“We are delighted with our University’s performance in the Times Higher Education student experience survey,” said Chris Browne, Deputy President of Dundee University Students Association. “The past few years have seen improvements in areas such as the Library and Learning centre, halls of residence, employability and the amount of activities offered to students on campus.”

A new video aimed at encouraging more students to come to Dundee uses time-lapse photography to highlight this range of facilities, amenities and strengths that the University can boast. The new ‘pink’ InfoZone in the Library and Learning Centre appears early in the video, and students can be seen working late into the night towards the end of the video, as the impressive glass structure of the main library remains lit up on campus.

Have a watch, and let us know what you think. The timelapse video was created by local photography company Frame Focus Capture.

Times Higher Education Student Experience Survey
University of Dundee Press Release

The Library and Learning Centre was formed as a merged service in January 2009 under the directorship of Dr Richard Parsons, combining the existing library services with support for elearning activities and the academic staff development programme. The LLC offers a forward-thinking and innovative environment, committed to providing support for learning, teaching and research activities across the University Of Dundee.

This role lies within Research & Systems division, where the LLC is seeking to appoint a highly-skilled, motivated individual who can demonstrate aptitude in system delivery, electronic service enhancement and team leadership. These skills will be used to co-ordinate the development and maintenance of our wide range of learning and library systems, with particular responsibility for the library management system.

The role includes team leadership responsibility for the IT Support and Systems staff (5 FTE). This proactive team includes a recently appointed systems developer, and works to support and enhance numerous online services including an LMS, VLE, search services and a repository.

A number of new initiatives are currently underway which provide example projects the role-holder could expect to be involved in:
• Transition to comprehensive RFID technologies and self service in all library sites
• New web-scale discovery system to search online academic resources
• Open source digital repository for online archiving of publications
• Integration of existing library and learning systems and further development of website

The division has an established reputation for system delivery in both elearning and library fields and are committed to building on existing work to remain an exemplar institution in this field.

Candidates should have a good degree based in computing or information professions, and minimum 4 years relevant experience, with experience of an academic environment and of team leadership highly desirable.

Informal enquiries should be addressed to Hannah Whaley, Assistant Director – Research and Systems Division. Email : h.whaley@dundee.ac.uk (tel 01382 384277)

Read the Further Particulars

Apply for this job online

For the Library of Congress, they are confirming loudly their continued commitment to preserving and researching what matters to their nation, and with it the absolute requirement there is for them to do so. This furthers the important work they have already done in digital file standards and the semantic web, and shows an understanding and sensitivity towards the way history is now being written, and by whom. For some time now we have spoken of the changes in the news and publishing industries, and the role the average person can now play in communicating news. With this announcement, there is a sense of validation for what was already a widely accepted change in communications medium.

For Twitter, they have become the social network of history – it is the information passed through the channel they created that is being stored for all of time. One of the underlying concepts that has led Twitter to this has been their ideal of openness. Facebook, MySpace and even Friends Re-united before them kept everything locked down and internal – holding the data their users created close to them, in case it represented any possibility for further revenue. When you post on Twitter, the information you create is publicly available – therefore it can justifiably be viewed as such, archived and made available to researchers.

Twitter has therefore come to represent the thoughts of the population at any given snapshot in time, including historical events like the Obama election, topical events such as Michael Jackson’s death and real-time news like the Hudson Bay plane crash. While admittedly it is an unfortunate aside that many of the populations thoughts continue to be drivel, contained within them are the views of the masses on key events, and the idea that these remain open and accessible for researchers is very significant. A colleague rightly commented today that much content of newspapers is also drivel, but as with Twitter, the key news is still documented, discussed and evaluated within. How heartbreakingly (in fact, chillingly) different the communications surrounding 9/11 would be to look back on had twitter been used then as it is now.

We can therefore hail this as an important step for both research and open access. We can expect university researchers to draw immediate and fascinating data from the archives that attracts public interest and engagement. As many academic papers, conferences, and concepts are discussed online and tweeted, we may even find new ways to collate the information surrounding ‘published research’. This creates an odd irony – a company’s committment to openness may have made it easier to access what people think about a piece of research than it is to access the actual published document.

- Big deal bubble must burst, as it is unsustainable for many institutions

- We must move further towards open access, but it is not yet clear how

- Journal impact factor isn’t good enough anymore, we need to review the commentary and produce new ranking factors

- Linked information is nearly here, allowing informal and pre-publish conversations to be viewed and measured in a structured way on the web

- The age of the article is here, meaning metrics, usage and discoverability will increasingly be at article level rather than the ‘journal container’

- Just-in-time must replace just-in-case, as no one can maintain a full array of items that may only occasionally be required

The discussion around these issues is healthy, as is the growing volume with which librarians and researchers are willing to speak them out loud.  However these key themes are notable for representing problems, not solutions. It is clear that licensing models, researcher metrics, electronic and open access still have some way to evolve to meet the growing needs and expectations of the community.

