'Learning is a conversation, not merely a lecture'

We've started the new year very well by having a short paper accepted at this year's LILAC in March. This will be a great opportunity to meet so many people that we've been in contact with about our project and to talk about possible future collaborations. It will also be a great chance to get some instant peer feedback about our project. We hope to meet many like minded librarians and to see what everyone else has been up to in the IL field nationally.

We're coming towards the end of the project now, with just a student focus group and an informal discussion with the academics involved to get through. We've also started writing up our project report, which will be finished by the end of February, so we'll have March to perfect our presentation!

Closer to home and all students at Birmingham received a welcome email from the University on their return after Christmas. This email highlights the importance of becoming 'enquiry-led learn(ers)' and goes on to describe attributes of an enquiry-led learner, including 'happily seek(ing) out your own resources, above and beyond those recommended by your tutors' and 'think(ing) critically about what you hear and read, weighing up the facts to come to your own conclusions'.

As information professionals we must tap into this university ideal of the enquiry-led learner with our embedded information skills training and generic training across the disciplines, focusing on self-directed study and using a problem based approach. We can help students achieve this ideal by supporting them to become information literate. We can also link at a higher position with the university's aims for independent learning by getting involved at the policy and committee stages and showing that we have an expertise that is invaluable at a strategic as well as practical level.

Enough excitement for now - we'll report back on the focus group....

PRINCE

Picture: Main Library, University of Birmingham

In order to manage the BRUM project, we’ve used the full Prince 2 project management methodology. I initially thought this was over the top for a small-scale project, but in fact this has proved exceptionally useful in a number of ways:

Milestones – As part of our Project initiation document we set clear milestones, and have to report monthly against these. This ensures a real focus on what needs to be done.

Communications plan – We all think we publicise our projects and developments, but are we communicating to the right people at the right time? This clear communications plan, ensures that we communicate to all stakeholders in a systematic manner.

Issue, Risk and Assumption Log – Extremely useful for articulating what might go wrong and planning contingenices.

Information Services (University of Birmingham) now use PRINCE 2 and PRINCE Lite to manage all of their projects (currently over 100). A Project Office has been set up to oversee this, and have been extremely supportive and helpful - thanks especially to Rea Shahein and Vicky Holmes

End of year blog

We thought that as it's nearing the end of 2006 and the beginning of the New Year we'd have a mini review of what we've acheived so far with our project. We met with staff in our Project Support Office yesterday so that got us thinking about certain aspects of our project.

Creation of RLOs vs. liaison
I think we both started off with the idea that the creation of the RLOs would be the most time consuming section of the project. However, we now realise that it's the liaison, advocacy and promotion which has taken up most of our time and is the aspect least in our control. Even when we used new software and came across technical barriers we managed to create our RLOs on time and to a basic specification.

The difficulty came when trying to get academics on board and stay on board. This was partly due to the time of year that we chose to begin our project. The autumn term is busy enough without project work but trying to juggle usign BRUM RLOs with delivery of their curriculum proved too much for some of our academics. We would recommend anybody attempting something similar spend the spring/summer term heavily promoting and getting staff on board and then by the time the new academic year starts RLOs can already be embedded.

External response
We were really surprised and pleased to receive some great responses to an email we posted on the LIS-INFOLITERACY mailing list. I'm drafting an email to send out to respondees with suggestions for future collaboration and the possibility of arranging a mini-conference/symposium at which we can all discuss RLO issues and future projects.

Project management network
Internally we also discussed the possibility of an annual meeting of all project managers within the university. We feel as if we're on a steep learning curve and that we've already learned so much that we'd like to pass on or share with others. It would be really useful to get together with other project managers to get ideas about what's worked and what hasn't in their projects.

Looking ahead
We've thoroughly enjoyed the project so far and we're now looking to 2007 with focus groups in January and an end of project report in February. However, we've had so many ideas for post-project actions that we know our involvement in RLOs and BRUM won't end when we hand in the project report.

We also look forward to continued inspiration from colleagues in the university and further afield. See you in 2007!

UCEL - Universities’ Collaboration in eLearning

The UCeL website now includes links to a range of subject-specific RLOs, all of which are interactive and include quality audio-visual materials. These are well worth looking at, and we would be really interested in hearing from anybody who has had a chance to use them (or re-use them!)

New and exciting

I subscribe to Ben Toth's Libraries in the NHS blog and there was a link on it yesterday to the blog of Tim Berners-Lee. I had a look at it and now subscribe to that too. Keeping up with the inventor of the world wide web is very interesting and you find out all sorts of things about new web languages, the semantic web and how the usage of the web is changing.

There is also a blog entry by Tim on net neutrality; how we must keep the web/net country neutral and not let one single body have authority over it. Through listening to one of the History of Information audio lectures from UC Berkeley this morning I went on the moveon.org site and noticed that they've got a Save the Internet campaign going on the same issue of net neutrality - please visit the site and register your support any way you can. It's crucial that we preserve the incredible freedoms we enjoy on the web and are able to continue to explore new ways of sharing information (including RLOs) and collaborating on projects.

All of my recent reading on RLOs/repositories and my work with our institutional VLE is leading me to think about how web users (especially students) will shape our own online world. Imagine if everyone used a piece of personal web space to link to or interact with every aspect of their online world. So, you'd have all of your links (bank, e-commerce etc.), communications (blogs, MySpace, email etc.), work (institutional VLEs, RLOs etc.) and recreation (music, films, books etc.) hosted in the same space and every new link that you found could be added to it. Visually it could look like a mind map. It would make a lot of sense to someone like me and maybe it's already happening with the semantic web. Tim Berners-Lee (and others) is creating a new type of web broswer, the Tabulator. If anyone can help me to understand if this is moving in the right direction let me know.