Introduction and Hands-On Session June 2007 David Millard, Yvonne Howard Learning Societies Lab University of Southampton Kate Dickens, Ann Jeffery, Julie.

Introduction and Hands-On Session June 2007

David Millard,

Yvonne Howard

Learning Societies Lab

University of Southampton

Kate Dickens, Ann Jeffery,

Julie Watson, Kate Borthwick

eLanguages

University of Southampton

Objectives

• For us to tell you how the CLAReT project hopes to make Learning Object Repositories easier to use and more reflective of community needs

• For you to get an early look at one of our tools (a concept map navigator)

• To discuss the concept map themselves – do they reflect your understanding of language teaching?

CLAReT• CLARE Tools• JISC Funded 1 year project• Based at University of Southampton (LSL and eLanguages)• One of a family of projects concerning Repositories for Learning

Objects and Assets

CLARE

• Version of ePrints (the Open Access Repository)

• Developed by the L2O (Sharing Language Learning Objects) project

• MURLLO (Management, Use and Re-purposing of Language Learning Objects) is a project looking at how we can encourage the reuse of Learning Objects (LOs) (IPR, Online Editing, etc)

The Problem

General practitioner' teachers and lecturers [who] are increasingly clear about their need for meaningful contextual information about the resource to enable them to assess it and reuse it. A particularly popular request is for some kind of review process that allows users of the resource to record their usage and evaluation of it for others to examine

(Rehak & Mason, 2003, Casey 2004).

These requirements make clear the need for new conceptions of learning object meta-data, and new ways of using repositories—not just for search and retrieval, but as a living, growing body of shared practice.

(Casey, Brosnan & Geller, 2005)

How do you know what LOs to reuse?

– How can you find them?– How can you trust them?– How can you provide feedback?

– How do we create a living, growing body of shared practice?

CLAReT Aims

• To create tools foster community involvement and to enable that living body of shared practice

• In practical terms:– Developing tools to improve CLARE’s usability

• To make LO discovery easier?• To help people share LOs?• To expose LO history to help people judge quality?

– Looking at Social Computing (Web 2.0) features• Harnessing the wisdom of crowds (ala Wikipedia)• Taking the best practise of repository interface design

The Tools• A Concept Map Browser

– To help people find things that they may not be able to articulate

• Enhanced Search– Promiscuous search! No blank walls– Return as much as possible, but ordered

• Everything is interlinked– Highly connected metadata – (e.g. click on a keyword to get all the items marked with that keyword)

• Comments and Ratings– Gives LOs some provenance– Further info on what contexts they have been used in

• Enhanced Front Page– Open and inviting rather than an imposing search box– Suggested LOs (high rated, most recently added, etc).

• Aim: to explore the concept map used in the tool

• Role play in scenarios– Why are we doing it this way?– We have chosen typical user roles as personas– Each persona has a scenario that is typical of their

activities

• We will ask each of you to choose a persona and ask you to enact their scenario– Using our concept map tool to identify concepts in the

teaching languages domain

Hands on Activity: Concept Map

Scenarios

Chrissie (teacher)

Louise (independent

learner)

Lyn (course designer)

Roland (teacher on sabbatical)

Ruth (teaching assistant)

Tom (secondary

school teacher)

Have fun!

• Take a look around and choose a persona, feel free to discuss the activities with the others at your poster

• Start when you’re ready…

Discussion

How did you get on?

• Concept Map Structure– Were you able to place all of your resources in the map?– Was it easy to decide where to place your resources in the

map– Did you ever choose to place a resource on a parent concept

rather than the end of a branch?– Does the concept map have the coverage that you would

expect?

• Concept Map Terminology– Is the terminology in the map the same as you would use?– If you disagreed then did you still recognise the terminology

(was it unambiguous)?

Discussion

Some comments raised in previous workshops:

• Learners and Teachers use different terminology– Different terms or different maps?

• Is order important?– How can we reflect thought process (typical searches)

• Overlapping terms – useful or confusing?

• Show info on nodes (number of resources under a concept/branch)

• How to deal with language specific concepts