With the right techniques you can tackle any enquiry, even if you know nothing about the subject or the information sources available to answer it. With practical group exercises based on real enquiries throughout, the course will guide you through the entire enquiry handling process, from taking the initial enquiry through searching efficiently to finding an answer - and deciding what to do if you can’t find one!
This programme enables participants to go one step beyond what enquirers can do for themselves by applying strategic questioning, analytical skills and smarter searching.
By the end of the programme participants will have:
The programme will be of benefit to any staff new to enquiry work in an organisation or needing a refresher on the basic techniques. It will also be valuable for those looking for a systematic way of tackling enquiries, whatever the subject and for anyone who wants to boost their confidence in dealing with enquirers and finding information.
Please note that this course requires participants to have access to the Web.
Tim Buckley Owen
Tim is the author of the classic textbook Answering Enquiries Successfully (Facet Publishing, 6th ed due 2012). He’s had nearly 40 years’ experience of handling enquiries – in public, business and research libraries, as well as in his journalism and consultancy work.
Sample programme
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Responding to enquiries by phone or email, we are deprived of nearly all the clues we take for granted face-to-face. With no eye contact, facial expression or body language – and frequently no tone of voice – it’s vital to manage communications with the enquirer effectively. The risk of misunderstanding or offence is high; customers tend to be more impatient, and it’s very easy for them to take their query elsewhere.
Designed for experienced enquiry handlers within the organisation, this programme draws on good contact centre practice to demonstrate the special techniques needed in managing and operating a remote enquiry service. It includes extensive use of group practical work and an emphasis on branding, presentation and customer care.
By the end of the programme will have:
This programme will be of benefit to information staff in the organisation who deal with enquiries by phone, email, text or instant messaging. Managers who operate or are developing a remote enquiry service wil also benefit. Anyone who needs to discover the challenges of dealing with enquiries when the enquirer is not present will also find this programme valuable.
Please note that this course requires participants to have access to the Web.
Tim Buckley Owen
Tim is the author of the classic textbook Answering Enquiries Successfully (Facet Publishing, 6th ed due 2012). He’s had nearly 40 years’ experience of handling enquiries – in quick reference, special enquiry work and extended desk research.
Sample programme
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Analysing 600 years of music, drilling down into population databases, understanding social unrest through digitised newspapers – these are just some of the new lines of research that the winners of the second Digging into Data Challenge will now undertake.
Their research is part of an international competition that promotes innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis.
Funded by eight international research organisations from four countries – including JISC, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the arts and humanities research council (AHRC) from the UK - the successful 14 teams are mixed groups of researchers from the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States.
They will receive grants of over £3m in total to investigate how computational techniques typically applied to the sciences can also be applied to change humanities and social sciences research.
Alastair Dunning, digitisation programme manager at JISC, said, "Digitised data offers researchers radically new opportunities for understanding old questions and formulating new ones. The range of projects demonstrate some of these opportunities."
1. Cascades Islands or Streams? (Indiana, Wolverhampton and Montreal universities) will measure the impact of humanities and social science research on traditional scholarly sources but also across social networks, blogs and other informal modes of communication.
2. ChartEx (Washington, Leiden, York, Toronto, Brighton and Columbia universities) will develop new ways of exploring medieval charters in their full text versions
3. Digging into Connected Repositories (The European Library Office, Open university) will analyse the effects of open access publishing on research
4. Digging by debating (universities of Indiana, East London, Dundee and London) will develop and implement a workbench called InterDebate, with the goal of digging into data provided by millions of expert books and articles
5. Digging into Metadata (Universities of Drexel, Manchester and Glamorgan) will create new metadata tags to help researchers discover information across multiple repositories
6. Electronic Locator of Vertical Interval Successions (ELVIS) (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, universities of Aberdeen, McGill and Yale) will study changes in Western musical style from 1300 to 1900, using the digitized collections of several large music repositories
7. Imagery Lenses for Visualizing Text Corpora (Universities of Utah and Oxford) will explore whether data visualization can help researchers make new observations and generate new hypotheses about literature and linguistics
8. Integrated Social History Environment for Research (ISHER)-Digging into Social Unrest (Manchester, Illinois and Tilburg universities and International Institute of Social History) will develop an integrated tool to help social history researchers use sophisticated text mining
9. Integrating Data Mining and Data Management Technologies for Scholarly Inquiry (University of California, Berkeley; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; University of Liverpool; the Internet Archive and JSTOR) will integrate large-scale collections into a stored and managed preservation space
10. Mining Microdata (Minnesota, Leicester, Guelph, Alberta, Montreal and Essex universities) will make use of make use of data-mining technology to exploit one of the largest population databases in the world originally digitized for genealogical research
11. Trading Consequences (Universities of Edinburgh, York and St Andrews) will examine the economic and environmental consequences of commodity trading during the nineteenth century using information extraction techniques to study large corpora of digitized documents
Total programme funding is approximately £3,075,000
Find out more about the competition and why JISC is involvedvia Jisc news
Biddy Fisher has been awarded the Order of the British Empire in the New Year Honours List
A career-long librarian, Biddy is an outstanding champion of library and information services, the profession and CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals.
“I was humbled to receive the notification that I was to receive an O.B.E,” said Biddy Fisher, “Although this award will have my name on it, I would like to dedicate it to all those who continue to work tirelessly in libraries and information centres and in the interests of all communities. I believe wholeheartedly in the life enhancing potential of libraries and I like to think that this wonderful honour recognises the role that the profession plays in our society.”
Annie Mauger, CILIP Chief Executive, said:
“Biddy was an outstanding President for CILIP in 2010 and dedicated her year to meeting as many members as possible and promoting what they do. She has been a wonderful supporter of new professionals and has become greatly admired by many.
However far beyond that she has been a fantastic leader and advocate for the profession for many years and can be particularly proud of her work in promoting mentoring and professional development. We are so delighted for her and she truly deserves this recognition.”
