At Spoken Word Services we have trialled podcasting of lectures in different subject areas here at Glasgow Caledonian University. If things had worked out differently GCU may have gone to iTunesU earlier too - still, it’s not too late …

Story from BBC News

‘University College London, the Open University and Trinity College Dublin are putting lectures onto iTunes.

Educational content is already available in the United States through the non-charging “iTunes U” section of the music downloading service.

But European universities are now joining, providing video and audio material for students to use on iPods or computers.

The service will include recordings of lectures from leading academics.

“Our students will be able to revisit materials presented to them in lectures, so they can learn anywhere and anytime,” says Professor Peter Mobbs at University College London (UCL).

Lecture on demand

The initial offerings from UCL will include material about neuroscience, the university’s “lunch time lectures” and an audio news round-up.

The Open University is promising to make available 300 audio and video files with material from current courses.

Trinity College Dublin is promising lectures from journalist Seymour Hersh, scientist Robert Winston, author Anita Desai and politician Alex Salmond.

This will be available from iTunes U, launched by Apple computers last summer as a free education area within the iTunes online music and video store.

It is intended to make lectures available to students at the institutions and to a wider public audience.

This has been used by leading US universities to provide lectures and research news, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley and MIT.

Many universities in the UK have been making their own podcasts of lectures, but this will be the first time they have been distributed on the iconic iTunes service.

Open University vice-chancellor Brenda Gourley said it was an exciting new opportunity for anyone, anywhere in the world to gain easy access to its courses.

“Our aim is to partner our established distance learning expertise with the power of the internet to provide as mobile, flexible and personalised learning as possible, whatever your current educational level, personal circumstances or technological abilities.”

A recent market survey showed that four billion songs have been sold through the service since it launched five years ago, making it the biggest music retailer in the United States.

The iTunes service gained its dominant position in online music as the downloading service for the iPod player.

A spokesperson for University College London said that the service would appeal to “techno-literate students” and “reach new audiences around the world”. ‘

A conference attendee has set up this del.icio.us page with tags linking to content discussed and presented at the Open Repositories Conference in Texas. There is a particularly interesting tag leading to an article by Paul Miller, ‘The Technology Evangelist’, on library 2.0. The del.icio.us page can be found by clicking here.

The 3rd International Conference on Open Repositories takes place in Southampton between the 1st - 4th April 2008. The Conference will be hosted by the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, which has a long history of research into the technological aspects of open repositories. The conference will provide focused workshops and tutorials and will also use general conference sessions as a platform to debate and bring together all the issues raised over the four days.

The second international conference on open repositories is being held as I type between the 23rd and 26th January in San Antonio, Texas. The conference aims to encourage discussion and promotion of it’s goal of achieving repository interoperability . The conference is sponsored by many global organisations including Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett Packard, which illustrates the importance and scale of the event.

The Spoken Word did have plans to attend the conference but unfortunately these plans were never realised. However, it is my intention to keep up to date with the developments at the conference, including discussion surrounding Fedora, by trawling through various blogs and message boards and to report them here, on the Spoken Word Blog.

On 12th February David and Iain go to the DELOS Conference on Digital Libraries in Tirrenia, a beach resort near Pisa. Benito Mussolini transformed this formerly swampy city into what he called ‘The Pearl of the Mediterranean Sea’. Tirrenia is now a major Italian tourist spot and is popular with young clubbers-so David and Iain are sure to have a good time.

DELOS is a network of excellence on digital libraries and is committed to a vision that digital libraries should ‘enable any citizen to access all human knowledge any time and anywhere, in a friendly, multi-modal, efficient and effective way, by overcoming barriers of distance, language, and culture and by using multiple Internet-connected devices’.

The conference aims to present the latest research and technology in the field of digital libraries and to promote discussion and ‘exchange of ideas’ through various formal and informal satellite meetings.

