Alternatives to using a wiki to teach?

I’m looking for some advice or suggestions on alternatives to using a wiki during a session.

Last year I blogged about my experience using a wetpaint wiki with 1st year computer scientists which overall went well as the students liked the option to interact online, rather than interact verbally in the classroom. We found last year and so far with the group this year that they are far happier doing things in front of a computer!

Anyway, there are up to 70 students and I would like them to comment on issues such as the pros and concs of wikipedia during the session. The wetpaint wiki would not allow several people to edit at once so most of the students entries were lost or overwritten last year.

If anyone can recommend an alternative solution?

- wiki software that will let multiple people edit?

- chat room software that can deal with a big group?

- discussion forum software?

- would a blog allow lots of people to comment at once? Or would it fall over?

I only really need the software during the session, as I’m not expecting them to add to it afterwards, so it needs to be free and easy to use/register for. I would have used a Blackboard discussion board but this module isn’t using Blackboard!

Kindle: First impressions in the Library

Last week my boss asked me to go ahead and purchase a Kindle for the Library to trial.  Ordered it around 3pm on Friday and it was on my desk early yesterday afternoon.  First impressions (and comparing it to the Sony reader I trialed last December) aren’t bad.  Some gut reactions:

Pros

• Wireless works out of the box* – with no set up
• Manual almost not needed – intuitive to use
• Access to Wikipedia and Amazon.com works flawlessly
• Nice look and feel – keys and case
• Navigation around the menus feels modern and slick
• Electronic paper impresses again with clarity
• USB charger works happily with my PC
• Joystick works well as selection tool

Cons

• Screen smaller than Sony
• Heavier than I expected
• 3G Wireless crippled in UK (currently)
• £200+ is still a bit much when it only comes bundled with a dictionary & user guide
• Annotation of text bit tricky
• No stylus or touchscreen functionality
• Not in colour
• Doesn’t recognise native PDF documents placed on it

I quite like the Kindle, even now 24hrs later when the “WOW!” factor is wearing off.  I’m finding the smaller screen (than the Sony) isn’t bothering me quite so much now.  I enjoyed flicking it on for the first time on the train last night (it needed a three hour charge first) and being on wikipedia less than 30 seconds later.  I even liked that it said “Hello Gareth” when it booted.

So in terms of usability I would say the Kindle has the slight edge – certainly the plastic coated metal protected me from holding onto a cold metal object out of doors (something the Sony fell down on).  The keyboard layout looks slightly odd at first (it is QWERTY but aligned like a PDA not a keyboard) but was responsive to the touch.  Actually all the keys click nicely without too much of a clunk.

The shame is that the 3G mobile internet browsing has been locked out in the UK.  Can’t Google, can’t Twitter, can’t Facebook.  Can’t even read my email – so as a replacement for a netbook, 3G phone or PDA the Kindle fails.  Yes it looks nice and easy to buy books from Amazon.com, but I’ve not been able to locate any free ones nor have I been able to put my own PDFs on to read.  That alone would have made it very handy in the library sense – got an interlibrary loan?  Zap – there you go, read it on your Kindle.  So far as I can see so far though, this isn’t the case.

In this regards the Kindle begins to raise the same worries in me that have kept me away from Apples iPod/iTunes network – the push to the proprietary media/documents only.  When I have an electronic reading device I want it to read my documents - not just the documents you choose to sell to me.  AntiPirary? Or just my inexperience…yes it appears the latter.  A search of the manual reveals that the Kindle can handle electronic texts, but only in Kindle (.azw, azw1), text (.txt), unprotected mobipocket (.mob1, .prc), audible (.aa, .aax) or MP3 formats.  That seems a real let down.

There is a service whereby you can email your PDFs to Amazon, and then for a fee (these are my documents remember) have them transfer wirelessly to the Kindle.  You can get around this by having it emailed back to you.  Unfortunately in terms of securely electronic delivery PDFs from the British Library, well frankly that wouldn’t work.  But for others, I can see it’s an area where we might be entertaining a little experimentation – if anyone else has tried this, let me know how it worked out for you!

That’s it – my first reactions to the Kindle.  Not perfect, not a world beater and by no means the must have item this Christmas.  Would I buy it for myself?  Frankly no, not as it currently is configured or priced.  Personally I’ll be waiting for a reader with flawless wireless, that allows me to upload and read native PDFs rather than passing them through a clunky two handed email exchange, and with touchscreen functionality.  Oh, and can I have two screens so it feels more like reading a book?  If the Nintendo DS can do it…

* Actually the only place the wireless hasn’t worked is right here at my desk!  Our building being somewhat of a shield for mobile phone signals.

