Thanks to Alyson Tyler whose blog alerted me to a new JISC summary of some of the technologies to look out for in the next 1 to 5 years, and how they can help with or relate to learning and education. It’s an excellent short and easy to absorb summary, very well presented.
Staying ahead: technologies to watch in the next five years:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/inform/inform32/FutureTech.html
Alyson’s blog:
http://libalyson.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/technologies-to-watch-out-for/
HEFCW have now published “Enhancing Learning and Teaching through Technology: refreshing the strategy”
http://www.hefcw.ac.uk/documents/publications/circulars/circulars_2011/W11%2032HE%20Enhancing%20Learning%20and%20Teaching%20through%20Technology.pdf
Shortened, updated and with some revised longer-term indicators.
“In publishing the strategy for enhancing learning and teaching through technology for higher education (HE) in Wales from 2007/08 to 2016/17 we recognised that it would need to be reviewed at regular intervals. This circular provides an update to the strategy to take account of changes in technology, the policy context and the HE funding regime.”
Posted in learning & teaching, technology
Tagged HEFCW, learning, teaching, technology
The 2011 Horizon Report from the New Media Consortium and Educause has been published online.
The Horizon Project, is the centerpiece of NMC’s Emerging Technologies Initiative, and charts the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning and creative inquiry.
Key trends:
*The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing.
*People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want.
*The world of work is increasingly collaborative, giving rise to reflection about the way student projects are structured.
*The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.
Critical Challenges:
*Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
*Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag behind the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching.
*Economic pressures and new models of education are presenting unprecedented competition to traditional models of the university.
*Keeping pace with the rapid proliferation of information, software tools, and devices is challenging for students and teachers alike.
Technologies to watch:
Eelectronic books, mobiles, augmented reality, game based learning, gesture based computing, learning analytics.
The report and further information can be found here http://www.nmc.org/horizon
Among the issues faced by UK universities and colleges, the carbon emissions from their ICT loom large. One cause of the growth in these emissions is demand for computing and in particular the ever-growing demand for data storage and data centres.
One way of tackling this demand has been explored by a JISC-funded project at Cardiff University.
The team at Cardiff’s Information Services Directorate have been studying ways of storing computer files that can reduce the amount of energy used by computers for storage by over 80%.
Dubbed Planet Filestore, the project has developed an approach to storing data on disks with different energy consumption depending on the frequency with which the data is accessed. Data which is not used very often is moved to a disk which uses less power, thus saving electricity and money while still allowing users near instant access.
When put into full production at Cardiff University, it is anticipated that this will save the university 87600KW.h (or approximately 51 tonnes of CO2) per year which, at current prices, would cost around £10,000 per annum. These savings are likely to increase significantly with escalating storage requirements and energy costs. Environmental savings are also likely to be made in terms of space occupied, procurement, shipping, disposal and hazardous waste reduction.
Rob Bristow, JISC Programme Manager, said: “The approach piloted by Cardiff Information Services has the potential to make a real difference to the carbon footprint of universities if it is adopted across the sector. The more than £100 million that electricity for ICT costs the sector every year is likely to rise in the future and initiatives like this can make a real difference”.
The project has intentionally used techniques and technologies that will easily transfer to a wide range of corporate systems across the world, including those in education, research, public bodies and commercial companies.
Project leader Paul Rock said: “The greatest benefit will be felt if many more organisations were to use this kind of approach to minimise the energy footprint of their filestore. This would mean that the electricity and carbon savings arising from this project would scale dramatically”.
To help make this approach more widely available, JISC is funding Cardiff University Information Services to develop a web-based tool that universities and colleges can use to model the benefits of different scenarios of file storage in terms of environmental and economic savings.
Download the report and recommendations here:
Posted in technology, Welsh universities
Tagged Cardiff, green, ICT, sustainability, technology
A videoconferenced event at Aberystwyth, Bangor, Cardiff and Swansea Universities.
Wednesday 2 February 2011.
Videoconferencing is a technology whose time has come. This unique event will combine local and videoconferenced presentations, discussions and research. It will present the reasons why you need to get the most from your videoconferencing facilities – and how to do so.
It will highlight the ways in which videoconferencing can help meet the current environmental and financial challenges faced by education and the public sector. Who should videoconference? When should videoconferencing replace travel? When is travel more appropriate? How to get people using the facilities? How much money, time and CO2 emissions can be saved? What are the benefits to staff and the organisation?
This event is organised by the Welsh Video Network and has a focus on Higher and Further Education in Wales, but will be of interest to the whole public sector.
More information and booking from http://www.wvn.ac.uk/vfactorreg
We would like to take this opportunity to invite you to attend our ‘Learning in a Digital Wales – Dysgu mewn Cymru Digidol’ event on 30 June 2010.
