Repositories

OERs: what’s stopping us?

The recent  M25 Learning Technology Group meeting focussed on Open Educational Resources (OERs).   Despite my somewhat limited knowledge of this topic it fell to me, as the meeting’s organiser, to provide an intro.  So here it is once again if you missed it.  OERs are teaching & learning materials available for reuse without charge. They are one element of a much wider Open Education movement (not sure that’s quite the right word but it’ll do). While reading about OERs I came across an interesting video lecture Openness, Aggregation and the Future of Education (50-mins) by David Wiley that’s worth a look.

In my introduction I gave examples of 4 different  OER-related areas as well as highlighting some upcoming OER conferences & UK projects:

I also highlighted two blog posts that put the case for and against OERs: The OER Debate (Patrick McAndrew) Those OER Issues (Martin Weller). The UNESCO OER Wiki is another place to look for further information on OERs.

Back to the meeting and I just wanted to highlight one of the four sessions which was a discussion led by Leo Havemann, Sarah Sherman & Bryony Bramer from the Bloomsbury group of UoL colleges.

They got us all discussing the barriers that prevent people sharing and those that prevent the use of others’ OERs.  Their This Educational Resource Could not be Opened slides includes a compilation of both the barriers and potential solutions we identified in our discussions (slides 6 & 7).  Despite the success of the likes of MIT & the OU – in terms of getting stuff shared if not re-used – it seems there is more than a long way to go & much to overcome for most institutions and their teaching staff.

Error message from Bloomsbury slides was generated here: http://atom.smasher.org/error/

This post is syndicated from: http://mattlingard.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/oers-whats-stopping-us/

March 30th, 2010|Open Education, Syndicated, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off on OERs: what’s stopping us?|

Launching JISC Digital Media at BAFTA

Yesterday afternoon I went off to the salubrious surroundings of Piccadilly to BAFTA headquarters to attend a launch event for the newly rebranded ‘JISC Digital Media‘ service. The new service previously existed under the name TASI, which we were told, in no uncertain terms, we are no longer allowed to mention. I came across TASI many years ago as a very useful support website for using digital images in teaching. Not only providing the technical know-how, but also some very good pedagogical reasoning for using images.

Video and sound too!
As part of their relaunch and new funding, the new JISC Digital Media service also supports use of video and audio material in addition to still images. To quote the launch booklet “JISC Digital Media exists to help the UK’s FE and HE communities embrace and maximise the use of digital media”. They’ve redesigned their website, with a bright new look, to make it far easier to find useful support guides and related materials, such as upcoming training workshops.

Digital media helpdesk
One thing that had passed me by previously was that they also run a national helpdesk. They can provide technical and copyright advice for institutions looking to set up support for digital media use within their teaching and learning. They can also provide help for more complex requests such as setting up a digitisation programme within an institution – possibly leading to consultancy.

Upcoming training courses run by JISC Digital Media include “Copyright and Digital Images”, “Colour Management”, “Building a Departmental Image Collection”, and “Essential Photoshop Skills” and many others.

If you are an LSE member of staff then please contact us at CLT if you have any questions about the JISC Digital Media service or about digital media in general.

Kris.

March 6th, 2009|Images, Audio & Video, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off on Launching JISC Digital Media at BAFTA|

Language Box

Today I’ve been attending a Language Box event at Kings: Rethinking Teaching and Learning Repositories. Language Box is a JISC-funded e-repository. I arrived, as is my way, with a healthy scepticism (and a scepticism that’s always higher when it comes to repositories)! However, I think I’ve been won over.

In essence Language Box is an online location for teachers to upload, store, find & share teaching materials.  Resources (videos, links, worksheets, powerpoints etc) are added to a single collection but you can then easily manage your own sub-collections and favourites.

The project has three approaches that I particularly like and that might just make it a success:

  1. Asking the practitioners what they actually want. (Current repositories don’t seem to work, why not?)
  2. A focus on making it work for individuals to manage their own resources… and if sharing & re-use occurs then that’s a bonus
  3. Simplicity (we were asked to fill in a usability survey 🙂 )

Language Box has some similarities to the work we have been doing with Columbia University: French Language Teaching Resource but also some key differences:

  • Our project provides lists of tags to choose from to classify material when adding it to the collection, whereas choosing tags in Language Box is left to the user.
  • But the real difference and one that perhaps gives Language Box more potential is that the material can be visible,  accessible & usable by students without needing to transfer it to the VLE (although you can also do that if you want to, but why bother when you can link).

One of the most interesting debates today was whether or not students should be allowed to add material to Language Box. There seemed to be a 50:50 split on this one., with some feeling that giving students an opportunity to create resources would be a great learning activity but others wanting it kept as a teachers’ collection of ‘quality materials’.

