FÉILTE 2016 took place on Saturday, October 1st in the RDS, Dublin. The Festival of Education in Learning and Teaching Excellence, is a celebration of teaching which showcases the work of teachers who are leading innovative learning projects.
Now in its fourth year, the day provided a platform for teachers to share their stories of innovation with each other and the public. Read more
Science Foundation Ireland will be allocated nearly €40 million to fund major research projects over the next 4-5 years. The announcement was made by the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Mary Mitchell O’Connor recently and will see SFI distribute the funding through their Investigators Programme. The awards will support over 200 researchers and the amounts awarded will range from between €500,000 to €2.7 million over four to five year periods. Read more
In todays working environment, keeping your IT skills up-to-date is important for all employees, regardless of what profession they are in.
Even the Irish Defense Forces need to ensure that their personnel are IT competent.
Flight Sergeant Will Fitzgerald, Chief Information Technologies Instructor at the Defence Forces, has offered some thoughts on the integration of ECDL into the Irish Defence Forces and how important it is for their personal development. Read more
An interview given by Our Deputy CEO Mary Cleary has been featured in the Sunday Business Post.
Titled ‘Back to School for Techies’ Mary discusses the return of the academic year and why professionals should also think about upskilling, she also talks about the introduction of the CPD system and how IT professionals can utilize it to build and track their training profile, by saying;
“It’s a very busy time for us, apart from the school agenda, everyone is thinking about their professional development. The European e-Competence Framework enables people to give a structure to their career planning. One of the things that people lose track of is a career path, as it’s very common to change”
In January 2011, a National Electronic General GP Referral Pilot Project was established to achieve an electronic referral pathway between GPs and seven pilot hospitals. The Cork and Kerry Reconfiguration Team managed the pilot on behalf of the Clinical Programmes and Strategy Directorate (CPSD) Primary Care Programme. The Adelaide and Meath Hospital, incorporating the National Children’s Hospital (now Tallaght Hospital, Dublin) was included in the pilot, along with the six acute hospitals in Cork and Kerry. Read more
A new paper from researchers at the University of Oxford, prepared for the European Commission, has examined ways to raise productivity and reduce the digital divide in Europe. The paper, titled, ‘Digitalisation, Jobs and Convergence in Europe: Strategies for Closing the Skills Gap’, looks at the effect that digital technology has had on the workplace, including automation and the introduction of new tasks and activities to existing jobs. Read more
An innovative new programme to meet emerging roles in software engineering has been launched by ICT Ireland Skillnet in collaboration with the Irish Computer Society (ICS), Institute of Technology Tallaght (ITT) and the Irish chapter of Iasa Global. The new MSc in Applied IT Architecture was developed with the support of Fidelity Investments Ireland, IBM Ireland, CISCO Ireland and LM Ericsson. Read more
Via www.ted.com
Research carried out at Oxford University in 2013, concluded that almost one in every two jobs have a high risk of being automated by machines in the near future. Machine learning is the technology that’s responsible for most of this disruption, as it’s the most powerful branch of artificial intelligence. According to Oxford, it allows machines to learn from data and mimic some of the things that humans can do. Read more
Looking back at the year 2001, it’s hard to imagine how different the world of technology was and how we have come such a long way in fifteen years.
Global internet usage was at just 5% then, compared to 50% today, and connection speeds were depressingly slow. For those fortunate enough to have internet access, there wasn’t much to do besides email and some very basic services (on poorly designed websites!). Google was merely in idea stages, Amazon was a start-up and YouTube and social media didn’t exist at all yet. Mobile phones were quite common, but weren’t capable of much more than a phone call or text.
So thinking about how far we’ve come since then, are you prepared to see what’s in store for the next fifteen years? According to Forbes.com, here’s 5 tech trends we’ll see by 2031:
An innovative new programme to meet emerging roles in software engineering has been launched by ICT Ireland Skillnet in collaboration with the Irish Computer Society (ICS), Institute of Technology Tallaght (ITT) and the Irish chapter of Iasa Global. The new MSc in Applied IT Architecture was developed with the support of Fidelity Investments Ireland, IBM Ireland, CISCO Ireland and LM Ericsson. Read more
GPs across the country can now refer patients into every acute hospital electronically, following the completion of phase one of the HSE National eReferral Programme. Over 10,550 eReferrals were received in hospitals in May, up significantly from the 2,289 received in August 2015, when the new process was initiated. Using the e-referral solution, a GP can submit a referral electronically, directly from their practice management system to the hospital in question using the HIQA-approved referral form and immediately receive an acknowledgement confirming receipt. Read more
HISI (the Health Informatics Society of Ireland) are proud announce that they will be sponsoring the eHealth Award at this years’ IMSTA Awards, taking place on Thursday 6th October 2016 at the Croke Park Conference Centre.
The same award was also sponsored by HISI last year, with the the winner being Beaumont Hospital with its Patient Buddy Transplant Ap.
Patient Buddy is a patient self-management platform for Kidney Transplant patients to take control of their condition. The solution is empowering Kidney Transplant patients through a smartphone application with home monitoring and diagnostics, helping them to improve the lifespan of their Transplant and giving their transplant care team additional data to improve their care.
Via ECDL Foundation
The ECDL Foundation have published a new position paper showing the danger of relying on self-assessment to demonstrate digital skills.
How do you measure digital skills? How do you work out whether a candidate for a job has the skills and competences that they will need to do the work? Letting people self-assess their skills can seem like a simple solution, but it brings a big risk that they will misjudge their abilities.
Read more
IMSTA have announced the award categories for their annual ceremony, being held on Thursday 6th October 2016 at the Croke Park Conference Centre.
HISI are delighted to sponsor the eHealth/Digital Award again this year. Read more
As robots become an increasingly important asset in the workforce, a report by McKinsey shows that jobs in food service and manufacturing may be among the first lost to automation.
The report, which analyzed thousands of workplace activities in the United States to determine which occupations are most at risk, found that those which rely on ‘predictable physical activities’, like food preparation, have a higher likelihood of automation, followed by data processing and data collection. Read more
