Student research into the use of technology in higher and further education

Jisc conducted a study into the use of technology in higher and further education to mark the launch of the Jisc Digital Festival.

Crossing the Threshold: Moving e-portfolios into the mainstream

Crossing the Threshold, one of a series of advice and guidance publications, is designed to support use of the online e-Portfolio Implementation Toolkit and video case studies by those involved in wide-scale implementation of e-portfolios in their institutions. As the resources address the needs of both managers and practitioners, the publication has relevance for a wide range of readers in further and higher education and work-based learning. To assist the planning and effective management of a large-scale e-portfolio implementation, Crossing the Threshold follows the stages of an implementation journey with insights and guidance drawn from the toolkit and its supporting case studies. Links are provided throughout the publication to more detailed information in the two online resources.

How can IT professionals make the step into leadership roles?

Last year, Jisc began work with EDUCAUSE - the US organisation for IT professionals in higher education - to find out the skillset of the CIO of the future. One of the findings of our project was that many aspiring technology leaders find it difficult to make the step up. Louisa Dale, director Jisc group sector intelligence, talks through the learnings and opens a call for IT professionals to get involved in the next phase of work.

Digging into signs: Developing standard annotation practices for cross-linguistic, quantitative analysis of sign language data. Final Report.

For sign languages used by deaf communities, linguistic corpora have until recently been unavailable, due to the lack of a writing system and a written culture in these communities, and the very recent advent of digital video. Recent improvements in video and computer technology have now made larger sign language datasets possible; however, large sign language datasets that are fully machine-readable are still elusive. This is due to two challenges. 1. Inconsistencies that arise when signs are annotated by means of spoken/written language. 2. The fact that many parts of signed interaction are not necessarily fully composed of lexical signs (equivalent of words), instead consisting of constructions that are less conventionalised. As sign language corpus building progresses, the potential for some standards in annotation is beginning to emerge. But before this project, there were no attempts to standardise these practices across corpora, which is required to be able to compare data crosslinguistically. This project thus had the following aims: 1. To develop annotation standards for glosses (lexical/word level) 2. To test their reliability and validity 3. To improve current software tools that facilitate a reliable workflow Overall the project aimed not only to set a standard for the whole field of sign language studies throughout the world but also to make significant advances toward two of the world’s largest machine-readable datasets for sign languages – specifically the BSL Corpus (British Sign Language, http://bslcorpusproject.org) and the Corpus NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands, http://www.ru.nl/corpusngt).

Digging into Data 3 Progress Meeting

On Wednesday 17th June, the UK projects funded under round 3 of the Digging into Data challenge gathered together at Paddington for the mid-term progress meeting. This workshop provided projects with the opportunity to present, not just on progress to their plan, but on highlights, issues, challenges and share this information with the funders and other projects.