Get out the bunting

Well, blow us down with a feather! Learning Resources won the Tell Us award and our lovely Sarah Arkle (Reader Services Manager) and Marcus Woolley (Deputy Director of Learning Resources & Student Services - University Librarian) collected it from Colin Salmon. Unfortunately, your correspondent had to leave before the dancing began, but he promised to make the most of the dance floor. 

Colin Salmon compered the evening really well. He has an honorary doctorate from the University and grew up in Stopsley (Luton) "less than three miles from Putteridge, but I never got to see it". He knew a lot about what the university is trying to achieve and the impact it has in Luton, And there was a heartening  'small world' moment, Ine of the other night's winners - Gurch Randhawa (Professor of Diversity in Public Health and Director of the Institute for Health Research) - pointed out that he and Dr Salmon are both involved in the same campaigning organisation to promote organ donation in BME communities; they'd just never met before.

@ACLTcharity @NBTA_UK @NHSBT Colin Salmon - organ donation ambassador at @uniofbeds research awards pic.twitter.com/WTm7zzkBIM
— GURCH randhawa (@gurchrandhawa) June 13, 2014

Student Experience Awards: Learning Resources nominated

Tonight the University's Student Experience Awards are being held at Putteridge Bury site, near Luton. This site is mainly used by the Post-Graduate Medical School and for post-graduate business courses. But occasionally it gets used for internal conferences and other functions.

The Student Experience Awards were founded by Bill Rammell when he became Vice-Chancellor because he wanted to ensure every department puts the 'student experience' at the centre of their activities.

This year Learning Resources are really proud that the Reader Services team have been nominated for their championing of the Tell Us scheme. Although every team in Learning Resources is always looking at ways of improving our resources and services for students, the clearest feedback about 'fixes' and issues comes from students who use the Tell Us (or other feedback routes) to explain what improvements they'd like to see.

Tell Us feedback gave Learning Resources the evidence to get the go-ahead for 24/7 opening in Bedford and Luton and the creation of the Silent Study floor at Polhill. Sometimes Tell Us suggestions are really big ideas like those, but we also get lots of messages about smaller but important issues which are things we can review and quickly fix.

This infographic summarises the Tell Us comments, compliments or concerns the university had in the first half of this academic year. The National Student Survey which has been heavily publicised this Spring is hugely important for the university's rankings but the questions are quite 'big picture' (non-specific) and it is only completed by final year students so Tell Us is a great way to influence the university's policies and facilities whilst you're doing your course.

The World Cup of Everything Else

(c) Nicolas Raymond (http://freestock.ca/flags_maps_g80-cote_d_ivoire_grunge_flag_p1133.html ) This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

 

 

 

The Wall Street Journal has put together a fun stats-based infographic for the 32 countries competing in the World Cup. Sadly, Cote d'Ivoire England for public spending on education. On the upside, our rainfall isn't as copious as it might sometimes appear.

One-day site closure this weekend

Please remember that Polhill Avenue (the road) and the Bedford Campus will be closed all day on Sunday 8th June. This includes the library. This is because of resurfacing work on Polhill Avenue and relocating the electricty substation (which is in the old garages between the Campus Centre and the three-storey building under construction).

Luton's Park Square Learning Resources Centre will be open all day if you desperately need to use university computers.

Looking at referencing afresh

I recently attended an interesting study day on looking at new trends in citations and referencing. There were some really interesting papers from everybody from software providers (http://www.mendeley.com looks particularly strong as a 'free' gizmo), PhD students and librarians working in colleges and universities. Basic citation skills are covered in KS1 but there's a big gap between then and starting uni. And 'attribution' is a form of politeness that hasn't really been adopted by web-users, even though it was such a massive part of print-culture (really since the Enlightenment and beyond).

Storify is one way of amalgamating digital objects on a particular theme. You can pull in elements from blogs, pin-boards, YouTube etc). This event had a hashtage so I just wanted to collect the tweets (you can discard ones you don't need) and left it in a linear template. With something more visual, I'd probably opt for the slideshow view so I could flick through the object-record without scrolling.