The council has concluded that it is of “vital importance” that the long-term viability of Europeana, which was launched in 2008, is ensured and that it continues to be developed as a valuable resource for the creative industries, notably by improving the quality and variety of the digitised cultural material (including text, audiovisual, museum objects and archival records) held within it.

While recognising the efforts of member states and the valuable work already achieved by Europeana, the council has concluded that further steps are needed to turn Europe’s cultural heritage into a lasting asset in the digital age.

It has underlined key areas that must be focused on in order to bring out the richness of Europe’s cultural heritage in the online environment:

• Cooperative effort around content quality
• Continued work on technical standards for digitisation and metadata
• Vision to avoid a 20th century black hole in content and making more in-copyright material available in Europeana
• Promotion of voluntary agreements on the digitisation of out-of-commerce works
• Full respect for intellectual property rights

The council asks member states to continue to consolidate strategies and targets for the digitisation of cultural material and to continue to support, develop and raise awareness of Europeana among the general public. It has set out a roadmap for work for 2012-2015 which covers areas including digitisation strategies, funding, copyright, the development of Europeana and ensuring long-term digital preservation.

The SCA believes that the council’s conclusions highlight the need to invest in digitisation – only 15% of our cultural heritage has been digitised so far – and the imperative of making copyright work in a digital age. It is also essential to explore new business models based on opening up content, and exploit the power of open, whether data, licences or standards.

These are all areas where the SCA has led the way in both research and practical training for practitioners in the field.

The JISC-led SCA fully supports Europeana and has made the UK’s first direct award towards the endeavour through the Europeana 1914-18 initiative.  JISC funded the first project of this sort in 2008 with the University of Oxford’s Great War Archive and has funded Europeana to support the UK collection day at the Museum of Lancashire in 2012. As a result of these initiatives, extraordinary real-life stories from the first world war have come to light and will be shared online.

Since the start of the digitisation programme in 2002, JISC has invested over  £30m in digitisation and content enhancement and is now celebrating a ‘decade of digitisation’.

The SCA calls on other organisations to show their support for the principles set out in the Council of Europe’s paper.

Read the Council of Europe’s conclusions in full: Council conclusions on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation

In this show, Kim Catcheside, interviews staff and students involved in the Digital Literacies in Transition – A Model for Transforming Graduate Attributes JISC-funded project, which is developing a model to support digital maturity linked to graduate attribute development. Simon Walker and Mark Kerrigan, explains how the project is employing cross-university studentships to foster a community of student-led change. Students, Rebecca and Daniel speak about their involvement in the project. The project is also engaging with employers to develop and pilot a ‘Rate our Graduates’ initiative that will subsequently feed into curriculum design and delivery workshops.

Helen Beetham, synthesis consultant for the JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme, also shares the outcomes from the synthesis from the baseline reviews from the 12 Developing Digital Literacies projects and 10 professional bodies and associations which provide valuable insights into the emerging issues from the programme.

For further information on JISC’s work in this area visit:
• http://www.jisc.ac.uk/developingdigitalliteracies and http://bit.ly/ddl-prog
• Collation of digital literacies projects’ blog postings: http://bit.ly/jiscdlblogs
• Programme blog: http://elearningprogs.jiscinvolve.org
• Programme related webinars: http://bit.ly/jiscdiglitwebinars
• Subscribe to JISC-DIGLIT-PUBLIC@jiscmail.ac.uk mailing list for updates about the programme and follow #jiscdiglit on Twitter
• For institutional videos from the Developing Digital Literacies projects visit http://bit.ly/jiscdlprogvideos to hear about how they are implementing digital literacies at a strategic level
• Digital literacies resources on the Design Studio: http://bit.ly/designstudiodiglit
• Digital literacies workshop materials: http://bit.ly/jiscdiglitworkshops

image from BPSUSF on Flickr

We heard this week that too many young people lack the social skills needed to get their first job.  The report by the Work Foundation (PDF) doesn’t explicitly mention digital literacy, but perhaps it should. With an estimated 90% of UK jobs requiring some level of IT competency, the notion of digital literacy – those capabilities that equip an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society – is becoming a key requirement for employability.

