Benefits Realisation

EdShare workshop:

Traditional Educational Repositories vs. Web 2.0 Resource Sharing

University of Southampton, 4 November 2009

Traditional repositories vs. Web 2.0 Resource Sharing
The University of Southampton’s JISC-funded EdSpace Project organised a workshop on Wednesday 4 November, 2009, entitled “Traditional repositories vs. Web 2.0 Resource Sharing”.  The event was both stimulating and informative and will help us to design a second Assembly which we will be organising for early 2010.  Professor Hugh Davis welcomed us all to the workshop, which started at 10:30.

Moving Traditional Learning and Teaching Repositories to Web 2.0
First on the agenda was Dave Millard’s presentation “Moving Traditional Learning and Teaching Repositories to Web 2.0″ Dave gave us some useful insights into the issues that we have explored in the EdSpace and Faroes Projects, while building EdShare and the LanguageBox here at Southampton.  His talk addressed the questions: What have we learned about the features of a share? (at Southampton, we have dispensed with the word “repository” and use “share” instead)  and what do we need to do to take things forward?

We have discovered that for formal (research-focused) repositories, people appear to be most interested in safe, permanent archiving where materials are monitored and curated.  Educational resources, though, are not primarily for archiving.  For these, people are more interested in: hosting, organisation and community.  Dave declared that in terms of metadata,  the minimum amount should be manually inputted and the maximum amount added automatically. In addition, he said that people also wanted the shares and the resources to be able to integrate closely with the VLE. He drew his presentation to a close by suggesting that the best way to develop a system is to be guided by the principles of cognitive ergonomics  -  whereby the system aligns with people’s own behaviours.

Formal Repositories and Informal Web 2.0
Sarah Currier’s presentation ”Top Hats and Trainers: Formal Repositories and Informal Web 2.0″ came next.  Sarah has been working on a Project: SHEENsharing:  with the “Scottish Employability Co-ordinators Network” where they are using Diigo http://www.diigo.com/ and Netvibes http://www.netvibes.com/ to share content. Sarah wanted to direct us away from the “versus” concept in the title of the workshop towards 2 separate questions -  in what ways can educational communities make best use of formal repositories and web 2.0 sharing? and how can repository developers and managers best support their communities by leveraging web 2.0 services?

Sarah talked about her early engagement with the technologically naive community of employability co-ordinators.  A key question she posed for them was: “How confident are you in being able to find your web-based resources in a year’s time?” The confidence levels of the community shifted from very low at the outset of the Project to much, much higher as the Project reached its end.  She also emphasised how important it was for repositories to have feed features, linking with all feed readers (not simply a couple!).

Sarah’s Project is presented across a whole range of different forums:
• http://www.sarahcurrier.com/
• http://sheensharing.wordpress.com/
• http://groups.diigo.com/group/employability
• http://www.netvibes.com/Employability#Welcome

Exploring metadata
The final session of the morning was a discussion on metadata facilitated by Su White. We considered the affordances of metadata (Su dubbed it:  does it matter data?), Trojan horse approaches e.g. engaging people in discussion on other learning and teaching issues and thereby linking to discussion on metadata. Next, emergent, modelled behaviours – people are interested in having the course code or module name to understand more about the content and pedagogical design of a specific programme; and finally, peoples’ intent – what is the institutional, purposeful strategic direction?  We recalled Dave Millard’s mantra of:  minimum amount of metadata should be manually inputted with the maximum amount of metadata automated. Su encouraged the community to develop really clever algorithms to pull metadata from both the content as well as the depositor/creator space.

We broke for a satisfying and convivial lunch.

The future of educational resource repositories in a Web 2.0 World
Brian Kelly from UKOLN got us off to an excellent start after the break. In spite of his protestations of his thunder having been stolen by both Dave Millard and Sarah Currier, his keynote, “The future of educational resource repositories in a Web 2.0 World” was both entertaining and provocative. Brian led us through the O’Reilly definition of Web 2.0, and steered us to an understanding of how the education sector is well positioned to go through another change in making best use of Web 2.0 services, including the kinds of applications that improve, the greater the use that is made of them – e.g. Slideshare and Amazon.  In the context of copyright and IPR, Brian soundly observed that focussing on issues of ownership is merely a mechanism to maintain the status quo and to block change.   Brian encouraged the identification of a “third way” – a blended approach which enables services to be developed, informed by the research understanding such as that which has been developed at the University of Southampton.

Ali Dickens followed on from Brian by leading us in a discussion and stimulating risk analysis exercise on Copyright.  Ali is the Project Director for HumBox, the subject centre-based OER Project based here at the University of Southampton.  Ali asked us to consider the risks associated with making content for education publicly available.  The HumBox Project has already identified a range of risks, some legal aspects such as the respective institutional and individual liability, use of third part content.  In addition, issues are emerging which relate to ownership and mechanisms for the identification of ownership.

Yvonne Howard, a researcher in learning Societies lab in ECS at University of Southampton concluded the afternoon with discussions of people’s favourite Web 2.0 tool features.  The features which were identified by Yvonne’s session, included: widgets, RSS and mobile apps,  and Twitter appeared to be an extremely popular tool.

The day concluded with a discussion about whether it would be useful to set-up a community that could facilitate continued discussion of some of the issues identified within the event – which I think requires serious consideration.

Debra Morris
University of Southampton
November 2009