SUILCoP talk

Just wanted to update everyone about a presentation that I gave at the Staffordshire University Information Literacy Community of Practice (SUILCoP) on the 29th April. My talk covered the background to BRUM, RLOs in general and, most importantly, sharing learning material. It was good to speak to an audience who were all interested in sharing IL RLOs, but don't quite know where to start. After waffling on for about 45 minutes, there was a short group discussion and many of the issues that came up at the LILAC symposium were echoed here, including:

• Developing standards - by which I mean having a set of standards as to how material is first created. For example, DDA compliance was raised as an issue for one library and I'm sure this would be a universal standard.
• Training/expertise - it was agreed by the participants that some of our time when developing IL training material is wasted in getting to know software or new bits of kit (e.g. Captivate, TurningPoint, Echo360) and virtually no formal training is offered in library schools (Bob Glass of MMU is keen to follow up this point in particular).
• One-stop shop - many people expressed interest in the idea of a one-stop shop of shared training materials or at least a detailed listing of what's out there. I have put up a current listing of all the IL RLO sites that I'm aware of on the ILRLOShare wiki (details below).

It was a really enjoyable event and it was interesting to meet so many like-minded library folk. I've uploaded my slides to SlideShare so please take a look: http://www.slideshare.net/NancyGraham/rlo-design

IL RLO Share wiki

In order to keep the momentum going from the LILAC symposium discussions I've set up a wiki at http://ilrloshare.wetpaint.com to host:

• the discussion write-up
• discussion threads on all topics discussed at LILAC
• IL RLO intitiatives/project links
• IL RLO events
• del.icio.us links relating to IL RLOs and sharing of learning material

If you're interested in any of the above or any aspect of IL RLOs please follow the link and click on the Apply to be a Writer button.

LILAC in Cardiff

A weekend off and Rachel and I were on our way to Cardiff to LILAC 2009.

This is an annual conference devoted to all things information literate and I was running a symposium, along with Nicola Siminson of Jorum and Rebecca Mogg from Cardiff University, on setting up an IL RLO community of practice (CoP).

This was my third time at LILAC, so it was great to catch up with so many familiar faces again. It was a really packed conference with loads of interesting parallel sessions. The symposium was due to take place on the morning of the last day and when I found out the running order I was a bit disappointed to have to wait until the last day (not least because it meant I couldn't stay out late the night before!). However, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it meant that I got to sit through other sessions that focused on RLOs and get a sense of what people were talking about in these sessions.

I think what interested me the most about so many of the papers was that, to some extent, I'd seen it all before. There were so many projects, large and small, up and down the country that seem to still be focusing on creating so much content from scratch, rather than searching for existing appropriate content and re-purposing. More than once I found myself busily writing notes and then giving up half way through as I thought "...but...didn't so and so do a similar thing last year? But better? For less money? And in less time?".

This is fine as long as the IL community and wider library community are happy to accept that so much duplication of effort is still going on. If library managers are happy to set their librarians off on projects to create IL learning material without first seeing what else has been done, re-using what they can and embedding and re-branding to suit their context then that's great.

Except, I'm not sure that this is the case. I would argue that most librarians would love to go to a single point of access site with a set of links to high-quality IL material along with explicit indications of permission for re-use. I would also argue that these same librarians would like that learning material to have been created in easy to adapt formats with some information about how easy it should be to edit.

One of the most inspiring (if that's not too strong a word) papers was from Katy Wrathall on the SMILE project, in which the project team actually re-purposed existing material to create a module of IL resources on a Moodle site. I've yet to read the project report all the way through but I'm sure that some important lessons can be learned from this project.

We ran our symposium on the morning of April 1st (!) and had a healthy turn out of about thirty attendees. The group discussions gave us some very interesting talking points and it was just a shame that we didn't have longer for the open discussion. All the attendees indicated that they would like to see a continuation of the discussion and the organising of a CoP to support sharing of IL RLOs.

After the session we promised that we would keep in touch with the attendees and so I've now set up an IL RLO Share wiki. Anyone interested in joining our fledgling CoP should follow the wiki link and click on the Apply to be a Writer button. More information on the wiki to follow.

