- Date:
- 2007-2012
- Themes:
- e-Science, Grid and Distributed Computing, Human Computer Interaction
- Funding:
- JISC, Microsoft Research
myExperiment is a collaborative environment where scientists can safely publish their workflows and experiment plans, share them with groups and find those of others. Workflows, other digital objects and bundles (called Packs) can now be swapped, sorted and searched like photos and videos on the Web. Unlike Facebook or MySpace, myExperiment fully understands the needs of the researcher and makes it really easy for the next generation of scientists to contribute to a pool of scientific methods, build communities and form relationships - reducing time-to-experiment, sharing expertise and avoiding reinvention.
Primary investigators
Secondary investigators
- mib104
- drn05r
- Danius Michaelides
- Jeremy Frey
- Simon Coles
Partners
- University of Manchester
- University of Oxford
Associated research groups
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Grid and Pervasive Computing Group
- Date:
- 2008-2010
- Themes:
- Embedded Systems, Formal Methods, Design, Automation, Simulation and Optimisation
- Funding:
- European Commission
Primary investigator
- jpms
Partners
- Certess, CEA-LETI, AerieLogic, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
- University of Verona, Graz University of Technology, University of Paderborn
Associated research group
- Dependable Systems & Software Engineering
- Date:
- 2007-2009
- Themes:
- ELearning, Platforms and Tools, Mobile Learning
- Funding:
- JISC
In common with many other professions, the training of social workers requires students to be placed in social work settings and to undergo assessment in the workplace. Trainee social workers, in England (those on an accredited social work degree (ug or pg)) must successfully complete 200 days in a practice setting. Currently the social work professional bodies indicate there is a lack of e-learning support for all stakeholders involved in the placement assessment process.
This project aims to provide mobile software toolkits to support work-based learning and assessment for social workers. A user centred design approach will be used to work closely with stakeholders to ensure that the applications we develop are based on actual needs. The mobile application architecture will be adapted from lessons learnt from the MPLAT project. It is envisaged that two applications will be developed. These applications will be subject to an extensive evaluation of their use by our partner social work delivery institution. Development and evaluation of the mobile applications will be done during the funding period. The outcomes will continue to be supported and further enhanced for a further 12 months. The dissemination of the outcomes will be accomplished in partnership with our supporting social work professional bodies.
Primary investigators
- David Millard
- Balbir Barn
- Lester Gilbert
- Gary Wills
Secondary investigators
- Yvonne Howard
- hcd
- pz2g12
Partner
- Thames Valley University
Associated research groups
- Web and Internet Science
- Electronic and Software Systems
- Date:
- 2007-2009
- Theme:
- ELearning, Platforms and Tools
- Funding:
- JISC
The Faroes project will establish a lightweight repository for learners and teachers to share their resources, based on the CLARE repository (a version of ePrints), the experiences of the L2O, MURLLO and CLAReT projects, and the active community of language teachers and learning technologists that these projects have been engaged with. Through a number of workshops with the language teachers community of practice we have noted two important lessons:
- That the community is eager to share their resources and wants a lightweight repository that they can incorporate into their everyday practice. They are keen that the repository should have a user interface that follows the best-practice principles of Web 2.0 sites (social, interlinked, evolving and flexible).
- Practitioners are enthusiastic about sharing learning assets: simple resources such as videos, audio files and presentations. This is because of the simplicity of producing and reusing them (for example, there is no overhead of content packaging, or complex metadata authoring).
- It is clear that in our engagement with the community we have reached a tipping point; we need to deliver a real usable repository that fulfils these requirements in order to begin to explore the difficult issues concerning authorship, provenance, authority and copyright in the context of a real system with real users.
The project will therefore engage with the established community of language teachers in order to deploy a lightweight repository that will support the sharing of multimedia resources between individual practitioners. We will work closely with the community, taking an agile software engineering approach focused around the notion of the perpetual beta. In this way we hope to both foster cultural changes in resource sharing in the community, and also to create innovations in repository design based on Web 2.0 best practice.
