What can teachers and learners do with a digital “sea of stories”?
In addition to digitising a huge variety of material (text, sound, images, moving images…) tracing about 500 years of British and international history, culture, life and society, the great majority of digital collections funded under the JISC Digitisation programme has also developed learning resources and tools to help teachers and students make the most of a digital “sea of stories”, and prevent drowning in it.
This presentation introduces some of the recently launched digital collections and highlights key interactive features that can be used by teachers and learners to complement more traditional teaching methods, including e-learning framework (Newsfilm Online); interactive writing frame and maps (Cabinet papers 1915-1978) and path creation scheme (First World War Poetry Digital Archive).
The slides also highlight some of the key issues for digitisation projects and provide examples of how these have been handled by projects within the JISC Digitisation programme including:
o Content selection
o Metadata
o Licensing and IPR
o User engagement
o Sustainability
as well as references to useful resources and toolkits.
Learning on Screen 2009 – Call for Papers
The Learning on Screen Conference 2009 will be held at The Wellcome Collection (183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE) on 7th and 8th April 2009.
This annual conference was established by the Society for Screen-Based Learning and focuses on the delivery of learning and research with moving image and sound – be it broadcasting, web delivery or cinema.
Two key themes of the conference will be:
• Disability and Access to Moving Image and Sound
• Online Moving image and Sound Services for Learning
The programme will be arranged in 30 minute sessions. The organisers are therefore seeking proposals with a speaker presentation time of 20 minutes each.
Proposals should be submitted (with a title and 200 word summary, along with your name, current position and short biography) to pa@bufvc.ac.uk on or before 15th January 2009.
For more information about the conference please visit the BUFVC web site.
“Did Bob’s Pills cure gout?”
If we make it, they might come… but it is a fact that any newly launched digital collection has to compete for attention with a huge amount of material already available on the web. Resource creators, therefore, have the challenging task of devising ways in which to interest and engage potential users.
Projects within the JISC digitisation programme recently attended a workshop which focused on how best to engage users with digital resources, the challenges this poses but also the many possibilities offered by online collections to be exploited in an interdisciplinary way.
Workshop leaders presented a framework for e-learning engagement, the Digital Artefacts for Learner engagement (DiAL-e Framework), that provides guidance on different approaches, or learning designs, that one can adopt to engage users with the resources.
Part of the workshop also explored, through group work, the value of working across collections in an interdisciplinary way. Groups made up of representatives of different digitisation projects were assigned the task to devise a question for students that would allow them to research a topic by consulting material available from their different collections.
One group, made up by staff from the John Johnson collection of Electronic Ephemera, British Newspapers and 19th Century Pamphlets projects, came up with the fictitious question, “Did Bob’s Pills cure gout?”.
As the group spokesperson explained, “only by searching to and fro between all three of the resources represented by our group, could a user discover the real story of ‘Bob’s Pills’ – the early promise (advertising testimonials – ‘Miraculous!’), the scandal (newspaper reports of nasty side effects) and the dodgy methods employed by its powerful parent company ‘Robert’s Medicines’ to try and retain its credibility (using editorial clout to influence debate in medical pamphlets).”
Finding the right answer was not the primary aim of the exercise, but far more important was the interesting journey of discovery that this process led to.
Using Sound in Education – Sound Archives User Panel
The Archive Sound Recording Project is developing its user panel, and holding a related event on 11th March 2008. Details below
The British Library’s Archival Sound Recordings (www.bl.uk/sounds) is a JISC funded project to make selected material from the Sound Archive available online to Higher and Further Education institutions. The project will be hosting a User Community event on 11th March at the British Library, St Pancras, for academics and postgraduate students who would like to become more actively involved with the service.
Reflecting the material we are making available, we are looking for specialists in Art and Design, Art History, Media, English, History, Social Sciences, Music, African Studies, Zoology, Political, Religious and Cultural Studies.
User Community members will have the opportunity to influence the direction and development of the project, support the development of case studies, host workshops, give conference papers and work with us to encourage use of the resource in the academic community.
There are two levels of involvement: User Panel members will be asked to attend a small number of meetings and workshop sessions during 2008 and early 2009, and Online Community members are invited to contribute from afar. Due to the large amount of interest that has been shown in the User Panel, we may have to be selective regarding membership of the Panel itself. Contributions by members of the Online Community are equally valuable to the project, as ultimately the community engaging with the website will be entirely online.
If you are interested in attending the event please send me an email (ginevra.house AT bl.uk) with a short CV or a link to your web-page. Places are limited, and we may have to select attendees to ensure an even spread of academic disciplines and geographical area.
Ginevra House
Engagement Officer
Archival Sound Recordings Project
British Library
Strategies for ensuring re-usable content
The JISC presenation at Educa Online focussed on strategies that funders can take to ensure material digitised in their digitisation programmes is available for re-use by a variety of different users (eg teachers, lecturers, postgrards, undergrads, interested members of public)
For JISC these five strategies are
- Ensure licensed usage for educational sector so that users can be confident IPR is cleared
- Use of open standards so that content does not become locked into particular technologies
- Establish links between content and the national curriculum so that educators can easily export content into their classes
- Develop strategic links with other relevant partners so that content gets exposed to particular user communities
- Support assisted take up programmes to provide context to content that can otherwise be overwhelming
The full slideshow is available from Slideshare
The importance of media literacy
Members of the JISC Digitisation Programme attended the Educa Online e-learning conference in Berlin at the end of November 2007.
Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, was one of the key speakers at the conference. He made an impassioned attack on what he saw as the anarchic, non-professional nature of Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, My Space and other Web2.0 services.
To Keen, relying on computer algorithms or permitting any users instant ability to upload content was destroying years of accumulated wisdom garnered through peer-review, editorial control and authorial responsibility.
Many of the Keen’s statements were rather polemical, and suggested throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
However, discussion of the issues at the conference reinforced the idea that the important thing is not to try and ignore such Web2.0 services but put media literacy at the top of the Internet and e-learning agenda. This way users will be able to distinguish a trusted website from a second-rate one, and better manipulate services such as Google and Wikipedia.
A further point to consider was that this issues should not just revolve around information technology literacy but a broader media literacy. Knowledge arrives from many different media – newspapers, television as well as the Internet and plenty others – and so to gain a proper understanding of knowledge, these media need to be considered together rather than separately.