Beyond the Technology: The education 4.0 podcast

Repositories are being established and developed across the UK to help make research papers and other resources freely available to all who want to use them. In this podcast, Jisc programme manager Andy McGregor speaks with Philip Pothen about the recent developments in this area and how Jisc's work is beginning to impact on further and higher education.

Membership of the UK Access Management Federation recently reached 100. In this podcast Mark Williams, a member of Jisc's access management outreach team, talks to Philip Pothen about the work of the federation and what benefits the growing number of members can expect from federated access management.

The Jisc IPR Consultancy was started in October 2005 to provide expert advice to Jisc in the area of intellectual property rights. IPR Consultants Naomi Korn and Charles Oppenheim talked to Sara Hassen, Jisc Communications Manager, in a Skype interview about the interesting challenges we will face related to IPR in the education sector associated with the use of Web 2.0 & Social Software, and issues we need to consider and address.

The £22m Jisc digitization programme is making available a wide range of vital scholarly resources to UK education and research. One of its programme managers is Alastair Dunning who, while talking to Philip Pothen for this podcast, discusses what the programme is delivering and why the international conference in Cardiff represented an important landmark both for the programme and for wider attempts to make available scholarly resources of national importance.

David Robey is contracted as Director of the AHRC's ICT in Arts & Humanities Research programme, a 5-year programme running until 2008 to build on AHRC's groundwork in ICT provision. David has recently authored Jisc's brand new 'Research in the Arts & Humanities' briefing paper, and in this interview he chats to Alice Gugan via Skype where he outlines his views on the issues arts & humanities researchers face, initiatives they should be aware of, and the importance of e-Science.

Kevin Guthrie is president of the US-based Ithaka, an organisation which supports innovation in the use of ICT, providing shared services and national initiatives for the benefit of US higher education. Here he talks to Philip Pothen about why international collaboration is important to the digitisation of scholarly resources and what the US and the UK can learn from each other.

Joyce Ray is Associate Deputy Director for Library Services at the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a US-based funder of digitisation and other programmes. Speaking at the recent international digitization conference at Cardiff, she was able to give an international perspective to some of the challenges facing funders in the digitization of high-quality content for education and other sectors. During the conference she took time to speak to Philip Pothen about some of these challenges.

Google has quickly become a key player in the digitization of scholarly resources. In this podcast two librarians - Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and Mike Keller at Stanford University - who are both working with Google to digitize large parts of their collections, talk to Philip Pothen about the opportunities and the challenges of working with the private sector to digitize important scholarly resources.

Chris Batt is the Chief Executive of the Museum Libraries and Archives Council, a key partner of Jisc's in the Strategic Content Alliance, a cross-sectoral body looking to widen access to online content for all citizens of the UK. In this podcast he talks about the work of the MLA, the Strategic Content Alliance and why the public sector is crucial to any attempts to create an information landscape that has quality and the needs of its users at its heart.

Students are increasingly becoming familiar with using social networking and other interactive web services such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube. This phenomenon has important implications for educational institutions as students increasingly expect such services - or at least aspects of such services - to be mirrored in the delivery of courses. In this podcast, Jisc's Lawrie Phipps and Dave White from the University of Oxford speak about the impact such technologies - commonly gathered under the umbrella term 'Web 2.0' - are having on education and research and how institutions can harness them meaningfully and effectively in support of their students.

The Jisc-funded TechWatch service recently published a major - and hugely popular - report on Web 2.0 and its implications for education and research. In this Podcast Philip Pothen speaks to TechWatch's director Gaynor Backhouse about the work of the service and why the report has been so successful.

An article in the new Jisc Inform by Steve Bailey, senior Adviser at Jisc infoNet, talks about the management of electronic information by administrators and records managers. In this podcast Philip Pothen speaks to Steve Bailey who goes into further detail about how new technologies are presenting new opportunities as well as new challenges in the management of information.

Launched at a major conference in Manchester on June 5th, the Depot is a national repository for all UK researchers to deposit their research papers into under terms of open access. The Depot is being hosted by EDINA at the University of Edinburgh and in this podcast Philip Pothen asks EDINA's director Peter Burnhill about his vision for the Depot and why UK researchers should, as the advice goes, 'Put it in the Depot'.

The UK Access Management Federation launched in November 2006 and provides the UK Schools, Research, Further and Higher Education sectors with a secure way of accessing online learning materials and services using federated access management technology such as Shibboleth. Elsevier ScienceDirect was an early adopter of Shibboleth and took park in the UK pilot federation. For this Podcast Jane Charlton from Jisc spoke via Skype to Ale de Vries from Elsevier ScienceDirect about some of the issues around adopting this new technology and what the main benefits and challenges are for publishers and service providers.

As President of Universities UK and Vice Chancellor of Liverpool University, Professor Drummond Bone's thoughts on how UK education and research can maximise its impact across the world carry particular weight. In this podcast Philip Pothen reports on Jisc's 2007 national repositories conference in Manchester where Professor Bone outlined his views on the importance of repositories to the UK.