Category Archives: JISC

Mosaic – an authors perspective

Posted on by

TALL has invited me to be the author of a short online course for a new project, MOSAIC, which will bring together, reuse, and provide guides to, existing material on the web. This seems like a very worthwhile project, as there is so much material online now that looking for specific information, and distinguishing between authoritative and unmoderated, and useful and less useful, sites can be daunting, and I’m guessing that a lot of very good sites which happen not to come up close to the top of a Google or other search are left languishing and unvisited.  There are excellent portals, lists of links, and bibliographies, but in the case of the subject of this course, Anglo-Saxon history and culture and Old English literature, the more accessible and unscary to the non-academic or non-specialist they can be, the better.

I’m very pleased to be asked to write this course.  Old English is very popular with those undergraduates and graduates fortunate enough to be able to study the subject (even with those who initially resisted but, in the days when it was mandatory, had to read it), but I think is considered difficult and obscure by those who have not read English, and even by English students whose institutions’ courses begin after the period.  This course will be accessible in all ways: it will not require prior knowledge; it will provide translations in Modern English of Old English texts; it will stake participants through the history of the Anglo-Saxon peoples in England (to use modern terms) step-by-step; it will allow participants to work at their own pace; it will bring to participants’ attention websites they might not otherwise have discovered, or have had access to; best of all, it will be free for anyone to use, anywhere, anytime. 

I hope that the course will dispel some of the myths about Old English literature that seem to linger among people who haven’t ha d the chance to read it, such as  that it is all about fighting or swilling mead after fighting. Old English literature is so varied, and the language of the texts so powerful , vivid, and evocative, that it should be available to everyone. Of course, translations and modernisations are not the same as the texts’ original language, but there are a number available for free legal download which give a sense of the metre, alliteration and other sound-qualities of the originals. It will be important to offer a selection of translations, and to encourage participants to think about the issues involved in translation.

Since Old English grammar is usually cited as the thing that puts people off trying to learn to read the texts, it will be important to make very clear that this is not a course that requires participants to learn the language. Equally important, however, will be offering participants the opportunity to have a taste of the language, and to get a sense of the ways in which it differed from Modern English (as well as the ways in which dialects spoken in Saxon England differed from one another). Fortunately, there are recordings of readings of Old English texts online, and I’m hoping it will be possible to commission a short recording of our own of the sounds of the alphabet. Obviously, our knowledge of the sounds of Old Englishes is a matter of scholarly surmise, but in discussing a culture that was largely oral rather than literate, it is vital to have a sense of the forms in which the narratives of that culture were transmitted.

 

Using online resources will mean that the website can be illustrated with and contain links to some of the fabulous artefacts and art of the Anglo-Saxons, some of which (such as the carved crosses and other religious artefacts, and the weapons and armour) illuminate elements of the texts. It also means that we can show what the manuscripts looked like when the oral narratives were committed to written language.

The books and more recently films of The Lord of the Rings, and the recent film of Beowulf have brought some elements of Anglo-Saxon culture into modern popular culture.  I hope that will lead people to our website.

Where to look for reusable content?

Posted on by

As we kick off the Mosaic project (trying to develop a short course in early English literature using at a majority of preexisting content) I am trying to develop a list of places to start looking for this content that we want to re-use. I know that Sandie (our subject matter expert) has already identified lots of excellent resources using her knowledge of the discipline, but with the growth of OERs (Open Educational Resources) and portals and repositories to access them, I should hopefully not just be able to identify some likely looking content, but also content that will be easy for us to reuse – in terms of permission and copyright.

I have been clipping this area for about 3 years so had a list of about 65 things tagged free content and about 75 tagged OERs. A lot of these were the same thing tagged in different contexts or commentaries on the phenomenon more generally, rather than links to specific content, this got rid of a lot of links. A lot were very specifically K12 or focussed on a specific discipline that was not our course (at the moment it seems to me there is a lot more on the sciences and social sciences than on the humanities). There seemed to be a lot of initiatives that had a very impressive front page but very little behind it, or ones that did have a lot of content but clearly even I (as a non subject specialist) could tell there would be nothing appropriate for our course.

