Four and a half years at Knowledge Exchange

Digital Author Identifier Summit in London

It has been rather quiet on this blog. The main reason is that I put most of my energy in communicating work related stuff through Knowledge Exchange, through the website, twitter, etc. The past years at Knowledge Exchange were very lively and taught me a lot. Working with the partner organisations has shown me the value and richness of the different cultural backgrounds and approaches. I have learnt a lot from the insights of the experts. What is also great is the variety in interests of the partner organisations ranging from research funding, infrastructure funding, innovation, libraries and tackling the range from hard to soft e-infrastructure. In my view the true power behind KE is the interaction between the experts in the partner organisations and countries. It was always really inspiring to bring a group of experts together and to see how quickly discussions arose and the speed in which great ideas could be developed. The years have been quite lively, some really relevant reports were released and workshops organised. The initiative has recently been expanded with the fifth member, CSC. The challenge is now to balance large expectations and ambitions with the limited scale which is KE. It never has been a large initiative and its power has been to pick out the small ground breaking activities where it is really useful to bring knowledge together, share, develop this further and start a debate. I trust this will continue to lead to valuable results in the future.

Upheaval on student thesis in Utrecht

A Dutch news site mentioned that a student´s master thesis was being withheld by the Utrecht city council as it would contain critical information on a Youth scheme in Utrecht. According to the thesis youths with a criminal background would have collected funds for internships without actually doing any work.

See: http://www.nu.nl/binnenland/2371071/gemeente-utrecht-hield-kritische-scriptie-tegen.html and http://www.dub.uu.nl/content/omstreden-scriptie-vrijdag-terug-op-uu-site

The thesis is now available on the University library website and I was really chuffed as it was a student from social sciences, so it has been included in the collection I have helped to set up years ago together with the university library.
It is now scoring as best downloaded thesis: http://studenttheses.library.uu.nl/topten.php?language=nl

For the tweets on this see: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23scriptie%20%23utrecht

E-learning for kids, worldwide learning content for kids

An interesting note at the end of one of the sessions is the e-learning for kids initiative. The aim is to develop courseware for for children aged 5 to 12 years worldwide. This connects nicely with the one laptop per child initiative. Noticeably this does not appear to be webbased but they have chosen to run materials locally.