Exclude teaching and learning materials from the open access repositories debate. Discuss.

Posted on by

Much of last week’s meeting of the JISC Repositories and Preservation Advisory Group was taken up with a discussion of the findings of the Repositories Roadmap Review which is being undertaken by Rachel Heery. The Review, which is not yet public, sparked a lively discussion during the course of which Andy Powell put forward the suggestion that teaching and learning materials should no longer be included in the same discussions as open access scholarly works as the issues relating to their use and management are just so different.

As one of the small quota of œteaching and learning type folk on RPAG I was inclined to cautiously agree with Andy. Many of us who have an interest in the management of teaching and learning materials have been frustrated for some time that repository discussions, debates and developments often focus too much on scholarly communications and research papers while neglecting other resource types such as teaching and learning materials and data sets. Im sure Im not the only one who feels a bit sheepish about having to jump up at regular intervals and say œbut what about teaching and learning materials? There has in the past been a tendency to assume that Institutional Repositories set up to accommodate scholarly works could also provide a home for teaching and learning materials in their spare time. And this despite the fact that theres considerable debate regarding how effectively learning object repositories can manage teaching and learning materials, never mind capital I capital R Institutional Repositories!

In the past Ive suggested that the language and discourse of the Open Access movement œdoesnt fit teaching and learning materials. In a written contribution to the discussion Andrew Rothery of University of Worcester went further to suggest that:

the concepts and values around open access, archiving, metadata, sharing, and publishing dont really fit.

and that the whole model of formal institutional repositories just doesnt support teachers day to day practice.

So whats the answer? Id suggest that we need to begin by asking a lot more questions before we can start coming up with answers. Questions such as:

What to teachers actually do with their materials? Where do they currently store them? How do they manage them? How do they use them? Are there things teachers cant do now that they would like to? How do learners interact with teaching materials? Are there personnal, domain and institutional perspectives to consider? And how do they relate to each other?

We need a discussion that is focused squarely on the requirements and objectives of teachers and learners not one that is an addendum to the, admittedly worthy, open access debate.

A word of caution though¦. My one concern is that if we exclude teaching and learning materials from œrepository debates, and indeed JISC funding programmes, will we stop talking about them all together?

And one last thing¦itll be interesting to see how OER developments influence this debate.

Semantic Technology Working Group

Posted on by

Last Friday saw the first meeting of the new CETIS Semantic Technology Working Group. CETIS Working Groups are a little different from the Special Interest Groups you all know and love in that they have a much tighter focus, a finite lifespan and a remit to produce one or more deliverables. I was particularly interested to attend the launch of the Semantic Technologies Working Group as it is a direct offshoot of the Semantic Technologies for Teaching and Learning session that Phil and I ran at last year’s CETIS Conference. Sheila has already written a short blog post about this meeting but here’s a little more detail.

The working group has two primary aims, firstly to act as an expert working group for the new JISC SemTech project, also funded as a result of the conference session, and secondly to develop recommendations for potential future work based on the outputs of the project. The first meeting of the working group was closed to enable us to focus in detail on the scope of the SemTech project however future meetings are likely to be open to the wider JISC community and all those with an interest in the use of semantic technologies for teaching and learning.

Participants at this initial meeting included Robin Wylie of Learning and Teaching Scotland, Michael Gardner from Essex, Sue Manuel from Loughborough, Tony Linde from Leicester, Simon Buckingham Schum from the OU, Helen Beetham from JISC, Hugh Davis and Thanasis Tiropanis from Southampton and Sheila, Wilbert, Phil and I from CETIS. And not forgetting, as Wilbert tweeted at the time, “iSight, conference phone, projector, 3g modems, ipod, mobile phone herd and the odd mouse.”

Thanasis Tiropanis opened the meeting with an enthusiastic and engaging introduction to the SemTech project which is based at the University of Southampton and will run until February 2009. The aims and objectives of the project are:

  1. Survey of the relevance and use of semantic tools and services in HE/FE, informal and exploratory learning. The impact of current work on semantic enhancement of successful Web 2.0 services will be reported.
  2. A roadmap for further developments in semantic technology adoption in HE/FE, informal learning and exploratory learning.
  3. The HE/FE institutional perspective of tools, services, relevance and quantifiable benefits.

