Latest news from the Virtual Training Suite

JISC funding for Informs and the Virtual Training Suite will come to an end at the end of July 2011.

As part of the removal of central funding for Intute in July 2010, we conducted a full review and market research to help us investigate the possibility of introducing a subscription model for the Virtual Training Suite and Informs.  We regret to inform our users and contributors that no realistic alternative funding model for either service has been identified.

Our investigations told us that institutions would be willing to pay for Informs and the Virtual Training Suite in principle, but given the current economic climate and the reduction in library budgets these services are unlikely to be regarded as a priority.  As a result, the number of subscribers would not provide enough income to continue in their current form.  Therefore, in consultation with the Informs Advisory Group and JISC, the following ways forward have been agreed.

• We will investigate releasing Informs as open source software so that it can be installed and run locally in your own institutions.  This work is in its early stages, but we will provide more information throughout the next few months, and full documentation will be made available to make the transition as easy as possible.
• We will keep Informs running at Mimas until December 2011 to allow users to move to the open source version or find other alternatives.  Until this time all tutorials will work as normal, and helpdesk support will be available.
• The Virtual Training Suite site will be available until July 2012, but the tutorials will not be updated beyond July 2011.
• All Virtual Training Suite tutorials will be individually available to download and reuse from August 2011.

We would like to thank all Informs and Virtual Training Suite users and contributors for their support during this difficult year.  We would particularly like to thank those of you that took the time to speak to us, offer feedback and complete our survey.

For more information, please see the FAQs on the Informs and Virtual Training Suite websites,  and please contact us if you have any concerns.  We have also made the market research report and the Informs Technical Review available on Intute.

State schools were recently accused of hampering students’ life chances, when CILT (the National Centre for Languages) polled schools about how many teach foreign languages.  Out of the 171 schools polled, only 36% of state schools were teaching a foreign language to the majority of pupils aged 14 or 15.  However, 94% of private schools were teaching a foreign language to the majority of pupils aged 14 or 15.  Many are now teaching Mandarin in fact.  French, German and Spanish are still the most widely taught languages across the board.  The new English baccalaureate measure will require pupils to achieve at least a C at GCSE in English, maths, science, humanities and a foreign language.

But will this get more young people learning languages? Some teachers I know say it is an uphill battle.  Perhaps the Web will provide more fun ways for students to learn…..by using services like Twitter and Internet cafes to encourage communication and talking about things which really interest kids.  Twitter has some nice channels such as LangForCareers and DoubleTranslate.

Internet for Modern Languages, from the Virtual Training Suite, offers all sorts of quality online resources for educators or students, to help them learn languages and have more fun.  Check it out.  Or see our related tutorials on Linguistics and American Studies.

Want to find good resources on Russia and Soviet Studies? See our recent article on this published by the Society for Co-operation in Russian and Soviet Studies.  It’s in the Spring 2011 issue.

Getting to journals and journal articles is still more difficult than it should be – how are online services trying to help students and academics get to the latest research?

TechCrunch reports that Academia.edu has launched a directory of 12,500 academic journals as part of their website. The idea seems to be that by using your social network of connections, recommended readings will come to you, rather than having to seek them out yourself.

The journal directory has a simple keyword search interface and you can also browse by topics – such as history, economics or chemistry. Titles are not ranked according to their impact factors, perceived authority or other qualitative measures, but according to how many followers they have amongst the Academia.edu community.

This is certainly a competitive area with a number of other key services working on this and other journal related issues – some favourites services of mine are:

JournalTOCs a free and searchable collection of scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs). It contains TOCs for nearly 15000 journals collected from over 600 publishers. By registering, users can get email alerts about new TOCs and save their list of TOCs online.

The Directory of Open Access Journals covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, across all subjects and languages. Almost 6000 journals are listed in the directory and nearly 2500 journals are searchable at article level, providing access to close to half a million articles.

Jurn is a curated academic search-engine, indexing 3,692 free ejournals in the arts and humanities. It includes “online academic or art-world/literary publications displaying i) clear editorial control and ii) offering at least some substantial free content.”

The key issue that these services are trying to address is solving the conundrum of getting academics and students to relevant individual articles when they are spread all over the Web, as in the case of Open Access titles or behind the paywalls of a myriad of commercial publishers.

It’s a subject that we address in all of our Virtual Training Suite tutorials:

• Electronic journals and bibliographic databases are highlighted in the Tour section.
• The difference between Open Access and commercial publishing is examined.
• Students get the chance to search for themselves in the Try It section looking at Google Scholar.

However, it’s clearly an evolving area and it will be interesting to see whether Academia.edu can succeed in using these social networks to help students and academics find their way through the journal article maze.

Picture credit: Dentistry Library: Journals stacks (serials) from rosefirerising on Flickr.

Typing a few keywords into Google isn’t research, yet the words search and research are often bandied about as though they were interchangeable – but is this a new problem? Surprisingly, no.

The notion that the word research is used when we really mean search, is a topic that I’ve meant to look into for quite a while. It’s something that I feel a tad guilty about, after all we use the tagline – Developing Internet research skills – for the Virtual Training Suite.

I set out to do a bit of preliminary Internet searching expecting to be swamped by news stories chastising students for being too reliant on Google or Wikipedia and opinion pieces saying that the Internet is making us stupid or enhancing our brains in ways that we can’t even imagine.