But will they really make graduates more employable? Why are digital literacies important to institutions and students? Is this something new or the same old skills agenda just repackaged again?

These issues and more are explored in a two part series of JISC on Air radio programmes that looks at how institutions have recognised the strategic importance of digital literacies of all staff and students working in a digital world.

In the sixth episode we are exploring how universities and colleges can help teaching staff, researchers, support and administrative staff to develop their digital literacies – those capabilities which prepare an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society.

One trend I’ve noticed is that when it comes to ‘keeping up’ with their tech-savvy students, institutions are realising that this is no longer a race they can win.  Instead they are looking for approaches that allow them to continue to meet the needs and expectations of learners in the 21^st century.

These issues are explored in a two part series of the JISC on Air radio programme that looks at how institutions have recognised the strategic importance of digital literacies for staff and students working in a digital world.

Find out more about how JISC is investing in the area on our website.

Watch videos showing how different institutions are implementing digital literacies at a strategic level with our funding

To follow the ongoing developments of the JISC funded Developing Digital Literacies projects visit the Netvibes page which collates all the project blog postings and subscribe to the Developing Digital Literacies programme blog for up to date information about the developments in the programme

Join our digital literacy mailing list to contribute to discussions around digital literacy and how it affects your institution.

JISC On Air Podcast Episode 7: Developing digital literacies for working in a digital world
(Duration: 15:48)

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• Mujina: a way of testing your SAML IdP and SP from Surfnet
• Encryption and Cryptography for Filesender: something I have talked about before from the nice people at AARnet.
• An Italian pilot to test the use of twitter to support astronomy pedagogy (note Andy McGregor and the Elevator people).
• A new approach to provisioning with SAML from Yaco, who also wrote the code for PEER.
• A presentation on Unhosted, another project looking at breaking the cycle of giving data to third party providers. Sounds a lot like UMA – SMART people!
• Peter on the (federated) TERENA Trusted Cloud Drive project that might be of interest to Eduserv cloud people.
• Another shiny R&E federation in the form of Tuakiri (New Zealand). I’ve had to register an entity with Tuakiri and can confirm they are a nice federation to join.
• A useful talk by Scott Rea on managing the risks presented by the recent CA attacks and failure. Definitely worth a look at the Dartmouth College report if you are an IT manager in R&E.
• Chris Phillips on SCIM beating up SPML. I think it is too early to say if any of these standards will be useful in cloud provisioning, but happy to sit tight wait and see at the moment.
• Bjarni talking about PageKite, another project starting to question the way the web is being used and whether it achieves the aims of ‘freedom and privacy’. This chimes with the talk I will be giving tomorrow (plug plug).
• Shooting more moons with a collaboration between JANET and PowerFolder to federate up their product(s)….which is a bit like a private dropbox on acid. So more handwaving towards the cloud folks.

I’ve been trying to find a common theme to cunningly link all of the talks. It’s difficult but I think most of the speakers were saying:

• here’s some stuff.
• we’ve done it for you.
• it works.
• go play!

This is the compelling pitch offered to millions of prospective students from a bewildering array of start-ups and initiatives. Building on the open educational resource movement to create immersive online learning courses scalable to a global audience, and then giving them away. It seems like hardly a week goes by without another powerful announcement concerning another Massively Open Online Course (MOOC).

Examples include EdX (MIT/Harvard), MITx, Udacity (Stanford/Independent), Coursera (Princeton, Standford, Michgan, Pennsylvania), OERu (Abathasca), Khan Academy (Independent).

All share a similar business model: free content, free learning experiences, paid accreditation and additional support.  A business model that ALT-C 2010 attendees may find hauntingly familiar.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(video taken from a presentation given by Heather Price and David Kernohan from JISC,  Li Yuan and Sheila MacNeill at JISC CETIS, at the Association of Learning Technologists [ALT] conference in 2010)

Like any buzzword the term MOOC has shifted in meaning as use has expanded, from a specific set of pedagogic assumptions around networks and learning, to a term for any large online course with no initial fee.  These initial framings of the idea drew heavily on concepts around connectivism, and saw the learner as an active participant both in the design and the delivery of the course, alongside a network of peers.

