Is academia ready for Web 2.0?
As part of its development, the Pre-Raphaelite Resource digitisation project recently commissioned an audience research study to consult users about whether the inclusion of Web 2.0 features on a resource of this type would be useful or important to the education community. The report indicated that:
“there is some readiness among the education community for Web 2.0 technologies but only in the context of academia as a status-conscious, competitive environment. Whilst there are clear benefits to be achieved from providing teachers and students with the opportunity to share ideas in the context of stimulus artefacts, many hold reservations about ‘giving away’ their intellectual property.”
Some interesting points to note:
• Social networking features are perceived by both HE students and lecturers as primarily for pleasure rather than for work, although for younger students, the boundaries between work and life are increasingly blurred
• Content is still king: to be a truly useful research tool, students and lecturers need to know that a resource has been created for them and has scholarly merit, and reliable and relevant content
• Wikipedia was singled out by both FE and HE interviewees as being particularly unreliable, and yet highly popular;
• The features most associated with a Web 2.0 approach (rate, comment, upload, blog and send to friend) were commonly described with reference to social networking or e-commerce sites and were largely considered non-academic and therefore inappropriate for the Pre-Raphaelite online resource.
The study was carried out by Illumina Digital.
Read the Pre-Raphaelite Resource project: Audience Research Report;
Appendix 1; Appendix 2; Appendix 3; Appendix 4; Appendix 5
Contribute your digital memories of WW1
As part of the JISC funded First World War Poetry Digital Archive project, the University of Oxford has launched a web site to allow members of the public to submit digital photographs or transcripts of items they personally hold which are related to the First World War.
The ‘Great War Archive’ site will run for three months (March-May 2008) and aims to collect together artefacts, letters, diaries, poems, stories that have been passed down from generation to generation reflecting the true experience of the First World War but which are now in danger of being lost.
This resource will subsequently be made available free of charge from Armistice Day (11 November 2008) as part of the First World War Poetry Digital Archive web site, which will feature a multimedia collection of primary material from major British poets of the First World War.
For more information on how to submit your digital items, visit the Great War Archive web site.
The above image is taken from a sketch book belonging to Percy Matthews. Matthews trained at the Ramsgate School of Art and during World War I he served on the Western Front as a Private in the Kentish Buffs, and later in Salonika as a Lieutenant in the Middlesex Regiment. It was in Salonika that he produced his remarkable sketches of scenes and characters from military and civilian life. The image was submitted to the Great War Archive by Elizabeth Masterman on behalf of Peter, his son. This, and other sketches, have now been donated to the Imperial War Museum, where they are currently undergoing conservation.
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.