This is not the first time this week that I’ve been looking at storing stuff.

Languages Show-and-Tell

Today I attended a Language Centre show-and-tell organised by Hervé Didiot-Cook and attended by teachers from the LSE as well as our good friends from Columbia University Language Resource Center – Bill & Stéphane.

Challenges/Risks of Second Life

Tamy Zupan, the LSE’s SL evangelist (!) talked us thru’ some of the challenges we are going to face as we look at introducing Second Life.  These include an interface with a steep learning curve, negative attitudes from staff and students, a lack of narrative (as it’s a virtual world not a game), unclear moral & ethical boundaries and some cultural challenges and of course the pedagogy: how to take advantage of the potential that it offers for for language teaching and how to assess this.  CLT will be supporting the Spanish teachers in a pilot which, for now, will very much be an opt-in for students who are keen to explore the use of SL in their Spanish studies.

Ireland's National Digital Learning Repository

Sunset over Galway BayI had a really interesting meeting this morning with Paul Gormley & Michelle Tooher, staff at CELT, NUI Galway. We were swapping notes on our respective teaching material repositories. On the face of it the projects are very different but as we discussed there are lessons to be learnt from each other and ideas to pinch!

The National Digital Learning Repository (NDLR) is a national project bringing together all Irish universities & Technology institutes. It is similar to the UK’s Jorum in some respects and also based on the Intra library software. I don’t know much about Jorum but a key difference to the NDLR approach has been to base it around communities of practices and devloping these communities first in the hope that the use of a shared repository will follow. The guys at Galway are the leads for the Modern Languages’ Community of Practice. Each community has a blog (see previous link) which acts as a focus for the community. Before ‘selling’ the repository across the institutions the MFL team populated it with 100 locally avialble resources (mp3s, PPT files etc). The collection has now grown significantly (I forget exactly!).

I was introducing them to our more informal joint project with the University of Columbia which is being piloted with LSE French teachers having worked successfully in NYC with other languages. Earlier this week we held the first training session for teachers so that they could start uploading resources. The repository is based on drupal and is open to all to browse resource titles and descriptions but retrieving a resource requires a login.  It uses a predefined taxonomy which staff use to ‘tag’ their resources.  Items can be located by searching or by browsing the tags.

The NDLR Galway team mentioned they are looking at introducing creative commons licensing for the repository and this is something we should look at too as well as joining in there existing community of practice.

The other area we touched on and both want to explore further is how we encourage staff to provide feedback on how they’ve used each others’ resources without diminishing their desire to make their stuff available and subject to comment.

Image: http://flickr.com/photos/bhalash/123929842/

June 26th, 2008|Open Education, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off on Ireland's National Digital Learning Repository|

Open Education

I have just come across the Cape Town Open Declaration, a “statement of strategy and …commitment [to open education]”. The focus is very much on the development and sharing of ‘open educational resources’ but there is stuff about the sharing of teaching practices too. It all seems quite reasonable but there is a bit of a debate around it of course, see Downes vs Wiley – Cato and Cicero revisited and Open education and the cape Town declaration. The declaration is supposed to spark dialogue so it’s off to a good start, although I suspect that particular dialogue was already there!

We’re currently working with the French department here at LSE and colleagues at Columbia University on a repository for sharing French teaching resources and while the teachers behind the project are keen to share the fruits of their labour I know that other teachers here and elsewhere are not, particularly when sharing goes beyond the dept / institution. I’m off to become a sceptical signatory if they’ll allow such a thing!

Coincidently, I also came across U-Now: an open courseware initiative at Nottingham university this week.

PS When did Martin Dougiamas relocate to Austria 😉 (See Cape Town signatories)

Investigating Drupal

I have been looking at Drupal as part of a slow burning project which is aiming to create a repository for language teachers to share teaching resources. The project is a collaboration between 3 universities but will initially run as a pilot for the French department at LSE. It’s still in the development stage but some real resources will be added soo. Project >>

Drupal is essentially a content management system – see for example HarvardScience & MiNa – with social software features built-in: tagging, blogging, RSS etc. It’s open source and one of the areas we’d like to explore, is content sharing through possible integration with Moodle, our virtual learning environment. At present integration only seems to go as far as single sign on which is aimed at those who might be using Drupal for a portal or intranet site alongside Moodle as a VLE. One of the aims of the OpenAcademic project is to integrate Drupal, Moodle & MediaWiki but it’s not clear how far this has got. That project has produced DrupalEd which is a pre-configured version of Drupal for use as either “a social learning environment or a more traditional learning environment”.

November 9th, 2007|Social Media|Comments Off on Investigating Drupal|