Keeping up to date - alerting services

ISS will be running a training session on 'Keeping up to date - alerting services' on 3 May.

What: Keeping up to date - alerting services
When: Tues. 3rd May 12 – 1
Where: PC Room 3 in the Library

This session will look at the various e-mail and alerting services which you can use to keep up to date with new books, journal articles, conferences, etc. It will include a demonstration of Zetoc and ticTocs, two services for keeping up to date with new journal papers.

To book a place, please email b.r.mathias@swansea.ac.uk

e-Learning Reading Group

The next e-Learning Reading group will be based on the reading Miranda's story http://tiny.cc/ZpE8O A look into a near future for University education.

• So, what do you think of Miranda’s story?
• Do you see it as a future for University education?
• Would you like to see it as a future University education?
• How does her story relate to your experience?
• Could you picture yourself as Miranda?

Date: Wednesday, 03 March 2010
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: PC Room 1 in the Library Building @ Swansea University
Directions to PC Room 1


More information can be found on the Facebook group
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=119122737194

The Association for Learning Technology’s Open Access Repository

The Association for Learning Technology’s Open Access Repository was formally launched at ALT’s annual conference ALT-C in September and is now available. The repository represents a long-awaited development in ALT’s work and services as it allows users to contribute assets and make them available via the repository. Since it went online the repository has had about 10,000 visitors, browsing, searching for and downloading journal articles, conference presentations, links to webinar recordings and similar content.

The repository currently contains post-prints from the ALT’s peer-reviewed journal ALT-J from its inception in 1993 to Vol. 16 (2007) and will be updated periodically with new volumes 18 months after publication by Routledge. The repository also contains items relating to:

• ALT-C conference
• ALT events and webinars
• Learning Technology topics, events or publications
• ALT Members
• ALT’s Certified Membership Scheme – CMALT
• ALT Special Interest Groups such as the recently established Learning Environment Review SIG (LERSIG)

It will be extended further to cover:

• exemplars of best practice
• guides for good practice in design & use of education technologies
• research papers
• sector reports related to e-learning
• wiki-based content that can be added to and extended by practitioners

For further information or if you would like to contribute assets visit
http://repository.alt.ac.uk
You can also create your own user account on the repository homepage.

e-Learning Reading Group

The first of a monthly, or so, get together to discuss a particular article or book relating to e-learning.

When: Tuesday February 17th 11.00am

Where: PC Room 1 in the Library Building

If you can't make the session you can join the discussion on the wiki http://labreadinggroup.wikispaces.com/Reading+One

Reading: An absolutely riveting online course: Nine principles for excellence in web-based teaching by Jim Henry & Jeff Meadows

You can access the reading from here http://tinyurl.com/choxm9

Abstract: This article explores excellence in web-based teaching. Drawing on the views of experts in the field and the perspective of their own years of experience, the authors compiled a list of 9 principles to provide direction in the search for online excellence. The principles include: the online world is a medium unto itself; sense of community and social presence are essential to online excellence; in the online world, content is a verb; great online courses are defined by teaching, not technology. The list is not intended to be an exclusive set of principles or a comprehensive guide to online teaching. Rather it is a collection of important ideas and suggestions for teaching excellence in the online world.

Scholarly journals - new free service makes keeping up-to-date easy

Keeping up-to-date with the scholarly literature just became much easier, thanks to a new service called ticTOCs - Journal Tables of Contents Service.

http://www.tictocs.ac.uk

ticTOCs is a new scholarly journal tables of contents (TOCs) service. It’s free, its easy to use, and it provides access to the most recent tables of contents of over 11,000 scholarly journals from more than 400 publishers. It helps scholars, researchers, academics and anyone else keep up-to-date with what’s being published in in the most recent issues of journals on almost any subject.

Using ticTOCs, you can find journals of interest by title, subject or publisher, view the latest TOC, link through to the full text of over 250,000 articles (where institutional or personal subscriptions, or Open Access, allow), and save selected journals to MyTOCs so that you can view future TOCs (free registration is required if you want to permanently save your MyTOCs). ticTOCs also makes it easy to export selected TOC RSS feeds to popular feedreaders such as Google Reader and Bloglines, and in addition you can import article citations into RefWorks (where institutional or personal subscriptions allow).

You select TOCs by ticking those of interest - thousands of TOCs, within a tick or two (hence the name ticTOCs).

ticTOCs has been funded under the JISC Users & Innovations programme, and has been developed by an international consortium consisting of the University of Liverpool Library (lead), Heriot-Watt University, CrossRef, ProQuest, Emerald, RefWorks, MIMAS, Cranfield University, Institute of Physics, SAGE Publishers, Inderscience Publishers, DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Open J-Gate, and Intute.

ticTOCs home: http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/
News from ticTOCs blog: http://tictocsnews.wordpress.com/
For more information, contact:
Roddy MacLeod, ticTOCs Management Support, Heriot-Watt University Library, Edinburgh, UK
email: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk
tel: +44 (0)131 451 3576