I’m going to be starting a SCORE fellowship in August and so now might be a good time to talk a little bit about it and get some feedback! The proposal I put together follows on quite nicely from some of the C-SAP stuff that i’ve just finished.
Whereas the C-SAP project initially was focussed on the teachers use of YouTube resources in class, and trying to encourage students’ use of it, one of the big findings that suprised me was the students were already using YouTube and other sources to look for online educational resources, with little guidance.
So my proposal to SCORE was to support this within the design of my introductory anthropology course. I will introduce the concept of OER in the first week, and focus on ways of evaluating the quality of online materials more generally (media/ OER literacy?). At the moment I’m focussing on little OER as much as big, so YouTube etc. still very much counts. Then I will encourage students to source the content for the following weeks sessions.
Obviously there are a bunch of issues here. The course is already designed, so if the students don’t bother finding anything I still have plenty of content! But another idea which struck me as potentially interesting is a google jockey. This is where I would encourage a student to look for resources in class. This could be a really interesting way to encourage best practice in searching for and evaluating OER resources. This could be one use of the android tablets which we recently purchased (and haven’t used so much so far!) There are still a bunch of issues to think through, but I’m looking forward to having the opportunity to do so as part of the SCORE project at the OU, where I met some great people when I was working on the Digital Scholarship project with Martin Weller and others.
I’ve also found out that I’ve been succesful in getting a place at the CONCEDE conference in Portugal in september which should be an early opportunity to discuss these ideas. This conference is a really interesting concept in itself, it’s about the use of user generated content and the conference has tried to organize itself along user generated lines, with participants voting for the talks they most want to hear, and the most popular getting their expenses paid! I was lucky enough to be one of those talks 🙂
Digitalscholarship Blog 