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February 05, 2013


Imagination and other cues can create a compelling sense of reality. #mscidel

Imagination and other cues can create a compelling sense of reality. #mscidel





Jisc is supporting colleges and schools in raising awareness on internet safety standards

As part of Safer Internet Day on 5 February and in support of new Ofsted guidelines, Jisc is offering advice, guidance and tools to improve internet safety within colleges and schools.

In September 2012 Ofsted produced new guidelines to ensure e-safety measures are commonplace within schools. By this they mean, how the school protects and educates staff and students in its use of technology, and what measures are in place to intervene and support should a particular issue arise. Due to the importance of safeguarding students e-safety is now seen as a top priority within education.

Malcolm Bodley, further education advisor at Jisc comments: “E-safety has been raised high on the agenda for schools, but there are also risks for colleges. Although students may be older, technology in colleges is becoming more and more widely used and students often have more online freedom.

“I believe it’s important to put e-safety measures in place within any learning environment to protect students and staff.”

Jisc aims to raise the agenda of e-safety and encourages colleges and schools to:

  • Train staff and students to be aware of e-safety and recognise e-safety issues
  • Put in place a member of staff who is accredited to act as an e-safety officer
  • Provide a clear reporting processes
  • Ensure a recognised internet service provider (ISP) with age-related filtering is in place

Malcolm continues: “Jisc offers a wealth of tools and assistance that can help colleges and schools to ensure they are safeguarding their staff and students.”

For more information on internet safety from Jisc:


International Digging into Data Challenge launches

Today, the third round of the Digging into Data Challenge, a grant competition designed to help develop digital research in the humanities and social sciences launches in Canada, the Netherlands, the UK and the United States.

This international grant competition sees Jisc in the UK deliver the programme management and grants administration, with £1 million funding for the successful UK grantees coming from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Stuart Dempster, programme manager for the Digging into Data project at Jisc says: “To enable new research opportunities to flourish and for our universities to remain competitive in an international environment, our researchers and computer scientists need new skills and approaches. We need more data scientists, we need advanced analytics to capitalise on big data and one way to achieve this is through this transformative international challenge. Building on from two previous successful phases we are pleased to announce a third phase of Digging into Data which aims to help our arts, humanities and social science researchers and developers build new insights into data on both sides of the Atlantic.”

During the first two rounds of the Challenge, held in 2009 and 2011, nearly 150 teams, representing universities from across Canada, the Netherlands, the US, and the UK, competed to demonstrate how innovative research methods could be used to address questions in the humanities and social sciences. Twenty-two of those teams were awarded grants during those earlier rounds, each of them demonstrating new methods for analysing vast digital resources used for humanities and social science research, like digital books, survey data, economic data, newspapers, music, and other scholarly, scientific, and cultural heritage resources that are now being digitised on a huge scale.

Due to the overwhelming popularity of the earlier rounds, two additional funders have joined for round three, enabling this competition to have a world-wide reach into many different scholarly and scientific domains.

The nine sponsoring funding bodies include:

  • The Arts and Humanities Research Council (United Kingdom)
  • The Economic and Social Research Council (United Kingdom)
  • The Canada Fund for Innovation (Canada)
  • The Institute of Museum and Library Services (United States)
  • The National Endowment for the Humanities (United States)
  • The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada)
  • The National Science Foundation (United States)
  • The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in collaboration with The Netherlands eScience Center (NLeSC) (Netherlands)
  • The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada).

The deadline for applications is 15 May 2013. Further information about the competition and the application process can be found at www.diggingintodata.org.


February 04, 2013




Previous tweet will only make sense if you have watched the week 4 Csikszentmihayi video :) #mscidel

Previous tweet will only make sense if you have watched the week 4 Csikszentmihayi video :) #mscidel


Right folks, I am all blogged, tweeted and Storified out for the day. Going to bed with a book. Not a trashy novel though :). #mscidel

Right folks, I am all blogged, tweeted and Storified out for the day. Going to bed with a book. Not a trashy novel though :). #mscidel












February 02, 2013




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