Biddy has worked in public, academic and health libraries. Her career started at the University of East Anglia and she retired as Head of Information Services at Sheffield Hallam University in 2008. Biddy chaired the CILIP Library and Information Research Group, was an external examiner for the CILIP Chartership Board and a committee member of the Yorkshire and Humberside Branch. In 2010 Biddy was President of CILIP and is currently Chair of the CILIP Audit Panel.
-ends-
Press contact:
Mark Taylor, Director of External Relations, CILIP
Tel: 020 7255 0654
Mobile: 07792 635 305
Email: mark.taylor@cilip.org.uk
Notes to editors:
CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals is the leading professional body for librarians, information specialists and knowledge managers. CILIP’s vision is a fair and economically prosperous society underpinned by literacy, access to information and the transfer of knowledge. CILIP is a registered charity, no. 313014. Visit www.cilip.org.uk for more information.
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Tony Blair's former speechwriter, Peter Hyman, is about to recruit staff for his new school. Unlike some that have already opened, his establishment will be all about innovation, innovation, innovation, he tells Janet Murray
When Peter Hyman left Downing Street after more than 10 years, he didn't want to be known as the guy who used to be Tony Blair's adviser. "I think there's nothing worse, if you have done something quite high profile, than to go into something that's on the edges of that, so you are sort of dining out on the fact that you once did something," he says. "I wanted to work my way up from the bottom."
And that is exactly what he did. Having persuaded the headteacher of a north London comprehensive to give him a trial run as a classroom assistant, he trained as a history teacher and worked his way up to become a deputy head in just five years.
His first few days in the classroom left him on a high for weeks. But no amount of political fisticuffs could have prepared him for breaking up fights, trying to persuade students who "couldn't sit still for more than five minutes" to write essays, or, in one memorable incident, dealing with a teenager who was threatening to climb out of a window, six floors up. Looking back, he can laugh about it, but going from "being relatively respected in Number 10 to being humiliated … shouted and sworn at, or whatever," was tough.
Eight years on, though, he is about to open his own school. One of the 55 successful bids in the second wave of free schools, approved to open this year, it will educate four- to 18-year-olds in Stratford, in the London borough of Newham, one of the most deprived areas of the city.
The ambition, says Hyman, is to close the achievement gap between the "richest and poorest" and offer a curriculum that "prepares students for the 21st century", hence its name – School 21.
The biggest inequality is between the literate and illiterate, he says. "The world we mix in … is about written reports, about reading newspapers every day, writing things down and discussing them, and that world is completely closed to a student who hasn't got past the basic level of literacy."
And traditional methods of assessing students are no longer fit for purpose, he believes. "The idea that in any walk of life you would say 'my judgment of you as a person is for you to sit down in a room for two and a half hours and regurgitate facts in a written exam' is utterly, utterly broken as a system."
So Hyman is throwing out the rulebook. Pupils at School 21 – due to open in September – will not follow a conventional timetable, with "one teacher and 30 children" and a set number of periods each day. Instead they'll have a mixture of lessons, seminars, lectures, one-to-one coaching and, for secondary children, even free periods. They'll study fewer subjects in isolation, and do more project-based work (assignments that combine history and maths, or business and languages, for example) and have lessons in thinking and debating skills.
Hyman is self-deprecating and funny on the topic of his early teaching career, but he is very earnest about School 21, which according to its website will be a "place of joy, discovery, wonder and imagination". His conversation is littered with references to self-development books and teaching manuals, all of which have contributed to the philosophy behind the school.
It couldn't be more different from Toby Young's West London Free School, one of the first to open last September, where teachers wear black academic gowns and Latin is compulsory.
One of Hyman's favourite teaching methods, which he is keen to tell me about, is known as the Harkness Table, used at US colleges, where (put simply) students sit around an oval table with their teacher and talk about something they have read. He also believes in starting the day with exercise. "I think something like martial arts … martial arts one day and maybe chess the next. What do you think?" he asks.
As a former teacher, I can't help feeling sceptical, I tell him. What makes him think sitting pupils around an oval table or starting the day with Taekwondo will win them over? He dodges the question, and talks some more about teaching methods, before concluding that size is what really matters. At his current school, which has 1,700 pupils, he says he doesn't recognise half the children. School 21 will have a maximum of 75 in a year group and no more than 25 in a class, which means "no one falls between the cracks".
And with a new school, behaviour policies need to be right from that start, he says. "Every government comes in and thinks that teachers need more powers, but it's not about that. It is about having consistently applied, simple, clear systems. With a new school you can start with exactly the ethos and expectations you want and build from the beginning."
He criticises the Tories for making children do rote learning and memorise the kings and queens of England. But his will be the first English language specialist school, and he argues for separate punctuation and grammar lessons.
Free schools, he says, are a good thing if they are "teacher-led, by people who have really thought about it, in areas of both need and deprivation" and he says that, under Labour, they would simply have been "an extension of the academies programme". But he criticises the Tories for "effectively nationalising schools".
Hyman was one of the authors of the speech in 2001 used by Tony Blair's press spokesman, Alastair Campbell, to herald a shift in policy away from the "bog standard comprehensive" and towards different types of schools ... the very seed of the free schools and academies programmes now being pursued so energetically by the Conservative-led government, and bringing Hyman's own new school into being.
The phrase "bog standard comprehensive", which was widely regarded as derogatory, still makes him uncomfortable, and he points out at every opportunity that he is proud to have been employed by comprehensives: the three he has worked in have been "incredibly innovative".
But these days Hyman refuses to discuss his politics or party policy, saying pointedly that he is "not a Labour spokesperson". "I am not here to defend every bit of the free-school policy. I am here to say why I'm motivated by the sort of school I want to set up," he says.
He shrugs off the idea that it is middle-class parents who are more likely to take a gamble on a new school with an unorthodox curriculum. But recent data suggests there could be some truth in this. The Department for Education claims that 12 of the 24 existing free schools are in some of the most deprived parts of the country. But in the 23 schools that responded to freedom of information requests on the topic, on average just 9.4% of free school pupils were eligible for free school meals – compared with an average of 18% in state schools across England.
