Beyond the Technology: The education 4.0 podcast

Jisc TechDis has been at the forefront of supporting the needs of students and staff with disabilities or learning difficulties for many years. In this podcast interview, Jisc TechDis director Sal Cooke talks to Philip Pothen about a new initiative that's set to make a significant difference to the support available in this area to colleges and universities around the country.

Limited take-up by researchers of new (and not so new) technologies is a challenge that Jisc and other organisations are seeking to get to grips with. As Jisc's e-research programme gains momentum, Matthew Mascord, Acting Programme Manager for the community engagement strand of the programme, talks to Alice Gugan from Jisc about the work of three projects endeavouring to get to the bottom of researchers' motivations and by extension encourage them to take a keener interest in how they might work and collaborate more effectively.

A partnership of four national ICT bodies - from Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK - recently announced the successful publishers under its multinational licensing initiative which is seeing online resources made available across national borders. In this roundtable discussion, representatives of the Knowledge Exchange organisations speak about the initiative and about how this work fits in with their wider mission to create a layer of scholarly content for education and research sectors.

Great Expectations of ICT: how HE institutions are measuring up? Is a new report that is being published by Jisc and Ipsos Mori. The research follows an initial study carried out with sixth form students about their expectations about the use and availability of technology when entering higher education. This new research shows what their experiences were like during their first year and in particular their use of web 2.0 technologies. In this podcast Rebecca O'Brien speaks firstly to Charles Hutchings, market research manager at Jisc, about the report and then later to one of the students who took part in the study.

Newly published case studies are giving real-life examples of how ICT can help widen participation and support learner progression. In this podcast for Inform Plus, Jisc programme manager Sarah Davies talks with Philip Pothen about e-portfolios and how they're supporting students in making vital decisions about their learning, their work and their careers.

Newly published case studies are giving real-life examples of how ICT can help widen participation and support learner progression. In this podcast for Inform Plus, Jisc programme manager Sarah Davies talks with Philip Pothen about e-portfolios and how they're supporting students in making vital decisions about their learning, their work and their careers.

Thanks to identity cards and certain high-profile cases of data loss, the issue of identity management is never far from the headlines. In this podcast with Philip Pothen for Inform Plus, Jisc programme manager James Farnhill unravels some of the complexities involved in managing identity in further and higher education and explains how Jisc's work is supporting colleges and universities.

Research Libraries UK has a central role in meeting the research community's information and resource needs. In this podcast interview with Philip Pothen for Inform Plus, its new Executive Director Anne Poulson talks about RLUK's role, the value of research libraries and why they provide a vital support for the wider research community.

With concern for the environment and fears about climate change never far from the headlines, our use of ICT is coming under increasing scrutiny. In this podcast for Inform Plus, Rob Bristow, Jisc programme manager, talks to Philip Pothen about Jisc's work in this area and why the coming months will be particularly important for this new area of activity.

Angela Beesley is the chair of the Wikimedia Foundation and a champion for the power of wikis in encouraging collaboration in a range of contexts. A keynote speaker at the Jisc conference next week, she gives an exclusive podcast interview for Jisc in which she explains to Philip Pothen some of the uses of wikis in education and research and defends wikis such as Wikipedia against the charge that they lack the quality and provenance needed for educational use.

Jisc and the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) recently announced that they would be awarding transatlantic grants to foster collaborative digitisation projects between the UK and the US. To celebrate the move Jisc and the NEH held an event at Kings College London in January 2008 to discuss issues relating to international digitisation. Later on in the podcast we'll be hearing an excerpt from one of the presentations from the event, but first Michelle Pauli, working for the Jisc Digitisation Programme, took the opportunity to put some questions to the key organisers of the event.

The e-Framework for Education and Research is an international initiative that provides information to institutions on investing in and using information technology infrastructure. The primary goal of the initiative is to facilitate technical interoperability within and across education and research through improved strategic planning and implementation processes. In this podcast Sara Hassan speaks with Wilbert Kraan, a member of the e-Framework working group, about the e-Framework's aims, knowledge base, services and major achievements to date.

Libraries are 'absolutely critical to academic success'. So says John MacColl, a European Director at international library organisation OCLC, in this interview with Philip Pothen to mark OCLC's sponsorship of the Jisc Conference 2008.

One of the projects in Jisc's digitisation programme, the Welsh Journals project is set to add to a growing body of materials dedicated to Welsh, culture, history and language. In this podcast, director of the project Arwel Jones talks about how digitisation can promote wider efforts to make a nation's culture and heritage available to all.

The internet provides a host of opportunities to enrich the learning, teaching and assessment process. This podcast looks at examples of approaches used in assessment and the resources provided by Jisc and the Higher Education Academy.