Instead, I was drawn to an article on PubMed Central from the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association - When does search become research? by Edith Dernehl, read at the 43d Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association at Ann Arbor, Michigan, May 29 … in 1941.

She starts by neatly outlining the problem, in terms that ring true nearly 70 years later.

“Research has as its object the exploration of uncharted fields, while search leads only into domains previously explored. We all know that many a search wrongly assumes the name of research, when the work reported has hardly shown evidence of even a thorough survey of a subject, and has no trace of the original thought so essential to any project dignified by the name research.”

But the student or academic should be just as careful as the commentator in their choice of words to describe their work.

“No matter in what field he chooses to work, he must bring originality of thought or of approach to the task. Without these attributes or without new truth, his work can at best be called a library search and should never be classed as research work.”

However, the librarian must treat the searcher and researcher equally.

“One of the qualities most necessary for a librarian, therefore, is vision; she must show judgment, guided by imagination, in her decisions, and she must cultivate an understanding for the needs of the searcher and the researcher alike.”

She concludes by saying that:

“A search will often be rewarded with useful information; if not, then even a small problem, solved by a live intelligence, may well be called a bit of research well done.”

Suitably chastised that there really isn’t anything new under the sun, I’ve discovered that search became conflated with research at least as far back as 1941 and probably a lot earlier! And perhaps I won’t feel so bad about saying research when I mean search – as it’s clearly not something that has come about purely since the invention of the Internet.

Two recent studies looking at student attitudes to technology have found similar themes, despite being conducted on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2010 is the annual survey of US undergraduate students that looks at their ownership, use and perceptions of technology both inside and outside the classroom.

Student Perspectives on Technology – demand, perceptions and training needs is a report from the NUS undertaken as part of the HEFCE Online Learning Task Force. It took a more qualitative approach using consultation events, online discussions and an online survey of FE students.

So what did they discover …

Searching skills

Both studies show that students think that they are good online searchers.

88.6% agree that they were effective online researchers. (NUS / HEFCE)

Eight out of ten (81%) students considered themselves expert or very skilled in searching the Internet effectively and efficiently. (ECAR)

Information literacy training

However, both studies also reveal that students have concerns about how to use the information they find online for academic purposes.

There was a common request for more skills training, particularly around how to effectively research and reference reliable online resources in the NUS / HEFCE study.

Student ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of online information and understand ethical / legal issues was lower than their assessment of how effective they are in searching the Internet in the ECAR study.

Amount of technology used in teaching

Both studies show that students are cautious about the amount of technology used in teaching and prefer a blended approach of technological and traditional teaching methods.

The NUS / HEFCE study shows that students prefer a choice in how they learn and that opinions are fundamentally divided over e-learning. It was recognised that not every area of study needed e-learning and that is would be more effective if it was an option, not an obligation.

The ECAR study has consistently found that students only want a “moderate” amount of technology in their courses, although the definition of what a moderate amount is, is probably very different now than it was five years ago.

Other issues

Perhaps the most important findings to bear in mind, come at the end of the ECAR study which concludes that “many student technology adoption patterns are surprisingly stable,” but that “there is no stereotypical student when it comes to technology”.

Is there still a place for Women’s Studies in the world of coalition politics, Strictly Come Dancing and WAGS?  A quick survey of postgraduate courses in the UK, on postgrad.com showed that 39 universities do indeed have courses.  Titles range from Women, Culture and Society, to Women’s History and even the wonderfully named The Menopause and Beyond. But do students need help with finding information on Women’s Studies? Feedback which the Virtual Training Suite receives from librarians and educators tells us that there still  is a need for information literacy help for students.

A new version of the Virtual Training Suite’s Internet for Women’s Studies was released this summer, offering good advice, a list of fascinating websites for academic research, and scenarios of students using the Internet for research, such as  – ‘Can Virginia Woolf, modernist writer,  be classed as a feminist? ‘   It shows how educational materials, primary sources,  library catalogues, blogs and news sites can provide quality materials for learning about Women’s Studies.  For example, The Women’s Library in London (part of London Met University) has valuable collections about the Suffragist Movement, women’s employment, oral history and female emigration.  Other interesting websites in the tutorial include The F-Word – an online forum for feminists now, and Wikigender from the OECD which tracks progress of gender equality in the OECD countries.  Media websites include Radio 4′s Women’s Hour which has its own website with podcasts.  YouTube is also worth a look, in its EDU Women and Gender section, where there are currently about two thousand video clips on women’s health, leadership and more.

For the more rebellious, the Pink Stinks website looks at gender stereotyping and encourages discussion. And according to online sources, such as  Frassanito (2008), in the journal Child’s Nervous System,  vol 24, pp881-882, ‘Pink and blue: the color of gender’, there is evidence that in the early twentieth  century, boys in North America were often dressed in pink and girls in blue. Probably pink became more of a girl’s colour from the 1940s onwards.

Xpert Attribution is a new tool from the University of Nottingham that can help you credit your sources when using images, audio and video.

Much attention has been focused on citation and plagiarism advice about the correct use of textual material, but it is increasingly important to do the same when working with other types of media.

The tool searches open media (images, sound and video) from Flickr and Wikimedia and aims to automatically attribute the appropriate license.

Find out more about how to find, evaluate and use images, audio and video in this series of Virtual Training Suite tutorials produced in partnership with JISC Digital Media.

Internet for audio resources
Internet for image searching
Internet for video & moving images