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:
Thank for this post (accessed via Twitter), Graham. I think the combination of autonomy and experience is very important. 106 cases seems more than ‘modest’ though as a foundation for the discussion!
Best wishes
Keith
Agree with the Digital Natives nonsense, even if the premise had validity (that is the neurological makeup of people exposed to the digital world from a young age in some way are different) it isn’t at all useful in the same way that research into race and intelligence can only be divisive and dangerous.
However, I don’t necessarily agree with the assertion that “work organisation would seem to be the most important factor in introducing social software in enterprises”. My experience in running large scale (hundreds of students), work-based, online degree programmes is that need overcomes perceived barriers. This is based on working with students with an average age of 40, 80% o them being female – a very unlikely group of technology adopters from a Digital Natives perspective!
Cheers, Stephen.
“The term [digital natives] was dreamed up with no research to support it but became popular in the media. OK – these things happen. But it is totally useless for trying to discuss any real development and use of new technologies.”
I´m not sure I would agree that the term “digital natives” is nonsense. Whether biological or social, I think most would agree that technology has changed how Generation Y receives information (i.e., learns) as opposed to earlier generations. If most learners born after 1980 are learning from current technologies and teachers are not tapping into these technologies in delivering information in schools, well, isn’t that a basis for development in teaching and learning circles? This doesn’t necessarily mean that the younger generation is automatically more technologically savvy than the older generation, however. It only means that the younger generation grew up with technology and the older generation did not. It means, in my humble opinion, that teachers that ignore technology are doing a great disservice for not facilitating the development of learners using tools they will certainly need later on. And even if learners have certain technology skills, educators are still needed to design assessment and instruction that provides educative experiences that are aligned to a particular curriculum.
If the term “digital natives” serves as motivation for teachers to get training on technologies to be used in their classes, I´m all for keeping it in our lexicon. For teachers who already use technologies in their classroom, the delivery method of learning in the future will depend a lot on how the younger generation chooses to use new technologies.
I’m glad someone with a bit of clout has said this. I think it’s a term, with as you mention no evidence to back it up, which is generally used by people who don’t know what they’re talking about and who will also use a series of other meaningless phrases to make it look as if the do – journalists, policy makers, managers and other pseudo-intellectuals.
Good article, Graham. Really struck a chord. The places of work and education (locus of learning) are far more important than any other more accidental attribute of the individual. There was a real chime with a piece of work done by colleagues at Brookes, similarly calling the “Google generation” into question
http://rworld2.brookesblogs.net/2009/03/20/digital-natives-analogue-colonists/