Clearly this is an ideal conference for promoting and speaking about the Spoken Word, with key figures from around the global digital libraries community in attendance. The Spoken Word’s colleagues, Maureen Lister, from the Universita Di Bologna and Jerry Goldman of Northwestern University in Chicago also have plans to visit the conference, which will be beneficial to continuing and furthering our ties and work with these institutions.

Spoken Word Services and the Academic Liaison Librarians met on Tuesday 16th January to discuss the issue of podcasting. This posting is an update to a previous post by Iain Wallace that outlined the agenda of the meeting and his general thoughts on podcasting in the setting of the library and can be found by clicking here. Iain started off the meeting by giving a brief introduction about what ingredients were needed to make a podcast and gave some examples of the work that other libraries have done with podcasting such as Glasgow University and Glasgow Metropolitan College. However, it was agreed in the meeting that the Caledonian University Library podcasts would steer clear of the irritating electro music that seems to grace the podcasts of other higher educational institutions in Glasgow.

Aidan Johnston and Ewan MacPhee of Spoken Word then showed the group of librarians the set of Hospitality Video Podcasts that they had made on behalf of the Higher Education Academy.

The Academic Liaison Librarians raised many interesting issues and questions regarding podcasting. They are keen to continue with plans to create a podcast based around using journals and finding appropriate articles in the library. It is thought that this will cut the time that staff have to spend showing students how to use library services without being any less informative or helpful.

The librarians seemed to be very positive about creating a podcast and a follow up meeting has been planned to discuss the issue further.

This is the face that lead one attendee of the Nursing E - Learning Seminar to label David’s presentation there as ‘inspiring’.

Just Before Christmas, David Donald, Spoken Word’s aptly named ‘Principal Investigator’, unexpectedly ended up presenting to the Nursing E - Learning Seminar at Glasgow Caledonian University. Iain Wallace was originally supposed to carry out the presentation but had to step out at the last minute on account of a winter illness, although from the feedback it appears that David was a more than worthy replacement.

David spoke generally about the Spoken Word, including the background of the project and services, the work it is currently involved in and the services it provides in the environment of web 2.0.
One attendee of David’s presentation said: ‘This is exciting. I haven’t replied before as I was trying to remember where I got your address. I suddenly remembered this evening. I know because I am taking the Caledonian module in e - Learning and one of our group just heard an inspiring talk from David and put the address on our VLE’

Next week in Edinburgh there is a Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) seminar on developing research capacity. The seminar ties in with a 2nd call in the EPSRC and ESRC TEL strand. We anticipate that there will be representation there from Glasgow Caledonian University.

The TEL call was intended to support academics and user partners in building substantial and sustainable capacity for further interdisciplinary research on technology-enhanced learning. However, few proposals addressed this directly or provided innovative approaches to this challenge. This seminar should be of interest to all those with development awards, shortlisted for large awards or thinking about submitting proposals to the second round of TEL funding.

Prof. Stephen Baron (TLRP Associate Director for Capacity Building) will provide an introduction to initiatives in this area. Jim McNally (University of Stirling) and Lesley Walker (Forfar Academy) will provide different perspectives as a PI and as a teacher on a TLRP project in which teacher ethnographers conduct research in their own settings. This will be followed by presentation of initial findings from an analysis of all the 120+ proposals submitted to the first round of funding for the TEL programme as well as commentary on the assessors reviews of those proposals. There will then be opportunities to make concrete suggestions for ways in which we can develop capacity in TEL and inform the second round of funding.

More information and registration at http://www.tlrp.org/tel/tel_events.html

Google Literacy Project

Reuters reports that Google has launched a new website solely dedicated to literacy. The article reports that the project will allow teachers, organizations and those interested in literacy from around the world to access and share information pertaining to reading resources. According to the article, the service seeks to combine a rich set of resources to combat global illiteracy. It also uses Google’s mapping technology to help literacy organizations find each other, and provides links to reading resources. The article reports that the website was unveiled in Germany during the Frankfurt Book Fair; the United Nations and a literacy campaign organized by fair officials have also joined the project.

Full story at Reuters ‘Google launches literacy project to link resources‘

Via Rights.com news briefing