The project outputs will include a number of Web 2.0 plug-ins to the ePrints system (the basis of the CLARE learning repository), but the project will also explore the way in which multiple repository installations can become part of the same social space ââ¬â this is necessary for searching, recommendations and common tags to be available across several connected repositories (as might be expected in different educational institutions). The approach to distributed social spaces, and the interfaces that will enable this, will be important innovations in repository design.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- Miguel Arrebola
- Les Carr
- Gary Wills
Partner
- University of Portsmouth
Associated research groups
- Learning Societies Lab
- Web and Internet Science
- Electronic and Software Systems
- Date:
- 2005-2010
- Themes:
- Semantic Web, e-Science, Multimedia
- Funding:
- _other
Maestro provide an open platform for the music information retrieval research community by bringing together Semantic Web technologies for annotation, Web 2.0 technologies for sharing and Grid technologies for distributed computation.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- jbi02r
- drn05r
- krp
Partner
- Stephen Downie, UIUC
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2007-2008
- Themes:
- Human Computer Interaction, Interaction
Category search within digital repositories is poorly supported. This means that people wishing to access the assets of digital repositories are largely limited to keyword search, which means they must know what they want in order to look for it. Our participant studies of digital repositories use have shown that, when restricted to keyword search, it is perceived as often easier to use a search engine like Google rather than keyword search on a local repository, even if this is to find a local artefact. An advantage that local repositories currently have over massive search services, however, which is not being leveraged, is local or community-based knowledge. This knowledge of context, such as who works with whom; how one project "Over Here" relates to another project "Over There." In this proposal we plan to investigate how cross-repository browsing/exploration can be assisted via social, semantic tagging mechanisms, and to deliver a test framework and web services both to investigate the use of and to deploy services for such meaningful mechanisms.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- das05r
- jl2
- Date:
- 2007-2010
- Themes:
- Human Computer Interaction, Interaction
- Funding:
- AHRC, EPSRC, JISC
Vision: To provide the best support possible for researchers to be able to explore relevant information sources and build new knowledge.
Mission: * To integrate heterogeneous data sources so that they can be explored effectively via one interface service * To deliver an optimal interaction approach to support this exploration * To develop a better understanding of how researchers use these new tools over time, so that these tools can be optimized to support the process of discovery, creativity, invention, and the development of new knowledge
Primary investigators
- monica schraefel
- Mark Everist, Music
- Jeanice Brooks, Music
- Richard Prolfreman, Music
Secondary investigators
- das05r
- David Bretherton
Partners
- RISM
- RILM
- COPAC
- British Library Sound Archive
- Grove Online, Oxford University Press
- Date:
- 2007-2009
- Themes:
- ELearning, Platforms and Tools, Digital Libraries, Reusable Learning Objects
- Funding:
- JISC
A copy of the original EdSpace proposal (with CVs and letters of support removed) can be found at http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/hcd/EdSpace_final_short.pdf and the original JISC call can be found at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/capital/circular0107/appendix_g_0107_institutional_exemplars_call_final.doc
VLEs have proved to be useful tools in facilitating staff in organising educational resources and activities in a hierarchical structure representing the structure of programmes and modules. However, while they are excellent vehicles for delivering materials, they are not in themselves ideal mechanisms for managing and curating materials. What we require is a repository of educational materials that can be used to populate VLEs.
The University of Southampton has taken the strategic decision to develop a repository for educational materials using its well established EPrints research repository software as the framework. The reason we have chosen this route is embedded in our understanding that excellent technical specifications alone will be unlikely to facilitate the cultural change necessary throughout the institution; it is the co-design process of specifying and implementing the details of the system that will be most important in ensuring community and uptake.
The EdSpace repository will be a central part of the educational infrastructure as envisaged in the recently implemented e-Learning Strategy which focuses on enabling student centred research-led learning, inclusivity and employability.
The EdSpace repository will be a social site allowing staff and students to share resources; it will provide for metadata, tagging, and semantic mark-up of stored items. A range of local and external tools will access the repository using services interfaces. Between the tools and the repository are service layers to allow users to annotate items according to an educational ontology or according to other metadata schemas, to set the access policies which will apply to items, and to create and access versions of items.
The University seeks funding to accelerate the process both in implementing the technical changes to the EPrints interfaces and providing the personnel to engage academics and students in the co-design process. Both the University of Southampton and the wider JISC community will benefit from extending EPrints into the educational domain, and from the case study of the institutional change and integration.
Primary investigator
- hcd
Secondary investigators
Partners
- ISS
- The Library
- LATEU
- Student Services
- The EPrints team
Associated research groups
- Learning Societies Lab
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2007-
Primary investigator
- Prof Hugh Perry
Secondary investigator
Associated research group
- Optoelectronics Research Centre
- Date:
- 2006-2007
- Funding:
- EPSRC
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- DJ Richardson
- kef
Associated research group
- Optoelectronics Research Centre