Research

Volunteering makes you happy!

New research by the Department of Government suggests volunteering makes you happy and improves quality of life.

The study suggests that voluntary acts, like involvement in a community project, can be good for a person’s health, a child’s education and reduce the crime rate.

Professor Paul Whiteley said: 'Our results reveal an interesting link between helping others and enjoying a good quality of life. It seems that when we focus on the needs of others, we may also reap benefits ourselves. Voluntary activity in the community is associated with better health, lower crime, improved educational performance and greater life satisfaction.'

The study found a link between communities with volunteering programmes and people who were happy with their life. The research was based on 101 randomly selected district authorities. The district found to have the greatest happiness rating, with high levels of volunteering, was Sevenoaks, followed by Chester and south Cambridge. Places scoring lower grades in the life satisfaction league were Huntingdon, South Derbyshire and Havering (east London).

Not surprisingly the study has received comments in the national and regional press. The Daily Telegraph reported that Peter Rogers, vice-chairman of the Sevenoaks Society, was not surprised by these findings and said: 'It’s a very pleasant place to live. I feel it does have a good community spirit.' However there has been criticism from those towns described as unhappy. The Hunts Post, which covers the Huntingdon area, quoted district council leader, Derek Holley: 'I’m staggered. It’s completely at odds with all the research that we see.'

Chimera receives e-learning funding

Chimera, the University's Institute for Socio-technical Innovation and Research, based at Adastral Park, has just started a £105,000 Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funded project to develop new e-learning tools.

The DELTA project aims to develop a new range of tools using open standards and specifications that will allow practitioners and learners to share e-learning resources.

Dr Michael Gardner, Deputy Director of Chimera, explained: 'The project will use some of the techniques from the emerging 'Semantic web'. Rather than just searching for resources using simple keywords, such as in Yahoo and Google, the system will be able to reason about these resources and provide much more sophisticated search and retrieval mechanisms. Ultimately, users should be able to search for any type of e-learning resource by either following a structured question/answer dialogue or by browsing a 'graph' for the domain that they are searching within.

'Initially the project will focus on the sharing of teaching and learning case studies but the system will be designed to support the sharing of any type of online resource, such as teaching plans. The project is also considering the challenge of 'growing context', whereby users will also be able to comment on and annotate any of the resources in the system, and these comments and annotations are then made available to the rest of the user community.'

For more information visit the e-learning tools project website at www.jisc.ac.uk/etools.html.

Also in the printed November edition of Wyvern:

• making sense of statistics