Birkenhead Sixth Form College: Opening up remote access to the college network brings wider benefits to all

Birkenhead Sixth Form College implemented a virtual network to open up remote access to the college network for its students, staff and governors. In particular, for childcare students on work placements, this has meant 24/7 secure access to their work and resources, and the ability to make timely updates to their work evidence logs. The impact is better continuity of learning and a dramatic increase in the hand-in rate for work. For the staff, governors and college as a whole, the benefits of anytime-access to the network are more than were envisaged at the outset; not only is it saving them valuable time and eliminating the need for large print runs, it is expected to bring cost-savings to the College in the long term.

Bolton Sixth Form College: The springboard project

Mishka Fielding, Learning Resources Manager with the help of Anthony Beal, e-Learning Adviser, RSC Northwest, created a one-hour interactive session to promote Learning Resources and Information Literacy to staff and students within the College. These sessions successfully promoted the department, increasing their stock circulation by 50% and their usage of e-books, putting them 1st out of 200 in the ‘Jisc Collections Project’.

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).