Much of the rest of the meeting was taken up by a discussion of what constitutes “semantic technology” for the purpose of the project. Unsurprisingly this discussion was not entirely conclusive but there seemed to be some agreement that there should be some level of reasoning involved at the machine level. “Inference” was another term that kept cropping up. There was also general agreement that to be relevant to the project the technology must be used with some pedagogic intent and not simply for recording or resource discovery. For example mindmapping tools may not be regarded as semantic technologies for the purpose of the project however an application such as Omnigator which consumes topic maps and merges them on the fly is very much in scope. There’s still a lot of discussion to be had on these issues and it’ll be very intriguing to see what kind of technologies Thanasis and the SemTech project turn up.

For further information on the SemTech project please visit the project website at http://www.semtech.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ or to learn more about the CETIS Semantic Technologies Working Group contact Sheila or I.

Choose your tag with care

Posted on by

The official tag for the recent Dublin Core Conference in Berlin is dc2008berlin however my colleague John Robertson noted that more than a few conference participants had uploaded images to flickr tagged dc2008. This tag also turns up lots of holiday snaps from Washington DC along with images from some rather more exotic events including DragonCon 2008.

dc2008

Do you know where the Description Set Profile Working Group is?

By Foenix. Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.

DragonCon 2008 055

Sharks, tombstones and timewarps at Dublin Core

Posted on by

The theme for this year’s Dublin Core Conference, was œMetadata for Semantic and Social Applications. Like previous DC conferences this was a dual track event with working groups running along side peer reviewed presentations. I attended the conference primarily to participate in the working groups and I have to confess that many of the academic presentations were somewhat outwith my domain, however there were a couple that caught my attention.

Jennifer Trant of Archives & Museums Informatics gave a thought provoking keynote Access to art museums on-line: a role for social tagging and folksonomies which presented findings from Steve: The Museum Social Tagging Project. Steve is:

engaged in systematic research into how social tagging can best serve the museum community and its visitors.

Jennifer began by asking if tagging could help museums answer common queries such as:

Im looking for a picture of a well dressed man standing in front of a window. Can you help me find this painting?

Museum catalogue records, or œtombstone data, are not good at answering questions such as these.

To illustrate this point Jennifer showed us a painting by Winslow Homer called œThe Gulf Stream.

The Gulf Stream

Copyright © 2002-2008 www.winslow-homer.com This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.

Now it’s hard to miss the sharks here but nowhere, Jennifer pointed out, does the catalogue record mention the word œshark (Personally I was stunned by the sheer tackiness of this painting but thats another story¦ ;-) The Steve project attempted to address the œmis-match between the vocabulary of the visitor and the museum by inviting the public to tag almost 2000 works in 11 museums. 86% of the tags allocated by the public were œnovel to the resource and the intersection with museum terms was primarily œgenre terms such as photograph, sculpture etc. Clearly the public found these terms useful but the project concluded that the tags also had significant value for searching and broader retrieval purposes. More importantly they were able to incorporate new points of view into museum records. The public had effectively created an alternative scholarly vocabulary.

Im not sure how many parallels we can draw between the museum sector and the teaching and learning domain, however I liked the idea that users can generate living dynamic descriptions of resources which can complement more static œtombstone data. I also whole-heartedly agreed with Jennifers concluding assertion that

we dont know enough about how people search and what they are searching for.

This is certainly something we have been aware of in the education domain for some time. Its difficult to create effective educational metadata profiles if we dont fully understand how teachers and learners search and what they are searching for. Semantic density anyone? We do need to recognise that individual teacher and learners will view and experience educational materials in very different ways and we also need to acknowledge that theres more to metadata than œdefinitive static records. In order to improve access to educational resources we need to create services that can accommodate dynamic resource descriptions from a range of sources rather than mausoleums of tombstone metadata. (Okay Ill stop pushing that metaphor now¦)

