Last night I dreamt I went to Clackmannanshire again. It’s hard to know what to write the morning after. Last week we had a workplace debate about the referendum. Colleagues for Yes were a clear majority. There’s a lot of hurt being felt today. In the past I have granted compassionate leave following the loss of a loved one or the death of a pet. What should we give for mourning a dream?
The office is very quiet, one of the big topics of discussion is gone for a generation.
University of Edinburgh is about to embark on a large scale media recording and management project, not unlike those going on at many of our peer universities. We aim to improve our media systems capability to support recording, storing, streaming and managing the increasing collection of audio and video assets used across the collegiate university for learning, teaching, research and public engagement. The existing infrastucture is outmoded and does not offer to the university the service and functionality users currently expect. Failing to refresh the existing systems represents a risk to the university, and to IS, in not being able to respond to business needs of the schools and colleges who wish to make more use of audio and video online for an improved student experience.
We will also explore approaches to the publishing of resources under intellectual property licenses ( eg Creative Commons) that permits use and repurposing ( re-use, revision, remixing, redistribution) by others where appropriate.
The early stages of such a project have the fun bits of finding out who in the University is doing what already in preparation for putting in place a multi-platform broadcast strategy. So far I have discovered You Tute, Research in a Nutshell, dozens of Youtube channels, Edinburgh University on ItunesU, Panopto, CaptureED and of course, our MOOC videos. We are also tracking down a list of all the video and audio recording studios around the place.
Edinburgh University subscribes to the excellent ‘Box of Broadcasts’ service. BoB enables all staff and students to choose and record any broadcast programme from 60+ TV and radio channels. The recorded programmes are then kept indefinitely (no expiry) and added to a growing media archive (currently at over 1 million programmes), with all content shared by users. Staff and students can record and catch-up on missed programmes on and off-campus, schedule recordings in advance, edit programmes into clips, create playlists, embed clips into Learn or Moodle, share what they are watching with others and search a growing archive of material. It will be fascinating to discover the ways in which this service is being used.
Edinburgh is also part of BUFVC which offers an amazing Moving Image gateway which includes 1,600 websites relating to moving image and sound materials in over 40 subject areas.
I am confident that Edinburgh must have a hefty collection of film in its own archives. It would be fun to do a project here like Oxford University IT Services have done this summer in Dreaming Spools. The project has engaged with alumni all over the world and discovered a wealth of film and video made by some of the most influential film makers, journalists, artists, writers, actors, activists and technicians during the periods when they were students.
I get asked about this a lot.
As the library advice pages rightly say: It is a common misconception that there is an “exception” to copyright for educational purposes. In fact “fair dealing” only covers non-commercial research or study, criticism or review, or for the reporting of current events, but this does not extend to making copies of texts for students to use in the classroom, or to including images in presentations. It can be an infringement of copyright to include copyrighted images in teaching materials without permission.
Luckily there are a wealth of images collections which have been licensed for re-use with Creative Commons. In these collections you can easily see the permission you have been given and there is no need to undertake the onerous task of tracking down the copyright holder, or consulting a librarian.
Choosing Creative Commons images saves you time and effort as well as being good practice.
If you’re looking for content that you can freely and legally use, there is a giant pool of CC-licensed creativity available to you. There are hundreds of millions of works — from songs and videos to scientific and academic material — available to the public for free and legal use under the terms of our copyright licenses, with more being contributed every day. Flickr is a good place to start. Also Wellcome images, Wikimedia Commons, the British Library, Getty Images, Internet Archive or Edinburgh University Digital Image Collections.
Some of these collections even include handy tools to help you attribute the images once you have decided to use them so you will never again forget from where you got them.
JISC also provide a helpfulguide.
“Sharing, done properly, is both smart and right.” 1
I talked a lot about Creative Commons licences today.
The horizon ( as seen from the rooftop terrace of Evolution House) looks bright, and near, and enlightened. What a privilege to spend a beautiful morning in a stunning venue brainstorming creative ideas with clever and motivated colleagues. I enjoyed reflecting on the last 15 years which have brought me back to this place and on how much easier life is now that the we have a licensing framework that the creators of works can understand, their users can understand, and even the Web itself can understand.
Most of my presentation was based on an open approaches case study I wrote for Jisc a while back, but I also managed to get in a name check for Bodington VLE.