Open Access Week: The LRA Team

Thinking back over this week, I think the one thing I’ve forgotten to highlight are the people here whom make the LRA work.  First off the core team, myself, Margaret – and from this week our newest member Valérie.  Margaret and Valérie are your first line of contact as a Leicester academic or postgraduate student when you want to get material onto the LRA.  They can also help out with general questions relating to your retained author rights, mandates and locating open access materials.  The easiest way to contact them is via email lra@le.ac.uk or ethesis@le.ac.uk.

The LRA Team’s full contact details can be found here: http://www.le.ac.uk/li/research/archive.html#contact

Then we have the supporting staff members, those people who aren’t working with the LRA on a day to day basis, but whom have more than a little understanding about the issues and common answers to questions relating to it.  First among these is Rob, our current Copyright and Coursepacks Administrator.  Rob can be reached at copyright@le.ac.uk.

His full contact details can be found here: http://www.le.ac.uk/li/about/CopyrightandResearch.html

On top of this the LRA is supported by our colleagues in the rest of the newly formed Document Supply & Repository team, and whom if you ring the LRA you may well get on the line.  As well as these staff, I must also acknowledge the work that the members of LRA Progress Group (LRAPG) from the library, ITS and Research Office play in supporting out work, and helping to discuss the often complex developing world of scholarly communication.

That’s it, a brief guide to the team and supporting staff that help us run the LRA here at Leicester.

Visualising Information Literacy

Getting across to students what information resources they need to use and when

cc luisvilla: http://is.gd/4xkiI

to use them can seem a thankless task.  Its often pretty dry material and training sessions aren’t usually scheduled to link in with the point at which students immediately need to use the resources.  Medical librarians at the Clinical Sciences Library are in the halfway through running some sessions this year which we hope begin to address this problem. 

We have been experimenting with a new approach to our library training with our first year medics giving them a mindmap of information resources they need for their course.  The School of Medicine invited us to get involved in their new ‘clinical problem solving’ module, which aims to get new students making connections between their modules and understanding deeper processes rather than trying to get by learning by rote.  The students have to solve problems by making these connections and they are expected to be able to do their own research to before they can work out the answers. Google and Wikipedia alone won’t do this for them. This is where our information literacy training fit in. 

Previously we have dived straight into Medline to get them conversant with the research literature and how to find it.  This time we created a map of information resources.  The map links directly out to the resources and is organised to help the students see which places to go for either an overview of a topic or for more detailed information.  The resources range from dictionaries and clinical guidelines to statistics and bibliographic databases.  It is hoped that the students can return to this map to help them clarify where to look for information at any time within their course. 

In our training session the students are introduced to the resources on the map by integrating voting questions using Turning Point to ensure they understand them.  Later in the session they are given the task to find the answer to a clinical question using two contrasting resources, explaining where they found the information to support their answer and also how they found it. 

Its early days and when we have finished our sessions we will compile our feedback from the students and the course tutors.  We are hopeful that the map has the potential to be developed into a more ambitious elearning tool useful for many different contexts.

Open Access Week: Federal Research Act

Those following the developments in open access and scholarly research publication often look to the US and Australia, and to a lesser degree the Scandinavian countries, whom are generally a year or so ahead of the situation in the UK.  Interestingly in the States at the moment there is a bill, the Federal Research Access Act of 2009, which is looking to legislate the following:

“…require researchers with grants from certain federal agencies — those that fund more than $100 million in extramural research annually — to make their final peer-reviewed manuscripts openly available in digital repositories within six months.”

Okay, it does look like this is a successor to a similer defeated bill back in 2006; but since then both the political landscape and the open access movement has seen considerable developments.  Funders mandates are now very much a central theme now, where as in 2006 we were only seeing the first ones emerge.  Would we see a piece of legislation like this in the UK?  Probably not anytime soon given the run up to the general election in 2010; I find it unlikely that with the state of the economy anyone’s going to be able to bring scholarly research access up the political agenda.  I certainly don’t think the vast bulk of public are aware, or even overly concerned, that so much of their taxes goes to pay for access to research we’ve given away. 

Maybe this is something that OA advocates should be doing – reaching out to the general public and getting the OA debate out of the ivory towers and into the press and media?  Perhaps it’s a role for UKCoRR or the reformulated RSP?

