1. Project co-ordinator (D Marsh) visit to Àngels Trias i Valls, 19 May 2009, Regents College, London

Related pages

1. Angels: sample materials audit
2. Materials for Visual Anthropology

Begin with the issue of creativity in the digital medium, still a problem / limit for most staff when approaching elearning or digital content.

Question of ‘how would you like the materials to be re-used?’ Perhaps it’s not easy to imagine how to re-use one’s materials.

Contrast with OU materials – professionalism, raises student expectations when they have taken course there and then participate in other courses. Notion of visualising the learning.

Subject benchmarks – when we first started creating this material at UWL there were no benchmark statements for Anthropology. We would pass all new materials and content through our external examiner. We would also develop in accordance with research guidance from the ASA (Association of Social Anthropologists), particularly in regard to ethics in a course of this nature – no ethno-centric material or implied assumptions, in the material and in the supporting course guidance. 

When originally developed, our focus was social anthropology – with a similar core of content to other social anthropology programmes in other institutions, though our material was from the beginning envisaged for online delivery – any quality review / benchmarking criteria of the material were same for on campus and virtual delivery.

For a meaningful and coherent experience of learning about social anthropology, there are perhaps 4 key elements which must be guiding principles:

• Comparative elements
• Culture
• Anti-ethnocentricity
• Ethnographic case studies

For any course on social anthropology, these principles should be a base-line for building a pedagogic framework of readings and materials.

So any object / course content in social anthropology should have to encompass the four ‘C’s:

• Culture
• Comparison
• Contrast
• Context

We talked about how users (peers / teachers) would interact with the material – what structure will guide use in other contexts? One simple requirement to reside with the resource would be a checklist of user requirements – this would help to pre-assess the needs? *Could this be a function in JORUM or the supporting pedagogical toolkit? At present we don’t know how JORUMOpen will look, whilst there will be a range of metadata fields and other ways of tagging material we can’t make too many assumptions at this stage on how these will be figured in JORUM.

It was suggested that one other research group to bear in mind is the Social Anthropology and Computing Centre at Kent University.

They have developed a rich collection of materials, resources and links to online material. Also developed some software for modelling anthropological theories such as kinship.

We discussed in more detail the classic ‘headings’ or topics in social anthropology, and new topics which were becoming part of the research and teaching field (such as DNA and kinship). Angels will provide a broad mapping of topic headings for a typical social anthropology curriculum.

Returning to the issue of creative uses of the digital medium for teaching, Angles described a metaphor of online learning as a version of medieval scribal culture – as scribes used to copy materials from manuscripts, in some ways our modern practices are not much greater than simply re-copying source material between formats – how can we understand and make use of the affordances for learning offered by new technology? Following from this, Angels mentioned the ‘new’ art / cultural movement of altermoderism, which also seems to offer some interesting metaphors for the open resources movement – indeed, altermodernity in reference to art is figured in these terms:

“The artist is a wanderer, drifting about in space and time, drawing from a vast, fluid fund of collective ideas. And his or her work is far less about a single finished object than about continuing processes of development and connection in which one thing always seems to be leading to the next.”http://arterials.blogspot.com/2009/02/alter-modernism.html

Could this be a vision of the itinerant teacher? Anyway some interesting ideas. Going back to the metaphor of modern online materials as a re-iteration of medieval scribal practice, perhaps we are still focused on writing marginalia, rather than really exploring what is possible with technology? There is also a risk for JISC and these kinds of projects in that we will end up with another batch of re-compiled instances of text i.e. it is quite difficult within the parameters of a ‘project’ to think beyond deliverables / reporting / meeting objectives. It was also noted that the strength of this project lies on the disciplinary and collegial approach, which will hopefully transcend some of the market rhetoric about OER – Angles noted here the recent paper in ELiSS by Jonathan Church, and his experience in the USA of online ‘boutique’ learning.

We discussed the wider OER movement and it’s origins in initiatives such as MIT Open courseware and the OU Open Learn platform. Angles also mentioned the Fathom project, a consortium led by Columbia and involving LSE, which had been making openly available a number of resources through the project website.

Angles has also found the LSE public lectures to be very useful, an open video / podcast archive of material relating to politics and social science. Whilst these are rich and interesting lectures, from a teaching perspective there is no framework to suggest how one might use these resources within a course – they are simply available for free, partly to raise the profile of LSE. It raises the question again of what counts as an ‘open educational resource’?

The MIT opencourseware archive is also extremely rich and varied, and although it often details the course structure and syllabus from the original programmes, it does not offer any support or framework for a pedagogical transfer / re-use of the material. For example see the Anthropology section for a list of modules, many with course materials, reading lists, assignments etc. Interestingly, in the information about MIT OCW it states that: 

“MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.”

It also states that “OCW is not an MIT education”. So the material is there for anyone to use as they wish – educators, students, interested general public. But although it represents the bulk of the learning material in any one course, it does not replicate the experience of being a student at MIT, nor does working through the material lead to any accreditation. Therefore without any meaningful pedagogical structure, or ‘pedagogical encounter’, is this another example of ‘scribal’ practice in the digital age? Perhaps we need to know how may people go on to take courses at MIT through an encounter with this material?

