Posts Tagged ‘LNCD’

LNCD funding available: Technology for Education

Posted on January 31st, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

From today’s internal communications email to University of Lincoln staff:

Small grants and student bursaries are available to [University of Lincoln] staff and students to support research, teaching and learning initiatives that explore, develop or critique the use of technology for education.

LNCD is a progressive group that includes educational developers, technologists, teachers, researchers and students, and was set up to support the objectives of Student as Producer through the research and development of technology for education.

Small grants and student bursaries are available from LNCD to support work that relates to the use of technology for education. For more details, see the LNCD funding page. The next deadline is February 28th.

CLOCKmakers wanted: Lincoln needs web developers!

Posted on January 24th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

(I promised you an awful clock-related pun in every CLOCK blog post title, and by crikey I’ll deliver one.)

Lincoln needs web developers! As well as the full-time developer we’re recruiting to the Orbital project team (still open for applications – just!) we’re now looking for willing and talented people to fill two part-time web developer posts for our new CLOCK project.

In a nutshell:

  • The University of Lincoln, working in consortium with Cambridge University Library and Owen Stephens Consulting, has been awarded £49,877 by JISC to investigate ways of driving innovation in libraries’ interactions with Open Bibliographic Data, through a project we’re calling CLOCK (Cambridge-Lincoln Open Catalogue Knowledgebase).
  • These new developer posts will include a significant amount of working with library data-exchange formats, web standards, and Linked Data, including contributing to the development of a sector-wide data.ac.uk service.
  • The role requires extensive knowledge of the web and its attendant technologies and the software development and analytical skills to put this knowledge to good effect. The postholder should have demonstrable experience as both a producer and consumer of RESTful web services.
  • You can apply online via the University’s jobs website
In a second nutshell:
  • Closing date is 2 February 2012
  • Salary: grade 6 (from £25,251 pro rata)
  • There are two part time posts available (0.4FTE each – i.e. approx. 2 days a week)
  • Posts are fixed term until 31 July 2012
  • Based at our lovely Brayford Pool Campus in Lincoln city centre

This is an opportunity to work alongside a range of interesting people from the University Library in Lincoln, from Cambridge University Library, and from the national Discovery programme, as well as a growing ‘cross-project’ pool of developers in LNCD, our agile open-source ninja webdev hothouse. “If we were to summarise our technologies and interests I guess they would be #agile, #opensource, #opendata #LAMP, #php, #codeigniter, #mongoDB, #OAuth, #APIs, #HTML5, #CSS3, #github and moving towards #RDF and #LinkedData. Just seeing these hashtags listed together should cause your heart to beat with excitement :-)

If you have any questions about the role please get in touch!

Library tech vendors! Want to sponsor DevXS, a student developer event in Lincoln in November?

Posted on September 13th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

DevXS is a free developer conference/hackathon for undergraduate and postgraduate students in the UK.

Organised jointly by DevCSI and LNCD, it’s taking place in Lincoln on the 11th, 12th and 13th of November, and we’re looking for sponsorship!

Confirmed sponsors already include Amazon Web Services and Xirrus. If you fancy getting your name in front of 200 of the brightest young developers in the country, then all the details are on the DevXS website.

Oh, and if you’re a student and you’d like to attend DevXS, registration is now open. Here’s who’s coming already.

Developers Unite!

DevXS is a developer marathon spread across three days, where students from across the UK and beyond are encouraged to team up and build cool things that contribute to university life.

DevXS is about students sharing their ideas, mashing up data and building prototypes that improve, challenge and positively disrupt the research, teaching and learning landscapes of further and higher education.

We’re going to award prizes to the best ideas, prototypes and collaborations and there are going to be developers from universities around the country hanging around to help you out.

Sound awesome? Register now.

Over the moon: Lincoln awarded £240k JISC funding for Orbital MRD project

Posted on September 9th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

Satellite City

In July, I blogged about our latest bid for JISC funding – this time for an project called “Orbital” to develop a university research data management infrastructure, piloted with the School of Engineering.

I’m delighted to announce that we were successful. The University of Lincoln has been awarded £241,500* funding for Orbital, under JISC’s Managing Research Data call. The project runs for 18 months, starting on 03 October 2011.

