Digitally Ready

RU Digitally Ready?

Posted on May 25, 2012 by Alastair Culham

Posted in Dissemination | Tagged QR code | 3 Comments

Chelsea Flower Show is Digitally Ready!

Posted on May 25, 2012 by Alastair Culham

Alan Titchmarsh and Rachel De Thame may spend their time admiring the large and expensive show gardens around the grand marquee but to the digitally ready enthusiast surely the most photo worthy item in the show is the 2 metre high QR code made from sheet metal cut to show dark hedging behind that surrounds the educational exhibits.

Turning Towns and Cities Green – the hedge surrounding the education exhibits in the grand marquee at Chelsea 2012

The QR code given is a real one that directs the user to the RHS web page describing the theme of these exhibits.

Turning towns and cities green – a 2m high QR code made of steel

The Reading University stand this year was in collaboration with the Royal Horticultural Society and showcased the active collaborative research betwwen the two institutions on the impact of climate change on gardens and green spaces in the UK.

Posted in Digital community | Tagged Alastair Culham, Chelsea Flower Show, QR code | Leave a comment

Symposium: Supporting Academic Practice in a Digital Age, 17 May 2012

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Kim Shahabudin

I recently attended this one day symposium at the University of Exeter, hosted by the JISC-funded Exeter CASCADE Project and the University of Exeter Academic Skills team. Over 80 delegates attended from universities mostly in the South and Midlands. A variety of roles were represented, including subject academics, learning developers, educational developers, librarians, educational researchers and ICT tutors. This meant an early recognition that in digital literacies, as in any other area of HE, there’s no chance of applying a one-size-fits-all approach.

Differing needs, applications and anxieties quickly became apparent, as did differing levels of confidence. The ‘desert island’ question at the end of the panel session was especially telling: asked what one piece of technology they would retain on a desert island, one panel member said she’d be glad to be rid of all of it, while another said as long as there was no email, he’d be happy. (I empathised.)

Twitter still seems to be a particular source of anxiety, especially anxieties around boundaries and digital identity. It does seem as if the only effective way to understand Twitter is to use it, and the ‘follow ten people for a couple of weeks’ advice is a good way in. Perhaps some of this anxiety could be overcome with a more structured timetable of tasks – something like the ‘23 Things’ approach?

The event began with two plenary sessions, Dilly Fung (Exeter) on New Academic Literacies, followed by Helen Beetham (Exeter CASCADE) and Martin Oliver (Institute of Education, London) on Students’ Digital Practices: Studying in the Age of Google. I found Helen’s idea of overlapping and interacting digital tribes (e.g. social media users/programmers/email and WPers etc) a much more useful way of thinking than the natives/immigrants or even residents/visitors schema that have been proposed previously.

The panel session that followed these included two very articulate student members. One stated that in her experience most students are more concerned about success in their studies and less about employability. Perhaps some of the current emphasis on the latter risks making a separation between the two in students’ minds?

In the afternoon workshop sessions included hands-on experience of using screencasting to give feedback, using social media for peer-mentored learning, referencing tools, and knowledge production via tweets, blogs and wikis. We will certainly be trialling screencasting for producing resources in Study Advice this year – engaging, easy and effective.

The day gave me plenty to think about (and lots of new Twitter followers…) but perhaps the strongest impression I came away with was that there is much talk about training staff in digital literacies, but little about who takes responsibility for training students – people were quick to say that they didn’t have time/expertise/hardware. But there are plenty of good training resources already out there (see Paul’s elearning resources from Paul Andrews at Newport for an especially useful collection), and a good first step would be to collate and evaluate them, and to produce some examples of how they could be embedded into teaching practice.

For another view of the event, see the CASCADE blog .

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged digital literacy | Leave a comment

The open access argument is hotting up further with Harvard putting its weight behind free to view publications as reported in The Guardian. What the article doesn’t mention is that you need to be a fairly rich researcher to publish in many free-to-read journals. Typically the cost per published paper is around £2000-£3000.

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Alastair Culham | Leave a comment

Tracking Downloads with Centaur

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Shirley Williams

In an earlier post I asked: Is it worth tweeting about academic papers? and I apologized for the quality of the graphs saying “Centaur does not allow users to extract data over a specified period”. Well it is possible to get better graphs although the interface is not easily found. But if anyone is thinking about repeating my experiment with a paper in Centaur it is worth knowing that this link http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/cgi/irstats.cgi?IRS_epchoice=EPrint will take you to an interface where you can select your own papers, dates and graphs. Now a lot of the interface is quite complex and liable to generate far too much data to be useful. But the daily download can be used with the Centaur ID for an article to get the downloads over the last few weeks so you can see whether that tweet or blog post had any impact. you get the ID from the items page in Centaur.

