This blog tends to focus on research and often comments on how technological developments will alter the management of information and the computation of data. Occasionally, however, we also discuss issues within the undergraduate and postgraduate degrees (and modules) our team happens to deliver. It is therefore worthwhile announcing to all those who read the blog that our team has launched a new undergraduate degree programme for 2011: BSc Business Communications.
In BSc Business Communications at LJMU (UCAS Code: N102) students will study the strategic importance of communication, information and technology, and the role these play in the modern business organisation. Further information on the new programme can be found at our standalone BSc Business Communications website, the official LJMU BSc Business Communications website, or our Facebook group (BSc Business Communications at LJMU). BSc Business Communications is recruiting now for 2011/2012.
Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts
Monday, 15 November 2010
Thursday, 22 October 2009
Blackboard on the shopping list: do Google need reining in?
Alex Spiers (Learning Innovation & Development, LJMU) alerted me via Twitter to rumours in the 'Internet playground' that Google is considering branching out into educational software. According to the article spreading the rumour, Google plans to fulfil its recent pledge to acquire one small company per month by purchasing Blackboard.
The area of educational software is not completely alien to Google. The Google Apps Education Edition (providing email, collaboration widgets, etc.) has been around for a while now (I think) and - as the article insinuates - moving deeper into educational software seems a natural progression and provides Google with clear access to a key demographic. This is all conjecture of course; but if Google acquired Blackboard I think I would suffer a schizophrenic episode. A part of me would think, "Great - Google will make Blackboard less clunky, offer more functionality and more flexiblity". But the other part (which is slightly bigger, I think) would feel extremely uncomfortable that Google is yet again moving into new areas, probably with the intention of dominating that area.
We forget how huge and pervasive Google is today. Google is everywhere and now reaches far beyond its dominant position in search into virtually every significant area of web and software development. If Google were Microsoft the US Government and the EU would be all over Google like a rash for pushing the boundaries of antitrust legislation and competition laws. This situation takes on a rather sinister tone when you consider the situation in HE if Blackboard becomes a Google subsidiary. Edge Hill University is one of several institutions which has elected to ditch fully integrated institutional email applications (e.g. MS Outlook, Thunderbird) in favour of Google Mail. Having a VLE maintained by Google therefore sets the alarm bells ringing. The key technological interactions for a 21st century student are as follows: email, web, VLE, library. Picture it - a student existence which would be entirely dependent upon one company and the directed advertising that goes with it: Google Mail, web (and their first port of call is likely to be Google, of course), GoogleBoard (the name of Blackboard if they decided to re-brand it!) and a massive digital library which Google is attempting to create and which would essentially create a de facto digital library monopoly.
I'm probably getting ahead of myself. The acquisition of Blackboard probably won't happen, and the digital library has encountered plenty of opposition, not least from Angela Merkel; but it does get me thinking that Google finally needs reining in. Even before this news broke I was starting to think that Google was turning into a Sesame Street-style Cookie Monster, devouring everything in sight. Their ubiquity can't possibly be healthy anymore, can it? Or am I being completely paranoid?
The area of educational software is not completely alien to Google. The Google Apps Education Edition (providing email, collaboration widgets, etc.) has been around for a while now (I think) and - as the article insinuates - moving deeper into educational software seems a natural progression and provides Google with clear access to a key demographic. This is all conjecture of course; but if Google acquired Blackboard I think I would suffer a schizophrenic episode. A part of me would think, "Great - Google will make Blackboard less clunky, offer more functionality and more flexiblity". But the other part (which is slightly bigger, I think) would feel extremely uncomfortable that Google is yet again moving into new areas, probably with the intention of dominating that area.
We forget how huge and pervasive Google is today. Google is everywhere and now reaches far beyond its dominant position in search into virtually every significant area of web and software development. If Google were Microsoft the US Government and the EU would be all over Google like a rash for pushing the boundaries of antitrust legislation and competition laws. This situation takes on a rather sinister tone when you consider the situation in HE if Blackboard becomes a Google subsidiary. Edge Hill University is one of several institutions which has elected to ditch fully integrated institutional email applications (e.g. MS Outlook, Thunderbird) in favour of Google Mail. Having a VLE maintained by Google therefore sets the alarm bells ringing. The key technological interactions for a 21st century student are as follows: email, web, VLE, library. Picture it - a student existence which would be entirely dependent upon one company and the directed advertising that goes with it: Google Mail, web (and their first port of call is likely to be Google, of course), GoogleBoard (the name of Blackboard if they decided to re-brand it!) and a massive digital library which Google is attempting to create and which would essentially create a de facto digital library monopoly.
I'm probably getting ahead of myself. The acquisition of Blackboard probably won't happen, and the digital library has encountered plenty of opposition, not least from Angela Merkel; but it does get me thinking that Google finally needs reining in. Even before this news broke I was starting to think that Google was turning into a Sesame Street-style Cookie Monster, devouring everything in sight. Their ubiquity can't possibly be healthy anymore, can it? Or am I being completely paranoid?
Thursday, 11 June 2009
Cracking open metadata and cataloguing research with Resource Description & Access (RDA)
I have been taking the opportunity to catch up with some recently published literature over the past couple of weeks. While perusing the latest issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (the magazine which complements JASIST), I read an interesting article by Shawne D. Miksa (associate professor at the College of Information, University of North Texas). Miksa's principal research interests reside in metadata, cataloguing and indexing. She has been active in disseminating about Resource Description & Access (RDA) and has a book in the pipeline designed to demystify it.