From the project proposal:

“The Orbital project will develop, test and implement a state-of-the-art research data management system, which meets both internal and external partner organisation’s requirements in terms of robustness and security. We will apply a proven approach to the management of institutional data, through the proposed use of MongoDB (a very fast, flexible, schema-less database technology), to create flexible services for capturing, storing, preserving and sharing research data in real time across internal research groups and with external research partners via secure, public APIs. A personalised web interface for specific researcher profiles and a public discovery interface will also be developed.”

Joss Winn from CERD will be the Orbital project manager; I’ll act as “lead researcher”, working—alongside other staff from the Library, Research Office, ICT services and the School of Engineering—to conduct a literature review and examine existing guidance and practice, lead the user requirements analysis, and contribute to the implementation & evaluation of the project. We’ll also be appointing not one but two new developers to work on Orbital.

There’ll be a steering group consisting of senior staff from the VCO, School of Engineering, College of Science, Library, Research Office, and ICT. We’re also bringing in external consultancy from Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery Ltd, the Innovative Design & Manufacturing Research Centre of the University of Bath, and the UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC).

This is a hugely significant project for Lincoln (and the first funding awarded to a CERD/Library/ICT project since we established LNCD). What we’re doing here – it works. To my colleagues, and especially Joss: well done. Congratulations.

We’ll be setting up a project blog for Orbital, at http://orbital.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/ – watch that space.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*Yup. Nearly a quarter of a million quid. No messing, eh?

LNCD is Not a Central Development group, but it is a Recursive Acronym (and a Pun)

Posted on September 7th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

We’re about to formally launch LNCD, the new University-wide technology for education group convened by Joss Winn from the Centre for Educational Research & Development, and including people from CERD, ICT Services, and the Library. LNCD’s website is now live, at lncd.lincoln.ac.uk (and also at lncd.org). LNCD is Not a Central Development group.

LNCD logo

A couple of people from the Library are already involved in LNCD, but anyone with an interest in the use of technology in higher education is welcome to join using this form.

“LNCD is a progressive group that includes educational developers, technologists, teachers, researchers and students, [and library people! – PHS] and was set up to support the objectives of Student as Producer through the research and development of technology for education…

“LNCD offers incentives to people who wish to contribute to the rapid innovation of appropriate technology for education at the university, through work-experience, research bursaries and assistance with internal and external applications for funding. We also provide advice and support for the use of technology in research, teaching and learning…

“LNCD is Not a Central Development group!”

N.B. the Library’s intern Steve Pannett designed the LNCD logo.

Smartening up the catalogue for September

Posted on August 4th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

We’re making a few changes to the home page of our library catalogue in time for the new academic year. Changes include:

  • Reduced ‘tabset’ browsing to only the most important elements of the catalogue.
  • Use of the newest version of the University’s Minerva logo and colour scheme.
  • Home page used for ‘top 10′ (…ish) links to Library services elsewhere on the web – these are served up using an RSS feed via Feed2JS (so that we can display the same links in other environments such as Blackboard). All placed in one of HiP’s lovely XSL stylesheets.

Very many thanks to the new LNCD intern Jamie Mahoney for help with styling this!

Here’s the current, ‘old’ front page:

Screenshot of the old catalogue home page

And here’s the new, redesigned page – still in development!

Screenshot of the new catalogue home page

You can have a look at it, if you like, at:

This isn’t intended as a long-term solution for the question of the Library’s web presence. There’s a lot more we need to do to consolidate and simplify the information we present to users across different environments (open web, intranet/Portal, Blackboard VLE, etc.). But it’s a good short-to-medium-term fix which makes the most of the tools we have available at the moment, and recognises the value of establishing www.library.lincoln.ac.uk as the home of our ‘primary’ presence on the web. If nowt else, that’s the address we’re printing on our induction materials :-)

We also had to work out a way of testing this on one of our public-access OPAC kiosks. I was particularly proud of this little MARC hack which allowed us to navigate to the test version of the home page without having to use the browser navigation bar (which is disabled on the kiosks).

