CORE

I've written on here before about CORE, so today's post is both a reminder and an update of how it may be useful.

In recent years, many Universities have begun to set up Open Access research repositories, where various academic papers, conference presentations, journal articles and more produced by the academics at these institutions can be found. Access to these collections is generally free, but finding the material relies on the user knowing where the item they want is held.

CORE aims to improve the visibility of these items by allowing users to search across (at last count!) 293 Open Access research repositories simultaneously. Once you've carried out your search, all of your results also have information about the authors, date, peer review etc of each item, so you know exactly what it is you're looking at, as well as a link to the full text.

I've carried out a number of searches around various childcare / education topics, and was impressed with the range of material that's available out there. So it might be worth bookmarking this site in addition to the other places that you usually look for research information. The site also offers free Android / Apple apps to allow you to access the site on the move!

If you'd like to try CORE for yourself, then here's the link.

EYES Search

Ever wondered  (or even noticed?) what the little search box on the right hand side of this page called 'EYES Search' is for? Read on...

One of the most frustrating things about doing a Google search is the amount of irrelevant or non-academic material which appears in your results. EYES - named because it stands for 'Early Years, Education and Social policy', and also because it looks for things - tries to get around this problem by only searching through almost 100 relevant websites which I've handpicked for the quality and reliability of the information that they provide. It's still using Google software to order the results, but will only show material from the sites I've selected, so in theory should be much more likely to find you something suitable for research purposes.

To test it for yourself, try doing a search for an essay topic in 'normal' Google, then do the same search in EYES and compare the results. See the difference? I don't pretend EYES is perfect, but I'm confident that in most cases it will point you towards useful information that you may not otherwise have found. Further information about the service is available here, and feedback with suggestions for improvements is always welcome - email me at: D.Renfree@ucb.ac.uk

Comparison of Google (on left) vs EYES (on right) search results - click on image for larger version

Review of 2012

If it’s nearly Christmas, it must be time for the annual round-up of major developments and new research published in the children’s sector during the last year. After all, you might have missed some of these the first time round…

The one thing that all practitioners and students can’t have missed was the introduction of the new EYFS in September. You can get quick links to the new EYFS and supporting documentation from this previous post, while the recent release of the new Profile Handbook and further materials are dealt with here. On a similar note, at the same time a new set of EYPS standards were introduced for those hoping to achieve the status.

The other large story of the year was the Nutbrown Review, which investigated the current system of early education and childcare qualifications. You can read the final report and other supporting documents from this link.

Annual reports from well known organisations are also a handy way of gauging current issues surrounding the sector. Some of the most useful ones from this year include the Childcare and Early Years Providers Survey and the Ofsted Annual Report, while for a more international flavour try UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children 2012 or the OECD’s Education at a Glance.

A few themes seemed to emerge when looking back at publications from the last year: certainly the cost of childcare for families was discussed in a number of reports by different organisations, such as the Resolution Foundation's Counting the Costs of Childcare, CPAG's The Cost of a Child in the Twenty-First Century, and the Family & Parenting Institute's Families on the FrontLine.

Linked to this is the never ending stream of reports into child poverty – just a few that were published this year were Save the Children’s It Shouldn’t Happen Here, CPAG’s Ending Child Poverty by 2020, and UNICEF’s Measuring Child Poverty, which compared the situation in the UK with other developed nations.

Another theme was the growing interest in outdoor play and the benefits which this can have for children. In March the National Trust’s Natural Childhood report made a big contribution to this debate, or you can read this previous post from September which provides links to plenty of the recent research in this area.

And a personal selection of interesting / useful stories and publications from the last year… Back in January the Children’s Society published the Good Childhood Report 2012; in June the Save Childhood movement was launched; also in June the Starting Well: Benchmarking Early Education Across the World report was published; and November saw the publication of Men Working in Childcare, a useful contribution to a topic about which I get a lot of enquiries.

A bit more? For research ideas you could do a lot worse than look at Education on the Web, an excellent research guide from the NFER. Or you could look at this post on Open Access Research for Childhood / Education, which has attracted a lot of site visitors from search engines in recent months. Or you could look at Social Bookmarking: an Essential Tool for Dissertation Students, an article published on Kathy Brodie’s website back in June (you may recognise the author!).

If there’s anything significant from the last 12 months that you think I’ve missed, do leave a comment below to let other site users know about it. If you’re a regular visitor here you’ll know I’m a fan of archive films, so get in the festive spirit by enjoying the short clip below from 1946, which includes sleeping children, toys that come alive, and… oh, just watch it! Merry Christmas…

#EYTalking

Since I joined Twitter I've found it an invaluable way of getting in touch with early years practitioners and for staying up-to-date with breaking news stories and new pieces of research that relate to the sector. So if you're on Twitter and want to engage with other childcare people, you may be interested in a new initiative called #EYTalking.