My own experience with ds106 has brought home to me the power and possibilities of this “classic MOOC” model.  As a MOOC on Digital Storytelling, the course is actually taught in a number of locations to paying students, and uses the huge numbers of open participants to support, direct and encourage creativity. For me, the power has been in the community not in the course.

In the UK, the experiments of Jonathan Worth and Coventry University with open online courses around photography (for example PHONAR and PICBOD) have seen similar results.  Students on the PICBOD course spontaneously organised and ran their own well received end-of-course exhibition.

Clearly the power of this form of MOOC works, in ways related to more traditional university outreach activity, to engage and inspire people outsides of the confines of an institution.  And bringing the interested amateur into contact with the ideas and processes of academia can only be a good thing for student recruitment.

A parallel movement, which could be exemplified by Anya Kamenetz’s “DIYu” and “Edupunk’s Guide”, sees the MOOC as a replacement  rather than an enhancement for institutional study. Courses within this tradition, despite the revolutionary trappings and “Education is broken” sloganeering, tend to be far more traditional in structure. Indeed it could be argued that only the zero cost of entry separates them from millennial initiatives like Fathom and UKeU.

The learning itself tends to be more pragmatic, with a skills/mastery rather than an understanding/practice focus, and there is a clear demarcation between tutor as source of knowledge and student as consumer.

To me,  it is this revolutionary strand of MOOCs that is reinforcing the traditional model of education,  and the institutionally-based pedagogic experiments of people like Jim Groom, Jonathan Worth and Stephen Downes that are challenging it.

This division between idea and expression is slightly more complicated in the world of computer programs, however. Clearly the lines of code in a program’s source files are analagous to the words on a page in a novel, but what is a program’s ‘plot’? Is it the broad task that the program is written to achieve? How about the arrangement of code elements – say the way that the task is conceptualised as subroutines or objects? At what level of abstraction does a program pass from being an expression into an idea?

This question is an important one for anyone who is publishing code. While it’s easy to see that pasting someone else’s source code into your own program is likely to need the original author’s permission, it’s less clear whether borrowing someone else’s object model, data model or API definition is an infringing act. These questions have been being discussed both in the US and Europe recently as a result of a couple of high profile court cases.

In the US, Oracle and Google have been fighting over a range of intellectual property issues – both patent and copyright-related – for almost two years now. One key issue that remains unresolved at the time of writing is whether certain non-literal elements of the Java programming language are protected by copyright. This argument centres around what are essentially helpful code snippets that are provided to Java programmers by the creators of the language. These are arranged into named sets, with established conventions for calling them up and making use of them (APIs). The question at issue here is whether the naming of these sets and the conventions for making use of them is ownable.

In Europe, in a case covering similar though not identical ground, the European Court of Justice has ruled on an argument between SAS and WPL over the issue of whether a programming language and the structure of data files are ownable. The former question is closely adjacent to the Google-Oracle APIs issue: is a conceptual arrangement of useful items copyrightable? In this case the ECJ ruled that it is not, and drew heavily on the analogy with literature and natural language; books in English are ownable, but you can’t own English. On the issue of data files, on the other hand, the ECJ held that the structure of a data file is ownable as copyright as a part of the expression of a computer program. So here we have a real example of a concept which is not a literal expression but is still not sufficiently abstract to be an unprotected idea.  (In the event this finding did not help the ‘owners’ of the data file format, as the act of infringement they were complaining about was legitimised by an exception in EU and UK law that permits certain acts in respect of computer programs if they are done for the purposes of facilitating interoperability.)