Either way, the reception and progress of this bill is certainly one to watch with interest.

Open Access Week: UoL OA Event 28th October

While it’s not falling within open access week there is still a chance for University of Leicester academics, researchers and postgraduates to find out more about the current developments in open access and scholarly publishing.  The Research Office (RSO) and the University Library are presenting an Open Access Information Event, Wednesday 28th October 1pm onwards (that’s a week today). 

The afternoon is broken into two sessions:

Session 1 is suitable for staff and research students in all disciplines.  Speakers include Christine Fyfe (UoL), Astrid Wissenburg (ESRC) and myself.  The focus is on the requirements of the UK HE funding councils and the Leicester open access perspective.

Session 2 is aimed at staff and research students working in disciplines covered by UK Pub Med Central (principally biosciences, health and medicine).  Margaret Hurley and Alison Henning (Wellcome Trust) will be speaking about their specific funding policies and the new UKMPC grant reporting services.  Finally Juliet Bailey (RSO) will talk about the Wellcome Trust OA fund at Leicester.

There will be a break for refreshments in the middle, as well as a chance for formal and informal questions to all the delegates.  The LRA team will be there in force, so it’ll be a really good chance to talk with us about what we can do to help you fulfil the various institutional, funding and theses mandates here at Leicester; as well as making sure your publications are read as widely as possible.

To reserve a place and for a full programme contact Laura Roberts

Open Access Week: JISC OA resources

JISC has rolled out a very useful page and set of resources today in support of open access week.

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/openaccess

In clear, plain english the page details the case for open access as well as the role JISC has been playing in supporting and developing the infra-structure in the UK to make it happen.  As well as the general overview of the benefits of OA there’s also a selection of resources for researchers, institutions and publishers; detailing why OA matters for them.  It includes a link to a wide range of resources and reports giving the scholarly background information that so many academics crave.  I’ll certainly be reading through some of these over the coming weeks.

The section for publishers is aimed mostly at those whom are embracing open access publishing – be it as a pure OA journal or a more traditional one offering a pay-up-front option (a fee to make an article available as open access where normally it would be available to subscribers only).

Interestingly the site also offers a section on the business case for open access, something that I know is close to the hearts of many senior institutional administrators.  I think this economic case is one I’d certainly like to know more about myself, as some of the discussions and 1-2-1 meetings I have with academics and staff at all levels move away from the philosophical “Open access is good for the research environment” and into the realm of “But what does it mean for the university as a business”.

The site also offers all the reports on a single page at the end, and while I know I’m never going to have a chance to read them all myself – they are certainly a worthy resource.  I can see that this site will be helping me shape the workshop I’m running in December for new academic staff, as well as those I offer to PhD students.

Open Access Week: Success Stories from Glasgow

I was pleased to see that the University of Glasgow is running stories about individuals who have experienced academic success on the back of making their work available on their Enlighten repository.  The first one concerns Dr Katherine Forsyth from the Department of Celtic and Gaelic who has had a phenomenal number of downloads of her out of print book (50,000). 

I wonder if there are any authors of out of print books here at Leicester who might like to consider exploring the possibility of making their texts available to all via the LRA?  Please get in touch if you are!

Open Access Week!

This week is Open Access week as declared by SPARC.  While we’re not having any formal celebrations this week at UoL, if you are a Leicester student or academic (or indeed any member of the institution) why not celebrate the importance of freely available research makes in all our lives by:

• Sending some final author versions of published papers (or any kind of research publication output) to the LRA team.
• Use OpenDOAR Search to track down freely available research
• Find out just how open to Open Access your favourite publisher or journal is – and if you don’t like what you find out, why not drop their editor a polite note.
• Find out just what your research funding body requires of your publications to satisfy their grant requirements – and remember that the LRA team are ever ready to help you out with this!
• Find out more about what the LRA is doing for research publications and PhD thesis
• Find out more about the global efforts towards open access
• Discover more about open access publishing and journals in your field
• Or just invite one of the LRA team over for a chat over coffee and #cake

I’ll be making daily posts on aspects of the LRA and open access throughout this week – and as always we warmly welcome comments from everyone.

Libraries and social networking – what’s been successful?

Next week I’m delivering a talk to some librarians in the region about social networking using web 2.0.  Now while I’ve various ideas about what I’m going to say, but at the same time I’d be really interested to hear from other librarians about what they’ve tried – or even thought about trying – in this regard.

