About three quarters of the materials for the ‘cooked’ Reading OERs have now been gathered and we now need to think about how to present them on the web – as a list of links, or as a more structured webpage? Also, how directive should they be? Should they be a fairly loose collection of resources for people to use, or should they be structured to encourage or answer certain questions? My experience is that tutors prefer to adapt materials for their own use in their courses, and the way they have been processed for other courses may not suit them. On the other hand, the resources need to be presented in a way which makes sense and is quickly understandable.
This week has involved more selection of documents from archives. It’s interesting to see how museums started, often almost accidentally. In the early days of the Museum of English Rural Life in 1951 the policy was to collect ‘ anything and everything that might prove useful ‘ during the pilot period. In a letter to Hugh Massingham, the author and celebrator of the English countryside, thanking him for donating his collection, museum staff said ‘ precisely where this notion of ours will end we cannot as yet foresee ‘.
I’ve also been transcribing an interview with Amy Smith, the creator of the Ure Museum of Classical Archaeology. She talked about all the work which has gone into the symposium display in the museum (the symposium being a Greek party). This Museum also had humble beginnings, and owes its existence to the first Professor of Classics at Reading, Percy Ure, and his wife Dr Anne Ure. Memorable quote from a 1938 letter written by one of the Ures replying to someone who had written offering some vases for sale: ‘our collection is largely junk picked up cheaply in Shoe Lane and the prices have generally been in shillings rather than in pounds’.
Earlier this month, our project was given the opportunity by JISC to present to the Content Advisory Group. The group is made up of experts working with digital content from a range higher education institutions who provide advice to the JISC Content team. The group is particularly helpful in widening discussion around the context of digital projects. So, I gave a brief presentation on how OBL4HE had been coneived and how the practical work of the project was unfolding. The group’s questions were really helpful in tackling the conceptual side of the project, for example, considering the added value of using these technologies to promulgate object-based learning and unpicking the disciplinary perspectives on this method of learning. The discussion also highlighted the range of work developing within this funding round on 3D technologies and I now have some valuable contacts to follow up. Many thanks to the advisory group!
Crocodile handbag
This week I interviewed Amanda Callaghan, curator of Reading University’s Cole Museum of zoology, about the ethics of displaying human and animal embryos. I then spoke to Amy Smith, curator of the University’s Ure Museum, about the design of one particular display. The recordings will be used for OERs on museum ethics and display design respectively. The crocodile handbag pictured above is in the Cole Museum in a display looking at conservation and the impact of humans on the environment.
I have also been looking through Ure archives for documents for an OER on Histories of Collecting, which will be about how museums came together and early collecting policies. It’s a bit of a puzzle; I’m not sure how intrinsically interesting most of the documents are, but then again students will need to get used to using all kinds of archive material, not just documents which are immediately appealing.
We recently experienced the first major stumbling block for our project, which came in the form of losing our Content Developer to a brilliant new job in Birmingham. Our loss was Bravissimo’s gain as Isaac Boateng joined their technical team. Some quick thinking was required. To date, UCL’s project staffing had been structured with digitisation coming under the auspices of Learning & Media Services and the content development to be undertaken by one project officer. My role would be to provide a bridge between the lecturers’ and students’ subject-focused input and the Content Developer’s requirements for the creation of the digital resources. However, with the loss of Isaac – a new constellation of staff was required… The solution was found in three subject-specific developers and one technical mentor. So, we welcome to the project Dave Hone, Krisztina Lackoi and Matt Paskins, who will use their expertise, respectively in paleobiology, art history and the history of science, to develop OERs under the masterful guidance of the Petrie Museum’s Giancarlo Amati. So, I am looking forward to getting everyone together and planning the next step in content development. This will prove particularly exciting because Giancarlo is our resident expert in 3D technologies and has already developed some interesting new educational resources using 3D.
Monday this week was a JISC networking event, where we had the chance to discuss project issues and solutions with others from JISC projects. Above is a representation of a project journey, with an ‘impact crater’ and e-books as the outcome (one of the projects was working on making e-books out of textbooks). It took the form of a ‘JISC Divine Comedy’.
Apart from that I have been working on selecting documents from the Astor archive, a process now finished. In the end copyright issues may be the most influential consideration in deciding what to digitise.
There’s nothing like spending time in archives to make you realise how much complex and incomplete sources are massaged into stories in order to form history. These documents are often rather antiseptically called ‘primary sources’ but what comes out of the Astor archive is letters, memoranda, newspaper articles and other documents showing passionate commitments to various causes. Nancy Astor was incredibly energetic and committed to the many causes she espoused and one letter from an assistant explains that she has had to go away for a few weeks to avoid what we would now call burnout.
For digitisation, for copyright reasons we have had to focus on letters written by Astor herself or by her husband, Waldorf. It may be that these become ‘tasters’ of the archive which encourage students to look further into the paper documents which cannot be digitised.
We have now decided on a licence for the resources, using the helpful guidance given by the Creative Commons website. Subject to sign off, it will be:
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
Moving on to selecting materials for a second OER now, which is likely to include documents from the Nancy and Waldorf Astor archive, kept at Reading University. Nancy Astor is best known now as Britain’s first female MP (elected in 1919). However, the archives reveal her campaigning interest in many issues, such as housing, disarmament and appeasement between the wars, and ‘moral hygiene’. (Astor supported attempts by the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene to ensure high and equal standards of morality and sexual responsibility between men and women).
Designing OERs is a game of at least two halves; as well as the selection of objects, design of OERs and embedding them in courses, there are copyright and licensing considerations. The project team has now to choose a licence or licences for the OERs developed under the project.
As project manager on the OBL4HE Project, it was a great pleasure to be invited to visit the University of Reading’s Museums earlier this month. Like UCL, Reading has a great range of different types of collections and taken in combination with their fascinating archival material – my mind went away full of new ideas for our project. Whilst there I was presented with a range of corn dollies, a terrifyingly large tarantula in a glass jar, a wealth of agricultural machinery, and the Mills & Boon back catalogue – what more could I want! My day out was action packed and it was great to sit round a table with colleagues at Reading and discuss the exciting projects they are working on and our plans for OBL4HE.
So, now we have completed our exchange visits, it is time to think carefully about connections between our two halves of the project. Key themes for development seem to be: controversial museum objects and the ethics of public display and historical approaches to representing the past in museums.
This week saw exchange visits between two of the project partners – the Museum of English Rural Life and the various museums and collections at University College London. Staff from each institution were introduced to staff and collections at the other. Fascinating objects in the Grant Museum included a preserved Crescent Nailtail Wallaby (now extinct) and ‘Little Nicky’, the first commercially cloned cat (although Grant Museum manager Jack Ashby said it was not the actual cat in the jar). The preserved animals were often ‘adopted’ by donors to the Museum.
Meetings were held during each day to update each other on progress with the project.