These issues may seem annoyingly abstract and  inconsequential, but in fact they have deep significance for all software authors and consumers. While software is treated as a literary work in copyright law, its tendency to be more formally structured and complex than literature means that the division between idea and expression in it will tend to be hard to find. This in turn means that there is often a real lack of clarity on what aspects of a computer program can be legitimately reused by other software authors. This exposes the authors to risk, and means that we as consumers can find ourselves relying on software that infringes others rights and may be subject to unexpected licence fees or removal from the market. While not specifically an open source issue, it affects open source just as much as closed source. So the recent ECJ judgement and the forthcoming decision on API copyrightability in the Google-Oracle case are of real benefit to the IT community. Whatever the specifics of the decisions, their clarity will be useful.

I also set up a couple of other timelines using the Diptiy timeline service way back in 2009:

This one pulls a feed from the CETIS Curriculum Design web site topic area 

This the #jisccdd twitter feed.

 And this one has various feeds relating to #jisccdd

Without a doubt, Apache Hadoop that is the most important open source project in this space. It is amazing to see how fast the Apache Hadoop ecosystem is growing and how everyone is trying to jump on the bandwagon. Start-up companies like Cloudera and Hortonworks have no trouble finding venture capitalists willing to invest large sums of money. Similarly, nearly every major tech company is offering it, while other internet companies that deal with big data are using it (secretly or not). At the Eduserv symposium, EMC CTO Rob Anderson focused on the implication big data has for storage, and showed their Hadoop-based offering. Because the Apache licence allows you to use any Apache project in a closed-source implementation, EMC can sell their Hadoop distribution without needing to make that product open source.

There are big implications of the big data trend for the research community. Guy Coates of the Sanger institute showed how the amount of data they are managing is increasing rapidly. They are expecting this increase to continue, especially since the costs of human DNA sequencing is dropping dramatically. They expect it to drop to $1000 for a full scan within two years (excluding storage!). His main challenge was not the actual storage of the data, but the management of the data as researchers were analysing it. Sanger is using the open source tool iRODS, a community-driven project that originates from the Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) research group in the DICE Center at the University of North Carolina.

Another open source project that featured prominently at the Eduserv symposium was Apache CouchDB. Simon Metson of Bristol University explained how NoSQL is the enabler of big data and new database systems that do not use the traditional relational database approach are better suited for these tasks. Open source software projects like CouchDB, but also Apache Cassandra, are leading in this space. Simon highlighted that the community-aspect of big data is very important. By engaging with the community that uses these tools to solve their big data problem, you can solve the hard problems. Something you may encountered once in a thousand times, may have been solved by someone else in the community who runs into it more often, and vice versa.

The closing keynote was given by Anthony D Joseph, professor at the AMP Lab at UC Berkeley. He mentioned how Facebook started the Open Compute project to share best practice in cluster design for big data centers. It is an interesting example of the old economic adage that you should commodotise your complement. Berkeley is collaborating on the Apache Incubator project Mesos, which is a scalable cluster manager that can dynamically share resources between multiple computing frameworks. They support frameworks like Hadoop, Spark and MPI.

So the technology is there or is well underway in being developed. And being open source, anyone can download and start using it. Technology is not the problem of big data, but the challenges lie in the cultural and organisational change that is needed to capitalise on big data. People within and across the organisations need to be willing to share their data and think of new, intelligent and creative ways of making use of this data. Two well-known examples that were mentioned were the Google flutrends, a website that predicts flu epidemics based on what people search for, and a Twitter application that was created to detect and report on earthquakes using people’s tweets.

A final challenge that was recognised widely at the conference was the shortage of skilled people in the big data space. This is true both for the data scientists that were needed to analyse the data, and for people that can help curate the data longer term, which is a completely different challenge for many HE institutions. In the spirit of open source though, there are many resources freely available online for people who want to get started, such as on the website bigdatauniversity.com. And of course, if you want to get started with one of the open source projects mentioned, there are many ways to get involved.

In February we released JISC Elevator, a beta website designed to allocate JISC funding to ideas based on votes from those working and studying in higher and further education. People could submit an idea to the site via a video pitch and if enough people voted for it JISC would consider it for funding.

