Developing tools to record and annotate research presentations and workshops

CREW (Collaborative Research Events on the Web) aims to improve access to research event content by capturing and publishing the scholarly communication that occurs at events like conferences and workshops. The project is developing tools to enable presentations and similar sessions to be recorded and annotated and enable powerful searches across distributed conference and related research data. Searches will yield results within written documents such as abstracts and papers and also in rich audio-visual content, such as clips from presentations, questions asked at a talk or Twitter messages during presentations.

The project is a collaboration between the Universities of Manchester, Bristol and Wales, Bangor and is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) through the second phase of the Virtual Research Environments (VRE) programme. The project builds upon the success of Iugo and Memetic by developing and integrating these technologies and embedding them in a variety of authentic research settings, including Intute, a national JISC service to provide access to web resources for research to UK universities, the Institute of Health Sciences, which promotes health sciences research in Manchester and scientific visualization research groups.

Project website: http://www.crew-vre.net/
Intro video (5mins - good overview): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceFaFA4WUJc

Talis launches angel fund for Open Education Projects

Talis is offering grant funding of between £1,000 and £15,000 for Open Education projects. Aimed at individuals or small groups, the Talis Incubator for Open Education provides angel funding and other forms of assistance for ideas and projects that have the potential to further the cause of Open Education through the use of technology. All they ask in return is that you donate or ‘open source’ the intellectual property generated back to the communities that could benefit most from your work.

The Talis Incubator for Open Education scheme will run for 12 months from September 2009.

The submission deadline for proposals for the first round of awards is the 31st December 2009, with the first awards made towards the middle of March 2010.

The submission deadline for the second round is the 31st June 2010, with the awards made towards the middle of September 2010.

For more info see: http://blogs.talis.com/education/incubator/