Hyman insists the parents who have applied to School 21 do reflect the population of the local area and says he anticipates 40-50% of his pupils will be eligible for free school meals.
As well as offering children an alternative approach, Hyman believes he is offering teachers – he is about to start recruiting – something different. "I think a lot of new teachers coming into the profession are crying out for a model that is not just the same, lesson after lesson, the same teaching, the same way of doing things." In his approach, "the teacher becomes the specialist, coach, mentor, project-based-learning facilitator, seminar debater … so you have six or seven strings to your bow rather than just 'I'm here to give you nuggets of knowledge'."
One of his biggest concerns is that the Tory right with their "over-romanticised view of their private and grammar school education of the 1950s" could drag education back into the past. "If people don't speak up and say there is a modern curriculum that provides the skills young people need for the future, particularly in deprived areas like Newham … then that is a huge missed opportunity."
This week the Guardian Teacher Network features global wall planners and other resources to help teach pupils about calendars and to plan the year ahead
The New Year is about making resolutions and looking to the future, so where better to start than with a new classroom calendar full of ideas for 2012?
The Guardian Teacher Network has a variety of wall planners that will ensure you don't miss any teaching opportunities over the coming months, along with maths lessons for younger pupils about using calendars and timetables.
The Global Wall Planner is a colourful chart that lists a wealth of international days and weeks between now and the summer holidays. It is ideal for planning lessons, assemblies or whole-school activities with a global citizenship theme. Some of the dates covered include World Braille Day (4 January), Fairtrade Fortnight (27 February-11 March) and World Health Day (7 April). The wall planner can be used in conjunction with an online calendar that has links to learning and teaching resources for each global event.
The Chembakolli wall planner has beautiful pictures and illustrations of the Adivasi people, a tribal group who live in the south Indian village of Chembakolli. Produced by the charity Action Aid, the resource aims to help teachers and pupils keep track of important dates in the UK and India. It also highlights the struggle of the Adivasi to regain their land from government authorities and non-tribal people seeking opportunities for national park land, timber, and tea and coffee plantations. Resources to support the wall planner include slideshows and written information about life in and around Chembakolli.
The 2011/12 year planner features details of awareness days, religious festivals, public holidays and historical events to help you plan topical activities throughout the year. It is one of several resources produced by www.primaryclass.co.uk that are free to download for use in the classroom. Others include name labels, certificates and banners.
For KS1 and KS2 pupils, Use a Calendar is an interactive lesson that enables pupils to become familiar with the layout of a calendar. Pupils complete a drag-and-drop activity to build a calendar, and use a calendar to answer questions such as: "When is the third Monday in the month?" Pupils have 60 seconds to answer as many questions as possible. There is also a calendar template that can be printed out for pupils to complete.
Using calendars is taken a step further in the maths lessons "Use timetables" and "Read simple timetables and use this year's calendar. Pupils are encouraged to read timetables for buses, trains and planes in a variety of interactive activities. There are two supporting worksheets that can be printed out for use in the classroom or as homework tasks.
The Guardian Teacher Network has almost 100,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive materials. To see and share for yourself go to teachers.guardian.co.uk. There are also hundreds of jobs on http://schoolsjobs.guardian.co.uk.
A sabbatical for teachers; an end to student visa restrictions; and more Michael Gove? Some hopes for the new year
AC Grayling, philosopher and founder of New College of the Humanities, which is due to open in October
My wish for education is the abolition of school examinations. They are not necessary; evaluating students can be done far better by reading their essays, looking at their projects, and talking to them. Although more time-consuming, this is a fairer and more accurate measure of ability and attainment, and it liberates teachers and students from the distorting tyranny of the exam hamster-wheel, which replaces education with a reductive form of training. To guard against personal bias in continuous assessment, student evaluations would need to be summed from the views of several teachers – but university interviewers would quickly see which sets of teachers were over-stating their evaluations, and which were failing to recognise talent.
John Coe, chairman of the National Association for Primary Education
In its 2010 white paper the government said teachers know best; so my wish for 2012 is that ministers would start acting as though they believed that. Specifically, I'd like them to rethink the phonics test for five- and six-year-olds being introduced this autumn. The test requires children to read 30 words, some of them just phonic sounds with no meaning; my view is that it will confuse them, and could even be damaging. Teachers know best: so leave it to them to teach young children to read.
Professor Dylan Wiliam, deputy director, Institute of Education
I'd like to see a change to teachers' contracts so that they had to show that they'd improved in order to keep their jobs. At their annual appraisal, each teacher would have to show evidence of one thing they had improved on over the year. At the moment, there's no requirement on teachers to get better, and teachers doing their jobs better changes society, it makes more difference to children's lives than almost anything else.
Helen Mathieson, principal, Marine academy, Plymouth (a secondary school)
I'd like to see proper resources going into child protection. There's been an explosion in child protection issues for teachers, especially in areas of high social deprivation like mine. If people realised how great the needs of some children are, the resources would be put in, and children's lives – and their futures – could be changed.
Fazia Hussain, second-year law student at Sheffield University
My wish is for more outreach schemes and work experience for students – because, it opens your eyes. That's especially true for someone like me because I'm from a poor background. No one in my family has worked in banking, law and so on, so it's only through work experience that I can find out what's out there. Also, these days, when it takes so long to get a job, life can be very disheartening if there aren't schemes to get you on to the ladder.
Tim Brighouse, visiting professor at the Institute of Education
All teachers in leadership roles should be given a month-long sabbatical every seven years. Not extra holiday, but time when that teacher could become properly refreshed, by studying teaching theory, perhaps, and observing other teachers in practice. We have to replenish intellectual curiosity; that's the essence of good teaching.
John Doyle, head of Ormskirk school
My wish would be for the government to sort out the system for vocational qualifications. At the moment, it's a complete dog's dinner. In my school about 40% of pupils have neither the aptitude nor the inclination to follow the English baccalaureate. What they need is a system that gives them something worthwhile to learn, teaches them skills that will help them to be employable, and doesn't condemn them as second-class citizens. These objectives seem to be second nature in a country like Germany – but, for some reason, it's the holy grail in Britain.