RDA has been in development for several years now, is the successor to AACR2 and provides rules and guidance on the cataloguing of information entities. I use the phrase 'information entities' since RDA departs significantly from AACR2. The foundations of AACR2 were created prior to the advent of the Web and this remains problematic given the digital and new media information environment in which we now exist. Of course, more recent editions of AACR2 have attempted to better accommodate these developments, but fire fighting was always order of the day. The now re-named Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA has known for quite some time that an entirely new approach was required – and a few years ago radical changes to AACR2 were announced. As my ex-colleague Gordon Dunsire describes in a recent D-Lib Magazine article:
Reading Miksa's article was interesting for two reasons. Firstly, RDA has fallen off of my radar recently. I used to be kept abreast of RDA development through the activities of my colleague Gordon, who also disseminates widely on RDA and feeds into the JSC's work. Miksa's article – which announces the official release of RDA in second half of 2009 – was almost like being in a time machine! RDA is here already! Wow! It only seems like last week when JSC started work on RDA (...but it was actually over 5 years ago…).
The development of RDA has been extremely controversial, and Miksa alludes to this in her article – metadata gurus clashing with traditional cataloguers clashing with LIS revolutionaries. It has been pretty ugly at times. But secondly – and perhaps more importantly – Miksa's article is a brilliant call to arms for more metadata research. Not only that, she notes areas where extensive research will be mandatory to bring truly FRBR-ised digital libraries to fruition. This includes consideration of how this impacts upon LIS education.
A new dawn? I think so… Can the non-believers grumble about that? Between the type of developments noted earlier and RDA, the future of information organisation is alive and kicking.
RDA has been in development for several years now, is the successor to AACR2 and provides rules and guidance on the cataloguing of information entities. I use the phrase 'information entities' since RDA departs significantly from AACR2. The foundations of AACR2 were created prior to the advent of the Web and this remains problematic given the digital and new media information environment in which we now exist. Of course, more recent editions of AACR2 have attempted to better accommodate these developments, but fire fighting was always order of the day. The now re-named Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA has known for quite some time that an entirely new approach was required – and a few years ago radical changes to AACR2 were announced. As my ex-colleague Gordon Dunsire describes in a recent D-Lib Magazine article:
"RDA: Resource Description and Access is in development as a new standard for resource description and access designed for the digital world. It is being built on the foundation established for the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR). Although it is being developed for use primarily in libraries, it aims to attain an effective level of alignment with the metadata standards used in related communities such as archives, museums and publishers, and to provide a better fit with emerging database technologies."The ins and outs of RDA is a bit much for this blog; suffice to say that RDA is ultimately designed to improve the resource discovery potential of digital libraries and other retrieval systems by utilising the FRBR conceptual entity-relationship model (see this entity-relationship diagram at the FRBR blog). FRBR provides a holistic approach to users' retrieval requirements by establishing the relationships between information entities and allowing users to traverse the hierarchical relationships therein. I am an advocate of FRBR and appreciate its retrieval potential. Indeed, I often direct postgraduate students to Fiction Finder, an OCLC Research prototype which demonstrates the FRBR Work-Set Algorithm.
Reading Miksa's article was interesting for two reasons. Firstly, RDA has fallen off of my radar recently. I used to be kept abreast of RDA development through the activities of my colleague Gordon, who also disseminates widely on RDA and feeds into the JSC's work. Miksa's article – which announces the official release of RDA in second half of 2009 – was almost like being in a time machine! RDA is here already! Wow! It only seems like last week when JSC started work on RDA (...but it was actually over 5 years ago…).
The development of RDA has been extremely controversial, and Miksa alludes to this in her article – metadata gurus clashing with traditional cataloguers clashing with LIS revolutionaries. It has been pretty ugly at times. But secondly – and perhaps more importantly – Miksa's article is a brilliant call to arms for more metadata research. Not only that, she notes areas where extensive research will be mandatory to bring truly FRBR-ised digital libraries to fruition. This includes consideration of how this impacts upon LIS education.
A new dawn? I think so… Can the non-believers grumble about that? Between the type of developments noted earlier and RDA, the future of information organisation is alive and kicking.
Tuesday, 17 March 2009
Who's going to teach our "stuff"? and who's going to learn it?
Is this the right forum for this? We all know of the imminent and unwelcome restructuring facing us. Where does the future lie for this discipline, or can we even define what our discipline is? We're constantly reminded now that our HE degrees are products, our students are customers, and so what are we, retailers? Compared to many other "products" in this HE marketplace our products are relatively unpopular despite the fact that there are fewer universities providing what we do compared to a decade ago.
I constantly struggle to explain what it is we do and can therefore understand why students have difficulty in placing it in context. Perhaps a business school isn't the right environment but then neither is a computing department, or it doesn't seem to be, and we don't fit into education or anywhere else.
What is the long term future for this discipline, whatever it is?
It's St. Patrick's day (not St. Paddy's, or St. Pat's or Paddy's day) so I'm off for Guinness in the local.
I constantly struggle to explain what it is we do and can therefore understand why students have difficulty in placing it in context. Perhaps a business school isn't the right environment but then neither is a computing department, or it doesn't seem to be, and we don't fit into education or anywhere else.
What is the long term future for this discipline, whatever it is?
It's St. Patrick's day (not St. Paddy's, or St. Pat's or Paddy's day) so I'm off for Guinness in the local.
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