The other keynote which caught my attention was by Paul Miller of Tallis. What struck me about this presentation was that, excepting a very interesting potted history of the dotcom era, it was awfully reminiscent of a keynote I heard Tim Berners-Lee present at a World Wide Web conference in Toronto almost 10 years ago called The Challenges of the Second Decade (these slides provide only a bare outline of the presentation I remember) and Im not sure how much has changed in the intervening years. I already know that

the Semantic Web is about facilitating connections between data and unlocking value in all the data we collect and maintain

but has this happened yet? And if not, when will it? Dont get me wrong, Im very interested in the potential of semantic technologies and in particular the affordances they may offer to teaching and learning however I did rather feel like I was stuck in a bit of a time warp. I wonder if we need to wait a third decade before the Semantic Web becomes a reality?

Baleful twitterings

Posted on by

I recently heard a reading of the Tang Dynesty (8th century) poet Du Fus Ballad of the Army Carts on the radio. Normally Im not a fan of radio poetry, I find it a bit trite, but this was sufficiently moving to make me stop what I was doing and listen. Its a powerful meditation on the endless futility and waste of war and it was impossible not to appreciate the poem’s continued contemporary relevance after all these years. Sadly my musings on this evocative work were rather abruptly punctured by the final line:

The new ghosts complain and the old ghosts weep, and under the grey and dripping sky the air is full of their baleful twitterings.

Somehow that just conjured up all the wrong sort of imagery¦..

Translator (David Hawkes [1967]). A Little Primer of Tu Fu. Oxford University Press. ISBN 962-7255-02-5.

Brave words from Edinburgh

Posted on by

Lorcan Dempsey and Chris Rusbridge both note with delight that Edinburgh Universitys new strategic plan states:

The mission of our University is the creation, dissemination and curation of knowledge. [Governance and Strategic Planning: Strategic Planning – Strategic Plan 08-12] (my emphasis)

Im not clear if œknowledge in this case encompasses teaching and learning materials. If it does, Id be very interested to learn if policies or guidelines are being formulated at any level within the institution to manage their creation, dissemination and curation. Can anyone from Edinburgh enlighten us?

You can’t always get what you want…?

Posted on by

Dorothea Salo, self styled œone-woman institutional-repository harbinger of doom has written yet another characteristically thought provoking blog post on the role and future of repositories within our HE institutions. Although she focuses primarily on Institutional Repositories (capital I capital R), scholarly works and the uphill struggle facing repository managers (reporats) many of the issues she raises could equally apply to learning object repositories and teaching and learning materials. Ive picked out a few choice quotes which seem to be particularly pertinent:

… the real set of questions every single institution with an IR needs to be asking itself: What content do I want from this initiative, and what am I willing to do to get it? Spoiler for this post: if the full answer to the second question is œIm willing to run and market an IR! please dont start one, because that is not enough to get whatever it is that you want, and you will waste precious library resources, your people not least.

The IR is the solution! Now find me a problem! Uh, not that problem; I cant actually do anything about that problem.

We must refocus our planning away from IRs per se and toward specific content types and the resources were willing to throw at acquiring, presenting, and preserving them.

Once we focus on the stuff we want instead of the place were going to put it, we open up the questions we should have been asking all along. How does this stuff get produced, and how could we help produce it in a way that keeps it available to us? What happens to it when its done? What incentives can we offer to have it given to us, and are those sufficient to counter any opposing incentives combined with natural inertia and the actual difficulty of the task? Failing that, how do we find out about the existence of the stuff we want, and how can we then get our hands on it in the form in which we need it?

And then, at last, we can ask ourselves the elephant-in-the-room question: given the effort well have to put into getting what weve decided we want, do we still want to go after it? No, its not worth it, is a perfectly acceptable answer to that question, to my mind

I cant tell you how much I agree with those last two paragraphs. One of my hobby horses for longer than I care to remember has been that institutions need to consider the management and curation of all the myriad kinds of stuff produced during the process and as a result of scholarly and academic practice. Isnt this stuff the primary product of institutions core business after all?

“Better management and sharing of teaching and learning materials by individual teaching practitioners.”

