After a good lunch (food was ok, and got to meet a few of the people on my ‘want to meet’ list, and an interesting conversation with Meredith Quinn from Ithaka following on from the SCA session), the first session of the afternoon is on Virtual Research Environments.

The first phase of the ‘Virtual Research Environment’ (VRE) was inspired by the Virtual Learning Environment work – with an idea that the VRE would be a bit like a VLE, but with perhaps slight variations in the tools etc.

However, what they found was this wasn’t the case (actually, I’d say that it turned out that VLEs were not what was originally envisaged, and what are currently provided in the packaged VLEs). The speaker (who didn’t introduce himself, but possibly David de Roure?) says that the VRE is the virtual environment in which a researcher works – sounds like a circular definition, but I understand what he means – there isn’t a strict definition, it centres around the tools that a researcher makes use of. And of course, this is the argument behind ‘Personal Learning Environments’ (PLEs) – that this centres on the tools a learner uses in the pursuit of education – but this has been difficult to realise from an institutional perspective.

Now the speaker is saying that there is a stack of infrastructure/standards/tools etc. that we can agree on some common elements (e.g. TCP/IP, http, ftp), but the question is how far up the stack we can go. The other extreme is those who think that research is so varied, you need a custom approach to each element.

However, there is clearly a middle ground (which probably most people inhabit) which says that there are some common elements which can be delivered as part of a ‘VRE’, and this is what the VRE program is going to look at.

First up, Liz Lyon from UKOLN is going to look at the future of VREs