Two of the things I like about Creative Commons are the mission and the vision. These seem to me like values a university’s learning, teaching and web service should embrace.
Creative Commons develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.
Our vision is nothing less than realizing the full potential of the Internet — universal access to research and education, full participation in culture — to drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity.
Before I left Oxford I was given an unusual gift of some skeleton tableware. Due to a clerical error only 5 plates rather than 6 arrived. Amusing questions to the supplier followed: Had they put the right leg in, or was the right leg left out? In, out, in, out, that is what it was all about.
This week I was intrigued to try out the Anatomage table in Edinburgh University’s Dept of Anatomy. It’s the only one of its kind in Scotland and I think , one of only two in Britain. It’s a technologically advanced anatomy visualization system for anatomy education, it works with big data sets from CT scans and is used a bit like a big, table-sized i-pad. An i-bed perhaps.
It cost an arm and a leg, you use your finger to slice through bones and skin.
The anatomage table is table-like presumably to help human practitioners cope with the transition from the physical ( one dead body lying down) to the virtual ( multiple bodies spinning around). It was interesting that the discussion amongst my academic and learning spaces technology colleagues in the group quickly moved to the ways in which we could release/move the image from the table on to a standing screen, projector screen or interactive whiteboard.
Dissected virtual cadavers* are going to be a bit spooky at the best of times. The fact that these are located in the famous medical school skull room makes it even more stark. A contrast of shiny new cutting-edge virtual digital cutting technology in amongst some of the University’s earliest teaching objects.
The colleagues who generously showed us around are looking forward to new software updates and new body scans. As we stood, a small group around the table we did note however, that while the current male cadaver was wearing a modesty loin cloth, the female cadaver was afforded no such covering.
* is it still a cadaver if it is virtual? perhaps it is just a virtual body. Once it is digital the ‘dead’ aspect seems less relevant given we are training doctors who will operate on mostly alive people.
One of the best things about working in a research university is that you get to hang out near elegantly curated collections of beautiful old things. I am beginning to explore the University of Edinburgh libraries and research collections. Starting of course, with the collections of digital images online; so many wonderful things to find.
Today I am extra-excited to receive, courtesy of my colleagues in UL&C, my very cool new IS business cards, each with a selected beautiful image from our collections on the back. Thank you to Jo and Anne-Marie for knowing I’d enjoy them.
After so many years working on a film set in Oxford, I now seem to work in a fringe venue. There are box offices, bars and beer gardens being built right outside my office and groups rehearsing in every building. There can only be a few cities in the world where you can be within shouting distance of four different outdoor Shakespeare productions on any given evening. Oxford and Edinburgh are two of them.
In preparation for a feature about me in an upcoming issue of BITS magazine, I have been out and about on a photo-shoot with Rachel, one of our photographers. Rachel is clearly very talented as there are more than several usable pictures from the shoot.
During my first week in my new post I gathered together all of the staff on the new LTW division. They look much nicer in person than in the card-database-rogues-gallery I have on my wall. For my presentation I used images from the splendid SCRAN collection to which Edinburgh University has a subscription. The collection includes some cracking images of computers and computer users in the university dating back to the 60’s and 70’s. With all the fashions of geek-style throughout the decades. I’d show you some, but for some reason the license under which SCRAN grants use are a bit confusing as regards internet, blogging, sharing, publishing and educational use. Nevermind, here is a picture of some more recent computer users in one of our learning spaces.
Q: How many men did it take to deliver a computer in Edinburgh in 1964?
Our new Learning, Teaching and Web Division was formally created on August 1 2014, which seems like a good date to begin a new blog.
Edinburgh has a great reputation for digital innovation, it’s an exciting place to be at an exciting time. There’s a lot of talent here, and an appetite to take risks and innovate with bold moves.
It is important that the institution gets good support from central services. Learning, Teaching and Web Services (LTW) is bringing together the services in Information Services that directly support learning and teaching. This gives us the opportunity to innovate, enhance or expand services to support an improved digital student experience and public engagement. The academic technologies such as Learn and MyEd are absolutely key to the experience of our students, as are digital education, distance learning courses, online media, the university website and the technology which enhances our teaching spaces. We work closely with colleagues in the IS Skills teams and support for research data management to ensure that academic colleagues and students have the skills they need to make the most of the technologies on offer.