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Raising the bar: literacy tool saves pounds for public sector
A clever tool bar designed to help students with literacy difficulties to interact with text on screen is helping colleges to save money across the UK and internationally.
MyStudyBar is the latest initiative from the JISC Regional Support Centre Scotland North & East and consists of a collection of freeware and open source software which is specially selected to help students with literacy difficulties (planning, reading, writing, vision and voice). Although MyStudyBar is designed to support learners with literacy-related difficulties such as dyslexia, the toolbar can offer potential benefits to all learners.
Hundreds of downloads from as far afield as New Zealand and Australia equal savings of more than half a million pounds as the commercially equivalent price of the applications on a single MyStudyBar download is around £120. Garth Ritchie from the Ministry of Education, New Zealand, comments that the package “will make it easier to get assistive technology to the students in schools for whom it would not be considered otherwise. [JISC’s] work has direct spinoffs for inclusive education around the world.”
The tool bar includes a range of tools to support inclusion such as mind mapping, screen masking, word prediction, talking dictionary, text-to-speech, different saving options and voice recognition. Together, these have been designed to support the complete study cycle from research, planning and structuring to getting across a written or spoken message.
Since it was launched in early 2010, thousands of individuals and organisations have downloaded MyStudyBar, from the John Moores University in Manchester to the Fundación Todos Podemos Ayudar in Colombia. As Andrew Edis from New College Nottingham comments, “We have already distributed 16,000 USB sticks containing free and open source software from the RSC Scotland North & East, right across the college. I must say I’m impressed with this - in times of financial squeeze the fact that MyStudyBar is open source is a major plus.”
MyStudyBar has been produced by the same team at RSC Scotland North & East which created the award-winning AccessApps software suite.
For more information on MyStudyBar or on any of the software collections that make up the EduApps family of products, go online to www.eduapps.org or contact the Manager at the Regional Support Centre Scotland North & East: manager@rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk. 
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Let’s all go down the Strand!
Commuters, residents and shoppers who regularly tread one of London’s most famous streets are now being asked to contribute to a new online resource. The aim is to use social networking and mobile technologies to foster a sense of community in the Strand area of central London through a technique known as life-writing. Life-writing is a broad and creative field which explores personal life stories, and how they intersect with accounts of the lives of others. Residents, business owners and employees working in the area will all be visited by researchers from the JISC project, Strandlines Digital Community based at King’s College London.
The researchers will also visit local community centres and events, digitise materials from the King’s archives and interview staff at King’s and launch a website in the autumn to generate contributions. Ben Showers, programme manager at JISC, said: “We urgently need to engage communities with the research going on in universities and colleges to ensure that we really maximise these publicly funded resources and findings. But the benefits go both ways - so the training provided by Strandlines and similar projects is helping to create a more technology savvy population who are more confident in contributing to the web. “While the Strandlines project is engaging a community in the heart of London, the approach it uses will form a valuable model for similar work across the UK,” he concluded. The project will create an online, interactive resource documenting life and work on the Strand over the past 200 years, through stories, audio and photographs. It will combine material taken from the College’s own archive, Westminster City Archives and elsewhere with people’s own photographs and memories, captured through a grassroots digitisation project. Professor Clare Brant, project director working at the centre for life-writing research, said: “One aim of the project is to investigate the significance of the Strand in people’s life stories. Life-writing is a little different from oral history: while both value information about the past, life-writing also encourages awareness of literary and creative characteristics in the present, and how these may shape accounts of the past. At the Centre for Life-Writing Research, we look forward to learning about the Strand from others who live and work here; and to helping people explore new ways and new media in which to share their impressions of life on the Strand.” Download a booklet about crowd sourcing and how it works Lorna Hughes, project manager at the centre for e-research at King’s, said: "Web 2.0 technologies have created new and easy ways of bringing together communities and allowing them to engage with each other. We are excited about the chance to explore how these approaches can make the Strand come alive in the digital world."
Benn Keaveney, chief executive at Age UK Westminster, said: "The concept of memory, storytelling and making use of new technology being made available for our service users is something we are already investigating, and so we are keen to see what further work could arise out of this local project in the Strand area of Westminster."
The project has been organised by the Centre for Life-Writing Research, the Centre for e-Research, the Department of Geography and the King's College London Archives and will initially run as an 11 month pilot. Partner organisations include the City of Westminster Archives Centre and the charity Age UK Westminster. For further information, or if you would like to contribute material for the project, please contact Lorna Hughes, email lorna.hughes@kcl.ac.uk or telephone 0207 8482426. Find out more about the community collections that JISC is running
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Historic Welsh ballads online for a new global audience
 Historic news once sung on street corners is now being captured online in a virtual resource.
4,000 ballads from 18th and 19th century Wales are launching on a website run by Cardiff University and the National Library of Wales.
The songs document the important issues of their day, such as workers’ rights and crime, as well as local festivals and village gossip.
Funded through a £66,000 grant from JISC, the project has completed a network of digital resources giving access to these precious documents.
Academic editor of the Welsh Ballads project, Dr Wyn James of Cardiff University’s school of Welsh, commented: “Ballads were the ‘daily newspapers’ for the poor throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries, and were sold cheaply and widely at markets, fairs, and villages; they communicated news on local matters and overseas events of the day.
“We have selected around 15,000 pages of rare Welsh and English language ballads and have now made them available for audiences around the world to study and enjoy.”
 Ben Showers, programme manager at JISC, said: “The Welsh Ballads project puts in place the final piece of a national jigsaw of digitised ballads. Adding to the ballad collections of England and Scotland this new archive will help make this a unique and indispensable resource for researchers, students and interested members of the public.
“This project is part of JISC’s continued work to enhance collections of significance, and ensure that resources are not left in isolation, but brought together for the benefit of research, teaching and learning for everyone.”
Digitisation of the ballads collections was carried out in Cardiff University’s information services directorate and the National Library of Wales.
“With the funding from JISC we are able to put ballads studies in Wales on the world map, comparable with the best of other ballads projects in Britain and America,” said Janet Peters, director of university libraries at Cardiff. “Two rare ballads collections are now available from one website at Cardiff, jointly linked with a full catalogue and scanned pages at the National Library.”
Cardiff University also intends to make a small selection of sung audio recordings of some rare Welsh ballads available via its website later in the year. Access the Welsh Ballads online Listen to a pilot recording about the miners' leader Mabon and the campaign for better working conditionsMesur Wyth Awr - Eight Hours Bill 
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