From a Jisc press release:
Over 14,000 items of archived TV footage from 17 European countries are now available via the EUscreen online portal for teaching, research and general interest.
EUscreen – the result of a collaboration between 36 partners across Europe – provides a rich insight into Europe’s television heritage with content dating from the 1920s to the present day.
The portal includes rare footage and commentary on key events in history, including a 1962 interview with Martin Luther King about racial discrimination in the US.
John Ellis, Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway and principal investigator on the EUscreen project, said: “This is a valuable resource for anyone interested in social history or indeed TV history, as it brings together tens of thousands of clips from across Europe. The portal is available to anyone (not only academics) and it is very easy to get absorbed and spend hours browsing all of the footage.”
The expansive footage has also proved popular as a learning aid for foreign language students, with clips available in 14 languages.
By the end of September 2012, there will be around 30,000 items of digital content freely available on the portal as the European providers continue to add carefully selected material.
Explore the EUscreen footage
Open online seminar
Jisc are hosting an open, online seminar on ‘Making Assessment Count (MAC)’ on Friday 3rd Feb – 1-2pm. The presenters are Professor Peter Chatterton (Daedalus e-World Ltd) and Professor Gunter Saunders (University of Westminster).
The mailing for the seminar says” “The objective of Making Assessment Count is primarily to help students engage more closely with the assessment process, either at the stage where they are addressing an assignment or at the stage when they receive feedback on a completed assignment. In addition an underlying theme of MAC is to use technology to help connect student reflections on their assessment with their tutors. To facilitate the reflection aspect of MAC a web based tool called e-Reflect is often used. This tool enables the authoring of self-review questionnaires by tutors for students. On completion of an e-Reflect questionnaire a report is generated for the student containing responses that are linked to the options the student selected on the questionnaire.”
You can find out more ans sign up for the seminar at http://jiscmac.eventbrite.co.uk/
EC-TEL 2012
The EC-TEL 2012: Seventh European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning 21st Century Learning for 21st Century Skills takes place on 18-21 September 2012 at Saarbrücken in Germany.
The focus for the conference includes:
- How can schools prepare young people for the technology-rich workplace of the future?
- How can we use technology to promote informal and independent learning outside traditional educational settings?
- How can we use next generation social and mobile technologies to promote informal and responsive learning?
The deadline for proposals is April 2.
Visitors and Residents
David White (University of Oxford) and Dr. Lynn Silipigni Connaway (OCLC) have been attracting quite a stir with their JISC-funded work on Visitors and Residents: What Motivates Engagement with the Digital Information Environment?, being undertaken as part of the Developing Digital Literacies programme webinar series.
Slides, audio and a recording of the Blackboard Collaborate session where they presented some of the findings of their work can be found at http://bit.ly/jiscdiglitvr.
The keynotes, videos, radio shows and interviews from the ECER 2010 Conference in Helsinki:
I agree that e-mail is a critical communication piece, particularly in the workplace. Why?
It comes to you
Because it is such a commonly used tool, it is probably already installed and supported well by
your workplace (not blocked, not requiring additional logins, already populated by the people you most need to communicate with via address books)
It is simple/transparent. This is an application everyone understands because they have been using it for a long time. No additional learning curve.
You have excellent tools for archiving, filtering, searching (well, if you have a good client!)
It is often integrated with other productivity apps–calendar, etc.
It can be asynchronous or synchronous
You can email to individuals, to groups, use BCC and CC and it is not hard to set up contacts/contact lists for groups you use often.
While I like and use many of the emerging tools, they probably have a long way to go to displace email. Because it is a mature application, it has many many advantages with respect to features, interface, and support.
I think your point on maturity is important.
What other tools are approaching maturity?
Traditional learning management systems are pretty mature. Witness the common toolset (which is starting to incorporate more interactive tools within a common interface). I think that it is easy for “early adopters” to develop an “expert blind spot” when it comes to moving through, between, and harnessing the power of disparate tools. But if your goal is moving into getting a large percentage of your people to adopt, the barriers are surprisingly high. I get frustrated because my colleagues “don’t get it” and they are frustrated with me because I can’t seem to understand that they “don’t need it!” Email, of course, we all agree that we need! Honestly, a lot of our faculty don’t really use most of the features of the LMS either. They just don’t see the need. And when I make the effort to stand in their shoes, I usually come away with a good deal of sympathy for their position.
More on change management theory. . . the drivers are really an important thing to understand when you are trying to encourage adoption.
Have to say that this is the conclusion I have just come to after a year of experimenting with any number of forms of communication.
I don’t think we have forgotten the importance of e-mail communication. But I think it’s a real challenge to introduce e-mails in a PLE framework, because this is the typical program almost no one would change. So I think it implies one of the most hardly resolvable points of a PLME: We have to build a bridge between online services and tools and the ones that are on your desktop. Moreover, I think it’s the same with IM Clients; interviews have shown this, too.