So now I have a list of things I want Sandie to check out and …..it consists of 12 things…..

To be fair some of these are VERY big portals to a lot of other content, but I am kind of disappointed. Also having had a quick search around I am already almost totally certain that it is sites that are not as explicitly focussed on reusable learning content that are going to be the most useful. Sandie will be doing more digging on this in the next few weeks, and will let us know what she finds. In the meantime here are the links i think it is worth Sandie following up:

 

  1. Intute –http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/
  2. The OU –http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/
  3. Jorum –http://www.jorum.ac.uk/
  4. Merlot –http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm
  5. Rice Connexions –http://cnx.org/
  6. MIT OCW –http://ocw.mit.edu
  7. Open courseware consortium – http://www.ocwconsortium.org
  8. OER Commons – http://www.oercommons.org/
  9. Jisc Collections –http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/
  10. Directory of Open Access Journals –http://www.doaj.org/
  11. UNESCO List of Open Educational Resources –http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=OER_useful_resources
  12. Google OCW search – http://opencontent.org/googleocw/

So if you know somewhere else we should be looking let us know.

 

Finding the real need for planning tools

Posted on by

The concentration needed to develop our pedagogic planner tool Phoebe has necessarily brought our gaze inward during parts of the project. Over the last few weeks we have returned to looking outward, and have been talking to various people from other projects in the same space, particularly Jeff Earp from the ReMath project, Andrew Brasher from Compendium and Helen Walmsley from the Best practice models of e-learning project . It has been interesting to catch up and see where we all are, and to get a sense of how the themes that seem to be emerging from Phoebe resonate (or not) with other projects in this area. Added to this is an on going dialogue with our “sister” D4L funded Pedagogic Planner the LPP.

A key focus of all the current projects has been to develop tools that are fundamentally informed by the needs of our future users, rather than implementing a vision that is divorced from actual practice. Our current evaluations have been focusing on the practitioner level, but as our two projects come to the end of this phase of funding JISC are using this as a chance to address these questions more strategically.

As part of this Phoebe and the LPP will be at the centre of a review meeting that the JISC are organising in Birmingham on the 4th March. This will provide an opportunity to share and discuss our work with key stakeholders, and to explore how they might use the planner tools in their communities.

Mosaic

Posted on by

We have recently heard that we have got funding for the Mosaic project which aims “to develop an online course, ‘An introduction to the earliest English literature’, and a standard induction unit to introduce students to learning online, from pre-existing content external to the University. The project will also develop guidelines and case studies, as appropriate, to disseminate the lessons learned both within the University and to the wider HE community.”

This is going to be a really exciting and challenging project for us – taking something we already do well, developing short courses in English literature but doing it using at least 50% content external to Oxford.

Anyone who has studied one of our online courses will know we already have a policy of using the best content on the web to support the learning process, so that will be nothing new, it is the extent to which we are going to try and do this, that will prove the real challenge. In our favour we are working with one of our most experienced academics ,Sandie Byrne, who has already written Critical Reading: an introduction to literary studies, Jane Austen, and many other excellent courses for us.

As well as producing a course which maintains the high standard of online learning we already have across all our offerings, we are also looking to explore the issues to be found around developing courses with reuse of content and to develop new approaches and best practice for ourselves and others in the University. At the moment I think key issues are going to be identification of content, the line between learning content and learning design and the ever present copyright and IPR. I am sure it will all become clear over the next few months and we will endeavor to keep you informed on what we learn.

Evaluating Phoebe

Posted on by

Well after months of development and lots of talking to people in the design for learning community we finally started the process of evaluating the Phoebe pedagogic planner with practitioners, and at a first pass, gratifyingly seem to have created a tool that people want to use. Not that there weren’t lots of suggestions about how to make it better…..

As well as all the specific technical issues, a clear theme was the importance of the user community and how to support them. We had already given this some thought (and it is not as if there are not enough models out there to consider) but it is clear if Phoebe moves forward this is going to be one of the factors that most impacts on making Phoebe a tool that people want to use.

