Information School News

The iSchool uses a range of Web 2.0 tools in teaching: examples are two new resources to hep our librarianship students keep up-to-date; a Netvibes page http://www.netvibes.com/sheilawebber#Library_and_Information_updates and a Scoop-it page http://www.scoop.it/t/updates-for-librarianship/

JISC funds the White Rose Consortium of academic libraries and the Sheffield iSchool to develop Research Data Management (RDM) learning materials for LIS professionals JISC have funded the White Rose Consortium of the libraries of the universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York and the Sheffield iSchool to develop learning materials about Research Data Management tailored for the needs of LIS professionals. The project, RDMRose, will develop learning materials to be made available as Open Educational Resources for individual professionals to study as CPD and for other LIS educators to reuse, as well as for use in courses at Sheffield. Learning materials should begin to be available from January 2013. RDM refers to “the organisation of data, from its entry to the research cycle through to the dissemination and archiving of valuable results” [1] . The need for universities to put in place support for Research Data Management has been driven by the data deluge and research fund...

Sheila Webber and Dr Eva Hornung both presented at the Special Interest Group Phenomenography conference "Phenomenography and Variation Theory — New Challenges" held in Jönköping, Sweden, in August.

On Saturday 22 nd Sep, Alex Peng is presenting two new projects to public visitors in the Festival of the Mind, which will be held in the Sheffield Spiegeltent.  These two interdisciplinary projects (i.e. one focuses on developing and evaluating an e-learning system to train teachers and let them provide better support to disable young people, and the other aims to develop a mobile app to support the unmet needs of cancer survivors) are the results of Alex’s participation in the Sheffield Crucible programme ( http://www.shef.ac.uk/ faculty/science/training-and- development/sheffield-crucible ), and involve other colleagues from the Department of Human Communication Sciences, Academic Unit of Clinical Oncology, Department of Sociological Studies, and School of English. Further details can be found at: http://festivalofthemind.group.shef.ac.uk/a-box-of-ideas/

Lihong Zhou (Nick) f ormer MSc and PhD student in the our School and now Prof. in the Information School of Wuhan University, was awarded,  in collaboration with Miguel Nunes,  a   National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) Project entitled "Inter-organisational tacit knowledge sharing in hospitals through the processes of patient transfer and referral", with the project permission no. 71203165 and in a total of 210,000 RMB (approximately £21,000).   This is a significant grant in China both in terms of funding total and prestige.   The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) is the most important and prestigious scientific research grant funding body in the country and is extremely competitive (i.e. in   2011 there were 170,792 applicants and only 34,779 (20%) were approved).   Congratulations to Nick who is much missed in the IS Research Group.