Using learning resources: transforming the educational experience

On 22 January, I attended the JISC Using learning resources: transforming the educational experience event, held at the Aston Business School in Birmingham. The day featured keynote speeches by Alison Littlejohn and Andrew Comrie, parallel workshop sessions and an afternoon discussion. Given that Sheila MacNeill has already covered the keynote speeches, I’ll highlight the workshop sessions I attended…

In the sessions, I went to Re-purposing of learning resources and Managing learning resources. The former started with Ian Dolphin highlighting the role of encouragement – cultural, political and technological – in re-purposing learning resources. James Clay followed by covering the issues that prevent/discourage the repurposing of learning resources, such as branding (company logo/educational level indicator), granularity (can’t get a good quality version of an image out of a resource) and IPR (staff protecting their own). Dawn Leeder finished with an approach on developing reusable learning designs, mentioning practioner-based workshops, a range of templates and generative learning objects.

The later session featured an interesting presentation from Iain Wallace, who gave an insight into activities of the Spoken Word project. Iain pondered over whether the use of user-generated content sites such as Flickr and YouTube superseded the need for formal repositories of learning resources. It’s an interesting point – perhaps it’s simply a supplementary approach to reaching a different, wider audience. It could certainly be said that uploading content to such a public-facing area enhances the exposure and availability, whereas content in a repository can be difficult to find. CETIS’s own Phil Barker talked about ‘balancing the varying approaches to producing and maintaining metadata to support effective resource discovery’, talking about the limitations of automatic metadata creation, the need for cataloguing by content experts and the role of user-generated metadata, such as (social) tagging and context metadata. The Open University’s Patrick McAndrew covered some of the cultural, technical and legal issues surrounding open content.

Although the sessions were tight for time, the quickfire presentations (10 minutes each) were effective at stimulating interest into their respective areas. It was also particularly nice to get up and move to different rooms, rather than being kept in the same room all day. The buffet lunch was top notch too

Update: Conference outputs are now available on the event page.