Basically, the idea is for anyone with an interest in childcare or early years to go onto Twitter each Tuesday evening between 8 - 9pm, and swap useful stories, articles, reports and any other type of information using the #EYTalking hashtag. The first session takes place tonight, I'll be logging on to see how it all works in practice, and maybe get some ideas for things to post here in the future.

Quite simple really! Though you can read more about it by clicking here.

EYES Search

Possibly as a result of a mention in this article on Kathy Brodie's website - thanks Kathy! - more people have recently begun to use the EYES search box on the right-hand side of this site. I've no way of checking who you are or whether you're finding it useful (unless you get in touch to let me know...) but for those who've never used the service before, here's how it works:

One of the most frustrating things about doing a Google search is the amount of irrelevant or non-academic material which appears in your results. EYES - named because it stands for 'Early Years, Education and Social policy', and also because it looks for things - tries to get around this problem by only searching through almost 100 relevant websites which I've handpicked for the quality and reliability of the information that they provide. It's still using Google software to order the results, but will only show material from the sites I've selected, so in theory should be much more likely to find you something suitable for research purposes.

To test it for yourself, try doing a search for an essay topic in 'normal' Google, then do the same search in EYES and compare the results. See the difference? I don't pretend EYES is perfect, but I'm confident that in most cases it will point you towards useful information that you may not otherwise have found. Further information about the service is available here, and feedback with suggestions for improvements is always welcome - email me at: D.Renfree@ucb.ac.uk

Comparison of Google (on left) vs EYES (on right) search results - click on image for larger version

Evaluating Wikipedia

A slightly controversial subject today with regards to students... Back in the summer I presented a paper which argued that Wikipedia could, within limits, be a better source of information than its reputation suggests - most lecturers are reluctant to accept student work which cites Wikipedia for a number of reasons, the main one being that the site can be edited by anyone and so is open to abuse. There is good material to be found on Wikipedia, but separating the high quality from the poor is not always easy, and students would usually be advised to use it only as a starting point for learning about a topic.

To assist with using the site sensibly, you can now access an 8 page booklet entitled Evaluating Wikipedia Article Quality. This contains simple, easy-to-follow advice on how to assess whether pages on the site are likely to be accurate or well-researched, and teaches you how to follow the development of an article to see how it has evolved. While it's not definitive, it should help you to start considering some of the critical judgments you need to make when using Wikipedia, so that if you are going to visit the site, you can at least be more confident in choosing what material may be useful, and what pages should be avoided.

To view the booklet, click here.

(Image taken from http://xkcd.com/903/ under Creative Commons terms - click on image for a larger version)

Social Bookmarking

I've just contributed my first 'guest blog' to another site. Kathy Brodie is an Early Years Professional and Trainer who runs an excellent website which contains plenty of useful information and tips for students and professionals who work within the early years sector. The site is well worth a visit if you've got a few minutes, as you're likely to find at least a couple of items of interest!

Kathy kindly invited me to write an article on the topic of social bookmarking - what it is, and how it can be useful to you in your research. You can read it now by clicking here.

Twitter for Teachers

If you're a teacher (or trainee teacher on a PGCE) then you may be interested in The Creative Education Guide to Twitter for Teachers. This is a detailed 34 page guide put together by the team behind the Creative Education website, and provides plenty of advice, tips and guidance in using the service. Strongly recommended if you're toying with using Twitter in a professional capacity but don't know how to get started.

CORE

Not a post about a specific childcare resource today, but rather one about a general research tool which the site's users may find helpful...

In recent years, many Universities have begun to set up Open Access research repositories, where various academic papers, conference presentations, journal articles and more produced by the academics at these institutions can be found. Access to these collections is generally free, but finding the material relies on the user knowing where the item they want is held.

Now a new service called CORE aims to improve the visibility of these items by allowing users to search across 142 Open Access research repositories simultaneously. Once you've carried out your search, all of your results also have information about the authors, date, peer review etc of each item, so you know exactly what it is you're looking at, as well as a link to the full text.

I've carried out a few searches around various childcare / education topics, and was impressed with the range of material that's available out there. So it might be worth bookmarking this site in addition to the other places that you usually look for research information.

Childhood and Education on Twitter

I've recently set up a Twitter account, and so to the right hand side of this page you'll now see an area entitled 'Twitter Updates'. This displays recent tweets from my account (UCBChildEd) which will typically contain links to useful articles and other information relating to childcare and education. So in addition to the in-depth posts on this site which will continue, you'll also be able to get quick access to other items which will hopefully be relevant. Be sure to check these regularly, as there's likely to be something new every time you return!

