JISC Digitisation Programme

Despite the unbiquitous presence of moving image and sound in much of our daily lives, it has largely failed to make any impact in academic teaching, learning and research.

In an attempt to strengthen the role of film and sound in further and higher education, the Film and Sound Think Tank has recently launched a set of videos.

The films examine the role of audio and visual content in education, and how the protential of this media can be unlocked.

The fourth video is available on Vimeo:

JISC – Unlocking Artists’ Rights – JISC Film and Sound Think Tank

As an aside, it is interesting to note the number of views these videos have had in their short life on YouTube (one of the videos – Using Ausio in education – had 138 views).

While the numbers don’t necessarily tell us the whole story – how long were they viewed? – this may already signal the importance and levels of interest in this topic to the education community and beyond.

The first of this year’s releases of the John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera has just been announced.

The publication is a series of fourteen specially commissioned essays that respond to a diverse selection of items from the John Johnson Collection.

These concise and illuminating studies – which have been contributed by Rob Banham, Troy Bickham, Robert Colls, Simon Eliot, D. J. Taylor, Michael Twyman and Mariana Warner – are available in the John Johnson Collection alongside digital facsimile images of the items to which they relate.

The complete list of essays is accessible via a link on the John Johnson Collection home page or by clicking the Responses link in the toolbar that appears at the top of every screen in the John Johnson Collection.

New Content

Facsimile images of more than 13,700 items have been added to the John Johnson Collection with this release, bringing the total number of scanned items to 62,421 (a total of 167,356 images), including more than 19,700 pieces of theatrical and non-theatrical ephemera from the Nineteenth-Century Entertainment category and more than 9,500 items from the Booktrade category.

Over 10,900 Popular Prints are now available in facsimile form, along with more than 20,700 items from Advertising and over 1,400 from Crimes, Murders and Executions.

Future Developments: Enhanced Records for Crime, Murders and Execution

Of the five major categories of material included in The John Johnson Collection, the Crimes, Murders and Executions section is one of the most popular and most often consulted, providing documentary evidence which supports research in various aspects of social history.

The Bodleian Library and ProQuest are enhancing this material, with the help of JISC e-Content funding, by mapping individual records to the appropriate entries in a number of external online resources that contain references, citations or other related material, thereby offering users the scope to explore more easily themes and narratives encountered in the John Johnson Collection.

The project will guide researchers to other information directly related to their line of enquiry, and allow them to build connections or follow trails between different resources.

The resources that the project will link to are:

• Old Bailey Proceddings Online
• Harvard law School Library’s digitised broadside collection: Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders
• Newgate calendar
• Bodleian Library’s digitised catalogue of broadside ballads.

 More information is available about the project on the JISC website for this project.

The recent launch of JorumOpen sees free access to a growing collection of open educational resources.

JorumOpen will allow lecturers and teachers  to share materials under the Creative Commons licence framework.  This will allow for easier sharing, grants users greater rights for use and re-use of online content and is easier to understand.

Jorum has also developed a range of  Youtube videos on using JorumOpen.

For digitisation projects this is an ideal place to both deposit any educational resources you may have developed as outputs for your project, and also offers a unique resource for uncovering and reusing new resources.

Last week saw the launch of the Resurecting the Past Project from the University of Bristol.

The project has built a 3D model of the Pompeii Court from the Crystal Palace exhibition in the virtual world of Second Life.  

The project aims to:

• to make accessible to the public knowledge of the Crystal Palace and its collections.
• to increase awareness of and stimulate research into the Crystal Palace and to broaden our understanding of the place and perception of Classics in the nineteenth century beyond the universities and museums by reconstructing the collection and display techniques of a private speculative enterprise that shaped and reflected mid century ideas of taste.
• through dissemination and evaluation of our project to stimulate new approaches to teaching & learning, to encourage dialogue between academic institutions and the wider community and to encourage the increasing use of digital technology within the Arts and Humanities to reach its full, interactive potential.

The project launched with a party in Second Life  on Wednesday 16th December, and can be visited by following the link from the project webpages.

More details about the project can be found on the JISC webpages.

Jorum is a free online service providing access to teaching and learning resources, for teaching and support staff in UK Further and Higher Education Institutions.

The Jorum team is organising a series of free training events, commencing September 2009. These sessions will provide a blend of presentations, demonstrations and hands-on activities, including searching and depositing resources into Jorum, and exploring issues surrounding the creation of learning and teaching materials.

Delegates will also have the opportunity to try out the new Jorum OER (Open Educational Resources) Deposit Tool, and see examples of other tools that can assist you in creating learning and teaching resources.

The events are free to attend and are aimed at staff from FE and HE institutions who are involved in producing learning and teaching resources.

Places are limited (according to venue), and will be awarded on a first come, first served basis.

The first training event is scheduled to take place at UCLAN (University of Central Lancashire) on Monday 14th September 2009.

Further training events are being planned – so be the first to know and sign up to the Jorum Update mailing list to receive the dates when they are released.

Visit the JORUM website for further information and booking.

JISC has today realised its guide to using Second Life for lecturers and teachers.

The guide has been written by lecturers, for lecturers and aims to assist lecturers in their use of virtual worlds for teaching and  learning.

