work (although it was mostly very positive) but the standard of the reviewing, I felt like I was being assessed by university teachers.

I found the whole experience a bit of an eye-opener, not just for how the course was run, but how many people participated and how they communicated. From the work I assessed to how I was assessed and how many fellow students I communicated with, I got a real feeling I was studying alongside mostly fellow university staff and students. It left me thinking of the potential of MOOCs as I feel they have yet to breakout beyond the academic firewall, and go far beyond the West geographically. It also had me contemplating the downside of MOOCs, in that the bigger they are, the more potential for noise and a feeling of being overwhelmed. It left me with more questions than answers, but also a feeling of excitement as something great is going to happen. Each MOOC will be different from the next one, to how it is run to how students engage with each other. The range of tools and abilities do not make for a level playing field, but it does allow students to contribute what they like, and that the more you put in the more you should get out, even so you don’t have to feel obliged to put a lot in to get something out - this is no bad thing right now. 

How to look 10 years older in just 10 years!

IR's Claire Beecroft (that's me) is this week celebrating her first decade at ScHARR Towers! For those of you old enough to remember 2003, it was a world with no Facebook, no Twitter, no smartphones, no nuthin'! What it did have was the lovely IR team who immediately made me feel like I'd come home- if you'd told me then I'd still be here 10 years later, I'd have been really happy- so I had to mark the occasion in the customary IR way- baked goods:

I must have made my chocolate chip muffins at least 20 times over the last 10 years, but the exciting addition of a blob of chocolate Philadelphia in the middles elevates these to a suitably celebratory level.

I've seen a lot of comings and goings in 10 years, and IR, perhaps more than any other group within the School, has widened it's range of activities and embraced every technological and methodological trend and challenge that has come our way. I came here chiefly to do training of NHS researchers, and its that work that lead me to my 'University Teacher' role, via the Certificate in Learning and Teaching and my CILIP Chartership, and an awful lot of learning on the job.

I work harder now than I ever did, but I do love much of what I do, and I love our students and I Love with a big 'L' my best buddies in the IR team, so now that I'm in full Oscar-speech mode, it's time for a few thankyous (tissues at the ready!):

Andrew Booth: For having huge ambitions for us all, and for setting me on the course that got me to my job as it is now.

Andy Tattersall: For being the best office buddy, and for all the milky coffees.

Sonia, Anthea, Anna, Louise, Angie, Helen, Ruth, Pippa, Kath, and Tony: For being such great friends first and foremost, and being able to do basically anything (collectively at least!) I LOVE working with you all.

To Suzy for getting me through the promotions process in one piece, successfully! and for always being a friend first, and a manager second.

To Chris B, Chris C and Luke n' Dan- great 'comrades' and friends too. In another 10 years our plans for world domination will surely pay off at last?

There Andy- you asked me to blog it, and I blogged it good, no?

Latest Research Funding Update - Fellowships and Studentships (March 2013)

Latest Research Funding Update: Fellowships and Studentships

Photo by Miss Claeson 

Previous editions of the update can be viewed here

Posted by Kath