We are still in the early stages of our evaluation process at the moment, the session on Monday was mostly with practitioners from FE and ACL. We will be doing another two workshops in the next few weeks, the first with HE lecturers in Brighton and the second with student teachers in Swansea. We are also going to do a remote evaluation, so if you would be interested in taking part, letting us know what you think and shaping how we take the project forward, keep an eye on this blog for more information, or let me know by emailing me at marion.manton@conted.ox.ac.uk.

Reaching into the Web

Posted on by

As part of our JISC funded ‘Isthmus’ project we have launched a pilot Facebook group for students on our short online courses. The overall concept is to encourage a ‘community’ of students that exists beyond the run of any single course. It’s been running for 6 days now and so far we have 45 members (about 10% of this term’s students) and around 20 posts.

Deciding to use Facebook and then deciding exactly how to set-up the group was complicated and generated a lot of discussion here at TALL. Our students are generally older than a traditional university student and many of them are retired. The recent OxIS Internet survey reported that 42% of students signed up to a Social Networking site last year but of those in the retired ‘life-stage’ category only 2% signed up. In contrast Saga recently launched a Social Networking site for the over 55s and claimed that ‘Silver Social Networking’ was on the rise. Surveys of our students revealed that not many of them were members of Social Networking sites (around a third) but that only 26% were not interested in communicating with other students after their course had finished.

As well as the difficulty in deciding to run the pilot it was also not clear exactly what form it should take because it cuts across technical, pedagogical, social and legal issues. Each area for consideration pulls the design and principle of the pilot in different directions. The core challenge was how to strike the right balance between supporting and structuring the group without ‘owning’ or managing it. This involved consulting JISC legal, Oxford University’s Legal Services Office and a range of stakeholders (including the students).

So far the group seems to be working, but it is early days. More significantly I feel we have made inroads into how to manage our relationship with third party services such as Facebook. If we can establish some principles in this area then we will be able to take advantage of the wider web much more efficiently in the future.

Poster with bloated title wins award at ALT-C

Posted on by

I gave my talk on ‘Cultural Capital and Community Development in the pursute of Slaying Dragons’ at the ALT-C e-learning conference last week. The talk was well received which was very encouraging. The poster of the talk won a runners-up prize in the poster competition! How much of this was down to tactical voting I cannot say but it would seem that the e-learning community is becoming gradually more interested in the possibleuse of Multi-User Virtual Environments.

Talking about Dragons with Dragons

Posted on by

Last Friday I partook in a stressful but useful event run by JISC. Anyone who could make it had the chance to pitch their project ideas for the Users and Innovation callrun by Lawrie Phipps. The format was similar to the BBC ‘Dragons Den’ programme. Each project had to go before a couple of JISC representatives or ‘dragons’ and pitch their idea in a 5-10 min presentation. The dragons would then feedback on the idea and point out/discuss it’s pros and cons.

I was surprised to find that this process put me into my old ‘exam fear’ mode and I panicked for most of the day. However, there is nothing better for focusing an idea than knowing that you have to explain it to a third party, especially when some of it relates to World of Warcraft! It forced us to look at the marking criteria for the call and to turn vague details into well thought out project plans.

Our actual pitch to the dragons went well and their feedback was very helpful. It seems to make sense to do this kind of grilling before, not after the projects are underway. Hopefully it will lead to a better breed of projects.

What is Web 2.0 and how is it impacting on education?

Posted on by

Not my title but the title of a recent JISC podcast in which myself and JISC strand manager, Lawrie Phipps, discuss the nature of Web 2.0 and its possible relevance for education. We both take a cautious liberal view that recognises the potential in this new style of communicating and sharing whilst being clear that institutions can’t simply dive-in and appropriate the emerging online culture which seems to be in a permanent state of flux. If you are not sure what Web 2.0 is all about then this may be the non-technical introductory podcast for you.

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/Home/news/stories/2007/08/podcast07lawriephippsdavidwhite.aspx