It can be about any aspect of social networking, from reader development and user engagement, through to educational examples and professional development.  I’m interested in it all!

I’m especially interested in learning about any barriers that have stood in your way, and the ways in which you have either overcome them, worked around them or even been brought up short!  Examples might include

• Facebook presence: How has is helped?  Are you fully exploiting it? Did you try it as an organisation and then discard it for some reason?
• Twitter – what has it doen for you?  What can you do now that you could never do before?
• LinkedIn – a waste of time in the UK or a run away international success?
• Any other example – with links if possible.

And it goes without saying that post talk I’ll be sharing the talk, as well the comments from the librarians gathered.  Many of whom I suspect are very much cynical about the whole Web 2.0 experience and the apparent drain it puts on their staffing time resources!  Thus this is going to need to one of those sessions that’s not preaching to the converted – rather it’s going to need to really win them over!

The talk by the way is next thursday and I’ll be using the tag #liem when I’m tweeting about it (especially during the event – hopefully I’ll have a twitterfall running in the room!)

[Edit Fri 16th Oct: Well as you might have picked up from my online silence, I came down with the dreadded flu and had to scrap this session.  But have no fear, I hope to represent it at some point in the near future!]

Glyndwr University’s new librarianship foundation degree

Last week I took the plunge and took the long train ride to Wales and Wrexham.  I went over to appear as a guest lecturer at Glyndwr University’s new Library & Information Practice degree.  The degree’s had some good coverage in the press, as it’s aimed at those already working within a library service at a para professional (library assistant) level who want to move their skills on quite seriously.  I really approve of this.  Back in the early 2000s I was instrumental in getting Careers Days for Library Assistants off the ground through the Yorkshire CDG group; so I’m glad someone’s taken the idea further.

Whilst Wrexham might not be the most photogenic city, the University itself is rather nice and their welcome as warm as it comes.  And especially their library which Chief Librarian Paul Jeorrett took me round before my session.  Full of comfy leather chairs, exceptional lighting (natural and electric) and one of the most helpful and enthusiastic staff I’ve encountered for quite some time.  The students on all their degrees are going to really enjoy working there I can tell. 

My session (covering effective advocacy, visual communication and simple business cases for marketing your library service) went down really well – since I got two rounds of very enthusiastic applause.  Either that or they were glad that they could head off to lunch!

As the course is mostly by distance learning there is a real emphasis on getting to grips with Web 2.0 and social networking during this first week; the hope being that the small but enthusiastic class of 12 will keep in touch when they’re not having a residential week.  I have to say from my encounters with the students in the classroom and over the few meals we shared that I was impressed by their eagerness to learn and breadth of library experience.  They all deserve to do really well; as indeed do all the other tutors and course leaders at the course. 

I should also mention that every communication I had with the Uni (including a sudden need to swap the times of my session at the last minute) was via Web 2.0.  Indeed when I got my expenses form through a Web 1 channel, it felt rather a disappointment – but then Facebook doesn’t handle attachments very well (or indeed at all).

And they’re already advertising the 2010 intake, so if you’re a library assistant who’d like to consider developing more skills and a professional qualification, this course is well worth a very serious look!  Now if CILIP would only accredit it fully…

The 10 commandments of researcher development

I’ve been mulling over some of the main recurring points from the Vitae Researcher Development Conference 09 and their impact on my own practice as someone who engages with researchers. Here is a brief list of qualities that participants in Vitae 09 thought development activities should seek to encourage:

1. Ability to operate in a web 2.0 environment (for dissemination, collaboration, networking…)
2. Recognition of the value of both blue-skies creative thinking and applied research
3. Interdisciplinarity
4. Dialogue across disciplinary boundaries (This involves presentation and communication skills: researchers being able to present their ideas in accessible and jargon-free language.)
5. Participation and support from academic role models (Students are more likely to use their training if they see tangible evidence of its usefulness around them.)
6. Provision of physical and virtual spaces encouraging creativity, community and dialogue.
7. Getting students to be reflective and to analyse their own needs (E-portfolios were suggested as one method of encouraging this.)
8. Training that prepares future academics for new academic behaviours (VLRs, new devices and platforms.)
9. Recognition that preparedness  to cope with change and challenge is more important than any particular set of learned skills (Training needs to be flexible rather than prescriptive.)
10. Important role of emotional/motivational support in postgraduate research students (This can be done through events and networking opportunities, a focus on the writing process in workshops, providing alternatives to the formal supervision system etc.)

Can anyone add to these?