Childhood & Education on Twitter

Most large organisations and media outlets in the childcare and education sector now have Twitter accounts where they post little snippets of news, details of campaigns etc as and when they happen, making it much easier for interested parties to stay in touch with what's going on. Today's post simply gives you a list of links to these accounts, so that if you're a Twitter user you can subscribe to the ones that interest you. Or you could start following them all, and very quickly you should have an idea of the topics which are currently generating discussion in the sector...

I've tried to pick out the accounts which appear to be most active, and deliberately excluded some which are not updated regularly. If you know of a useful children-related account which I've not included, why not share it with other readers by leaving a comment at the bottom of this post?

Also, for the next few days you'll see a poll on the right-hand side of this page asking you about your Twitter usage. If enough readers are using it, then I can investigate setting up a Twitter service to complement this site.

Without further ado, here are the links:

Barnardos

Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP)

Children & Young People Now

Children’s Society

Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC)

Community Care

Daycare Trust

Department of Education

Equality & Human Rights Commission (EHRC)

Family & Parenting Institute

Guardian Teacher Network

Institute of Education

Joseph Rowntree Foundation

National Autistic Society

National Children's Bureau (NCB)

National Literacy Trust

National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER)

National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC)

Nursery World

Ofsted

Parentchanneltv

ParticipationWorks

Play England

Save the Children

Save the Children UK

School Food Trust

Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE)

Teachers TV

Times Educational Supplement (TES)

Training & Development Agency for Schools (TDA)

UNICEF

UNICEF Innocenti Centre

UNICEF UK

Young Minds

Connect@UCB

This semester all UCB students have access to a new service from the library. Connect@UCB is an online help desk which you can visit to get support in finding useful information. Simply log on during the advertised hours and a member of staff will be available to help with your enquiry - perfect if you're unable to make it into College!

The desk will initially be open each weekday from 10am - 12pm and 2pm - 4pm.

To access Connect@UCB, you will first need a Wimba Pronto account - information about this software and getting a free account is available from UCBOnline.

A user guide for Connect@UCB is available from this link.

QR Codes

As promised, an explanation of last Friday's post...

The picture in the post is called a QR code. Essentially it's a 'super barcode', and is used to provide information on... well, whatever you choose. To decode it, you need to have a smartphone (eg iPhone or Android handset) with a barcode scanner installed. Simply read the code with the scanner and the information it contains will appear on your screen, whether it's simple text, a hyperlink, or something else. In the case of last Friday's post, the code contained the following relevant-to-this-site quote:

'Anyone who thinks the art of conversation is dead ought to tell a child to go to bed' - Robert Gallagher

We are considering using QR codes within our library to provide quick access to different types of information, though this will depend on user feedback. If having read this explanation you have any thoughts to offer, please contact me at D.Renfree@ucb.ac.uk to pass them on.

You can read more about QR codes here.

You can experiment with them by generating your own from this site.

And a couple of further examples to give you an idea of what's possible: scan the code below for access to a free ebook of Dr Montessori's Own Handbook.
Or if you'd like to buy yourself a Kindle for Christmas but can't afford one, you can now download free apps for a range of devices which mean that your PC / smartphone can mimic most of the functions of a Kindle, as well as giving you access to its full range of ebooks. Scan the image below to see what's available:


Technical lessons over for now - normal posts about childcare and education research will resume next week :-)

What's This?

We're always investigating new ways to communicate news & information with our users, so today's post is a bit of an experiment (and hopefully fun!) with a new form of technology. If anyone can decode the puzzle below, I'd love them to contact me - D.Renfree@ucb.ac.uk - with the details of what it says and who said it. No further clues for now!

There's no prize as such, but if anyone solves the puzzle and is a fan of old, saggy, cloth-eared cats, then you can have the small Bagpuss toy that currently lives on my desk... :-)

Wonder Wheel

Sounding like something you'd find on a gameshow or a mispronunciation of an old Oasis hit, the Wonder Wheel is actually a feature of Google which readers may find useful, as it can help suggest search terms to narrow down your results.

To access this feature, start by doing a search on Google. Above your search results to the left of the screen you should see a link that says 'Show options...'; click on this and a menu will open with various options to improve your search that you may want to explore.

For now, click on the 'Wonder Wheel' link. This will bring up a graphic of your search, with ideas for related searches (see below for an example).


Simply click on these to look at another graphic with further suggestions for search terms. If you sometimes struggle to think of useful keywords, this may be one way of making your searches more effective. When you've got a collection of words in the centre of your diagram that you're happy with, click on the 'Web' link at the top of the menu and your results are displayed. This method of searching isn't for everyone, but may be worth a try if you have been seeking information for a while without success.

