RSC NewsFeed

Welcome to the fifth edition of NewsFeed for this session brought to you by the two Scottish JISC Regional Support Centres. As befits the firework season, this bumper issue explodes with information on IT and how it can be applied to teaching and learning. Here you’ll find sparklers in the shape of JISC information from Invitations to Tender to Podcasts, resources and advance news of conferences just over the horizon.  Other pyrotechnic highlights include an add-in for PowerPoint allowing you to integrate web pages with presentations, a beginner’s guide to blogging from the BBC and the latest in our ‘Snippets’ series presenting shining stars from the Internet skies.

The British Library and JISC invite tender to conduct a three year longitudinal study investigating and assessing the information-seeking behaviour and scholarly outcomes of young and future scholars in the UK.

The broad aim of this research project will be to track researcher behaviour over a three year period to gather evidence to understand how PhD scholars currently in higher education in the UK search for and use information and resources both on and offline, and the emergent technologies used to do so.

Total funding of £90,000 (including VAT, travel and subsistence) is available for this project.

Deadline for proposals 17.00, 28 November 2008

Click here for further information and full tender documents

With the wealth of information available to everyone on the Internet these days, searching for reliable, quality-assured material to use in teaching can be a real headache. Where can you rely on to find good material? Who can you trust? What can you safely use?

It’s unlikely that your first answer to these questions would be ‘RCAHMS’, for the simple reason that you probably don’t even recognise the name. However the chances are that you’ve already come across material from our huge archive before - on television, in the press or in publications or exhibitions – without realising it. You may also have come across our material in Scran, probably the best-known online resource in Scottish education today, without realising that RCAHMS was one of the founding partners in Scran, or that Scran and RCAHMS have recently joined forces and are actually one and the same organisation.

The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS for short) was founded in 1908 and has been surveying, recording and interpreting Scotland’s built heritage for more than 100 years. The archive created through this work documents the interaction between people and places from prehistory to the present-day, through the buildings they lived, worshipped or worked in, and the marks they have left in the landscape. The collection is huge, currently standing at nearly 15 million items, and includes both recent and historical photographs, conventional and digital mapping, reports from archaeological excavations, aerial photography and drawings and plans of all kinds. It is widely used by planners, researchers, authors and the media, and we handle scores of orders every week for copies of our material, which we can provide digitally or in conventional formats (for a fee) within 15 working days.

Village Bay, Hirta, St. Kilda with a cleit (food storage structure) in the foreground. Crown Copyright RCAHMS 2008 (DP 044808)

So far so good, but readers will be asking themselves: ‘How accessible is all of this to me – and how can I use it?’ There are several ways we can help. Firstly, we are open to the public and if you can come to Edinburgh you are welcome to see us, either in person or (if you give us notice) with a group. The RCAHMS Search Room at John Sinclair House is open to everyone on weekdays from 09.30 to 16.30, and you can consult original material from the archive or be introduced to the work that we do through tours of the building or guided presentations of archive material. Individual appointments aren’t needed, but if you want to come with a group, or are interested in seeing material from the aerial photographic collections, please let us know in advance by contacting info@rcahms.gov.uk. For those in education, our archive is likely to be of direct curricular interest for history, architecture, archaeology, photography and any cross-curricular studies involving design, urban or rural planning or construction technologies. The technology behind it is likely to interest all those studying the use and presentation of geo-spatial data, or electronic data curation and preservation.

The second way we can help is through our online services. The RCAHMS website at www.rcahms.gov.uk explains the work we do and also acts as a portal to the main RCAHMS database, Canmore, which allows users to search the RCAHMS archive and to access more than 100,000 images online. Canmore is free to use, requiring only a simple initial registration, and educational users can then download these images free-of-charge for use in their teaching, or use the map-based search interface to search for and display the distribution of significant sites in a local area. Images from the RCAHMS archive, together with material from a wide range of other providers, are also available through the Scran website which holds 360,000 fully-searchable, copyright-cleared items which can be downloaded for educational use, and 3,000 ‘Pathfinder’ teaching resource packs which gather items together into specified themes and subject areas.

