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:
Indeed. And only the so called ‘robust, serious, trustworthy… schooling societies’ haven’t got that yet!
In many countries (mostly the developing ones) where the robustness doesn’t match the budget, the platform has always been and will always be the open and free web. And what for some might be regarded as ‘weak’, for others is seen as powerful.
– it’s how we transform this platform (think the word ‘platform’ gives people a sense of comfort and support) in an involving learning environment, with all the indispensable actors and characteristics attached to it. The word Platform comes to me as space; a learning environment, on the other hand, takes more than a place you can add yourself too. How many platforms have courses/modules created and with students added to it, but where the evidence of participation is inexistent…? [ it reminds me of school – just because my physical body is present in the classroom, does it mean I am there?].
They use what they have at hand – what they can afford to take part in this world. They don’t want to be left behind, and I must say that in some cases they haven’t. They have used the web as a platform to land and launch themselves in a wider world. All it takes is willing and vision (and that can’t be used … is more about development of perception!!)
The longer we wait for the platform to arrive, the harder it will be to catch up with the pace of those who have realized this from the very beginning.
The tools/platforms are important as a basis, but not the essence of learning. And I would just like to remind us all that before we had access to these technological platforms we already learned. So what I am trying to say is that what’s important in learning are the actors – the people with whom the learning relationships are established and developed; the artefacts – because they also have an history attached to it and we can learn from them; and everything that surrounds the learning environment: the contexts.
The Tools on the www? There are tools galore. The www is a platform that reinvents itself daily.
Now…. in a Learning Seminar what I honestly would like to approach – had someone asked for my opinion, and I am well aware it hasn’t been the case
A learning environment requires engagement by all parties involved, where communication, collaboration, feeling of community and care are regarded as vital to the activity of knowing…rather than the mere acquisition of knowledge.
And on that note, I just want to say that what would be nice to focus on is the people, the strategies, the policies that need to be in place for a learning environment to be constructed and personally adjustable in that big ‘platform’. Technology is important, but what is really important is how people learn, and that has still not changed. People learn with and from each other . That has also been the added value of ICT – reinvention of communication channels and learning relationships.