Information Environment (IE) & Virtual Research Environments (VRE) call for proposals: Briefing Day notes/Q & A
On 15th December a briefing day on the Information Environment and e-Research JISC Circular (12/08) was held. The event was held in order to provide an overview of the circular and to give people the opportunity to ask questions. The circular has £11m of JISC funding against it which is quite substantial. The calls in 12/08 focus on: digital repositories for learning and research, virtual research environments, use of text-mining and automatic meta-data generation and digital preservation. So in short the circular is seeking projects that are mainly about the creation, management and sharing of information that is part of the research and learning process in ways that support researchers, learners, teachers and administrators.
Here are the links to the presentations from the Briefing Day:
Policy and bid submission
Automated Metadata and Text-mining- strand A1
Digital Repositories: Start-up, rapid innovation and enhancement - strands A3- A5
Developing e-infrastructure to support research disciplines and digital preservation exemplars - strands A2 and A6
Virtual Research Environments (VRE) - strands B1-B3
Notes of the discussion and questions and answers from the briefing day:
IE and VRE Circular 12/08 15 December Briefing Day questions and answers
For some notes of the whole event as it went along see Andy Powell’s (Eduserv Foundation) live blog.
A few points of context:
JISC has funded projects and services in all of these areas previously. So what is different this time? I would say there are three general issues that underpin the projects sought in this circular:
* reflecting the maturity of digital repositories and other types of ‘e-infrastructure’ this circular is seeking further and improved alignment of these systems with user requirements. An emphasis in the calls is the need to involve/take into account end-users and a bringing together of these ‘e-infrastructure’ systems with research and learning processes.
* both the IE and the VRE strands of activity are about building on previous investment and lessons - so these are not completely new areas of activity. In the case of repository and digital preservation activity for example we’re seeking more repositories, improved repositories and policies, further integration with other systems and in areas such as digital preservation we’re looking for actual implementation of solutions that have previously been developed. However although this circular is generally about implementing areas where there has already been substantial work the projects are about improvement and so will involve new ideas and development.
* recognition that in many cases cross domain teams and skills are required to create, manage, use and develop digital systems, supporting policies and related practices within institutions.
The decision to publish the IE and VRE call strands together was partly a practical one as both funding areas were due to issue circulars at the same time, but there was more to this decision than that. Publishing them together was, I think, essential in terms of showing that information systems should not be developed independently of the requirements of the research process. I think if we’d published the calls separately there would’ve been a danger of perpetuating this often unhelpful division. In particular the projects sought under A2, Developing e-infrastructure to support research disciplines bridge both areas and seek to bring the research process and scholarly communications requirements together with underlying information systems. This particular strand in the IE calls also represents the fact that developing the Information Environment (or e-infrastructure) is not just about managing and disseminating information it is about supporting and improving research (and of course learning and teaching, although the projects called for under A2 focus on research). I think the connections that are emerging between both the IE and VRE programme areas are a good thing and are inevitable to progress.
OER: Metadata Now
At the JISCCETIS08 conference session on Open Educational Content/Resources (OEC/OER), we had a really useful discussion about what “minimal tagging” might mean in terms of OEC today. It was part of my presentation on technical infrastructure for the JISC/HEA OEC Programme. By infrastructure, I think I mean Paul Walk’s soft definition of infrastructure
The discussion made me reflect on all the assumptions that surrounds the term “metadata”, and the history that got us to where we are now, primarily around digital learning materials.
For the purposes of description, let’s abstract workflows down to two: creation to curation (authors), and discovery to delivery (finders). Metadata standardisation has always been about supporting the flow of content between people and systems, both for C2C and D2D. We’ve always known that if information about content is useful (and used) we should expect to find it somewhere in the workflow already. The vision has never been for users to have to fill in forms: that is just a step on the way to embedded interoperability, “metadata under the bonnet”.
One of the use cases which drove the adoption of schemas such as UK LOM was the assumption of complex objects in expert systems (VLEs) being transferred to other expert systems, with even search/browse services offering complex presentation options, displaying information on “semantic density” for the finders delectation. I think I would argue that now that is only a niche use case as far as open educational resources are concerned.
So when we’re talking about a “discovery to delivery infrastructure” for OEC, from granular assets such as word documents, slide presentations, through to packaged learning objects (with capital Ls and Os!), to online courseware, perhaps the place to start is: what information is already used in creation to curation tools/systems/platforms that could usefully flow through to help find and use content. This has always been the aim of standardised metadata for interoperability: embedding it into the system and making it invisible to the user.
Now there are so many C2C tools to consider, and even more D2D options, that its not effective to concentrate on any particular suite of tools. Thats why so many developers are interested in APIs, widgets and “eduglue” to stitch together what people are using, in an almost infinite combination.
And yet there’s also a renewed interest in community metadata particular for describing the contents of the content: tagging , folksonomies, linking resources together in the web2.0 world. Metadata may not be cool, but “tags” can be, and the network effect of community tagging is enabling navigation between content. As many people have commented, bottom-up or top-down, its still metadata. We don’t have to call it that, but we do count it as part of the infrastructure.
And thats where we always hoped to get to, isn’t it? We need to keep reviewing our primary use cases so that development effort is directed at the most useful interactions between tools/systems/platforms.