Blackboard 9 – Driving change, but in which direction?

During the last eight years there have been rapid development in pedagogies for online learning and the underlying technical systems to support these pedagogies. These systems have matured to form a next level environment, encapsulated in systems like Blackboard 9, and the expectations for Moodle 2.0.

Challenging experiences in deploying Blackboard 9.0 have highlighted the significant issues that these change processes are raising for our field, and fuelled concerns that central VLEs should be making way for more agile socially driven solutions. As many institutions are at the point of deciding what direction they believe will provide that next generation experience that we are all aiming for, this presentation opens the discussion about the extended issues they may face.

Teaching and assessing group skills

This presentation discussed the rise in the use of assessed group work in many disciplines within Higher Education over recent years because of efficiency gains, employability agendas and notably, the increased availability of online collaboration tools. An approach to collaboration was introduced that teaches about team work by focusing on assessment criteria and peer evaluation aspects of group working. A building block has been developed to deploy this methodology in a Blackboard environment. As well as discussing the concepts and challenges of groupwork assessment and introducing the methodology, the key features of the building block were highlighted.

During the last eight years there have been rapid development in pedagogies for online learning and the underlying technical systems to support these pedagogies. These systems have matured to form a next level environment, encapsulated in systems like Blackboard 9, and the expectations for Moodle 2.0. These platforms have looked to bring the technologies implemented up-to-date (look and feel, underlying code, standards compliance) and to provide a sound platform to build on in the future.

However, the move to Blackboard 9 has been demanding for many institutions in many ways – bugs, stability and performance, staff training, staff engagement and expectation management to name but a few areas. These experiences have highlighted the significant issues that this change process is raising for our field, and fuelled concerns that central VLEs should be making way for more agile socially driven solutions. As many institutions are at the point of deciding what direction they believe will provide that next generation experience that we are all aiming for, there is value in discussing the extended issues they may face:

• Do we want the change we say we do?
• Are we capable of moving large scale VLEs forward?
• Are jumps away easier than jumps forward?
• How do we focus attention on learning and teaching and not the underlying technology?
• How can we manage expectations and change processes?
• Is our understanding of the elearning infrastructure at institutions the same as our users?

This talk will refer to the University of Dundee as a case study example, but will be discussing the broader conceptual and strategic direction of the field at this time. Discussion welcome.

1. Amazon Kindle - sales of the Kindle have been impressive in the US (although unconfirmed), and it can now be ordered from the UK. It is also the most wished for item on Amazon. The Kindle 2 showed genuine progression in terms of functionality and it remains the main contender to become the iPod of the eBook world. With a catchier name than others (e.g. The Sony eBook Reader) and respected internet book giants Amazon as creators and sellers then it stands a good chance.

2. New Kids on the Block – some companies have come late to the game, allowing them to jump a step. Barns & Noble qualify with their new touchscreen Nook reader (although they are already getting sued) but a better example is CoolerBooks. Smaller companies retain the ability to be more agile in design and development will lead to better innovations, and therefore a path more likely to be travelled by the masses.

3. Mobile – why carry an ebook reader when you already have an iPhone at hand? The use of iPhone as an ebook platform has been increasing in two ways. One is through apps such as Stanza that effectively turn your iphone int a reader, letting you browse, download and read ebooks from a selection of over 100,000. The other is the Jamie Oliver route, where specific books are sold as iPhone apps in their own right, with additional video and voice content. Worth noting that Amazon have also released an app to read their proprietary book format on the iphone. Battery life and screen size remain reasons why this is unlikely to be adopted by the masses as a platform of choice.

4. Anywhere as a Platform – Google announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year that their ‘Google Editions’ ebook store will be launched early 2010 and will sell ebooks with no digital rights management attached. This means that ebooks become platform independent – you can read them on your PC, phone, Kindle or any reader. When Google step into any market it is significant, and these seems a well timed piece of the jigsaw puzzle that has taking shape for years with Google and their interest in books. Not surprisingly, a month or so later Amazon have announced a Windows application to allow you to read their ebooks on any PC (really covering all the bases now).

