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The end of the affair

January 31, 2013 in Uncategorized by rebeccareynolds | No comments

Amy with pots 1

The project is now drawing to a close but we hope this will actually be the beginning of the exploration of the new resources by students, teachers and the public at large.
About 6,500 objects and archive documents have been digitised and put with already digitised sources to create a source base of about 150,000 digital assets. Seventeen open access e-learning resources based on these were developed.

Images and documents digitised as part of the project can be found on Culture Grid here:

http://tinyurl.com/culturegrid-OBL4HE

Learning and teaching resources created as part of the project can be found on JORUM here:

http://resources.jorum.ac.uk/xmlui/browse?value=OBL4HE&type=subject

Resources using UCL collections include Vertebrate Diversity for Life Sciences students, Portrait Highlights taken from the Art collections, and E-Catalogue, which uses 3D technologies to help Artefact Studies postgraduates research material culture.

They can be found here:
www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/learning/objects-and-elearning

University of Reading resources can be found via the project page here:

http://www.reading.ac.uk/merl/research/merl-OBL4HE.aspx

Thanks to all involved for contributing to a successful, smooth and enjoyable project. Thanks also to the funders, JISC, for making it possible for more people to access the amazing collections in these universities.

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We are launched

January 25, 2013 in Uncategorized by rebeccareynolds | No comments

Project resources were launched at UCL’s Grant Museum this week. People who came had the chance to try out the resources, chat with the project team and generally catch up with each other.
Thanks to everyone who came along.

The project resources can now be found on Culture Grid here:

 http://tinyurl.com/culturegrid-UCLM

 

Museums for the Google generation?

January 16, 2013 in Uncategorized by rebeccareynolds | No comments

This is the title of a talk I gave at the MERL lunchtime network last week. Thanks to everyone who attended and for making it such an interesting session. Discussions arising: does it make sense to talk about object ‘literacy’ (in the sense of being able to understand objects) or is this an inappropriately textual term? Can objects on the Museum’s database be found on Google, and should they be available there? Should museums put resources into making high quality images of objects available online, given the cost and copyright implications?

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Evaluation results

January 10, 2013 in Uncategorized by rebeccareynolds | No comments

The evaluation of the Reading OERs with students is now finished and can be found here: response to educational resources 2

Here are recommendations and the conclusion:

Recommendations
1. Structure online resources pedagogically
2. Offer online resources as back-up for live sessions, not as replacements for them
3. Involve students in the design and testing of online resources

Conclusion
The two rounds of evaluation presented in this report show that students were clear about their preferences for online learning both in terms of content and format, and about their reasons for these preferences. They preferred online materials to be structured to encourage interactivity, for example by including questions. They did not think online lectures could or should replace live lectures, which had interactive and affective aspects not replicable online. Despite being part of a ‘digital native’ generation, the students show a clear appreciation of the value of learning through contact with real people and objects, and of the place of digital materials within such learning.

Also, thanks to JORUM for putting the behind the scenes OER on their homepage this month!

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Welcome to JORUM

December 6, 2012 in Uncategorized by rebeccareynolds | 1 comment

… the online learning resource repository, which I have never explored in detail before. I thought it surprisingly user-friendly and found an excellently produced OU resource on the Louvre museum which could be useful for Museum Studies students, here:

http://dspace.jorum.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/616

I have been modifying the Reading resources for the site – this mainly involves making disparate photos and text into worksheets so they don’t arrive as disconnected files when users try to download them. These have been uploaded by Danni Mills, who joined the project last month and who has quickly got to grips with the site.

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Preparing for filming

November 14, 2012 in Uncategorized by rebeccareynolds | No comments

Two people involved in the project have kindly consented to be in the Reading side of the OBL4HE dissemination film – Emily Mattock, who has used the display ethics OER in her final year dissertation, and Greta Bertram, who scanned many of the documents. We will be making the film next Wednesday with the help of Hannah Mendelsohn and Leah Gouget-Levy, two UCL students.

All scripts and audios have now been modified to include appropriate copyright information.

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Further student feedback

October 31, 2012 in Uncategorized by rebeccareynolds | No comments

I’m now writing up the evaluation report on the OERs, collating and analysing student feedback on both the content and web interfaces. A comment on the display ethics resource:

‘It was particularly interesting to hear from a museum’s point of view the reasons why they display both human and animal remains. This is because we usually only hear about the beliefs of the public and their consensus on what should or should not be displayed.’

And a comment on the web interface in the display design resource:

‘What really helped was when I found I was able to enlarge the pictures in the worksheet; this gave a lot better feel for the current display and the effect that had gone into its design; and thereby made it a whole lot more interesting. Suggest a bigger picture or maybe make the one on the web page enlargeable (possibly magnified when hovering over bits of it).’

Thanks to all students who took part.

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The labyrinths of copyright

October 25, 2012 in Uncategorized by rebeccareynolds | No comments

 

We are now onto planning dissemination and publicity for the project, and tying up loose ends such as making sure copyright acknowledgements are in place. I am modifying audio files, worksheets and typescripts to minimise the chance of them being used without attribution. It turns out I need to include the Creative Commons license and at least 3 logos on each document, as well as copyright declarations for the logos. At first I feared a Borgesian infinite labyrinth in which product outputs need a copyright declaration with logos, the logos themselves need a copyright declaration, and then the copyright declarations need a copyright declaration and so on. However, help was at hand with some very useful advice and examples from JISC of properly copyrighted work, such as this from © Leicester College below (please do not use without attribution)!

example copyrighted OER from Leicester College

and a useful blog entry here:

http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/philb/2012/09/20/good-licence-embedding/

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Communication training

October 9, 2012 in Uncategorized by rebeccareynolds | No comments

Off to a JISC communications training day. We were told to think of the best ways of marketing and selling what we had developed, and to present this to the other delegates. We did a mockup of a short video comparing research in the 80s (physically going to buildings) with researching from a computer. Above is the ‘scene setting’ for the 80s research. I also learnt how to tag this blog, which I will do from now on!

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The ERs are O (at least, some of them are)

October 9, 2012 in Uncategorized by rebeccareynolds | No comments

Three of the MERL-based resources are now on the museum website. Behind the scenes at MERL:

http://www.reading.ac.uk/merl/research/Merl-Behind_the_Scenes_at_MERL_pt1.aspx

A resource on the ethics of displaying human and animal remains:

http://www.reading.ac.uk/merl/research/Merl-Display_Ethics.aspx

A resource on display design at the Ure museum:

http://www.reading.ac.uk/merl/research/Merl-Display_Design.aspx

Thanks to Hayley Whiting and Claire Smith at MERL for putting these resources on the web. They will now be marketed to prospective students for the Museum Studies joint honours due to start next year, and I did promote them at the University’s Open Day to an audience of one! Targeted publicity…

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