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University of Canterbury

May 20, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

Inspiring story of how online helped the University of Canterbury in New Zealand get back on its feet after the earthquake in February 2011:

With the library still unsafe – and half a million books to be reshelved – major education publishing houses helped out by temporarily allowing access to their online resources for free. Much greater use was made of Canterbury’s online learning system: today it remains twice as well used as before the quake. But the senior management team knew it had to think about more than the physical environment.

“You start thinking it’s about the buildings, but it’s not,” says Carr. “It’s about the student body. We always knew it would be important to maintain student engagement or we’d get substantial student flight.”

The quake struck on the second day of teaching in the new academic year, making freshers particularly susceptible to being scared off.

With communication a priority, social media became a key tool, and the university set up “UC” accounts on Facebook and Twitter.

“The purpose was to disseminate information, but the real impact was that students were able to feel connected,” says Ekant Veer, senior lecturer in marketing at Canterbury, who is researching post-quake online expression.

“It also allowed them to vent their frustrations… the more social aspects of social media meant that students were able to feel their voices were being heard and their thoughts valued. Without it, many of them may well have struggled far more.”

Read full story. See also this story about creating a digital archive.

Filed Under Times Higher Education Tagged With Earthquake, New Zealand, Online Publishing, Social Media

Pod Academy: Academic Podcast

May 6, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment
http://podacademy.org/

http://podacademy.org/

Excellent idea, I must look further into this:

Pod Academy is an independent, not-for-profit platform for podcasts on academic research.  Set up by a group of academics, techies and journalists, it aims to inform public debate and uncover intriguing and challenging new ideas.

We are always looking for interesting new research, including research that throws light on events in the news, and work with researchers to develop entertaining podcasts that are accessible to the general public, as well as rigorous in their scholarship.

I read about it in Times Higher Education.

Filed Under Academic Research, Times Higher Education Tagged With Academia, Impact Agenda, Podcasts

Digitising the 19th Century

April 30, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

Increasing access to historical materials – looking forward to hearing about new research emerging from this:

Cengage’s plans to digitise the 19th century could open up a whole new world, finds Matthew Reisz

Described by its provider as “the most ambitious scholarly digitisation and publication programme ever undertaken”, Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) was launched last week.

Created by educational resources provider Cengage Learning, the project builds on the success of its ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) programme.

Abigail Williams, Lord White fellow and tutor in English at St Peter’s College, Oxford, believes that ECCO has “transformed 18th-century studies across the world…It has been exciting and liberating in opening up the arcane, the ephemeral and the neglected, and allowing us to read way beyond the confines of the canon. The searchability of the text enables us to retrieve words and references from among millions of pages in a few seconds.”

The only key downside of ECCO, adds Dr Williams, is its creation of “a two-tier system among universities”, since “no serious 18th-century scholar would now think they could do research without it, yet not every institution can afford it”.

Read full story or visit the site.

Filed Under Times Higher Education Tagged With Archives, Digitisation, History

LSE Bloggers Demonstrate Value of Blogging (@timeshighered)

April 21, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

Demonstrating the true value of blogging to a research project:

Website will ‘maximise’ impact by bringing debate to policymakers and public. John Elmes reports

The editor of a new multidisciplinary blog run by London School of Economics academics has argued that the medium is “fundamental” for modern-day academics and their research output.

Patrick Dunleavy, professor of political science and public policy, was speaking about the launch of the European Politics and Policy (EUROPP) blog, the central mission of which is “to increase the public understanding of social science in the contexts of European governance and policy making” across the European Union and other European countries.

LSE has been a pioneer in the academic blogosphere, and EUROPP is a continuation of its British Politics and Policy (BPP) blog, created in the run-up to the 2010 general election.

To supplement a Higher Education Funding Council for England-funded research project aiming to demonstrate how academic research in the social sciences achieves public policy impact, Professor Dunleavy also set up an Impact of Social Sciences blog in 2011 as a “hub for anyone interested in maximising the impact of academic work in the social sciences and other disciplines”.

He said: “There is a new paradigm of how you do research. You can do research in real time and do much more. Every [research] project should have a blog.”

Read the full story.

Filed Under Times Higher Education Tagged With Blogging, Research

FOI Act Damaging Research @timeshighered?

April 9, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

An interesting article about unintended consequences from the Freedom of Information Act:

The Freedom of Information Act 2000 is being used in ways that its creators did not intend, and universities are bearing the cost.

While the act aims to make the functioning of government (and government-funded organisations such as universities) more open, an unintended consequence is that researchers may be forced to hand over unpublished data.

The protection of freedoms bill, now in its final parliamentary stages, takes this a dangerous step further by extending the act to cover sets of research data in electronic form, even where they are incomplete or unverified.

FoI requests are an increasing headache for universities. At my institution, the number of requests has risen from 46 in 2007 to 132 last year, costing an estimated £185,000 in staff time. Furthermore, they are increasingly straying into research areas, and some institutions would say that this has caused problems already. For example, a research group at the University of Oxford spent a year rebutting a request for data from a big nationwide health study, submitted by a company with a significant commercial interest. Oxford incurred hefty legal costs in the process.

