Dinner for two: teaching and learning with digital content
In the last week, in preparation to bidding for the current eContent Capital programme, many institutions have made contact with Programme Managers to discuss their project ideas. Part of these conversations have focused around issues of learning resources creation, as projects in Strand A are asked to digitise special collections and then create Open Educational Resources (OER) by using the digitised material.
Learning resources can be wide ranging in type and differ substantially depending on their level of granularity and the degree to which digital content is embedded within a learning activity – as outlined in the OER infoKit.
A useful way of thinking about this range is through “the raw and the cooked” analogy – where a ‘raw’ resource is one at its most basic manifestation (eg a digital image) while a ‘cooked’ one at its most sophisticated level of interaction and embedding (e.g. interactive resources that involve a variety of tasks, aimed at specific learning outcomes or even integrated within learning designs).
The slides below highlight some of the learning resources produced by JISC funded projects which exemplify the “raw-to-cooked” range.
Next steps for Moving Image Archives
(This blog post coincides with the publication of the recommendations of the JISC Film and Sound Think Tank – pdf report)
JISC has invested signficant amounts in two fine archives of of moving images.
NewsFilm Online contains over 3,000 hours of film featuring events such as the Crystal Palace fire, an early interview with Nelson Mandela and the reaction to the death of Princess Diana.
The archive is soon to be built into a larger platform for images and sounds, called JISC MediaHub.
Meanwhile, The British Film Institute’s InView has 2,000 non-fiction UK film and television titles (covering topics such as health, education and the enivornment) from the 20th century to the early 21st.
Some high-level usage statistics are available for the NewsFilm Online resource (section 2.9 of this pdf report). It’s encouraging to see many universities have signed the licence to allow them to access and download the content. At least 200 institutions have signed up to use the resource.
However, usage of the resource remains unbalanced, with the number of searchers and user sessions being high in the first half of 2010 and then dropping away; overall it there are just over 7,000 user sessions per month.
Unfortunately, the number of times a video is accessed or downloaded is not indicated. I suspect, however, that the numbers would not be as high as one might want. Certainly compared to the numbers you might see for textural resources, usage for moving images archives is not in the same league.
Evidence from JISC’s recent Impact and Embedding projects provides a rough point of comparison. Web statistics always need to be taken with a pinch of salt, but the Vision of Britain site attracts 96,759 visitors a month, whereas the Old Bailey Proceedings attract 83,201 monthly visitors (see page 18 of this pdf for the statistics)
Why is this? What stops moving image archives from becoming more embedded in educational practice? I don’t think there is any one reason; but layers of reasons that build up to create a formidable obstacle.
1) Authentication
Because of the difficulties of copyright and licencing, many archives can only present their digitised film behind authentication.
Sometimes this does not prove a problem. The wonders of Shibboleth means access occurs with the minimum of friction.
But too often, there are barriers standing in the way. The university librarian needs to sign a licence; the researcher has forgotten his password; the teacher cannot trust that all his 20 students will remember their passwords, and foregoes using the resource.
It would be worth comparing statistics from an open archive (such as that at the Internet Archive or the Wellcome Film collection) to those behind access. And while most content on YouTube is not scholarly, it’s phenomenal user numbers say it must be getting something right.
If film is to be used more, much more of it needs to be made available under generous licencing conditions. Hopefully, the recent suggestions of the Hargreaves Review will create a framework for this to happen.
2) Moving image films are just too rich in content
Projects such as InView get funding because of scholarly richness of the content. But this actually turns out to be one of things that hold it back.
Television programmes that form part of the InView archive (such as legendary Channel 4 discussion programme After Dark) are full of meanings, interpretations and histocial and social signposts that provide fertile ground for scholarly inquiry.
When presented with such a film, sometimes several hours in length, the researcher and teacher still has to do an awful lot of work to go through it and pick out the points of interest that will engage her, her peers and her students. This might just be four or five clips of a couple minutes each; finding those ten minutes within a 2 hour file is a difficult job.
Projects such as NewsFilm Online try and get round this by ample description of each of its films. This partially helps, but creates another additional problem – now there is a huge wave of text to comprehend.
YouTube works well because the content that is submitted is often pre-edited into bize size pieces. One can instantly understand a 4 minute clip indexed on Google of the “Collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge“. But the moving image archives present too much.
3) Lack of clear methods of citation
Once a scholar has located the slice of the film that she wishes to use, how does she share that clip with other researchers? Or with her students? Or with interested members of the general public? URLs at the moment point to whole film clips; using a URL to fix a time ’slice’, or even an area of an image is still far from being part of the mainstream.
It’s considerably more difficult to share a clip of a film than it is to share an image or a portion of text.
