March 2012

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.

Click on the link below for findings about students‘ use of online learning resources and preferences for design and content.

Online learning preferences research 

This is a key paragraph:

Students see it as essential that online resources help them to complete their assignments and support course tasks; no students talked about the pleasure of accessing more information for its own sake or for background information, for example. There is thus little support here for developing resources as optional extras which complement students’ courses in interesting ways. Online resources do not have to be compulsory, but they need to be clearly relevant to students’ course tasks and fulfil a need not already met offline

Thanks to all students who took part.