Information School News

 A new University of Sheffield course that explores the nature and value of play across cultures and communities begins on 29 September.  Sheila Webber of the Information School is a lead contributor to the course. ‘Exploring Play: the Importance of Play in Everyday Life’ is a seven week long course which introduces different play worlds and lives.  The course covers aspects of play from its history and play in virtual worlds; to how knowledge can inform play and how play spaces are designed.  It will also explore how play helps learning and how it can help young people become successful as adults.  The aim of the course is to get participants to think differently about play and to understand how significant it is in our lives and our development.  Sheila Webber is the lead contributor for week six of the course which will explore virtual worlds.  Videos used during this week were filmed by Sheila in Second Life and include interviews with educators from Greece and the USA.

CLEF 2014 , the fifth Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) conference, takes place in Sheffield between 15 and 18 September 2014, hosted by the Information School at the University of Sheffield. This year’s event comprises an independent peer-reviewed conference which explores multilingual and multimodal information access evaluation as well as workshops and lab sessions which will test different aspects of mono- and cross-language information retrieval systems.  As with previous CLEF conferences, there will be a strong focus upon community-based evaluation and discussion on evaluation issues. Keynote speeches will be delivered by Susan Dumais of Microsoft, Fabio Ciravegna of the University of Sheffield and Ann Blandford of University College London. The General Chairs of CLEF 2014 are Paul Clough of the Information School at the University of Sheffield and Mark Sanderson at the School of Computer Science and Information Technology, RMIT University Melbour

A project to create a raspberry pi weather station is currently live in the Information School.  The Sheffield Pi weather station has been created by Romilly Close, undergraduate Aerospace Engineering student at the University of Sheffield.  The project was funded by the Sheffield Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) scheme and is being supervised by Dr Jo Bates, Paula Goodale and Fred Sonnenwald from the Information School. Information about the Sheffield Pi station and how to create your own can be found on the project website .  You can also see live data from the Sheffield Pi station on Plot.ly , and further information can also be found on the Met Office Weather Observations Website .    This work compliments the School’s existing project entitled ‘The Secret Life of a Weather Datum’ which explores socio-cultural influences on weather data.  This project is funded under the AHRC’s Digital Transformations Big Data call.  It aims to pilot a new approach to im