Toby Young, journalist and founder of the West London free school
My hope for 2012 is that Michael Gove remains secretary of state for education. I think there's a danger he may be promoted to the Home Office or the Foreign Office, but I hope he remains to see through the vitally important reforms he's initiated. I'm a huge admirer of Mr Gove: not only has he made it possible for groups of parents and teachers to set up taxpayer-funded schools, he has also put turbo-boosters under the academy programme, restored discipline to the classroom and reversed the process of dumbing down that saw Britain's schools plummeting down the international league tables under Labour.
Professor Les Ebdon, vice-chancellor of the University of Bedfordshire
My wish is that the government will retain the widening participation premium, so that universities like mine can continue to encourage students from backgrounds where a degree wouldn't be an obvious choice. It costs a university far less to take young people from middle-class homes with As at A-level; students from more diverse backgrounds involve more cost because they're more likely to have disabilities, to need childcare, or to need help with their English, for example. But these are the very people whose lives stand to be transformed by university. The government has been sounding lukewarm about holding on to the premium through next year: I hope it has a rethink.
Professor Patrick McGhee, vice-chancellor of the University of East London
I'd like to see Britain declassify students as immigrants, which would give them far more freedom to come to this country and learn, and to enrich our social and cultural life – and our coffers. Overseas students generate around £6bn for our country's economy each year, but we make it as complicated and difficult for them as possible. No other country would work so hard to turn away the brightest of the world's young people – they recognise what we should recognise, that they help us remain a leading intellectual and cultural country. Australia, New Zealand and the US have already made the change I'm advocating. I'm sure it would work for us.
Camila Batmanghelidjh, psychotherapist and founder of Kids Company, a charity working with vulnerable children
I'd like 2012 to be the year the government tackles unmet social needs and what they mean for education. There's too much emphasis on numeracy and literacy – what they're not taking into account is how much effect poor social care and trauma have on children's ability to achieve. These factors are the main driver of educational failure. Of course it requires investment, but if we don't tackle it, these children cost a lot more later when they're in pupil referral centres, or youth offender units, or the mental health services; and what's more, in time, they generate more victims.
Andy Wilson, principal of Westminster Kingsway College, London
In the current economic climate, FE colleges have a role that's potentially very important – we can help to skill people up for jobs, the kind of jobs that exist. But we're hampered by a system that puts too much emphasis on qualifications, on getting bits of paper. They're important, but it's not always about that – for many students, it's about finding work. We want to tailor our courses more closely to the local jobs market, but we need the government to back us properly in doing that. That means an overhaul of regulation and funding: if that could happen in 2012, it could make a huge difference to what we do and to the wider community.
The government's higher education reforms are anything but; they are rooted in a profoundly reactionary view of university, says Peter Scott
Almost drowned out by the raging Europhobia came the news just before Christmas that the UK has slipped below Brazil in terms of total gross national product. Predictions are that the UK will also fall below India and Russia by the end of the decade.
Meanwhile, student applications to English universities are plunging. In the autumn, most institutions submitted what must seem in retrospect optimistic forecasts of future student numbers to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce); a 20% decline was the worst scenario, and several were still predicting growth. As recently as a month ago, a blip was expected; now it looks more like falling off a cliff.
The two facts – Brazil overtaking the UK, and the plunge in student applications – are connected. Of course, it is not higher education's fault that successive UK governments have bet the house on the City and consumerdom (and kept out of global trouble through inflation and devaluation, both of which cost dearly).
But it is higher education's fault that it has largely accepted the high-fees logic of the Browne report and white paper, that a university education is a consumer rather than an investment good. Courses are like iPads; universities are brands, like Apple.
If this view is accepted, it does not really matter if overall demand declines – or if certain brands wilt. Consumer markets ebb and flow. The Browne and white paper proposal that stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and SIVs (strategic and vulnerable subjects) should be protected is the exception that proves the market rule.
But universities are not like John Lewis, great-and-good cooperative as it is; they are much more like railways and roads. Science and knowledge, skills and research, are the infrastructure of the knowledge society. If this counter-view is accepted, it matters a great deal if student numbers fall. The shortfall translates into a reduced output of graduates in 2015, just when they will be most needed.
Nor do many people expect student numbers to recover quickly, as they did after Charles Clarke's ill-advised increase in fees to £3,000 six years ago. Although middle-class demand will bounce back, demand from "non-standard" students, for less flattering brands and for less "saleable" products is likely to remain depressed for years. So graduate production will continue to lag.
The previous government, to its credit, realised this. Tony Blair's "education, education, education" and Labour's manifesto commitment to 50% participation were not, as they are usually represented, "bleeding heart" leftism. They were based on hard-headed assessments, validated by evidence, of the level of "production" of highly skilled graduates the UK economy would need to remain competitive.
In the Browne report, shamefully, a quite different meaning of "sustainability" emerged. It no longer referred to the sustainability of the UK's economy. Instead it was used to describe the squaring of a tawdry circle, between what citizens expect and what they are prepared to pay for as taxpayers.
In the process, a whole language has been lost – of the "race to the top" by investing in advanced skills, of "clever cities" in which social experimentation, cultural creativity and economic entrepreneurship form a potent mix. But be sure, that language has not been lost in the Far East, North America or even in the much despised Eurozone.
The government no doubt will point to various "growth" initiatives – and even one or two U-turns like the reprieve of Sheffield Forge Masters. But all the evidence is that Whitehall initiatives produce limited effects, at any rate in the long term. A free-market government surely should appreciate this most of all.
Without an enduring infrastructure, especially of highly skilled people, such initiatives flash and die. Maybe Vince Cable should pay as much attention to the skills component of his department's title as the business component, rather than leaving all the running to his Tory mate, David Willetts.
The interesting thing about policy is not the measures themselves, but the assumptions underlying them. Applying that test, the government's higher education reforms are anything but. They are rooted in a view of a university education common no doubt in prosperous London-land, but profoundly reactionary – as a bourgeois lifestyle choice rather than career-changing improvement, as validation rather than aspiration.