It goes without saying that there are huge parallels with thinking in other areas: resource discovery, open access repositories … but whilst we should aim for a common language, we still need to champion the use cases that are central to each endeavour. For OEC, I recommend joining the CETIS Educational Content SIG.
Grant Funding Opportunities
An update on funding opportunities …
This month, November 2008, we will be releasing a Call for projects for grant funding. Outline details are on the Grant Funding Roadmap. UK FE/HE institutions are eligible to bid, with some types of projects restricted to HEFCE- and HEFCW- funded institutions, due to funding streams.
We’re finalising the Call at the moment, but you won’t go far wrong if you start thinking about what you want to do in:
- implementing automated metadata and textmining
- starting up repositories for research data, research papers, learning materials
- networking and enhancing repositories
- preservation in relation to repositories
- short technical projects to improve repository services
- connections between services to support particular disciplines
Bidders will have until January to prepare proposals, and succesful projects will be expected to start by 1st April 2009.
For those of you most interested in supporting research, please note there will also be a Call for projects related to Virtual Research Environments.
If learning and teaching resources are of particular interest, in December there will also be a Call for the forthcoming HEA/JISC Open Educational Content programme.
Date for your diary: Monday 15th December will be a Briefing Day for anyone who would like to come and hear about the funding opportunities related to the Information Environment and Virtual Research Environment Calls. It will be in Central London, probably 10-4. Details will be released soon.
If you’re not based in UK FE/HE, you may be interested in the Funding Roadmap for Invitations to Tender. These are open to anyone, so if you think you have expertise relevant to the sort of issues reported on this blog, then tenders are very welcome.
We will announce the Call on this blog as soon as it is released.
Sharing images
How can we share images more effectively for use in teaching and learning? The CLiC report (”Community-Led Image Collections) looked at this question a couple of years ago and, more recently JISC and the Higher Education Academy co-funded some case studies building on that report. The results are perhaps unsurprising, but worth bearing in mind for future work. In short, we need to work both with the gravitational centres on the web (eg Flickr) and institutional facilities, and ask how these best support individuals and academic communities, we need to find ways of alleviating copyright worries without ignoring the issue; we need to come up with solutions that will work for small-scale community collections with little technical support; and we need to do all this bearing in mind that open sharing of images may not always have a business case. Put like this, the findings are perhaps a little anodyne, but the fuller summary and full reports show how these questions are worked through in visual arts, engineering, archaeology and geosciences.
Using Repositories for Learning and Teaching: Can we find a recipe for success?
I attended a JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme meeting, but for a change I was able to sit back and learn rather than run around stressed as the entire event was designed and organised by DRaW, one of the projects in the start up and enhancement strand of the programme.
This was the first of 6 programme meetings that will be delivered by the projects rather than programme managers and, in my opinion, it was a roaring success.
You can read summaries of the day produced by Nick Sheppard of the Leeds Met Repository project and Julian Beckton of the Lirolem project. The day started with 6 quickfire introductions to the Lirolem, Circle, DRaW, YSJ Digirep and Faroes projects and an overview of the issues with learning and teaching repositories from Andrew Rothery (of the University of Worcester) and Phil Barker (of JISC CETIS). We also had two impromtu introductions to the POCKET and Edspace projects. It ws interesting to note that all of these projects were adopting a different approach to the implementation of a repository:
- Julian Beckton presented the Lirolem project. They have developed an collaborative working space for architects that has a deposit facility straight into the repository and the repository itself has an interesting interface for displaying compound objects.
- Steve Burholt presented the Circle project. It has made the repository itself largely invisible and have focused on building interfaces for specific purposes such as basic search and a really nice search and reuse interface to the repository from inside their VLE.
- Sarah Hayes talked about the DRaW project. They are focusing on consulting with staff to produce a service that they would find useful as they have had a learning and teaching repository for 3 years but have not experienced significant usage. This compares badly to the research repository that has been in place for less than a year and is getting much heavier usage.
- Helen Westmancoat from the YSJ Digirep project has focused on a number of specific collections in their institution, this has had the benefit of promoting widespread interest amongst the other parts of the instiution.
- Dave Millard spoke about the Faroes project. They have adopted a very lightweight approach, focused on hosting an academics learning assets and providing web 2.0 features on the platform. They have chosen a minimal approach to metadata and shifted the focus of the repository from metadata to the object.
- Sarah Malone got up to talk about POCKET and how it is turning existing learning materials into Open Content using the Open University’s OpenLearn platform.
- Debra Morris introduced Edspace, which is a large institutional exemplar project that is aiming to develop a sustainable solution that is firmly embedded in institutional culture and infrastructure.
The afternoon session focused on using the experiences of the delegates to try and prepare a list of recommendations for people implementing a learning and teaching repository. The outcomes of this discussion will be turned into a document that can be shared. This will complement the structured guidelines for starting a learning and teaching repository produced by the CD-LOR project.
The slides from the event, the audio recordings and the recommendations will all be available from the DRaW website in due course.
I learned an awful lot at the event and it was really gratifying that the tone of discussions became more optimistic as the day wore on. From my conversations with delegates the day was really useful to them and I am looking forward to the remaining events in this series (see more details in this earlier post). I think that this type of event will complement the more traditional JISC programme meeting in a way that is beneficial to JISC programme objectives and to the projects.