What Sort of Web Animal are You?

Some of you may have seen The Virtual Revolution, a series recently broadcast on BBC2 to mark 20 years of the Web. The final episode focused on asking whether the Web is having an impact on relationships between people and even the way that we think. While it's probably too early to give a definitive answer to these questions, recent research into the browsing habits of children and students suggests that there may be a generational gap in the way that people use the internet to find information.

To investigate this further, the BBC has teamed up with University College London (UCL); the result is The Web Behaviour Test, an interactive exercise which takes 20-30 minutes to complete, and is made up of different types of questions and games. You need to register with the site before you begin, but this is free and only takes a minute. At the end of the test you'll be classed as a type of Web Animal depending on your responses - click here to read about the different types of animal, or here to learn more about the test.

I'm hoping to get together a group of students to take the test and chat about their responses, with a view to presenting a paper about web behaviour at the annual College Conference in the summer. If you'd be interested in getting involved with this then you can email me at D.Renfree@ucb.ac.uk for further details. Or if you'd just like to take the test for yourself, I'd be really grateful if you could contact me to say which type of animal you were classified as at the end of the exercise. In the interests of full disclosure, I'm apparently a leopard... :-)

Move Over Google?

Let's be honest, when we talk about searching the Web, we really mean using Google. In recent years it's become far and away the most popular search engine by any method of calculation - according to the stats I get from this blog, around 90% of visitors who have stumbled upon this site from an internet search have used Google to get here.

Yet could there finally be a challenger as the 'place to go' to get answers from the Web? Later this month the WolframAlpha service is set to be launched; this is not so much a search engine as a program that directly answers questions, instead of displaying a list of web pages that may contain the information you are looking for. This means that you will be able to type in questions in natural language and (hopefully!) receive accurate replies.

Not surprisingly, the promises made about the new service have got various bloggers and columnists rather excited. The more ICT-savvy types among you may want to read this article which goes into a little more detail; the rest of you would probably be advised to check the site regularly to find out when it goes live. Although of course if Wolfram Alpha really is as good as some are already claiming, then you'll surely be hearing about it again soon...

Improve Your Searching

Do you want to improve your search skills? If so, try taking a look at an excellent short video entitled Web Search Strategies in Plain English which has been put together by a company called Commoncraft. You may find it particularly useful if you are a visual learner, as it explains how to formulate and narrow a search with a series of simple diagrams. Or if you wish to find out more about other web technologies, the company has a series of similar films which you can access by clicking here.

Social Bookmarking

I've written about social bookmarking before (see previous post for details), and specifically a service called Delicious. Basically, social bookmarking sites allow you to save bookmarks so that they can be accessed from any computer, and make it easier for you to add your own tags, descriptions etc for each site to find them again quickly.

So far, so good; now this is where the 'social' part comes in. Once you've saved a bookmark, Delicious makes it very easy for you to see who else has saved the same pages or similar ones. After a while, you begin to see which other users have similar interests to yours, and so you can add them to your 'network' - this is much like making a friend request on Facebook. This means that when you log in to the site you can quickly check what these people have been tagging and vice versa, so that you each benefit from the other person's bookmarks.

In the year or so that I've been using Delicious, I've come across a number of people who are also saving information on childcare / education topics and added them to my network. A number of the sites that they've subsequently recommended have given me ideas for the blog and other work, and hopefully they're making use of the sites that I've saved too. It's an excellent example of how the Web can help users to share information for mutual benefit.

It seems to me that a service like this would be very useful for students who are usually working on an assignment alongside 20 or more others at any one time. If enough of you create an account with Delicious or a similar site and set up a network between yourselves, then all of the group should benefit from the research that each individual has carried out.

Hopefully that all makes sense! If you're already using Delicious, feel free to add me to your network - my username is allthecoloursfade (it's a long story...); this will give you instant access to my personal bookmarks containing several hundred web links to useful reports, organisations etc. If enough of you are interested in using something like this but aren't sure how to get started, then get in touch with me and I'll organise a workshop to demonstrate how it all works. Or you could just view this excellent video: Social Bookmarking in Plain English.

Safari

It's a slow news day so here's a couple of pointers to help brush up on your online research skills.

Safari is an interactive tutorial which helps users to learn about accessing, finding and reviewing information. The site has been developed by the Open University, and while a handful of its pages make specific references to the OU, almost all of its content is relevant to anyone wanting to improve their research skills. There are many other sites that cover similar themes, but Safari is probably the best example I've seen.

Also, for any Wikipedia addicts who may read this blog, this entertaining article on the BBC website may help to remind you why you should really be looking for more reliable sources to reference in your work.