Beyond the Technology: The education 4.0 podcast

Lord Puttnam of Queensgate is a champion for education. Chancellor of the Open University, Founder of the National Teaching Awards and former chair of NESTA - the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts - he has strong and fascinating views on education, on creativity in learning and teaching and the importance of technology to UK science and research. In this exclusive interview he talks about UK higher education, the importance of ICT and looks forward to the Jisc annual conference in April at which he will be one of the keynote speakers.

The Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) is a three year Jisc-funded initiative committed to delivering a co-ordinated framework of principles and best practice for the provision of online e-content for UK citizens. Its aim is to build a common information environment where users of publicly funded e-content can gain best value from those resources. Emma Beer is the manager for the SCA and in this interview she speaks with Robert Haymon-Collins at Online Educa in Berlin about the SCA, business models & sustainability and e-content alliance partnerships in general.

A petition organised by Jisc, European partners and SPARC Europe attracted nearly 25,000 signatures in 2007, including a number of Nobel Prize winners, as well as more than 800 education and research organisations. SPARC Europe's director David Prosser talks about what the petition achieved and why he thinks the open access argument has finally been won.

For the first time last year Jisc sponsored one of the Times Higher Awards - for Outstanding ICT Initiative of the Year. In this podcast for Inform Plus, Philip Pothen meets the winners of the award and discovers why the judges found their initiative quite so innovative and imaginative.

The library of the future is a digital one, says Toby Bainton, and digitisation is at the forefront of ensuring that important scholarly resources are made more widely available and at the same time of presenting a vision for academic libraries in a digital age. The secretary of SCONUL, the body that represents national and university libraries in the UK and Ireland, talks here about that vision and why he thinks that libraries which aren't delivered to the desktop are going to be invisible in the future.

A new report, commissioned by Jisc and The British Library, counters the common assumption that the 'Google Generation' - young people born or brought up in the internet age - is the most adept at using the web. Philip Pothen was at the launch of the report and spoke to the authors about a report that is already making waves.

The 'Mobiles Enhancing Learning and Support' e-Learning project has been being run from The University of Wolverhampton by John Traxler, who recently spoke about the potential and possibilities of mobile learning at the recent Online Educa conference in Berlin. Robert Haymon-Collins from Jisc managed to speak to John after his presentation and to hear his, and the project's, plans and projections for 2008.

In November 2007 Jisc and their international partnership company SURF had a large promotional stand at the Online Educa conference in Berlin. Robert Haymo-Collins, head of communications and marketing within Jisc, took this opportunity to speak with the event's organiser, Sally Reynolds, about the conference's growth and success, and the developments within the education sector and how the conference programmed sessions to meet the international delegates' expectations.

Listening to what learners themselves have to say about their learning is becoming more and more important to ensuring that they have access to the services and the technologies they need for their studies, their work and social lives. In this podcast, Philip Pothen looks at a publication - 'In Their Own Words' - and research into student expectations which attempt to listen to what learners themselves have to say.

The Jisc e-Leaning team have held two online conferences which have brought together a selection of key innovators within e-learning to discuss the current and future impact of using technology to support learning and teaching. In this podcast Lou McGill speaks to Judith Mole & Geoff Minshull, both of whom have worked within the education field for many years, and who now run Direct Learn Services, the company that hosted and supported both of the e-Learning online conferences. In this podcast they discuss the main differences of staging a major international conference totally online.

A recent European digitisation conference explored some important challenges facing national and university libraries across the continent as they attempt to join together to deliver a 'European Digital Library'. In this podcast interview Paul Ayris, librarian at University College London and a senior figure in these European developments, asks a number of challenging questions of the library community.

Procuring and developing IT systems which can meet the needs of colleges and universities requires a full consideration of open source software. So says OSS Watch manager Ross Gardler who, in this interview, explains to Philip Pothen why open source is so important and how most of us use it even without knowing it.

Go-Geo! is a portal which brings together a number of key geographically related resources. In this podcast for Inform Plus, Robin Smith, an analyst at the University of Sheffield and a regular user of the service, talks to Philip Pothen about how important changes to Go-Geo! are making a significant impact on learners, teachers and researchers in a range of subject areas.

Alice Gugan talks to Roy Kalawsky, Director of the Advanced VR Research Centre at Loughborough University, about the role visualisation plays in displaying today's research information, and specifically about the work of the UK National Visualisation network VizNet, and how it can help researchers.

e-Books are as yet an untapped and underused resource - a resource which could have a major impact on access to key texts particularly for undergraduates. In this podcast for Inform Plus, Anne Bell, Librarian at Warwick University, and Caren Milloy, Jisc e-books project manager, talk with Philip Pothen about the national e-books observatory project and how it is beginning to realise the enormous potential of an underexploited resource.