L&LR staff blog

To help promote off-air recordings to Health and Social Care staff and students,  Kevin has set up an area on Blackboard where we can list recent  programmes recorded.  Each item shows the programme title and brief summary of the content, with the title acting as a hyperlink to the library catalogue entry.  The collection includes both DVDs of television programmes  and audio CDs of radio transmissions.

Kudos to Social Work (i.e. Kev!), for being the first to use one of my formatted RefWorks books feeds in anger – see below a screenshot of Kev’s Social Works new books feed embedded into a live Blackboard site using feed2js (click for bigger):

If you have created your own feed, could you please:

1. Let me know.
2. Consider using Google FeedBurner to allow email subscriptions [which has worked well at Holbeach]; also to create a sensible feed URL à la http://feeds.feedburner.com/SWNewBooks
3. Add the feed to this UL wiki page?

And to see how ingesting an RefWorks feed into a VLE (Moodle, in this case) ought to be done, you might want to take a look at these videos on Owen Stephens’ TELSTAR project blog.

“TELSTAR is working on three main types of integration between the RefWorks reference management software and technology enhanced learning at the Open University.”

I’m writing this here because Julian asked for a reminder on how to do it (I had to remind myself first!) and thought a permanent record in the blog would be more useful than an ephemeral email.

Also: I’ve an idea that it may be useful to combine this with my process for creating new book feeds from RefWorks ==> Blackboard-site booklists as a replacement for the defunct Amazon building block.

So, here’s how to create a RefWorks account attached to a Blackboard site: this uses a Bb building block called ‘RefWorks Bridge‘.

Step 1: creating a RefWorks account within Bb

1. Log into Bb and navigate to the site.
2. From the ‘Tools’ menu, click on ‘Site Tools’.
   
3. Scroll down and click on the link to ‘RefWorks – bibliographic management software’.
   
4. A new window will appear. After a few moments you should see a ‘RefWorks Login’ screen.
   
5. Under the heading ‘Please select a RefWorks account to link to’, select ‘Create a new account’. Don’t try to use your existing personal RefWorks account! It will break your normal Portal/Athens login to RefWorks.
6. You should now see the standard RefWorks ‘congratulations’ message, telling you that you’ve created a RefWorks account attached to the Blackboard site. You can begin to use this RefWorks account as normal. The next time you go through ‘Site Tools’ to RefWorks, it should log you straight in to this account.

Step 2: locating the username & password for your RefWorks account

1. Within your new RefWorks account, go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Update User Information’.
   
2. Make a note of your login name (it will begin with the letters BB-).
3. Create a new ‘Read-only Password’ for this account and make a note of it.
4. Select your ‘Type of User’ and ‘Area of Focus’, then hit ‘Update’.
   

Step 3: displaying the RefWorks account to students

1. Go to a content area in your Blackboard site (e.g. ‘Learning Materials’).
   
2. In the top right, click on ‘Edit View’, the use the ‘Select’ drop-down menu to choose the option ‘Link to RefWorks database’ – hit ‘Go’.
   
3. After a few moments, you should see the ‘Link Refworks Database’ screen. Complete this form using the login name and read-only password from the previous step. You will also need to complete the ‘Course Document Title’ and ‘Text for Database Link’ fields – these determine what text will be displayed to students in Blackboard. Next, hit ‘Submit’.
   
4. Blackboard will display ‘Link to RefWorks database successfully added’. Hit ‘OK’ and switch back into ‘Display View’.
5. You will now see what your students will see – a Bb content item which links through to a RefWorks database.
   

The Mahara e-portfolios system is now accessible (via standard university username & password) at: portfolios.lincoln.ac.uk

Julian Beckton is blogging a set of instructions on using the system.

“An e-portfolio is a collection of information and digital objects that demonstrate your learning development, skills and competencies.”

You can read more about the open-source Mahara system on their web site. Other facilities for building an e-portfolio at Lincoln include PebblePad and Blackboard.

I’m pleased to announce that my bid to this year’s FED (Fund for Educational Development) was successful.

My funded project, the Blackboard-Digitisation “Boot Camp” will run between February and November 2009.

Photo: US Department of Defense

In a nutshell, the project aims to increase the amount of born-digital material, copied under licence, which is included within Blackboard VLE. It’ll achieve this through targeted and intensive work with groups of academic staff (that’s the “boot camp” bit!). It’ll involve some buy-out of L&LR staff time to spend on developing policies and support materials for d2d copying.

