UKOLN News

Becta, the UK Government”s lead agency for ICT in education has recently published volume 3 (2008) of its Research Report “Emerging technologies for learning”, a publication which aims
to help readers consider how emerging technologies may influence education in the medium term. Its content is an article by Emma Tonkin, Interoperability Focus Officer at UKOLN, entitled “If it quacks like a duck: Developments in search technologies”. In this contribution Emma examines some of the widely held assumptions about the ICT usage and behaviour of young learners
on the subject of searching for information and lays open some of the misunderstandings that abound within this area.

Brian Kelly will participate in the Oxford University Conference 2008
Beyond Debate entitled “Beyond Digital Natives: Old Problem, New Systems”
on 4 April 2008 at the Said Business School, University of Oxford. He has
been asked to speak against the motion “This house believes that the continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education.”

Simon Coles of the University of Southampton and Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN, gave a presentation entitled “The eCrystals Federation” during the Scientific Repositories session of OR08, the Third International Conference on Open Repositories. Slides from their presentation are now available.

A paper by Alex Ball of UKOLN, Lian Ding of the University of Bath and Manjula Patel of UKOLN, entitled “An approach to accessing product data across system and software revisions”, has been published in the April 2008 issue of Advanced Engineering Informatics. This paper is part of UKOLN”s involvement in the KIM Grand Challenge Project.

Paul Walk was invited to take part in a “Million Books Workshop” which took place at Imperial College”s Internet Centre on Friday 14 March. You can read his account of the workshop on his blog.

The 2008 UCISA Management Conference poses this question and aims to look at the contribution that IT can play in important parts of our lives. Brian Kelly will give a video presentation
entitled “Digital Natives Run by Digital Immigrants”.

The UK Web Focus blog appears as one of the case studies submitted in response to the call from the Communications, Liaison and Information Working Group of the UCISA Teaching, Learning and Information Group (TLIG). The Best Practice Guide is now available as a 39-page document which can be downloaded from the UCISA Web site.

Brian Kelly will give talks on “An Introduction to Web 2.0″ and “Web 2.0 and Digital Preservation” at a workshop for the Data Standards Group of the Society of Archivists. The workshop, “Sharing Made Simple: A Practical Approach”, is organised jointly by the Society and UKOLN. It will take place at the University of Manchester on 10 March 2008.

The Winter Issue of Ariadne, Issue 54, is now available with, among others, articles on E-Publication and Open Access in the Arts and Humanities in the UK, the solutions being developed by the Version Identification Framework (VIF) Project, the JISC-funded SWORD Project, and a description of the work of the RepoMMan Project. We are pleased to include an article on how endangered intangible South American indigenous heritage is being both preserved and disseminated with the aid of Web-based technologies. There is also a discussion of the position of Web 2.0 applications in the programmes of LIS schools in the United States, while human-powered search engines are placed under the microscope. Emma Tonkin of UKOLN and colleagues provide a series of international perspectives on the practice of social tagging of documents within a community context. Eddie Young of UKOLN Software and Systems writes on Saving Energy in the Workplace while Pete Cliff from R&D reviews a work on machine learning and statistics applied
to Web-accessible datasets.

A presentation entitled “UK Perspectives on the Curation and Preservation of
Scientific Data” was given recently on behalf of Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN, by David Arctur to the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, Massachusetts. Slides from the presentation are now available.