CISCO – potential partnership and WebEx Connect

I’ve just had a very short but interesting meeting with a fast-talking chap from CISCO who is meeting various folk from around the university to discuss potential partnership opportunities.

Mike is bringing CISCO’s networking expertise to education and described the company’s vision of using computer technology and the internet to engage young learners in a more personalised manner than is currently facilitated by traditional, class based education.  I was immediately struck with potential synergies with PC3 (see previous post)

Also, CISCO have recently acquired WebEx Connect which the website describes as “the foundation for a comprehensive collaboration strategy that delivers instant collaboration for your employees and an extensible development platform for you.”  It certainly sounded like it might be highly relevant for PERSoNA and Mike will arrange a demo for us shortly.

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PC3 Project

On Monday I attended the launch of Leeds Met’s most recent JISC finded project headed by Janet Finlay; PC3 – Personalised Curricullum Creation through Coaching – and was very excited by the fact that The Repository will be an integral component:

In a nutshell the project focuses on new markets of part-time work-based learners and the idea that traditional curriculum design, with its focus on institutionally-defined content, will not necessarily meet the specific requirements of such learners, who need provision that can be rapidly adapted to their particular and changing requirements. Instead, learners need to be able to design their own curricula and access provision at the level and within the time frame they need.

As illustrated by the diagram above this will be facilitated, in part, by a “Learning Bank” which will provide remote access to resources and will build on our 3 ongoing repository projects.

For more information visit the PC3 project blog.

I’ve got the post festival, metadata schema, taxonomical blues

I have to say that I really enjoyed the Staff Development Festival.  It got me away from my PC, interracting with folk from all over the University face to face and I can catagorically say that the current generation of social networking tools don’t even come close to this more traditional form of interraction!  The permenant stand in the marquee gave us a presence throughout the fortnight and I’ve had the opportunity to speak with a wide range of people from different faculties.  There was, however, variable interest from day to day with the Research Day, as one might expect, being the busiest but I was a little disappointed with a comparative lack of interest on the Carnegie Research Institute Day.

I’ve been given some full text papers to deposit and will follow up on contacts made to secure more still; a lot of interest also in a repository of Learning Objects and we should be able to get some good quality LO content over the next few weeks.

It was very useful also to get to know colleagues from the University Research Office in a less formal setting – previous contact has mainly been in meetings or via email.  Our stands were adjacent (for synergy!) and Babita has agreed to join me in advocacy presentations to faculty staff over the coming months which I think will be extremely useful in helping to get our message accross – and B is, no doubt, more familiar than I with the bureaucratic idiosyncrasies of the Leeds Met research community.

It’s now of pressing importance that metadata schema and taxonomical structure are stable so that we can start uploading content without undue fear of it being dislodged.  Unsurprisingly the academic in the street has not expressed a particularly strong view and this comes very much under a librarian’s remit – Wendy and I will sit down next week with two colleagues and I’m fairly sure we’ll be looking at Library of Congress Subject Headings as the main organisational structure; I’ve already added a skeleton taxonomy based on the top level of LoCSH which is now sitting alongside JACS and Leeds Met faculties (N.B. one of the features of the node based classification in intraLibrary is that an object can be classified under multiple taxonomies)

There are also work flow issues to consider and you would, perhaps, want a professional librarian/cataloguer to ensure consistency of classification, especially under the LoCSH so may be we’d ask an academic to classify just under faculty and then send the object to a librarian’s workflow for more accurate classification under LoCSH before it is published to the library.

And then there is the manner in which I am currently using intraLibrary’s collections for content by faculty – I originally adopted this approach as Mike T suggested it would be the easiest way facilitate a demo browse tree in his modification of the search interface but we now need to decide whether it would be more appropriate for faculty to go in a metadata field – probably not; it’s not a simple DC field that would be much use for external system searching and using collections in this way probably means we could lose the faculty classification hierarchy altogether and facilitate a more transparent workflow (using collections) to ensure objects are easily identifiable by faculty which is only really useful to us in any case.

In outline then, MIGHT it look like this:

The only taxonomy in intraLibrary is LoCSH; collections stay as they are now, one for each faculty and one for ALL Learning Objects (i.e. they go in one collection and are not distinguishable by faculty)

When an academic uploads a research paper (a challenge all in itself!) they need to specify a collection (i.e. a faculty) as part of the workflow, enter very basic metadata (title, author[s]) and upload; they DON’T classify – it is then passed to a librarian who augments metadata appropriately and classifies it under LoCSH before publishing it to the library.  (N.B. what if faculty names change and these collections are set in stone?)

When someone uploads a Learning Object they need to specify the Learning Object collection as part of the workflow, enter very basic metadata (title, author[s]) and upload; they DON’T classify – it is then passed to a librarian who augments metadata appropriately and classifies it under LoCSH before publishing it to the library.

…all of this for the meeting next week.