That view has always been there, of course, even during a half-century of progressive reform and rapid growth. Now it has re-emerged from the shadows. As Pitt said on hearing the news of Austerlitz, "roll up that map. It will not be wanted these 10 years". Let's make it five, if only to stop the UK slipping even further down the global premier league.
• Peter Scott is professor of higher education studies at the Institute of Education
Are Oxford's students running riot? Plus the Student Loans Company gets some help with its New Year's resolutions
Known for its medieval statuary and broad avenues, Georgian terraces and riverside pubs, Oxford sounds idyllic. But all is not well in the city of dreaming spires, where some residents feel concerns about students' rowdy behaviour are not being taken seriously enough.
By day, there is litter and swearing, say locals. And when the clubs and bars close at night, there are broken windows, fights, students walking over parked cars and even assaults.
But attempts to flag up concerns to police or the local council often fall on deaf ears, says Sietske Boeles, of the Divinity Road Area Residents' Association. When residents raised objections to the building of a new block of student flats, they were accused of "anti-student vitriol" by local councillor and chair of Oxford City Council's planning review committee, Tony Brett, who wrote that their concerns sounded "horribly like the racism of the 60s, the homophobia of the 80s and the sexism of the 70s".
Boeles also says complaints are not always followed up appropriately; students are handed back to the universities for punishment, who "might take their library card away or some other very lenient sanction", she says. And she points out that around 15 of the 48 councillors – including the council leader, Bob Price, who is HR director at Oxford Brookes University – have studied, worked or volunteered at one of the two universities. Some councillors are "simply eyeing up the student vote," says Boeles.
Both the city's universities were quick to dismiss the idea. A spokesperson for Oxford Brookes said: "We believe the university adds the equivalent of £1m a day to the local and national economy."
An Oxford University spokesperson said: "The university … is the largest employer in Oxford, supporting over 18,000 jobs, so it's not surprising that in any given grouping of local people you do find university employees."
The Student Loans Company should have no problem compiling a list of New Year's resolutions. Perhaps it could simply recycle last year's list.
According to its annual report, the SLC failed to meet around 62% of its targets for the year, with slow service, poor communication and late payments topping the list of student complaints.
The company started 2010 on a sour note, having failed to fully process 209,000 students' grants and loans – more than half of all applications – in time for the start of the academic year. The fiasco resulted in the departure of two senior staff.
In the report, the SLC blames its lacklustre performance last year on not having "sufficient numbers of trained staff in place" – and an increase in complaints, which it puts down to the fact that it has recently taken on responsibility for assessing students' eligibility for grants and loans.
The company remains optimistic. A spokesperson said: "We have seen a major turnaround of the performance over the last two years. These figures relate to last year's performance and our 11/12 processing figures show an even better service for our student customers."
Janet Murray and Martin Williams
A new survey of English teachers reveals intense worries about the consistency of exam marking at A-level
Exam boards in England, Wales and Northern Ireland may feel under siege. In recent weeks, the scandal of examiners allegedly giving too much help to teachers about future papers during training sessions – a subject covered by Education Guardian in 2009 – has been hitting the headlines. And a string of errors in last summer's exam papers led to an investigation by the watchdog Ofqual, which has concluded that while generally the boards met regulatory requirements, there were quality "issues" at all awarding bodies.
Now, as we await publication of the secondary league tables, a survey of English teachers carried out by the National Association for the Teaching of English (Nate) has identified the quality of marking as the largest worry among those teaching the subject at A-level.
A report in the latest edition of Nate's journal says: "The quality and consistency of examination marking … has led to a crisis in confidence about the ability of [exam boards] to employ markers and deploy procedures that can guarantee accurate results."
Ofqual surveys have found that, across all subjects, nearly three quarters of A-level teachers have confidence in the quality of marking, against 20% who do not. However, the Nate survey, completed by 144 teachers, found plenty of expressions of frustration.
One respondent wrote: "Our results were totally out of line with predictions and we were very concerned about the quality of the marking."
Another wrote of "shocking inaccuracy and inconsistency, and no apology for the distress caused".
Other comments included: "the gap between the most generous and most severe markers is a scandal" and "instances of erratic marking and moderation have increased, with some frankly bizarre results, and re-marks resulting in sometimes huge shifts [in the marks]".
Kevin Rogers, an English teacher and assistant curriculum manager at Bilborough College, Nottingham, says his c150 English language AS-level students had an "unhappy" experience last summer.
When results came back from the AQA board, teachers were surprised at the unusually small number of As and Bs. Eyebrows were further raised when staff went through students' completed scripts.
"Often we could not really see how the comments related to the script itself," says Rogers, "… so we would struggle to see how the student had ended up with the mark they had." In the end, all scripts were sent back for a re-mark, and 43 of the 150 students had their marks improved.
But it took until November. This can have big repercussions for students, some of whom will drop a subject after the AS exams if their first result suggests they are not doing as well as expected. Rogers adds that, with teachers and institutions also judged on pupils' exam grades, poor marking can provoke months of misplaced soul-searching by staff.
An experienced English A-level examiner, speaking on condition of anonymity, says the boards have impressive systems for checking that erratic marking is picked up. However, there are strains. "There is enormous pressure on the boards, seemingly from the government, for results to get out faster and faster," she says.
There are pressures on individuals, too. Typically, a marker might be allocated 200 A-level English scripts. The examiner says it would be "amazing" to get through three in an hour, suggesting a commitment in excess of 65 hours. With many examiners also teaching, this means a lot of work in evenings and weekends.
Occasionally, she says, an examiner faced with too much work might just leave scripts unmarked until the board tracked them down. Very rarely, a marker would be found to have marked too fast in a rush to earn money: pay rates for A-level English are typically around £6 per script.
The examiner added that in the scenarios described above, however, the boards would typically allocate very senior markers to these problem scripts, and the issue would be well handled.
Schools and colleges, she added, could sometimes feel aggrieved when students did not meet their predicted grades even though, on occasion, teachers had been over-generous with their predictions.
