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:
Hi Jenny and Graham,
Thanks for posting the presentation. It was presented in a much more accessible way for me than reading through some of the texts on this subject. I still have some work to do to have a clear picture of the importance of pragmatics, but i shall review your presentation and read more and hopefully become more enlightened -).
I’ll throw a couple of questions at you if i may.
1. “Pragmatics, we said is a sub field of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning” – Can you give an example of what you would hope to learn/gain from a pragmatic study of a particular context – I may seem like a stupid question, but what tangible things can we get out of a pragmatic study.
2. How do students know how to act in a Personal Learning Environment? What strategies do you propose to help learners to function in a PLE?
Thanks
Steve
Hi Steve
I guess in some ways I wouldn’t ever consciously do a ‘pragmatic study’ in education! For me, it’s more a particular ‘consciousness’ or awareness around some issues. As a linguist (albeit not a pragmatist!) I am interested in a ‘text’ and the way it is encoded and decoded and how that process is contextually determined. So, using a very simple example (from wikipedia), If you see / hear the comment “I have a green light” that could mean you are in a car at a set of traffic lights and about to move or it could mean that you have the go-ahead on project or it could mean you have a lamp of that colour etc. It is almost always obvious from the context which meaning is intended i.e the ‘meaning’ is context dependent.
So firstly, we need to recognise that different educational contexts will shape the meaning of the educational content. As McLuhan talked about ‘the medium is the message’ so it’s a bit like saying ‘the context is the message’. This is quite a useful idea that I can work with in education in a practical way. For example, it could be something as simple as asking yourself what messages does my classroom or institution convey to learners? Is it accessible? user friendly? overpowering? confusing? dirty? What values does it convey in the way it treats students, rewards students, recognises their achievement etc etc. ?
Because I work producing e-learning content, for me its also about making sure materials are not just translated but culturally localised and for the designer I work with making sure that colours/layouts/fonts etc work in other languages and cultures.
Secondly, in the crit-lit course context, we took pragmatism as a sub discipline of linguitics. Why? Because the other sessions were called things like ‘syntax’ or ‘semantics’ which are also sub disciplines of liguistics. So I made an assumption that they were using a linguistic framework to provide coherence and were using the word pragmatics in a linguistic sense. (That, in itself, a pragmatic analysis!!!)
However, pragmatism is also a philosophical tradition (the division between linguistics and philosophy being very fuzzy). It basically says that we do not necessarily have to have grand theories on which to build our practice but rather that certain contexts can generate ideas, activities, practices which are perfectly fit for purpose and no less valid for having no logical or philosophical basis. In fact, the validity of anything can only be through people accepting and using it. I think this is useful. It’s a sort of ‘proof of concept’ approach. We are in a period of rapid educational change and change is always messy and untidy. Institutions and systems hate mess. Ideally, they would like everything and every one changing in the same direction at the same speed. In reality, good ideas can spring up spontaneously from almost anywhere and, almost by definition, will break the mold. So I think there are big messages for research councils and institutional managers about recognizing and cultivating the good practices that don’t necessarily fit their frameworks but which appear to work.
As for the question on PLE, I’ll leave Graham to deal with that!
Jenny
Many thanks for your thorough explanation Jenny. My understanding is this.
1. Pragmatic Analysis – A definition:
To interpret a text (or communicative element), recognize the context in which it was said, written or otherwise communicated, so that you can appropriately recognize the meaning of the communication.
2. Being skilled in pragmatics means that you are aware of the different contexts you are communicating in and can tailor language (or other communicative elements) appropriately.
3. Following on from 2 is it fair to deduce that if you are communicating in unfamiliar contexts and/or you are ignorant of working in particular contexts you may not be able to communicate appropriately or effectively and are therefore pragmatically illiterate
4. Following on from 3 is it fair say that your Pragmatic literacy may vary in different contexts.
Any feedback would be much appreciated
Steve
PS: I did not refer to any other docs for my definition, just camt to this reasoning after reading your comment response.
I appreciated the way you two re-presented the material from the article using multimedia tools and linking the insights to educational applications.
Hi Steve
I think your summary is spot on! I have never thought about the pragmatic literacy / illiteracy idea before and I don’t know anyone who has used that expression but I think it’s a useful idea. I used to do a fair amount of work in the Middle East and could fill a book with things I managed to get wrong!