5. Not yet concieved – there is a good chance that the ebook platform of the future is still an unknown entity, an idea forming in the back of someone’s mind right now. The most obvious suspects are the unconfirmed (but widely known about) apple tablet or the Harry Potter style newspaper. The Apple tablet has the chance to combine the size and battery life of ereaders, with the flexibility of the various apps available, and the general functionality that Netbooks offer in internet, email and applications. Sounds good…

So which direction? I firmly believe that current ereaders are transitional technology – they exist to help move the mindset onto the concept of books being an electronic entity. This is why they are shaped like a book, come in covers that you can open and hold like a book, and some even have the graphic effects of page turning. Remember that the first MP3 players were the size and shape of walkmans – they could have been hexagonal but this wouldn’t have helped people make the jump! So that said, it seems hard to imagine that readers in their current format will still be here in 10 years – at some point people will find it needless to carry multiple pieces of technology that should be able to do the same thing. iPhones and the like are also not designed for purpose – too small and poor battery. They help sell the concept, but aren’t really workable.

So the answer has to be a combination of the final two – we’ll expect to read ebooks on whatever device we choose – and we expect the devices available to mature beyond eReaders and Netbooks. Agree?

1. My husband always buys a new PC game for going on holiday, to play when others are reading or generally having downtime. While PC games don’t require an internet connection just to play, it seems they now require a connection to install themselves and do their anti-piracy stuff before they will let you play. Dongle not working, we paid our £1 for 1 hour of wifi at the reception area (several times) and downloaded approximately nothing. After a day of failed attempts, we eventually resorted to finding a McDonalds and buying a Big Mac meal in order to use their wifi. All for something that previously we hadn’t even known required the internet.

2. A chap on local radio said that the new Cheryl Cole video was “not what he’d expected from her at all” which made me curious enough to whip out my iPhone and have a look. Unable to get YouTube, I became irked at every mention of it on the radio thereafter. My hubbie reminded me that I could always watch it when we got home the following week, instantly creating a fine line between passing interest and semi-obsessive Cheryl superfan.

3. Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace prize. Despite the fact that I have followed every minutiae of media effort surrounding him for the last 2 years, I was four days late in finding out this news. Even now, there is a significant part of me that doesn’t really think it happened, because I didn’t *see* it happen online. I didn’t get the realtime reaction and interest on twitter and by the time I was reading about it online, it was very much in the post-analysis phase.

So have any of these things had any significant impact in my life? Of course not, but either I’ve become a product of the spoilt brat culture of modern civilisation and can’t wait for anything, or the promise of ubiquitous computing has arrived and changed the way I expect to interact with the world and events around me. I am going to choose to believe the latter.

In real terms, Husband played his game, I watched YouTube when I got home and world events have now been proven to happen even without my watchful gaze. However, in the not too distant past, McDonalds was merely a place to eat, favourite videos would wait to be viewed on Thursdays on Top of the Pops, and at some point in the week it may have occurred to me to buy a newspaper. It highlights how automated our expectation of access has become and that it now requires a conscious adjustment to live without it. I guess that’s what the teens were trying to tell us in their survey.

“A range of enterprising academic software systems are in use at Dundee, and the Systems Developer will be part of a proactive team to further integrate and enhance these systems – ensuring they meet student and staff expectations. The team has an established reputation at an international level and is committed to building on existing work to remain an exemplar institution in this field.

The LLC is seeking to appoint a highly-skilled individual who can demonstrate aptitude in software design, web application programming, scripting, and data reporting. These skills will be used to design and develop add-ons, integrations, new functionality and automations, and contribute to upgrades, testing and issue resolution across all systems.”

I would encourage anybody interested to get in touch or send in an application – this one is a great opportunity for somebody.

Full details and further particulars.

The ability to work effectively in a team is seen as a crucial skill within many professions and industry sectors. There has been a rise in the use of assessed group work in many disciplines over recent years. There are numerous reasons for this increase, including larger class sizes (therefore making it efficient to have group submissions) and a greater emphasis on employability and transferable skills.

Despite this rapid progression, methods for assessing the individual contributions of team members have not advanced significantly causing a feeling of dissatisfaction amongst many students. Faculty are also concerned about the possibility of students gaining high marks because of their team’s effort, when the individual contribution was unsatisfactory.

An approach to collaboration has been developed that teaches about team work by focusing on assessment criteria and peer evaluation aspects of group working. As the amount of group work that students complete continues to increase, enhancing their learning in this area helps them achieve more from project work and benefit from collaborative learning approaches. By ensuring fairer grading for individual contributions to groups, students are less stressed by the challenges of team working and are better able to focus simultaneously on the project deliverable and team interactions.