About the Napier Education Exchange

Statement of intent

The Napier Education Exchange is a social networking platform that has been developed for Napier University staff to share and discuss all things related to the use of current and emergent technologies within their learning, teaching, training and education support capacities. In the spirit of web 2.0 this is an online networking site developed as a "for the user, by the user" resource. Without you the Napier Education Exchange will fail to come alive!

Quite deliberately you will not find lists of recommended websites, technology enhanced teaching approaches, or journal articles put forward by the creators of the site-that is your job. What you will find is plenty of space and opportunity for sharing experiences, questions, moans, stories, examples, successes, failures, observations, disputes, and concerns about...........well, a discussion in WebCT students are not engaging with, a peer review exercise enhanced by a wiki, or an online group-work activity gone all wrong-or right.

This is a pilot resource developed in response to requests by participants of EdDev's flexible learning strand of staff development courses for additional peer support in the form of an online forum. You are therefore encouraged to voice common problems, share good (and bad) practice examples and exchange ideas across all disciplines with your peers. In return you will benefit from an online community of education professionals dedicated to the exploration of technology and its role in learning and teaching. In its initial pilot phase of 3 months the target group includes the most recent WebCT Build participants and all active TurnitinUK users. Pending review and evaluation an institutional rollout will follow.

What to think about when using this and other web 2.0 resources: User guidelines Increasingly HE institutions are making use of what web 2.0 services offer: free, innovative, customisable, intuitive tools to publish, bookmark, share and network. So far, however, according to the latest findings (2008) by the JISC (Joint Information Services Committee http://www.jisc.ac.uk/) only one third of HEI's in the UK provide staff and students guidelines for use of what is essentially a third-party material.

While Edinburgh Napier University catches up as well please consider this short document as a draft for what, with your help and feedback, could inform an institutional web 2.0 guide for both staff and students. Until that time it is envisioned that users of the Napier Education Exchange are offered a basic framework within which to comfortably and confidently use a non-institutional online networking facility in an educational setting.

Ownership of data/Copyright When contributing to this site also consider the copyright of your contribution which may include, but is not restricted to, images, video/audio clips or quotes. If you do not have written permission to use the material then do not use it. If you have permission be sure to attribute the original creator. Refrain from using images from blogs, online newspapers or sites such as Google Images unless the terms and conditions of the site hosting the resource explicitely permits its reuse. The creators of the Napier Education Exchange reserve the right to remove any ambiguous content.

It can become very time consuming to investigate ownership of third-party material when developing content. Alternatively, consider drawing from one of the educational learning objects repositories that Edinburgh Napier University subscribes to such as SCRAN or EDINA listed under http://staff.napier.ac.uk/Services/Library/Electronic+Resources/LearningObjectsDatabases.htm . Consult free media collections such as from one of the JISC Collections or the digital media archive at http://www.archive.org/index.php or search photo sharing sites such as http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net/ , which make images available under an alternative licensing scheme known as Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/). The Technical Advisory service for images has published a useful set of FAQ's available at http://www.tasi.ac.uk/advice/managing/copyright_faq.html for publishing images in virtual learning environments or on websites.