By the way, Rachel and I also managed a few runs in Cardiff, round the lovely Bute Park.

Intrallect user's conference - Edinburgh

Rachel and I gave a paper at the Open Educational Repositories: Share, Improve, Reuse conference in Edinburgh, organised by Intrallect, on the 25th March. We had no expectations at all and really no idea who would be attending or presenting. It was only after we arrived at the Scottish Storytelling Centre and looked at the programme that we began to get really interested.

The two day programme was a good mix of long talks on JISC-funded projects and showcases of smaller projects from the UK and beyond. The conference kicked off with Amber Thomas from JISC outlining the Open Educational Resource programme of projects which are due to begin in April 2009. These projects will aim to encourage institutions and individuals to open up their learning material to be available to all. The projects will also track any cultural changes in how and why creators of learning material share their content.

As the morning went on the other, shorter talks focused on projects involving creation and re-use of learning material with the emphasis of making use of repositories (as the conference was sponsored and held by Intrallect) in opening up content. During these talks, metadata was an issue raised again and again (which was also an important part of our paper) so we felt at least that we would be speaking to a receptive audience.

We gave our talk, and during the questions bit at the end Catherine Bruen, from Trinity College Dublin, echoed our concerns about use of metadata to adequately give RLOs a context and to indicate how successful learning material had been in achieving learning outcomes/intentions. Catherine works as a project manager within the NDLR in Ireland and later on, over some lovely sandwiches, we discussed how important we also think metadata is for repositories for 'discoverability' (another big issue for ReJiG). There is a balance that needs to be struck between getting contributors to input detailed information about their material and with not wanting to burden them with too much work.

The following day we listened to Lou McGill give a talk about the Good Intentions report from JISC. This report focuses on gathering evidence of sharing learning material among individuals and institutions. Even though there is evidence that many creators of learning material are unwilling to share, 70% of respondents to a 2006 JISC survey said that they had re-purposed others' material.

The report includes various tables illustrating different models of sharing and indicates that subject-based reposistories and communities of practice (CoP) are very successful in encouraging sharing. This is good news if we are to build a CoP for IL RLOs.

Later on, in a break out session with Lou and Sarah Currier, there was a lively discussion on the issues surrounding sharing learning material and Lou mentioned a chapter of a book on the experience of the folk at Merlot (an educational resource repository). I've yet to read this but it will be interesting to read more about the CoP approach.

Anyway, Rachel and I really enjoyed the conference and felt that we learnt a lot about what is going on in the repository world and about what the hot topics are.

We even had time to run around the streets of Edinburgh, both in the evening when the castle etc. are lit up beautifully and in the glorious morning sunshine among the daffodils.

ReJiG at Birmingham and beyond...

On Wednesday 4th March I gave a presentation about the ReJiG project at the University of Birmingham's 6th Annual Learning & Teaching Conference (see photo). The talk covered the background of the project, aims and objectives, what we've done so far and what we still hope to do to tie up the project. I also talked about the problems that we encountered whilst trying to achieve our objectives and our suggestions for solutions, including the problems with access to Jorum (some of which will be solved with the new JorumOpen licence); taxonomies and searching, metadata and promotion of Jorum to academics at Birmingham.

Next week, Rachel and I will be travelling to Edinburgh to give a paper at the Intrallect Conference in Edinburgh (http://www.intrallect.com/index.php/intrallect/news_events/events). Our plan is to talk about these problems and our suggested solutions to the Intrallect team, who are behind the software behind Jorum, and that they will come up with ingenious ways to fix them all.

The following week, on the 1st April (!), along with Rebecca Mogg from Cardiff University and Nicola Siminson from Jorum, I'll be running a symposium at LILAC (http://www.lilacconference.com/dw/index.html) to look at issues surrounding re-use and re-purpose of IL learning material and the possibility of setting up a community of practice in the UK, a la ISCoP in Ireland. We're all hoping that we get an audience full of enthusiastic folk who want to join us in our mission to share our IL RLOs, spread good practice and stop duplicating our efforts.

I'll post back after each of the events.