Read full story.

Filed Under Academic Research, Times Higher Education Tagged With Freedom of Information, Research

Book Review: The Daily You

April 6, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

An interesting book review from Times Higher Education: The Daily You. We’ve discussed this quite a lot – the power of ‘niche’, and the danger that if you only look at things that are recommended to you because they’re similar to something you already like, how do you encounter the new?

The media industry has unquestionably been transformed by advertisers’ ability to collect data at the individual level about internet users and use it to design more effective ad campaigns. Here, Joseph Turow claims that the way individual-level data has transformed this media-buying process has been hidden except to a few industry insiders. The Daily You offers a nice description of how online advertisers now track internet users across websites in order to offer ads that they hope will be relevant and thus effective.

Turow is at his strongest when he describes, in careful but still accessible language, what media firms are doing and the technical details behind how they collect data. I particularly enjoyed his description of the inadvertently harmful effects of personalising news content. The fear is that by over-personalising news, newspapers inadvertently create “data silos” where someone who has not yet shown an appetite for international news will never have the chance to be exposed to it. This is something that deeply concerns Turow, a professor of communications, and his passion shows.

Read full story.

Filed Under Academic Research, Digital Literacy, Times Higher Education Tagged With Book Review

The changing nature of reading?

March 30, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

How is the growing use of e-books chaining academia and the publishing industry?

In the world of books, “the times they are a-changin’”, as Bob Dylan told us. And if bookshops and publishers are going through intense upheaval, this must affect the most compulsive producers and consumers of the written word – academics.

In what economists might call the “value chain” of reading, there are four distinct stages, all of them changing in unnerving but interesting ways. Of course, the process starts with the author, combining two substages, research and then writing; then comes publication which, for both journal articles and books, has historically involved commercial publishers or university presses. Then for books, if not journals, there are the booksellers, the only link in the chain to communicate directly with readers. (Libraries remain an important part of the ecosystem for academic and scholarly works but sadly no longer for general books and lay readers.)

Read full story.

Filed Under Times Higher Education Tagged With E-Readers, Kindle

Open Publishing: Hot Topic

March 25, 2012 By drbexl 5 Comments

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/116617

The debate about open publishing, etc. continues:

Tensions between publishers and funding bodies over open access to research papers have flared up again after the Publishers Association accused Research Councils UK of riding roughshod over publishers’ concerns in a new draft policy on open access.

The policy, which RCUK hopes to adopt by the summer, stipulates that the final version of papers produced with funding from any of the science research councils must be made freely available online within six months of publication.

Research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council would have to become open access within 12 months. RCUK would hope to see this period reduced to six once publishers in these fields, which are often smaller than science publishers, were ready to make the transition.

But the Publishers Association, which represents UK publishing companies, criticised the proposals and said it had not been consulted.

It said in a statement that “more in sadness than anger, we have little option but to oppose this policy”.

Read full story.

Filed Under Academic Research, Times Higher Education Tagged With Funding, Open Publishing, RCUK

The need for Universities to engage (properly) with social media

March 19, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

A great story in the pull out on the World University Rankings in Times Higher Education, encouraging universities to move properly into the digital age.

The increased importance of brands has been paralleled by rapid growth in the channels of information that shape reputation and transmit brands. Social media outlets have proliferated, diversifying the ways information is spread. There are live chats, blogs, interactive bookmarking and video sharing. All can and do shape reputations.

Universities have been slow to react to the shift in the media environment. They have one foot in the print and post era, and one in the online age. Yet they often engage social media on the same terms as they engage mass media: fixed and formal messages, static images and long production cycles.

…..

To achieve this brand leverage, universities have to engage with social media platforms and listen to many active voices. And they have to be quick about it because messages on these platforms move fast and reach many.

For example, a single student’s “status update” on Facebook at midnight about University X will reach on average 130 friends. If 15 of those friends comment, their messages will go to more than 1,000 individuals. Some will post a related message on Twitter. A complete stranger who searches for University X on Twitter will see this post; they could write a blog and reach another group of readers. Before University X’s communications office has opened, a message about the institution has been created and spread.

Read full post. Many lecturers are still treating social media as something optional … but we live in a digital world and we need to engage with it!

Filed Under Times Higher Education Tagged With Fear, Social Media, Universities

The Physical Campus: On its way out?

March 16, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

Image purchased from iStockphoto

There’s lots of debate as to what the 21st century classroom will grow to look like, and Times Higher Education picks up another story suggesting that the physical campus will become a thing of the past, as students log in when/where they want:

The traditional university model is unlikely to survive the next 50 years because teaching, examinations and student social life will be offered separately on an “a la carte” basis, the British Council’s annual Going Global conference has heard.

Opening the event in London, Ben Wildavsky, senior scholar in research and policy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas-based educational charity, said there was a trend towards the “unbundling” of the activities that universities traditionally have performed.

“The conventional combination of activities in a single physical campus – teaching, curriculum, socialisation and networking, credentialing, and in some cases research – is increasingly being questioned,” said Mr Wildavsky, author of The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World (2010).

Read full story.

Filed Under The Future, Times Higher Education Tagged With Campus, Choice, Offline, Online
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