The aim of the guide is to present the basics in order to help lecturers experiment, rather than them getting lost in mastering the detail of the virtual environment.

The Enriching Digital Resources strand of the JISC Digitisation Programme includes the Resurrecting the Past project.

This project uses the immersive virtual environment of Second Life as a way to recreate the Pompeii exhibition from the Crystal Palace exhibition, and uses the space to engage school children in a museum exhibition.

More details about the Ressurecting the Past project can be found on their website.

The new JISC guide to Second Life can be downloaded from the JISC website.

Moving images and sound recordings are still relatively little used as support to teaching and learning in comparison to other, more established, digital resources such as images and text material. However, they do offer great potential for being exploited in innovative ways within teaching and students work, as well as, of course, research.

The digitisation of key sections of the London Broadcasting Company/Independent Radio News (LBC/IRN) archive, the most important commercial radio archive in the UK, offers over 3000 hours of news and current affairs between 1973-1990s, which often present a different approach to state-funded (BBC) radio programmes.

On the LBC/IRN web site one can download a brief but useful paper by Dr Hugh Chignell, of Bournemouth University, who’s been associated with the project since its inception, on suggestions for how the archive can be used by teachers and students, (Chignell, H., 2009. LBC/IRN Archive Teaching and Learning Case Study. Poole: Bournemouth University. (Unpublished))

In his introduction, Dr Chignell highlights some general points before delving into more detail:

-The archive is important both in terms of content (especially news and current affairs coverage of political, economic, social and cultural events and developments) and for also for production techniques employed (including interviews, vox pops, phone-ins, reportage and rolling news).
- The online resource lends itself to student centred learning in which the student can explore the archive using the search and key word functions. [...]
- Perhaps the most exciting archive-based student projects will include examples of audio which have been downloaded and then edited and incorporated into a web based report with audio examples, possibly within a multimedia product.

Dr Chignell then proceeds to suggest some key themes of the period covered in the archive that can be traced through the recordings, such as:

- the election and politics of Margaret Thatcher
- the Miners’ strike
- issues relating to Health and AIDS
- others issues of social relevance such as Marriage.

This project was funded by the JISC Digitisation programme and delivered by Bournemouth University in collaboration with BUFVC.

Other sound and moving images projects funded by the JISC Digitisation programme are the British Library Archival Sound Recording, and the British Film Institute’s InView project.

Entries for the 2009 Jorum Learning & Teaching competition are now open.

This is the third year that the Association for Learning Technology has run the awards.  The competition previously known as the Learning Object competition, will be asking for the submission of exciting and innovative learning and teaching resources that have been created under a Creative Commons licence to showcase at the conference.

The Award will be presented at ALT’s annual conference, ALT-C, during the Wednesday Gala dinner on 9 September. This year ALT-C will be held at Manchester, 8 – 10 September 2009. 

The deadline for entries is 3rd July 2009.

First, second and third prizes kindly donated by Intrallect will be awarded to the top three resources entered. 1st prize £300; 2nd prize £200; 3rd prize £100.

Full competition details can be found on the JORUM competitions page.

There was an interesting article on the BBC recently that looked at how new technologies (specifically immersive environments using avatars, such as Second Life), are changing the way we interact with cultural artifacts (such as art and music). 

Furthermore, Bill Thompson, the articles author, points out that these environments are changing the very way such artifacts are created, and if institutions do not adapt and adopt, they risk becoming obsolete.  This ‘creative destruction’ has seen Google eliminate all competition, and Microsoft flourish in spite of IBM. 

What is even more interesting, and is something that is being explored by the Resurrecting the Past – Virtual Antiquities in the 19th Century, is the space that exists between us and the relics of the past. 

In creating a virtual museum environment within Second Life, and exploring innovative ways to allow us to interact with a reconstruction of the Pompeii Court from the Crystal Palace, the project is creating a new space between the present and the past

The use of technology will not simply allow cultural institutions the chance to survive and adapt to technological changes.  It also gives these institutions a chance to develop a space that allows all of us an opportunity to interact with the past in a completely new way. 

In creating this space inbetween there is the opportunity not only to interact with the past, but also to interrogate the present.  It allows us all to ask questions of those cultural institutions that currently negotiate between us and our cultural artifacts, and to question whether what they are doing is relevant to where we are today. 

By funding such innovative projects, by allowing this space, academic and cultural institutions are able to respond to the ways technology changes the demands of users, and what their role is within this relationship. 

Rather than ‘creative destruction’ such projects can help foster a sense of ‘creative engagement’, not just with technology, but with how all of us interact with our own cultural heritage.

More information on the Resurrecting the Past project is available on their Blog.

The Learning on Screen Conference 2009 will be held at The Wellcome Collection, on 7th and 8th April 2009 and will focus on:

Disability and Access to Moving Image and Sound.

The Learning on Screen Conference will offer an opportunity for academic service providers, web developers, lecturers, broadcasters, educationists, advisors, publishers and representatives of disability groups to meet to see examples of best practice, to learn about new techniques and to discuss the challenge of reaching the standards of delivery required by legislation to meet the needs and expectations of users.

For more information and details on how to book a place see the conference programme.