Posted on by

This was one vision articulated by participants during an interesting and productive meeting earlier in July that aimed to review the JISC Repositories Roadmap produced by Rachel Heery and Andy Powell in 2006. Following an introduction by Rachel Bruce and a discussion of alternative definitions of “repository” led by Rachel Heery the meeting split into groups to discuss the forward looking vision and tactics for three key resource types: scholarly works, teaching and learning materials and research data.

Our brief was to:

  • Note developments and achievements since the publication of the Roadmap
  • Articulate a vision of what we want to achieve and tactics for how to realise this.
  • Identify JISC interventions and priorities for activity.

The group discussing teaching and learning materials consisted of Amber Thomas, Jackie Carter, Andy Richardson, Andy Powell and myself and this post represents a summary of our discussion. I certainly cant claim the credit for all the comments and suggestions here!

Changes and Developments Since Roadmap Publication

  • Shift in focus from learning objects to learning materials.
  • Increased focus on media specific global repositories e.g. flickr, slideshare, etc.
  • Invaluable lessons learned from Jorums experience of license implementation.
  • Focus has shifted from system interaction to user / resource interaction.
  • Mashups have created many new types of content.
  • Mainstream understanding of œreuse relates to single media objects, e.g. jpeg rather than content package.
  • Much less focus on interoperability standards.
  • œContent packaging has become a bit of a dirty word.
  • Continuing growth in the use of virtual learning environments.
  • Open Educational Resources œmovement.
  • Web 2.0.

Vision and Tactics

Vision: Better management and sharing of teaching and learning materials by individual teaching practitioners.

Boundaries are blurred in the teaching and learning space, more so than in the domain of scholarly communication. The language and terminology of the open access debate is not directly applicable to the teaching and learning domain. Do we really want to open access to all teaching and learning materials?

Why bother to manage teaching and learning materials in the first place? Institutions are not currently accountable for the management of their teaching materials. We need a much more developed concept of œuse, never mind œre-use. There are many different levels of use and re-use and subject contextualisation is crucial.

Learning objects are just one type of teaching and learning resource. There has been too great a focus on sharing and reusing learning objects and this has arguably served to mask the much greater issue of how to effectively manage all types of resources, both digital and non digital, used in, and generated by, the process of teaching and learning.

A landscape study of what kind of content is out there and where it is stored would be useful. We make far too many sweeping generalisations and unsubstantiated assertions. It would be useful to take a representative sample of institutions across the sector and study how they are, or are not, managing teaching and learning materials. We also need to know more about policy intentions at a senior management level and resource management strategies at a personal level.

The overall aim should be for institutions manage their materials more effectively to help improve the quality and experience of teaching and learning.

At the same time as considering the role of digital repositories, institutional policy and personal resource management strategies we need to share knowledge of effective teaching and resource management practice and promote opportunities for teachers to develop and engage with new technology.

Among other benefits, better management of teaching and learning content should help to facilitate the disclosure of resources to students. De-duplication of effort should also be beneficial to teaching practitioners and to the institution as a whole.

The JISC vision should be to help individual teaching practitioners to improve the management of their teaching and learning materials and consequently improve the process and practice of teaching and the quality of the learning experience.

This is not a œdigital repository vision, this is a teaching and learning vision but we need to identify how repositories can help to make this a reality.

How can we measure if we are making any progress towards achieving such a vision?

One potential driver for change could be for JISC to work with QAA to make some kind of statement on the management of teaching and learning materials.

Activities, Priorities and JISC Interventions

  • Undertake baseline survey.
  • Identify and embed good practice at different levels within institution.
  • Work with QAA.
  • Improve awareness and practice of IPR and licensing issues among teaching staff.
  • Make better use of pilot license registry.
  • Evaluate existence and value of subject specific services for teaching and learning.
  • Open access to closed learning and teaching content collections (this could include content within vles).
  • Understand benefits and costs of services to individuals.
  • Understand and define range of relationships between repositories, vles, eportfolios and possibly also course catalogues.

An extra day

Posted on by

I’m just back from a very chilled out holiday on Mull in our VW magic bus and have now started working 4 days a week for CETIS, rather than the 3 I’ve been doing since my daughter was born. Hopefully the extra day will make all the difference. I might get round to writing some blogs posts, who knows, I might even manage to read something!