Category Archives: jisc

Digitisation Podcast

The JISC have released a podcast on the large digitisation programme.

The £22m JISC digitisation programme is making available a wide range of vital scholarly resources to UK education and research. One of its programme managers is Alastair Dunning who, while talking to Philip Pothen for this podcast, discusses what the programme is delivering and why the international conference in Cardiff represented an important landmark both for the programme and for wider attempts to make available scholarly resources of national importance.

Find out more.

Are you ready to play?

I dragged myself from my PSP to wonder if playing games is such a waste of time…

PSP

Today I still walk around and ask students to stop playing games on the computers in the Library.

Some students tell me that they are undertaking a course in Computer Games Design at which point I throw them out…

The JISC have recently published a guide on using gaming for learning.

Since the earliest times, games have been used to support training and learning objectives. With the development of computers and more recently the Internet, there has been increased interest in how leisure games and simulations can be used to support learning.

A newly-published report Learning in Immersive Worlds: a review of game-based learning explores the increased attention being paid to games to support learning objectives, presenting the findings of a literature review and a set of case studies of game-based learning from everyday practice contexts.

The JISC-commissioned report finds that computer games could have an important role to play in learning but that for learning to take place, games must be related to learning outcomes and be relevant to real world contexts of practice. Factors that influence learner motivation include, the report suggests, the player’s sense of challenge, the realism of the game, opportunities to explore or discover new information and learner control.

A copy of the full report of Learning in Immersive Worlds: a review of game-based learning is available with other guides from the JISC website. It makes for interesting reading.

Archival Audio Recordings

A new source of music and audio recordings which can be used for educational purposes is the British Library Archival Sound Recordings.

The Archival Sound Recordings service is the result of a two-year development project to increase access to the Sound Archive’s extensive collections. When complete, it will make 3,900 hours of digitised audio freely available to the Higher and Further Education communities of the UK.

Part of the JISC Digitisation programme there is a lot of audio and music..

music

Note you need to be licensed to hear and download the clips, but it is free to FE colleges (and HE Institutions) to get licensed.

User Experience

I am attending a very interesting presentation on user experiences. Introduced by Brian Kelly he gave an overview about the tools users use and offered reasons why institutions should not try and replicate these services but integrate and use them instead.

Brian Kelly presenting at the JISC Digitisation Conference, July 2007.

The next two speakers spoke about how the British Library and Newsfilm Online are designing their sites with the end user as the focus.

There were some interesting video clips of how the (currently unavailable) Newsfilm Online website will develop.

Attending a digital images workshop

I am currently attending a workshop on digital images at the JISC Digitisation Conference.

It is a technical briefing on capture, conversion and workflow.

Nigel Goldsmith, the TASI Technical Research Officer is talking about images, RAW format, Adobe’s Digital Negative format and JPEG2000.

Outlining many of the problems with JPEG2000 and why it isn’t widely used or supported.

It’s quite interesting.

JISC Digitisation Conference Plenary Session Day One

elephantHaving attended a really interesting session on Shibboleth and Federated Access, I am currently listening to the plenary about the other parallel sessions.

It is proving to be a useful and interesting conference. What is nice is that the presentations and other reports will be available on the conference blog.

Though the content of the conference is on digitisation and e-content, it is interesting how the focus of much of the conference is on web 2.0 and (unsurprisingly) Google. I suspect that this is down to the focus on end users’ needs rather than coming from an institutional approach.

A lot of talk about elephants as well, of which I seemed to have missed somehow the connection.

The plenary has finished and we are now looking at tomorrow.

A connected conference

What is nice about this JISC Conference is the connectivity. There is free wireless access, this means that you can access the websites mentioned in presentations, the conference blog (to read entries on presentations and workshops you missed), e-mail (so less of a pain when you get back to the office), you can blog and micro blog. You can upload photographs to Flickr and view others’ del.icio.us links from the conference.

Of course laptop batteries never last, but at this conference there are power points to plug your laptop in.

There is a conference blog and a conference wiki.

Makes a conference easier to digest and reflect upon.