4) Difficulties in editing and republishing
This is related to citation: downloading, editing and republishing movie content is time consuming and takes the right kind of software, hardware and a healthy amount of expertise to make it happen. Even with online video editors, it’s going to be a barrier to those who do not have the time to fiddle around.
For those republishing film on the web it requires the authentication to work and a workable platform to present the reedited film.
And even if you are not republishing on the web, there are a number of problems. It’s not easy to embed videos in PowerPoint; many have tried and failed.
And for much the same reason, when students present essays, it’s still much easier to do it with text / prose rather than try something novel like embedding a video. Presenting video is a dedicated task.
Beyond the tehcnical issues, the rights issues multiply (is it clear to the user if downloading and remixing the original material is permitted? can the remixed matieral be republished on the open web?)
5) Types of usage
Academics from the University of Hull produced a rich pedagogic framework that illustrated the many different ways in which moving image archives could be embedded into educational practice.
So, the framework, demonstrates how a teacher can exhibit ‘dissonance and shock in a small teaching space‘ or how ‘students can share and build knowledge in a collaborative fashion‘
It’s useful, inspiring stuff, but I suspect that most teachers still only really conceive of using moving images as simple illustrations or analogies – and for this short clips on YouTube are much more successful than digitised archives.
To use the videos in the time suggested by the University of Hull framework takes time and effort – some lecturers will engage, but it takes a special amount of passioan and dedication to make it work fully in the classroom. For some, pressed by other concerns, elsewhere it will just be too much.
———–
In looking at moving image archives, it’s worth comparing them to YouTube. Why does YouTube work? Why does it get so many hits?
Largely, because it avoids the issues cited above. No authentication issues on YouTube; complex resources are reduced to clips; clips can be easily embedded elsewhere; the illustrative or anectodal power of YouTube videos is easily understandable and reusable by anyone. plus there is critical mass of material on YouTube – even though there is plenty of guilty cats and sporting cock-ups, there are plenty of little gems which can act as brief illustrations within the class.
None of this is to say that moving images are not useful for education. They are. Moving image archives are immensely powerful in conveying historical and contemporary narratives.
But we’ve still not found the techniques to allow such archives to be used in education. And if we don’t we will never the nurture digital moving image in the way it deserves.
JISC funding call for eContent – recording available
The recording of the online briefing session held on 21st June for the JISC funding call 6/11 eContent Capital programme can now be accessed through Elluminate Live! at http://bit.ly/mS0AXi .
The power point slides can be downloaded here (see bottom of the page).
The briefing highlighted key issues to be considered in proposals as well as some hints on bid writing.
If you would like to get in touch to discuss your project idea, please contact:
Alastair Dunning (Strand B and C) at a.dunning@jisc.ac.uk
Paola Marchionni (Strand A and B) at p.marchionni@jisc.ac.uk
eContent Call – Agenda for Online Town Meeting
JISC is holding an online town meeting for those interested in the applying for funding in the latest eContent call
The town meeting is on Tuesday 21st June and starts at 11am.
The town meeting is being run via some software called Elluminate / Blackboard Connect. This is free and particpaints should follow this link to initiate their session – http://bit.ly/iizinj
Delegates are advised to test software and hardware before the start of the session and advice is provided by Elluminate
The agenda for the day is the following
- Protocol for using Elluminate
- Introduction and Background to the Call
- Outline of the Three Strands
- Key Issues to Consider
- Bid Writing Tips
- Question and Answer sessions will be interspersed throughout the agenda
Also, don’t forget to contact Alastair Dunning or Paola Marchionni to book a surgery session, even if only for a general chat about your application. We’re likely to be able to help strengthen your bid. We have an extra day lined up to add to the original three.
- Wednesday 22nd June (Alastair Dunning and Paola Marchionni)
- Friday 24th June (Alastair Dunning and Paola Marchionni)
- Wednesday 29th June (Paola Marchionni)
- Tuesday 5th July (Alastair Dunning)
Issues from the Digging into Data Conference
The eight projects from the international Digging into Data programme presented their project findings at a conference in Washington DC in June 2011. Much was discussed; here are the pertinent topics from a JISC point of view.
- Visualisation of data was a crucial medium. If you have results from over 190,000 trials (as the Data Mining with Criminal Intent project does), the analysis will not make sense until the results are plotted in a meaningful way, with blips and rises and falls in graphs indicating new areas for academic exploration.
Yet, many speakers had a methodological anxiety about visualisation. Did sampling and framing graphs lead to errors in causation? How was absent or flawed evidence represented? Visualisation tools need not only to be subtle and engaging, but they had to wear their methodologies on their sleeves.