So below are the downloads of another paper I co-authored, I’ve done a tweet and the first author wrote a blog post, can you guess when?

Thanks to Pat Parslow for showing me how to get this graph

In case your interested this paper is:

T.R. Liyanagunawardena, A.A. Adams, N. Rassool, S. Williams, Extending Higher Educational Opportunities through e-Learning: A Case Study from Sri Lanka, 1st International Australasian Conference on Enabling Access to Higher Education Adelaide, South Australia 2011, pp. 291-301.

Centaur entry http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/23842/

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Endnote and Google Scholar

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Shirley Williams

In an earlier post we looked at Google Scholar.

Last week I saw this link to a screencast about using Endnote and Google Scholar, it shows how to set up Google Scholar to link to institutional libraries and to export to Endnote, and what to do if you are away from the machine with Endnote on.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Endnote, Google Scholar | 1 Comment

Is it worth tweeting about academic papers?

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Shirley Williams

Last month Melissa Terras, from the Department of Information Studies at University College London, published a blog post “Is blogging and tweeting about research papers worth it? The Verdict”. In this post she explained an experiment she conducted by which she had written blog posts giving the back story of past academic papers and providing links to the papers in the UCL repository (the equivalent to Reading’s Centaur), she then tweeted about the papers and saw a sizeable increase in the downloads.

For our experiment we decided to use a conference paper that was uploaded last month to Centaur, in line with the publishers rules this is the version we submitted not the final version that they published as part of the conference proceedings. On Tuesday I looked at Centaur and saw that it had been downloaded 7 times. I tweeted the following at 6.00 pm that evening:

“Want to know about the range of techs used by guides round the world? http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/27755/2/GTimeSubmitted120112.pdf”
(actually the url was shortened by my Twitter client).

By the next morning (Wednesday) the downloads were up to 23.

I asked the co-authors to retweet, and by the next morning (Thursday) the downloads were 39.

Yesterday I asked Pat Parslow (@PatParslow) who wasn’t an author but has worked on related projects and is a regular user of Twitter if he was willing to tweet about this work, which he did:

“Digital Literacies, Digital Divide, Visitors/Residents, Natives/Immigrants technology audit in voluntary sector http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/27755/2/GTimeSubmitted120112.pdf #WAGGGS”

He also did a second post that linked to the hashtag of an event that was happening that day.

This morning (Friday) the total downloads stand at about 64.

(apologies the graph shows the whole year but the paper was only accessible for the last two months, Centaur does not allow users to extract data over a specified period).

There is some overlap in the downloads, presumably some people who follow more than one of us have downloaded it more than once.

But the number of people who have seen our work has increased significantly. Some of the discussion generated on Twitter has suggested the methodology needs to be revised to improve the work, which will be useful as we develop the work and look to submit to a journal.

Fairly obviously the number of followers you have on Twitter makes a difference to the number of people who read your tweets, your reputation for posting interesting links will dictate whether those followers actually read the link and/or retweet it. The time of day you post will make a difference, stuff published in the middle of the night will only be read by insomniacs and those in different time zones. If there is a hashtag that is related to the work it is worth considering using it.

There is work by Gunther Eysenbach “Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact” which has correlated Tweets about papers and the number of citations, which certainly indicates getting noticed on Twitter can help get your work cited. However there is also a downside Apoorva Mandavilli in the Nature article “Peer review: Trial by Twitter , reports that within days of publishing criticisms of papers are presented on Twitter. I’m not sure if this is actually bad because if the peer review process omitted to notice that your methodology was flawed surely you still want to know.

The paper this was based on is: S. Williams, C. Spiret, Y. Dimitriadi, R. McCrindle, Auditing Technology Uses within a Global Voluntary Organisation, Global TIME: Global Conference on Technology, Innovation, Media & Education, AAEC, Online, 2012, pp. 104-109. http://editlib.org/p/39406; the Centaur entry is http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/27755/

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Twitter | 1 Comment

Google Refine

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Shirley Williams

Google Refine is a powerful tool for dealing with messy data. It seems to have more power than a spreadsheet and lots of potential. Have a look at the videos on the Google Refine site to get a feel.

Unlike a lot of Google tools this one is downloaded to your machine and works with the data there, so there is no worries about loading data into the cloud and worrying about who can access. The capacity of your machine will dictate how much data you can manipulate.

I’ve only done a little experimenting and can see plenty of projects I could run with this, but there does look to be a steep learning curve and I can’t find much in the way of tutorials.

So if there are others who are interested in exploring we probably need to set up a self-teach group.