Meanwhile, an official working for the OCR exam board has made seemingly far more damning claims against procedures for investigating examiners' mistakes.
In evidence to the Commons education select committee, David Leitch, a supervisor working for OCR's parent body, Cambridge Assessment, says that senior OCR managers tried to stop further checks being carried out on the accuracy of examiners' marks after he and colleagues found 300 students' scripts containing basic mistakes in markers' adding-up. At least 80 examiners were found to be at fault.
The mistakes were first uncovered last August. Leitch says that in October, when discussing the matter, managers had not wanted to tell schools, colleges and students about them. Leitch reported the matter to Ofqual, and following this, extra checks were carried out by OCR.
An OCR spokesman says that managers had sought not to make changes to grades until after a thorough investigation. Eventually, in all instances where clerical errors were found, and where this was to the candidate's detriment, marks were changed. In only a few cases did this affect the overall grade: eight students' AS grades, two A-level grades and four GCSE grades improved as a result.
Over the years, exam boards have argued that the number of grades changed following a re-mark is very small as a percentage of papers taken.
Ofqual figures show that this year, across all subjects, 12,245 A-level papers had grades changed on re-marking, which equates to only 0.48%. However, the number of grades changed has grown by nearly 50% since 2007. It rose 16% last year alone.
Brian Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, says English is a particularly contentious subject, since subjectivity will always be greater than in maths and science. But he adds: "In general, the exams system is under strain because of the number of changes that are made to it [by ministers]."
Critics will also point to the implications of sheer scale. Some 16 million GCSE and A-level papers were sat last summer. Measures put forward by Michael Gove, the education secretary, including the ending of multiple modular papers at GCSE, may take some pressure off. But the exams regime will remain under close scrutiny, since the results are now so important to students, teachers and schools.
What can Duke Ellington and Miles Davis teach entrepreneurs? Quite a lot, say Warwick academics
Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Art Blakey are widely recognised as three of the greatest jazz band leaders of the 20th century. But did you ever consider they might be role models for entrepreneurs? In fact, each one of them has lessons to offer on how to inspire creativity and innovation within an established structure, according to Deniz Ucbasaran, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Warwick Business School.
Ucbasaran has been the lead academic on a paper, currently being peer reviewed, entitled Leading Entrepreneurial Teams: Insights from Jazz. It won an award for best paper at the Institute for Small Businesses and Entrepreneurship conference in November.
Entrepreneurs are like jazz band leaders, Ucbasaran argues, insofar as they have to "build creative tension and give individuals their heads" while working within the framework of a collective. They have to harness the "disparate egos of highly talented people" and somehow keep them working towards the same goal. "To the uninitiated, jazz seems like chaos, whereas the reality is that it's very ordered," she says. "Underpinning the structure is a long tradition of education and practice."
Like any business, jazz bands have products (concerts, gigs, recordings, etc) that must be marketed and sold, and have a range of stakeholders to satisfy (customers, audiences, peers, critics, etc), says Ucbasaran. "Further, like entrepreneurial managers, the leaders of musical groups must identify and exploit commercial opportunities to survive."
When asked whether she is a jazz fan, Ucbasaran replies: "I am now." Her two collaborators on this project have been fans for some time – around 45 years in the case of Professor Mike Humphreys, 62, from Nottingham University Business School. Andy Lockett, 39, professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at Warwick, is keen, too. Like Ucbasaran, he recently moved across the Midlands from Nottingham, where this project had its roots.
It began when two master's students came to see Humphreys and Lockett to ask advice on subjects for dissertations. Both were interested in researching knowledge management and leadership within the creative industries. Neither knew much about jazz, but they responded positively when their tutors suggested that the organisation of bands was worth investigation. "It offered them the chance to do something a bit different," says Lockett. "And they began by doing what we would never have thought of. They posted an advert on MySpace saying: 'Jazz musicians wanted: apply within'."
There was an immediate response, and soon the students were doing interviews with some of Britain's top performers. Among them were trumpeter Guy Barker, pianist Jim Watson and band leader Wynton Marsalis who, it soon emerged, modelled his leadership style on Art Blakey. "Others would refer back to Duke Ellington or say 'this was the way that Miles Davis did it'," Lockett recalls.
He and Humphreys looked at the transcripts and became convinced that the subject was worthy of further investigation. So, in collaboration with Ucbasaran, they began looking at how three giants of jazz ran their bands and the lessons they offered for business leaders. "We used all sorts of archival data, including biographies, autobiographies, press cuttings and sleeve notes," Lockett explains, "and came up with three distinctive styles of leadership."
The paper that so impressed the conference of the Institute for Small Businesses and Entrepreneurship is the second to emerge from that research. The first, Sensemaking and Sensegiving: Stories of Jazz Leadership, has already been published in a journal called Human Relations.
A recurring theme in stories about Ellington, it seems, was his talent for motivation and inspiration. But it was coupled with what the authors call "a laissez-faire attitude towards the behaviour of his musicians". He saw their foibles as the price to be paid for having access to their talents. For Ucbasaran that raises questions for entrepreneurs. "If you have a creative process, you have to have talented employees. But talent is not always easy to manage. To what extent do you accommodate wayward behaviour? You have to give them freedom and space, but direct them in subtle ways so that the end result comes together harmoniously."
Ellington's laid-back approach meant that he kept a cadre of long-serving core musicians together over several decades. Davis, however, rarely chose musicians who knew each other. As the paper puts it, "he felt that prior relationships might lead to the development of routines which hampered innovation and improvisation". So creative tension was his over-riding priority? Lockett nods. "He was less concerned about stability than the other leaders. If it worked, it would be brilliant. If not, he'd disband the team and start again."
Blakey was much more of a father figure, he says. "His speciality was bringing on young musicians. And he was much more concerned about the decorum and behaviour of his team than the other two." Which of the three offers the best guidance to the entrepreneurs of today? "It's impossible to say. All three offer lessons that can be taken on board."