We think JISC Elevator is a useful approach for a number of reasons:

• It is driven by what the sector wants. JISC projects are funded after an established review process conducted by experts. Elevator projects still benefit from this review but they also have an initial screening where a much broader range of people get to decide whether an idea is relevant to them or not.
• It establishes demand for an idea. One of the most difficult things for people who are applying for JISC funding to demonstrate is that there is a real demand for the idea they are proposing. The Elevator establishes this right from the start, if you can’t get enough people to vote for your idea then you don’t get funding.
• It supports small, practical ideas. Previous work in JISC has shown that small projects can have a big impact. Small projects also offer a chance to try out new technologies and very innovative ideas that have a higher chance of failure in a way that minimises the risk.
• It promotes ideas that benefit many institutions. To reach voting targets on Elevator ideas have to get votes from a minimum number of institutions so ideas have to appeal to people working in other departments and institutions and not just meet local needs.

In the future we are likely to use Elevator in more specific and targeted areas where small projects can be used to realise elements of the JISC strategy. It is likely that Elevator will be most useful in early stage innovation because it will allow us to support experiments with emerging technologies and practice that could benefit the sector by developing new tools, services and practices. We see this as a specific tool we can use to improve the allocation of innovation funding in certain areas. We don’t expect it to replace existing approaches.

We were very happy with how the trial went. In the 6 weeks the beta was live, we had 26 ideas and there were 2300 votes from 234 different institutions. There are more numbers and detailed analysis in the evaluation report I prepared on the trial.

Naturally as this was a trial, there were lots of things we think we might be able to improve upon. The report goes into some detail on this. We are about to embark on further development on the site to address some of these issues.

Of the 26 ideas, 22 reached their voting target. We then submitted these ideas to an evaluation with expert markers. Based on this evaluation we have decided to fund 6 projects – you can click on the links to see their video pitches:

1. Mobile Reflections – University of Leeds - Using mobile devices to enable students to capture videos of them reflecting on their work while out in the field
2. Interactive Visualisations – Oxford University - Developing an open source and easy to use tool to help researchers produce interactive visualisations that they can use for teaching, for investigating data and for disseminating their research
3. Classy Apps – Kingston College - Developing a guide to using apps on the ipad and iphone for teachers to engage GCSE re-sitters
4. Health CARE – City University -Developing augmented reality apps to support the learning of health care students
5. Open Access Index – Edinburgh University - Investigating the development of a score to denote how engaged an academic is with distributing research outputs via open access routes
6. Mobile app for course data – University of Central Lancashire - Developing mobile apps to enable prospective students to discover information about courses they may be interested in

There is a nice spread of projects here, they come from a range of institutions, address a variety of institutional functions and serve the needs of a number of different user groups. You can expect to see the results from these projects around the end of August.

We are in the midst of planning the next iteration of the elevator site. We see its immediate future as a platform for enabling innovation in specific areas. However in the longer term there are some more intriguing possibilities. Would it be useful to provide a version of Elevator that could be installed and used at universities, colleges and other organisations?  Can we use the Elevator to involve more students in the innovation we fund? How can we involve innovators from outside the further and higher education sector? Lots of questions and we don’t have the answers yet but we hope that by iterating our approach to Elevator we can continue to find new ways to support innovation in the sector.

Tate’s aim is to increase public awareness, understanding and enjoyment of British art from the 16th century to the present day. Successful in our Heritage Lottery Fund bid for Transforming Tate Britain: Building, Archives, Access, we are changing the way people engage with Britain’s cultural heritage.

You will oversee the digitisation of 52,000 treasures from Tate Archive, ranging from artists’ sketchbooks to photographs and hand written correspondence, as well as monitoring the development of the associated learning programme.  As an experienced Project Manager you will ensure the process is delivered on time, to budget and to the highest quality. Your team will work to best practice in the digitisation of fragile archival material and your robust project plan will see the operation run smoothly and efficiently. You will work collaboratively, building relationships across Tate and with volunteers, trainees and external partner organisations.

Enthusiastic about working with a national collection, you will combine your proven track record of managing large-scale digitisation of a similar kind with experience of running learning and outreach projects.

Contact details/How to apply:
Our opportunities are open for you to apply online. Please visit the Tate website for more details and how to apply.