Returning to issues for this C-SAP project, Angels wondered if it would be possible / useful to scope all open resources that people are already using in the social sciences? I think this would be a very worthwhile objective, though perhaps for a larger project following on from this initial pilot study – we know from JISC that if these pilots show promise, there is funding available for a longer term study into the use of open educational resources.

We also talked about ‘remix’ video tools as part of the culture of internet use – such free tools can be used for reworking video content, then uploading into Youtube etc. The interesting point is the relation to the earlier discussion of ‘alter-modernity’, in the sense that such a tool allows you to challenge narratives – open learning seems to give the impression that you can also achieve this ‘remix’ approach by taking content form different sources, mixing the ingredients (the cookery metaphor!) and creating new resources. Perhaps this also alludes to the creative potential of the medium, which is not necessarily the same thing as practice at the moment.

Once you have released materials, and they are inhabiting new spaces, what is needed to create meaningful learning experiences? As another example, visual anthropology led the way in making available ethnographic film as a type of open material – from this the RAI (Royal Anthropological Institute) hosts an annual film festival. So rather then simply creating an archive or ‘repertoire’ of video material, a new niche group has formed around ethnographic film – and this niche is also re-opened through other networks / events.

We also spoke of new web 2.0 tools such as twitter – Angles has used this, but as part of a rationale for engaging students in the use of resources, rather than as a novelty for it’s own sake. Moreover, the value of such social networking tools for teaching must be underpinned within a sound pedagogical framework – they could be useful servants to the open resources project and beyond, if given an appropriate framework.

Returning to the issue of JISC rhetoric about OER, and the drivers of HEFCE / JISC about using OER to drive up demand for UK HE (Ron Cooke Paper in response to the world leader in e-learning section of the ‘debate on the future of HE’) – again Angels hoped that JISC could transcend the idea of the OER projects simply developing a ‘repertoire’ of objects, delivered by JORUM and other platform and moved interchangeably between course platforms and modes of delivery. This actually would be an ambitious aim and far beyond the goals of the pilot projects – but the crux would still remain, what value would these digital assets have without a framework for meaningful transmission and re-use? Another metaphor was employed here – that of the car parks found in cities like Tokyo and New York, where cars are stocked in blocks on top of each other by hydraulic lifts. Perhaps the vision of JISC is to have a similar stacking system for open resources – though unlike these systems, and the stacking and ordering systems of traditional libraries, we don’t yet know the best methods for ‘parking up’ materials and then taking them out.

(See photo of example Manhattan parking lot in wikipedia).

In re-reading this, I think the materials can be re-used in different ways. 1 is to locate the content that can stands alone (types of exercises, thinking questions) 2 to locate examples of practice (for example film strips) and then 3) general curriculum practice 4) notes/supporting powerpoints and so on. I think this would be a strategy to start with towards helping think about these issues. 

Subject benchmarks –

All the modules (in the original courses) were validated by either internal or external (or both). Visual anthropology was validated externaly  -and we can always contact the external examiners, or even look at their comments- because it moved from level 1 to level 2 due to staff changes in my previous job. However, as with all anthropology courses if there is something that ASA would comment on i would take it very seriously to adjust to their criteria. You could also make a selection of external assessors -these can be appointed by ASA or other bodies-as departments do with their external examiners where an individual is paid to assess the courses, handouts and modules providing a writen form and report at the end of the process, to which we can reply and where there is a kind of personal and informed dialogue- that look into it, this maybe a more manageable.

One concern I have is that it would be imperative knowing who is within ASA that will make those decisions. There are few individuals within ASA, for example, that I would strongly object to having my work assessed by them due to these individual's biases. I want to note that this is not particular to me or to this work here. It applies to all projects alike.  

I am thinking about the models I have used when providing assessment to ERSC projects. Like in grant assessment I feel there should be the possibility that if there is an individual that it is known that may have conflicting interests then this needs to be resolved with the help of these bodies.

I'd say it is important to find people who may have conflicting interests with any of the creators of materials or learning programmes (not just with Anthropology, that is also something for my colleagues in Sociology, Poltics and so on to think about). In a sense there should be a process where there is transparency -one that is already mirror in much of our practice- and that works towards collaborative engagement of practice in the discipline. 

In that respect I think the existing model of using known external examinors, provided by ASA or other bodies, who are known in name and relationship to us -and with some criteria for code of practice- that ensures fairness to the process would be somthing we may want to consider and discuss in our future meetings.

I think in some of our previous discussions the issue has arisen that of how external individuals will 'judge' this kind of work, and that in one sense these external examiners will be some of the people that by default will test how these materials 'reach' them. I think we had discussed that in the process of external assessment there is a need for differenciating assement of issues like'ethics' and 'ethnocentricity' to the process of 'editing' the actual work.

Maybe it could be interesting to start thinking, as we do with degrees and courses, who could be a good external examiner, and as it happens, we may need to approach more than one person (of those suggested by ASA or other bodies) in case these individuals can not commit to it.

The wiki in this respect is very good because it traces the work and discussions and that is something an external may benefit from. Maybe the example of selecting one or two external examiners is too close to what we do with degrees and courses in our current departments, but it is an option that we may want to discuss?

I only put some running commentary here, I promise to come back and work on some of these ideas more closely (4 nov 09) -Darren, if you prefer these comments to go elsewhere, I am happy with these being moved or deleted. :-)  A TiV