RT @josswinn LNCD: Web Developer Intern

Posted on June 15th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

Last month, [Joss Winn] wrote about LNCD, a new progressive new group that includes educational developers, technologists, teachers, researchers and students and was set up to support the objectives of Student as Producer through the research and development of technology for education. With the formation of LNCD, we’re also looking to employ a recent graduate (or an MComp student on their placement year). The job is advertised from today and more details can be found on our Careers website.

This Internship is designed to help recent graduates develop the skills and experience required for a number of potential roles in web development and open source hacking. We’re looking to work with, support and mentor an enthusiastic developer with a genuine interest in the use of the open, data-driven web in higher education. We’re looking for someone who enjoys working both face-to-face and in a distributed online environment and who is keen to share their work with others across the university.

Based in the Centre for Educational Research and Development (CERD) but working across the university, you’ll be a member of LNCD, a progressive group that was recently set up to support the research and development of technology for education and includes educational developers, technologists, teachers, researchers and students. This graduate Internship is a new 12-month position, designed to provide you with the relevant mentoring, experience and skills for working in a cutting-edge web development and research environment. The role will require significant interaction with students and academic staff and you will be encouraged and supported to write about your work and present your work to peers across the university sector.

I really want this to be a rewarding 12 month Internship for someone, who’ll be working alongside colleagues in CERD, ICT (i.e. Nick and Alex) and the Library (i.e. Paul), as well as with academic staff and students. We’re asking for a lot, but you’ll get a lot back in return and you should end the year with experience working on several internal and externally funded projects, producing and contributing to publicly hosted open source code, attending and presenting at workshops and conferences and being a named contributor to at least one published academic paper.

If you’re interested in the Internship and wondering what you might be getting into, please do read about the LNCD group, its remit and the tools we use, and take a look at some of the work we’ve been doing over the  last year, too. Read about Student as Producer and what its objectives are and think about how you want to contribute to the work we’re doing at Lincoln.  Thanks.

A LNCD booklist

Posted on June 14th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

We have been able to buy a number of useful books on agile software development / rapid innovation of technology for education, aimed particularly at developing student skills and participation in institution-wide projects: they’re all in the GCW University Library now.

  • Allamaraju, S. (2010) RESTful web services cookbook. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly.
  • Chacon, S. (2009) Pro Git. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag.
  • Chodorow, K. and Dirolf, M. (2010) MongoDB: the definitive guide. Farnham: O’Reilly.
  • Cohn, M. (2010) Succeeding with agile software development using Scrum. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley.
  • Flanagan, D. and Matsumoto, Y. (2008) The Ruby programming language. 1st edition. Beijing; Farnham: O’Reilly.
  • Lawson, B. and Sharp, R. (2010) Introducing HTML5. Berkeley, CA; London: New Riders.
  • Lutz, M. and Ascher, D. (2004) Learning Python. 2nd edition. Beijing; Cambridge: O’Reilly.
  • Plugge, E., Membrey, P., and Hawkins, T. (2010) The definitive guide to MongoDB: the NoSQL database for cloud and desktop computing. New York, NY: Apress.
  • Powers, S. (2003) Practical RDF. Beijing; Cambridge: O’Reilly.
  • Richardson, L. and Ruby, S. (2007) RESTful web services. Beijing; Farnham: O’Reilly.
  • Segaran, T., Evans, C., and Taylor, J. (2009) Programming the Semantic Web. Beijing; Farnham: O’Reilly.

There’s a live copy of the same booklist on RefShare, available to download/export:

This little collection of books is designed to support the work of the new cross-University technology-for-education group, the existence of which Joss Winn announced last month. Since then, the group has been given a name: LNCD (it’s a partial pun on “linked”, suggesting “Lincoln”, and also a recursive acronym: see below and at: http://lncd.org/)

LNCD

LNCD’s Not a Central Development group

LNCD is a progressive group that includes educational developers, technologists, teachers, researchers and students and was set up to support the objectives of Student as Producer through the research and development of technology for education. The work of LNCD is informed by the progressive pedagogy of Student as Producer so as to engender critical, digitally literate staff and students. Core principles of the group are that we recognise students and staff have much to learn from each other and that students can be agents of change in the use of technology in education.