‘Learning in a Digital Wales – Dysgu mewn Cymru Digidol’ is a collaborative, cross sector event brought to you by JISC RSC Wales, with the support of LearnTech Wales, Moodle-Wales and Community eLearning Wales (CeLW) covering all educational sectors in Wales including Work Based Learning and Higher Education.
The aims of the event are:
The event will be a mix of presentations, hands on sessions, sharing of good practice, networking and discussion opportunities. The topics covered during the day include: personalised learning, accessibility and inclusion, effective use of digital media, portable free applications, assessment, Moodle, use of Web 2.0 and mobile technologies, eSafety/Safeguarding, the transformation agenda … and more.
For the full programme please visit http://docs.google.com/View?id=df7ss89s_49xc27mgc8
Further details and the booking form can be found here: http://admin.rsc-wales.ac.uk/events/event_details.asp?eid=550
The event will be hosted at the All Nations Centre in Cardiff and the cost is £50 per person.
We look forward to seeing you there.
Regards
The RSC Wales team.
Posted in events, learning spaces, technology
Tagged digital, events, learning, RSC Wales, technology
The HEFCE funded SCONUL report on ‘Shared Services’ is available to download on the Higher Education Library Technology (HELibTech) website.
A meeting is being held in London on 19th May to explore the study’s findings and proposals.
For more information and also a short article on Shared Services in general go to the HELibTech ‘Shared Services’ page: http://helibtech.com/Shared+Services You are welcome to edit the page and to join in the discussion started by SCONUL.
HELibTech contains a wealth of information about library technology. (See LGLibTech http://lglibtech.wikispaces.com/ for information on Local Government Library Technology-public libraries ).
‘Shared Services’ is one of the ‘Specific Themes’ listed on the HELibTech home page http://helibtech.com/ Other themes are Open Source and RFID. You are welcome to add others.
Posted in collaboration, technology
Tagged collaboration, shared services, technology
“The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, a qualitative research project established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry on college and university campuses within the next five years.
“In each edition of the Horizon Report, six emerging technologies or practices are described that are likely to enter mainstream use on campuses within three adoption horizons spread over the next one to five years. Each report also presents critical trends and challenges that will affect teaching and learning over the same time frame.
The 6 technologies described in detail in the body of the report are:
Mobile computing
Open content
Electronic books
Simple augmented reality
Gesture-based computing
Visual data analysis
The Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) has announced a new £44m high-performance computing (HPC) institute for Wales.
Called HPC Wales, the project will be co-funded with £10m from BIS’s strategic investment fund (SIF), which was bumped up by £200m to £950m, as announced by chancellor Alistair Darling in the government’s pre-Budget report.
The Welsh secretary Peter Hain pointed out the need to give industries real help to aid recovery and long-term growth. “This means creating the right conditions for enterprise and maintaining the UK’s position as one of the best places in the world to start and grow a business,” he added.
Hain continued, “HPC Wales will give firms access to supercomputing resources and also offer consultancy services and tailored training packages to enhance workforce skills.”
A statement from BIS said the additional contributions to make up the extra £34m will come from European funds, higher education in Wales and the private sector.
According to a BIS spokesperson, HPC Wales will be split across Cardiff and Swansea Universities with no centralised site.
Wales HPC will offer skills-development activities ranging from individual workshops to Masters-level courses. Short-term internships will also support two-way knowledge transfer and create stronger links between HPC Wales and the industrial community.
The Universities of Cardiff and Swansea will deliver HPC Wales, providing the technology and skills base to support research and development projects.
BIS expects HPC Wales to create more than 400 new jobs across the digital, low-carbon, health, bio-science, engineering and advanced manufacturing sectors, with the majority in highly skilled technical and scientific fields such as image processing, animation, 3D visualisation, data mining and simulations.
http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2254751/wales-44-million-supercomputing
The UK can only maintain its worldwide reputation for quality research, if researchers take advantage of the digital revolution, says JISC.
Today, JISC is launching a year-long campaign called ‘Research 3.0 – driving the knowledge economy’, to debate how digital technologies are changing not only what research we do, but how it can be carried out.
A new video , ‘How digital technologies are creating a new paradigm in research’, sets the agenda for the coming year and introduces the key issues such as how to share data, why collaborate and how to publish research work online?
To support this video, THE (Times Higher Education) publishes a ’Data Revolution’ supplement, highlighting how JISC is supporting universities and the Research Councils to advance in the ever-changing technology landscape.
Visit the campaign website at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/res3
Read THE ‘Data Revolution’ supplement at
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=409097