- The Digging into Data programme was framed for innovative projects with a focus on research outcomes. But you could see principal investigators itching to create more sustainable services that would allow their raw data and their ingenious visualisation tools to be used by a wider community of users.
The Mapping the Republic of Letters site, allowing users to trace the movement of intellectual thought in the eighteenth century is not only intriguing academically but is visually fascinating.
But it’s complex technology, which will shift as new content and new techniques arrive. How do such services get sustained for broader use?
- The Digging into Image Data (looking at authorship issues in medieval manuscripts, maps and quilts) had to draw on numerous types of expertise. Not just in those with different discipline strengths in the humanities (medievalists, art historians, historical geographers) but in different faculties (computer science and social sciences, plus developers)
However, one stakeholder was missing; very few libraries were cited during the conference, save as a source for original material. Do they really have no role to play in future digital research? Perhaps libraries can provide some vital support for the sustainability? Or for the difficult work of drawing together many sources, and normalising the metadata so they can be cross-searched?
- Many at the conference voiced the difficulties in convincing ‘traditional humanities scholars’ of the worth of exploring big data. The respondent to the Mining a Year of Speech project demonstrated that the ‘Digging’ community is involved in the big, human questions that are the staple of all humanities research.
For the linguist, harvesting the Internet can provide them with an enriched source of data for questions linguists may have been tackling for years – “do women talk quicker than men?”, “what makes someone sound unfriendly?”, “how does a student speak when he is uncertain?” or even “how does language change when people flirt with one another?”
If a methodological rift does emerge within the humanities, it is by returning to the shared questions that the rift can be bridged.
Does your collection include “treasures, oddities, and curiosities”?
Media coverage is always a good way of raising the profile of (digital) collections. If your university’s collection includes “treasures, oddities and curiosities”, the Times Higher Education would like to know about it for a new series they’re running entitled “Odds and Quads“.
Last week, the magazine reveiwed the Knitting Collection based at the University of Southampton, which had been part of a recent JISC-funded project, Lookk Here!
Knitting Collection, University of Southampton
Send suggestions for this series on the treasures, oddities and curiosities owned by universities across the world to: matthew.reisz@tsleducation.com.
JISC Grant Funding 06/11: JISC eContent Capital Programme
New funding for eContent is available from JISC in the following areas:
Strand A: Digitisation for Open Educational Resources (OER)
Release of digitised educational content for use and re-use on an open access basis through digitisation of special collections and subsequent creation of Open Educational Resources (OERs) for embedding in teaching and learning.
Funding available: £1m; 8-12 projects between £75,000 and £125,000 each
Duration: November 2011-January 2013
Strand B: Mass Digitisation
Mass digitisation of special collections and other analogue material of educational use that meets the needs of, and are of benefit to, learning, teaching and research.
Funding available: £3.4m; 7-9 projects between £150,000 and £750,000 each
- Duration: November 2011 – July 2013
Strand C: Clustering Digital Content
Bringing together existing, but currently scattered, digital content in innovative ways.
Funding available: £1m; 6-8 projects between £100,000 and £150,000 each
- Duration: November 2011 – January 2013
An online briefing event will take place on Tuesday 21 June 2011 at 11am. The participant link for this is: http://bit.ly/iizinj. Bidders are strongly encouraged to attend this briefing, although a recording will be made available after the event (link for recording: http://bit.ly/mS0AXi). The online briefing event will take place using Elluminate Live! Bidders are strong advised to view the hardware and software pre-requisites for Elluminate Live! by visiting http://www.elluminate.com/support.
For more information please see the JISC web site
JISC Presentation at Digging into Data Conference
Presentation given at Digging into Data conference in Washington DC, June 2011
Download the presentation via Slideshare
Some quotes on digital resources
a) After using the British Library Archival Sound Recordings website, an FE teacher commented: “The realism of it [interviews with photographers included on the site] inspired students and encouraged them to source other material beyond Google searches. It also placed the photographs in context, which you don’t get from Google.”
b) A teacher who incorporated digitised material from the First World War Poetry Digital Archive in the classroom found that: “Most students seem to find online material far more appealing than printed material, but the content of web sites is often less than academic. It’s very good to be able to refer to students to a web site of such quality from a sound academic source.”
c) A Lecturer in Historical Geography, who used the Histpop: Online Historical Population Reports website in second and third year undergraduate courses, which led to several high quality Final Year dissertations, noted how: “Histpop made it possible to do a completely different project [at undergraduate level]… It allows them [the students] to start using primary sources and do some basic research, which otherwise they wouldn’t be able to do.”
d) More recently, the University of East London devised a new course, Performing the Archive, based on digitised collections on the Online Theatre History Archive website, which they developed with a number of partners as part of the CEDAR project.