From my bid document (which I won’t reproduce in full here!):

This project will provide lasting benefit to the University, by:

 

i. Kick-starting the use of born-digital copies of published material in Blackboard VLE, widening student access to quality texts as part of online learning.

ii. Reducing student dissatisfaction with online learning using digital texts, which currently—as they are accessed via a separate system, and behind a separate authentication point, to Blackboard VLE—are not well integrated with students’ other online learning interactions.

iii. Raising the awareness amongst teaching staff of the possibilities of the use of library material within online learning activities, beginning new conversations between academic and library staff about the innovative use of purchased, subscription and licensed texts within teaching and learning.

iv. Supporting the work of the library in establishing a Reading Strategy [http://visit.lincoln.ac.uk/C4/C8/Policies/] to improve students’ [information] literacy.

v. Reducing the risk to the University of legal challenges by publishers arising out of illegal, unlicensed copying of born-digital texts (which could be identified as part of an audit by the CLA).

A few people have asked if we can (and whether we should) set up individual subject-specific blogs.

The thing is, we’ve already got ‘em (kind of):

• Architecture
• Art & Design
• Forensic Science
• Humanities
• Journalism
• Law
• Performing Arts
• Policy Studies
• Psychology
• Social Work

Each link is a separate RSS feed of postings to the main L&LR news blog, filtered down to only those posts which have been tagged with the name of a subject. Any new posts you add with the same subject tag will show up in the feed. And you can create a new subject feed by writing a post and creating a new subject tag.

These feeds could then by displayed in (e.g.) Blackboard using a tool like feed2js.org, which renders the RSS as JavaScript code (which you can then paste into an item in a Bb folder).

And if we ever wanted to have entirely separate subject blogs in the future, we could just convert the tag-specific feed into a separate named blog. Semantically there’s no difference in WordPress between a blog, a category, and a tag.

Paul

Hi all,

On top of the Athens system crash we experienced today, we’re having a couple of (alright, a few) ongoing issues with Athens at the minute, those being:

1. A number of databases still aren’t allowing direct access via Athens because of an out-of-date system file which forms part of UoL’s AthensDA mechanism (those databases being FAME, Mintel Reports, and the as-yet-unpromoted-to-users-until-we-sort-this-out ChildData). The way around this for the time being is to get the user to log in to MyAthens, and navigate to the database the ‘long way round’. The Online Services Team are helping to fix this.
2. First-time users of Athens are being sent round the houses when they click on their first Athens-enabled link: first to our terms & conditions, then to an Athens page, then back to the e-Library (for some reason), then to Athens’ T&Cs, then to the resource (hopefully!). I need to explore this further with the O.S.T.
3. Direct links to Athens-enabled resources from Blackboard are doubly-cursed, because Blackboard doesn’t set the Athens organisation cookie (as the Portal does). This is fine as long as the user has already accessed an Athens resource via the Portal, but not if their first-ever Athens login is via Bb. This includes links set up via LibraryLink > Find it @ Lincoln.

I’m working on all of these and I’ll keep you informed.

Paul

A few people have asked me if it’s possible to create reliable, persistent links to journal articles on Blackboard, via the link resolver, but without having to use the LibraryLink OpenURL tool.

• Yes, it is (Word doc.)

When you add the resulting link to Blackboard, you must make sure that it’s set to open in a new window. This is for two reasons:

1. Copyright – it’s considered “bad form” (i.e. borderline infringement) to open a third-party site in frames (it can look as if you’re appropriating the content and claiming it as your own). Blackboard uses frames.
2. Not doing so breaks Athens authentication, as I’ve discovered to my cost (I had to re-do a load of links to e-books that were’nt authenticating properly because the authentication was taking place in a frame).

Paul

This is more of a departmental guideline than a tip… and it applies when writing for the Portal, Blackboard, etc., as well as for the blogs.

Try and remember the other 3 campuses! If you’re writing for a Brayford audience about something which only applies to Lincoln, then make it clear in the story (and by using tags) that it’s a GCW-specific story.

It’s equally a good idea to clearly signpost when it’s a Hull-, Riseholme- or Holbeach-specific blog posting – and, conversely, to explicitly say when a story applies across all campuses and L&LR centres.

This allows users to filter our blogs’ RSS feeds, if they want, so that they’re not getting stories which only relate to centres they don’t use. And it helps avoid any “misunderstandings”!

There’s more on this in the [still draft!] bloggers’ guidelines.

Paul

I’ve added a ‘recent posts’ RSS feed for our general news blog to the Blackboard ‘Library’ tab, and to our home page on the Portal.

The Blackboard feed is done using a built-in “Channel” feature, which is unfortunately only available to administrators.

I created the feed on the Portal using a SharePoint Virtual Server Web Part provided by timheuer.com… you can use this tool yourself to add RSS feeds to any Portal site (Edit Page > Modify Shared Page > Add Web Parts > Browse > Virtual Server Gallery > RSS FeedReader).

The next step is to get the feed onto the main University web site.

Paul