In some businesses more than others, perhaps. Ucbasaran concedes that the insights from jazz are more pertinent in the cultural industries and "hi-tech businesses with a rapid pace of change".
The kind of businesses, indeed, that have made it more likely that the great jazz music of the 20th century is listened to in the 21st century on iPods rather than on vinyl.
Research into hair whitening suggests it was historians, not doctors, who described the overnight phenomenon – in order to dramatise events
In a study called Sudden Whitening Of The Hair: An Historical Fiction? Anne-Marie Skellett, George Millington and Nick Levell, at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, try to chop off a myth at its roots. People's hair, they believe, does not all of a sudden turn white. It just doesn't. Goodbye, ye hoary tales of Queen Marie Antoinette of France and Sir Thomas More of England each turning whitehaired the night before being beheaded.
Hair whitening – "canities" in medical lingo – takes longer than days or even weeks, they report in a 2008 issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
If somebody's hair did suddenly turn white, they say, it would most likely have an unnatural cause: "the washing out, or lack of access to a temporary hair dye".
They suggest one other possible, though maybe nonexistent, mechanism. The disease alopecia totalis makes people's hair fall out. Perhaps, in someone of mixed white and dark hair, some rare form of the disease might make only the dark strands fall out.
In medical monographs over the past 100 years, doctors have almost uniformly expressed scepticism.
In 1972, Josef Jelinek of New York University medical school, debunked dozens of supposedly documented sudden-hair-whitening claims, with a monograph in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine.
Jelinek, an MD, began by directing the blame: "It was not the physician but rather the historian who first seized on stories of sudden whitening to dramatise the tribulations of famous persons, principally in their grief or fear, in order to interest and astonish the reader. The poet, too, found poignancy in this phenomenon." He mentions as an example Shakespeare's King Henry IV, Part 1, where Falstaff says to Hotspur: "Worcester is stolen away tonight. Thy father's beard is turned white with the news."
Dr Alexander Navarini and Dr Ralph Trueb at University Hospital of Zürich, Switzerland have become the foremost modern scholars of sudden-whitening.
In 2009, they published a report called Marie Antoinette Syndrome, about a 54-year-old woman whose "entire scalp hair suddenly turned white within a few weeks". The next year, they published a paper called Thomas More Syndrome, about "a 56-year-old man with sudden total whitening of scalp hair and eyebrows within weeks".
They potter on about the names: "Saint Thomas More, who turned white in 1535, ought to have the right of seniority over the Queen of France who succumbed to the same fate in 1793. Since there seems to be no other particular reason for favouring Marie Antoinette over Thomas More, out of fairness, it would seem appropriate to use the term 'Marie Antoinette syndrome' for the condition afflicting women and 'Thomas More syndrome' for men".
Navarini and Trueb also disseminated some dark, happy hair news. A year ago, they published a monograph called Reversal Of Canities, wherein they explain that they can't really explain why "a 67-year-old, otherwise healthy, man presented with spontaneous repigmentation of his grey hair".
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
This programme provaides an opportunity for information staff to update their knowledge of current copyright issues in relation to digital information. The course looks at the ways in which digital content is treated differently within copyright law; how copyright law protects digital content types such as websites, broadcasts, databases, GUI’s, API’s and software, and the scanning of hard copy material.
Other issues covered in this programme include copyright versus contract law, copyright clearance of digital content and digital rights management.
By the end of the course participants will have:
The programme is valuable for all staff whos work involves addressing electronic copyright issues. It is appropriate for staff who already have a good basic understanding of current copyright law.
Note: The “Copyright in the Web 2.0 environment” Onsite course is a useful follow-up. It examines the application of copyright in a collaborative working and information sharing environment.
Paul Pedley
Paul has been a member of the Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance since 1998. He has written a number of books published by Facet Publishing: Copyright Compliance, Digital copyright, Essential law for information professionals (3rd ed); and Managing digital rights (editor).
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The Digital Economy Act 2010 imposes obligations on internet service providers to send notifications to their subscribers following receipt of reports of copyright infringement from copyright owners. How does this affect library and information services? Would libraries that provide public access to the internet be held liable for any copyright infringements undertaken on their network by library users?
By the end of this half-day programme participants will have:
This programme will be valuable for librarians responsible for copyright wishing to find out about how the Act affects copyright infringement; especially staff working in public, higher and further education libraries.
Paul Pedley
Paul has been a member of the Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance since 1998. He has written a number of books published by Facet Publishing: Copyright Compliance, Digital copyright, Essential law for information professionals (3rd ed); and Managing digital rights (editor).
Sample programme (half day)
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This course provides a full grounding in the basic principles and concepts of copyright law.
The day includes two practical sessions which provide an opportunity for participants to build up their knowledge of copyright. There are plenty of opportunities throughout the day for participants to ask questions and to share their experiences of copyright issues.
By the end of the course participants will have:
The course content is continually updated to take account of recent and forthcoming developments.
This is a foundation course aimed at those with little knowledge of copyright. Please note that as this is a beginner’s course it is not possible to answer in-depth sector-specific questions on copyright and licensing issues: however, additional Onsite programmes are available.
Paul Pedley
Paul has been a member of the Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance since 1998. He has written a number of books published by Facet Publishing: Copyright Compliance, Digital copyright, Essential law for information professionals (3rd ed); and Managing digital rights (editor).
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Ensure your organisation’s copying activities are copyright compliant with this one-day programme. The course considers how to pro-actively ensure copyright compliance, as well as setting out what can happen if your organisation is accused of copyright infringement.
The day will include how to determine if your copying has the necessary authorisation; identifying high, medium and low risk activities and how to minimise those risks.
By the end of the event participants will have:
The whole day is interactive, with plenty of opportunities to ask questions and for participants to share their experiences. A typical programme includes two practical sessions to help delegates test their knowledge of copyright, and to consolidate what they have learnt.
The programme will be valuable for those who need to ensure that their information service is copyright compliant and/or need to develop an organisational copyright policy in order to reduce the risks of copyright infringement.
