Help through the information labyrinth

The Academic Liaison Librarians for Education, Sport & PE are running new workshops four times a week in the summer term in Bedford Library. Get all your queries answered on literature searching, referencing and tools like DISCOVER and RefWorks.  Computers will be provided or why not bring your own device for tailored help? 

For times and dates see LRWeb's What's On calendar: http://lrweb.beds.ac.uk/help/whatson.

These are just some of the regular training workshops and drop in sessions on finding and using information in your subject area, developing your study skills and using Microsoft Office applications. All sessions are run by our ALL, PAD and CST colleagues and are free.  

The building work on campus is juggling along nicely and the old entrance for cars has now reopened. This week's new development is in the quad between P and R blocks, where they're installing a walking labyrinth. The one at Park Square is a beautiful feature but I think our dance students are going to need to find a new grassy patch to rehearse their routines and lifts in the summer. 

Improving student experience: how do reading lists fit?

I spent two days this week attending a conference looking at how different universities are trying to improve the  accuracy, currency and availability of reading lists for their units. There were lots of common themes but also some really idiosyncratic and intriguing nuggets. To help me keep track of what I learnt, I created a Storify; there are lots more excellent tweets on #mtrlc but these were the ones I need to reflect on.

It's probably a bit full of library-geekery to be of interest to you from an education-perspective. However, I'm including it here, in case I'm misjuding you and also because the activity of tweeting a CPD event has some lessons from a learning-perspective.

This was the first event where I totally abandoned note-taking and stuck to tweeting (with a scribble pad to capture actions). The discipline of brevity and the public nature of the form, makes you think much harder about what you want to record. It was enriched by the RT and direct tweet dialogues that evolved during and after papers.

And, after the two days, I felt I had synthesised more information than usual. But, I am more at sea, about connecting which learning point with which paper because you tweet in a stream; if I was typing or writing with a pen, I'd have left gaps/underlined things etc.

It wasn't until I came to do this Storify that I realised you can add in text and headings. Perfect!

Educating Walthamstow

Like everyone who seemed to pass through the library gates or take the uni bus, I was glued to the Educating Yorkshire series so I was delighted to see that Channel 4 is not just running a new series but that it will have two extra episodes.

It sounds like they have picked a good school as well to centre the series over. Frederick Bremer School only opened in 2008. So, the design of the learning spaces to fit the modern curriculum could be interesting. Just having a lighting/windows system that doesn't fight interactive whiteboard displays is a fairly basic!

It will not have the pupil-to-parent history we saw in the Essex and Yorkshire series; they'll have barely seen their first batch of eleven year olds through to GCSE, let alone them pitching up at parent evenings, 10/20/30 years later! And what about the internal community of the staffroom. I knew a lot of teachers who joined the new schools created during Milton Keynes' growth spurts in the 70s-80s. It could be an equally odd experience for people who'd taught for years, elsewhere, or NQTs.

But what has really made me grin, is that this time we'll see a female head this time. The senior management team at both Essex and Yorkshire were wonderful and I really respect them; I just think it will be fantastic to see a women in a city-based Engineering Specialist School. Jenny Smith has only been in post since 2012, herself so it's a bit like the risk our Vice-Chancellor took with the Freshers series here.

Musharaf Asghar (and Mr Burton) will be a tough act to follow. Think I'd better buy some tissues just in case.

Job satisfaction for Friday

I'm happy to see that teachers in primary/early years (13) and secondary (34th) settings come out really well in the Cabinet Office's report on life satisfaction associated with different jobs. Librarians don't do too badly (43) although library clerks and assistants are down at 196. And educators working in higher (61) or further (79) education institutions are a pretty chipper lot as well.

So, I guess that means we love Monday mornings too. (And I won't be dreaming of a little spot in Derbyshire.) Or don't statistics work that way?

The actual report was undertaken by the Legatum Institute as part of a long-term  project looking at wellbeing analysis. The Beeb has put together a quick list, if you want to check out the paths-not-taken.

Five reasons to use RefWorks

I have been experimenting with an online animation tool, called PowToon. There are lots of preset templates aimed at schools and education contexts. These can be easily edited and the whole system is web-based so you don't need to install software or anything. It is very simple; this one took me 55 minutes originally and another 5 to tweak after feedback from colleagues.

The only downsides are the logo (but I gather, like Prezi, if you upgrade you can remove the branding) and that as a Flash-file it doesn't play on iPads. There are some lovely, imaginative examples on the site. Great for introducing topics in a Primary classroom or getting kids to put together their own presentations.

Identity Management

(c) Hiro Sheridan

A plea from the a project group at JISC (the national consortium of experts on digital technologies for education and research) for help. The topic may sound a little like the first line of a William Gibson review, but they basically want your thoughts on 'how can universities help staff and students get more out of digital information sources'.

"As part of the Usability project, we’re investigating the way in which research staff and students in UK Higher Education access online academic resources such as research papers, articles and e-books.

We’ve put together a short online survey to find out more about the problems students and staff may encounter when trying to access these resources and to see what they do if they can’t access the paper they need. The survey is straightforward and shouldn’t take longer than 5 minutes to complete. The URL for the survey is https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YJ9G2QR If you have any questions about the survey or would like to be involved in further user testing please contact Stuart Church."

Celebrating National Library Day at Bedford

Sharing 'my favourite book'

The library on the Bedford campus celebrated National Library Day. This annual event is celebrated in libraries all over the country, but none of us can remember ever doing anything to mark it at the University so Rachel Bickley, the Sport & Physical Activity librarian, took action to correct that this year.

As well as inviting people to share what they read for pleasure (instead of the torture of assignments) there were freebies and book-themed cupcakes from talented bakers in the Reader Services and Academic Liaison Librarian teams.

NLD 2014

If you'll forgive me geeking-out over library science - briefly, I promise! - we were quite tickled that the cupcakes which were decorated with Dewey Decimal classmarks disappeared the fastest. Bedford must be a hotspot for classification afficiandos.