Aerial view of Woden Law hill fort, Roxburghshire, Scottish Borders Crown Copyright :RCAHMS 2000 (DP677288)

The third way we work with the education sector is through specific project work. RCAHMS runs an active Education & Outreach programme with local communities throughout Scotland, while Scran works directly with teaching staff in schools, colleges and HE institutions. (Requests for fresh training are always welcome, and should be sent to Scran’s Marketing Officer Neil Fraser (neil.fraser@scran.ac.uk).

In this, our Centenary year, RCAHMS has two flagship projects currently working directly with local communities. The Treasured Places project has offered people across Scotland the chance to take part in an online vote for their favourite ‘treasured place’ and to record their experiences there. The result is a series of workshops with schools and local communities. An accompanying exhibition, ‘Creative Connections’, is currently touring the country. In addition, a major free exhibition of original material from the RCAHMS collection has just gone on show at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre.

The glove & lace department, Jenners Department Store, Edinburgh c1900. Copyright RCAHMS (Bedford Lemere Collection) SC 466078

Scotland’s Rural Past www.scotlandsruralpast.org.uk is a five-year project to research, record and promote vanishing rural settlements throughout Scotland. Working with local community groups and with people of all ages, it offers local people the chance to work with RCAHMS surveyors to identify and formally record the legacy of post-medieval rural settlement in their area. The ‘Learning’ section of the SRP website explains the opportunities available for schools to take part in the project and offers suggestions for further work.

Alan Muirden

Education & Outreach Operational Manager alan.muirden@rcahms.gov.uk

Featured on the JISC TechDis website, Andrew Middleton, Academic Innovation, Learning and Teaching Institute  at Sheffield Hallam University provides some background, guidance and pointers to further information and support in relation to addressing issues around accessible podcasting. The article focuses on supporting students with hearing impairment and considers degrees of deafness and levels of responsibility for the educational podcaster.

Click here to read more.

On October 20th this year the New Media Consortium announced the release of this white paper produced in conjunction with the Economist Magazine and Apple Inc. They have seen the future… but does it work? Judge for yourself.

Click here to download the report

Image Future or Bust by Vermin Inc, from Flickr used under Creative Commons

The JISC invites tenders to conduct an evaluation of the JOS work programme covering academic years 2007-08 to 2009-10. (JOS = JISC Organisational Support committee)

The aims of the evaluation are to provide formative and summative evaluation support to the JOS work programme, providing in-depth evaluation analysis of both the programme’s institutional focus and rolling approach, and its projects’ outputs. Total funding of £80,000 (including VAT, travel and subsistence) is available for this project.

Deadline for proposals:12 noon, 24 November 2008

Click here for full tender documentation

JISC Legal, the specialist legal advice service, reports a recent crimewave in virtual reality. In the first case, two teenagers have been convicted in a Dutch court of stealing a virtual amulet and a mask from an online game which ‘belonged’ to a classmate.

The second case involved a Japanese woman, divorced in an online game who took revenge on her digital husband by killing his online avatar. The woman who was arrested on suspicion of hacking and manipulating e-data used his password and identification in order to log onto the virtual game known as ‘Maple Story’.

And the moral of these stories is that new technological developments inevitably bring new legal consequences in their wake which all institutions have to be aware of.

We’re big fans of Mind Mapping at the RSC and have covered various tools in past editions of NewsFeed. ConceptDraw are currently giving away free licences for their previous version of their mindmapping tool, ConceptDraw MindMap 5. All you have to do is fill in this form and it will autogenerate the key for you. The older version is no longer available for download on the ConceptDraw website. You can still get it from dowload.com

AltCollections is designed for teaching staff seeking to source electronic resources in alternative formats, such as large print, audio (MP3), DAISY and/or Digital Talking Books (DTB).

AltCollections contains a range of learning and teaching resources such as curriculum support packs at NQ and HNC level as well as a range of Clicker Grids, Word resources, interactive and switch accessible PowerPoint slides, symbol sets, Penfriend lexicons, overlays for Intellikeys and much, much more.

To visit AltCollections select this link

The Higher Education Academy Scotland have published their latest newsletter. This edition includes a summary of the programme of work planned for Scotland in 2008-09 with emphasis on Employability, Professional Development Planning, and Internationalisation and Education for Sustainable Development. As always there is also a comprehensive list of events for October to January.

The newsletter is available for download here