To get the best out of the course, delegates should already have a good basic understanding of the principles of copyright law.
Paul Pedley
Paul has been a member of the Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance since 1998. He has written a number of books published by Facet Publishing: Copyright Compliance, Digital copyright, Essential law for information professionals (3rd ed); and Managing digital rights (editor).
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In order to reach new audiences and develop outreach projects, public libraries are increasingly working in partnership with other organisations in the community. This course looks at how to identify, develop and manage partnership opportunities and projects effectively.
By the end of the course participants will have:
• an understanding of the nature of partnerships and the partnership lifecycle
• assessed the advantages and challenges around partnership working
• looked at how to manage challenges positively
• reviewed partnership agreements and joint working methods
• learnt how to secure effective outcomes through partners
This course is for anybody who needs to work in partnership with other organisations, in any library setting.
Kathy Roddy
Kathy Roddy is a qualified librarian with experience of working in public, academic and specialist libraries. She has also spent many years in a senior role in the voluntary sector. She is a freelance trainer and consultant and has been delivering training courses through CILIP for over ten years.
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Public libraries’ contribution to individual and community development is immense, but very little has been done in the past to measure the impact of public libraries in this wider sense. Now, the MLA has introduced the concept of ‘generic social outcomes’ and ‘generic learning outcomes’ as an important step forward in understanding the impact that public libraries have.
Participants will gain an understanding of generic social outcomes and generic learning outcomes, think about projects that the library service can deliver to meet these outcomes and examine/use the tools for measuring the impact of their library service.
By the end of the course participants will have:
This programme will be of interest to librarians in public libraries who need to evidence the difference that they make to individuals and the wider community.
Participants where possible should bring along a copy of their authority’s strategic plan.
Kathy Roddy
Kathy is a qualified librarian and information manager with considerable experience of working in public, academic and specialist libraries. She also has senior management experience gained in the voluntary sector and for the past ten years been a freelance trainer and consultant specialising in the LIS field.
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This course looks at information gateways to 7 key types of information: official (UK and global), statistical, academic, business and company, special interest groups, media and social networking sites, enabling the researcher to quickly and efficiently find quality information on the internet.
This programme is designed to introduce researchers to new research resources.
By the end of the course participants will have:
This programme will be of interest to anybody in an information role who is required to undertake in-depth desk research for their organisation, and can be tailored as needed.
Kathy Roddy
Kathy is a qualified librarian and information manager with considerable experience of working in public, academic and specialist libraries. For the past ten years she has been a freelance trainer and consultant specialising in the LIS field.
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This year has seen approximately half a million people visit the JISC website – who have looked at over 2.3 million pages in 2011 taking advantage of our resources and guidance across teaching, learning and research.
Nearly 800 of you took time to visit the JISC website on Christmas Day 2010 with the most popular searched story on the day being the Great War Archive rolled out in Germany.
JISC EMBEDDED OBJECT
Funding, online resources and JISC Collections were the three most searched-for terms on JISC’s website in 2011, with the top topics you wanted to know about shown below:
Top five news stories as viewed by you in 2011:
Over 25,700 of you watched us online.
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More and more library and information staff are being asked to carry out detailed desk research but have never had any formal training in the skills required to do the job well.
This course is designed for anybody in an information role who is required to undertake in-depth desk research and who would like to learn how to achieve the best results.
By the end of the course participants will have:
This programme is of benefit to staff in an information role who are required to undertake in-depth desk research for their organisation.
Kathy Roddy
Kathy is a qualified librarian and information manager with considerable experience of working in public, academic and specialist libraries. For the past ten years been a freelance trainer and consultant specialising in the LIS field.
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A well developed survey is one of the most effective tools to assess what your users need and want and how you can deliver it to them. Discover the tried and tested techniques used when developing an electronic survey. Learn about the questions to ask - and the questions to avoid!
Participants will learn the essentials of questionnaire design and will have the opportunity to construct a survey based on the needs of their own library service. The course will explore web-based survey tools and the use of Microsoft applications to construct and analyse survey results.
By the end of the course participants will have:
This programme is designed for librarians and other library staff who need to conduct online surveys for their organisation. Basic computer literacy is required, especially the Windows environment.
Kathy Roddy
Kathy is a qualified librarian and information manager with considerable experience of working in public, academic and specialist libraries. For the past ten years she has been a freelance trainer and consultant specialising in the LIS field.
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This course will enable delegates to design effective evaluation tools to measure and evidence their organisation’s effectiveness in terms of outputs, outcomes and impact.
Participants will understand the differences between outputs, outcomes and impact and consider the extent to which these can be measured through evaluation forms.
By the end of the course participants will have:
The programme will benefit any staff wo have responsibility for evaluating the outcomes and impact of library and information services and projects. This programme is suitable for those in public, academic or specialist library settings.
Kathy Roddy
Kathy Roddy is a qualified librarian with experience of working in public, academic and specialist libraries. She has also spent many years in a senior role in the voluntary sector. She is a freelance trainer and consultant and has been delivering training courses through CILIP for over ten years.
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Librarians in all sectors are increasingly having to collect statistical data in order to present a case - whether it be for a new service; to demonstrate value for money, or to present impact outcomes. Yet analysing, interpreting, comparing and presenting statistical data to ‘tell a story’/make a case can sometimes be challenging. This course explains statistical concepts and calculations, step-by-step, in plain English, and introduces Excel as a tool to ‘tell your story’/make a case using visual charts and graphs.
This course is for librarians who need to analyse, interpret, compare and present statistical data, either in the form of reports, presentations and/or PowerPoint.
By the end of the course participants will have:
This programme will be of benefit to librarians and information managers who need to work with and present statistical information for their organisation.
Participants need to have basic computer literacy and broad familiarity with Microsoft applications. No in depth knowledge of Excel will be assumed. Calculators will be provided.
Kathy Roddy
Kathy is a qualified librarian and information manager with considerable experience of working in public, academic and specialist libraries. She also has senior management experience gained in the voluntary sector and for the past ten years been a freelance trainer and consultant specialising in the LIS field.
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