Aidan spotted this Guardian article on the Saltire Centre, our new learning centre/library at GCU. Yup, folks, this is where I work

There are a lot more photos of it on Flickr - the ones by BigRedBall are mine. This set by JISC InfoNet is particularly good.

It’s a university, but not as we know it:

The Guardian featured our new Saltire Centre in its recent Educational Supplement (published Tuesday the 19th of September). The review is a very positive one and highlights on how the building is changing the way in which students interact with each and how the building is a sign of things to come and is paving the way for other Universities employing such a forward thinking approach to student learning and learning environments.

The Saltire Centre, a futuristic but people-friendly learning space at Scotland’s fourth largest university, has a serious purpose. But its impact on visitors and users, from the talking lifts to the inflatable igloos, is anything but solemn. It lifts their spirits and makes them smile.

Read the full article here.

(Via Spoken Word Matters).

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how to provide some sort of social network service for students and alumni at universities in Scotland. The thing is, the social side of things at Scottish universities is pretty good - but it does pretty much consist only of bars and nights out, and it’s difficult to meet many people from outside your own faculty other than through this sort of thing. What I’d like to see more of are kind of ‘half-way’ activities like informal societies and shared interest groups, to try to extend the links between disparate groups at the universities, and increase the general sense of ‘community’.

First of all, my journey started at the Facebook, an impressive social network for students and alumni, which having expanded out of its US homeland is available in about 20 HE institutions in the UK. Andrew Gruen introduced me to this, and while it’s impressive, it’s really only the beginning of what might be possible using social networks.

Last week in a History tutorial I discovered a whole range of interesting, and obscure, links between people attending. Several groups knew one or two other people there, but gradually it emerged that a lot more linked the attendees than was obvious at first. The tutor also mentioned that he had been keeping up with what a few ex-classmates were up to using Friends Reunited. While the intentions of FR may be admirable, it has two limitations for me: firstly, the only real semantic information is based on names, classes and schools; and the second is that it’s a horribly commercial endeavour. I think anything of this nature should essentially be student-led.

What struck me was that all of the extraneous information which people might want to submit could be presented in a semantic form, à la Facebook, but that on the scale of an individual institution, much deeper and more interesting links might be formed than what’s possible there.

The most obvious difference is that people will often know each other better - but on an institutional scale, it might also be possible to leverage clubs, societies and unions into providing semantics (or even allowing users to create metadata on their membership of such things that would emerge into a structure of sorts). Furthermore, the social network itself might be a highly suitable place for clubs and societies to base themselves and recruit new members. After all, if you can see others who are also interested in 2nd century Greek pottery, you might find (obscure societies permitting) that there’s a group set up for just your sort, or choose to set one up of your own.

Enter Ning. A development platform and API for social network apps. I’m going to give this a go, and possibly steal huge swathes of code (possibly). I don’t think it’d be very suitable for actual deployment but it might be useful as a playground to see what’s possible, and how it might work. Also, I’ve been tentatively looking into joining the Geek Society at UoS, so I’ll see if any of them are interested in looking into it. Spoken Word (where I work) might also be interested - hopefully in hosting, but it might also be relevant to the Shibboleth project we’re bidding for.

Unfortunately, as you can see, Strathclyde doesn’t exactly have a thriving societies scene, so I think a Glasgow-wide deployment might be appropriate. It also makes sense given the large numbers of intra-institution social links between students at the University of Glasgow, GCU, the University of Paisley and so on. Who knows, I might even get the unions on board.