E-books and E-content 2008

University College London, 13 May 2008, 10.00 to 16.30

E-books and e-content are becoming prevalent in all institutions - educational, cultural and commercial - through licensing, digitisation programmes, digital libraries and original content authoring. Content is also becoming more interactive and multimedia. At the same time many organisations are looking at new e-learning strategies which put e-content right at the centre. So how can organisations maximise the use of e-books and e-content to support these emerging e-learning agendas? Should they look to develop new content or turn to the publishing sector for ready-made solutions? Should they use the increasingly freely available content through national resource banks and other open access repositories? Should they develop and re-purpose e-content from existing resources to suit new audiences? And how best can resource managers integrate with other e-learning systems and frameworks such as VLEs and library systems and provide the support that students need? Finally, how are students using e-content in their learning at the moment - and how will this inform how we design content for the future?

This year's e-content meeting looked at these questions with input from e-content developers, e-publishers, business analysts, e-learning experts, researchers and through user case studies. Experts and practitioners assessed good practice from the UK, Europe and internationally.
 
The event was attended by those involved with delivering and developing e-content, supporting e-learning and the e-publishing business in general, including librarians, learning support staff, educationalists, publishers and rights owners in these markets.

E-books and E-content 2008 was hosted by UCL's Centre for Publishing, part of the School of Library Archive and Information Studies.

The programme for E-books and E-content 2008 included contributions from:

• the event was chaired by Elizabeth Chapman, Deputy Director of UCL Library Services, and Anthony Watkinson of the Centre for Publishing at UCL.

• the publishing sector: Rod Bristow, CEO of Pearson Education, a leading global publisher of e-content including Safari Books, who took a global and strategic view of e-content, and Dan Burnstone from Proquest (which now includes CSA), the international company involved with collecting, organising and publishing electronic information of all types, presented their view;

• from an OECD perspective, Jan Hylen from Stockholm argued the case for Open Access e-learning resources and the development of OA educational resource banks. He reviewed alternative business models and reported on the OECD work in this area;

• from education, Sue McKnight, Director of Libraries and Knowledge Resources at Nottingham Trent University and an international expert on e-learning and e-learning resources, took an educational perspective whilst Liam Earney and Caren Milloy from JISC Collections talked about the new project focusing on the copyright challenges of re-purposing content for use in e-learning.

• from CIBER at UCL, Dr Ian Rowlands reported on recent research at UCL on the Google Generation, examining how we search and use e-content, and amongst other case studies Barry Spencer of Bromley College described using Second Life to create content.

• a final panel session included Mark Carden, Senior Vice President and General Manager EMEA for Ingram Digital, owners of MyIlibrary. Mark has also worked at OCLC, Dynix and Innovative Interfaces.

Conference programme: CLICK HERE for a copy of the full programme.

Speaker biographies: CLICK HERE to see the speaker biographies.

Presentations: please click on the links below:-

Rod Bristow
E-content and E-learning - part 1
E-content and E-learning - part 2

Sue McKnight
Students need Stuff: Making it easier for online learners

Jan Hylen
Better universities with free content: the future of open educational resources

Dan Burnstone
Observing Student Researchers in their Native Habitat

Barry Spencer
Where 3D Virtual Worlds and e-Learning combine: introduction to Second Life (SL)





Email: slais-conferences@ucl.ac.uk