Content and digital resources

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Comment by Christine Lewis on July 3, 2009 at 5:31pm

Some really useful things being shared here and you may all want to see the learning revolution site at thelearningrevolution.ning.com looking at opening up content, resources, spaces for informal adult learning and self-organised groups. Community has just started, different audience but there will be input from a broadcasting and technology forum in the coming months.

Comment by David Kernohan on July 3, 2009 at 5:07pm

And hello from another JISC PM.
I've got overall responsibility for the OER programme that Heather (below) mentions. This is a tremendously exciting opportunity, and already we are seeing global interest in the programme and resources. Linked to the programme is the development of Jorum, particularly Jorum Open licensing, to act as a central point of deposit and discovery for these resources. Jorum Open is expected to be ready in around January 2010.

To briefly mention a couple of other areas of interest:

One growing problem in the educational content sphere is that of interoperability. BECTA and BIS are working to standardise content packaging for schools, but there is a lot of material out there in various formats that could be used. Our Transcoder tool.http://purl.oclc.org/NET/transcoder, allows conversion between various open (and eventually proprietary) packaging formats.

We have commissioned several reports into issues around content sharing and reuse for example the "Sharing Elearning Content" report (http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/46/), the "Good Intentions" report around business models for content sharing (http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/265/) and the "Learning Literacies for a Digital Age" report, which looks more generally at the development of the skills and literacies required by staff and students to work with online resources (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/projects/elearningllida.aspx)

And Heather has (perhaps modestly) not mentioned her own wonderful RepRODUCE programme, which looked at the many cultural, technical and legal problems around the reuse of content developed elsewhere.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearningcapital/reproduce.aspx

Comment by Heather on July 3, 2009 at 4:09pm

Hello!
You may be interested to know that between April 2009 and April 2010, JISC and the Academy are supporting a range of pilot projects and activities that support the open release of learning resources; for free use and repurposing worldwide. For more information see the Open Educational Resources Programme page at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/oer.aspx
I look after the Institutional Strand of this programme, and already the projects are sharing their progress and seeking feedback in their blogs - an aggregation of the feeds from this strand can be found at http://www.netvibes.com/hwilliamson#oer-institutional_projects

Comment by Bob Harrison on June 15, 2009 at 10:28am

I do not think you are disagreeing with the thread at all Alistair.....and I cannot see anywhere any assumptions about keeping up to date with technologies? I agree wholeheartedly about the whiteboard issue and feel strongly thta we have wasted huge amounts investing in technologies for teaching rather than technologies for learning. This point has been emphasised by by Diana Laurillard inher inaugral lecture at the london knowldge lab http://www.lkl.ac.uk/cms/ I also agree with your point about targets and the consequent risk averse environment in FE and skills. You do agree with the thread when you say "teachers do not have the time and training to use existing technologies".So the question to BECTA and partners and stakeholders is how do we address this and enable and empower the FE and Skills workforce to make use of the support available? The issue is not about new technologies but new ways of thinking!

Comment by Alistair McNaught on June 15, 2009 at 9:20am

Sorry, I have to disagree with some of the assumptions in this thread. I don't think teachers keeping up with technology is the answer. So much of the technology has a very short life cycle that teachers could spend their lives trying things that offer big promises but deliver small ones. When our researcher colleague looked at the accessibility of 140 web tools there were only 100 of them still extant when she finished a few months later. Teachers haven't got time to waste on the enthusiasms of technophiles.
When I worked at Becta I visited many colleges where great things were being done with simple technologies (PowerPoint, Excel, Word etc) in collaborative imaginative ways with learners, with only four laptops in class. The teachers I visited were active 5-7 years ago and the approaches would still be innovative in most classrooms today.
Speaking to a teacher trainer last week he bemoaned the way his students go into school placements full of ideas and innovation and come out a few months later with it all squashed flat because the classrooms are risk averse, the targets are sacrosanct and the curriculum is so finely tuned to maximise results at the expense of experiences that noone is prepared to risk innovation.
Focusing on how we need more and better technology is the one sure way to alienate teachers who haven't got the time or training to use existing technologies. How well are Interactive Whiteboards being used in most classrooms? How long does the voting system fad last?
Technology will have negligible impact on teaching until we have a curriculum designed for education rather than results.

Comment by Christine Lewis on June 15, 2009 at 8:00am

Thanks Bob - and a summary of this development: JISC has funded an ‘e-books for Further Education (FE)’ project to make over 3000 e-books freely available to every college and sixth form in the UK. E-books will be made available from the start of the next academic year via the ebrary e-books platform E-books will be made available from the start of the next academic year via the ebrary e-books platform. Subjects will range from Fashion Design to Software Engineering, Health and Social Care to Automobile Electronics, and Beauty Therapy to Practical Lambing. Access will be available whether students are studying in the college, at home or in an internet café. More info from the JISC website.

Comment by Bob Harrison on June 12, 2009 at 12:20pm

Here is welcome and overdue development from JISC...lets hope the staff have the skills to make effective use of what must the first wave of an enormous tide?
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2009/06/febooks.aspx

Comment by Christine Lewis on May 17, 2009 at 10:34am

Thanks Stuart - and for us I think Tom puts it very clearly when he says: 'I think the discussion is in the logistics. It’s about how we make it work without having technology and software that’s obsolete two minutes after it’s installed. It’s about finding people with the skills to identify what’s out there and anticipate what’s coming. It’s about finding a way to make an intricately-woven, multi-faceted system keep pace with change, without throwing any one component out of sync. It’s about looking at new models of faster, streamlined procurement of ICT. ' All really important stages we need to get right for our vision of FE and Skills in 2020. A mix of what the private sector needs to do and what the public sector needs to do. How close are we to this?

Comment by Stuart Edwards on May 17, 2009 at 10:02am

Hi Christine and group members

You might be interested in taking a look at this recent speech from Tom Watson on serious games - http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/games-based-learning-09-speech/

Stuart