Idea submitted by Paul Bradshaw of Birmingham City University School of Media
A dynamic learning directory that allows learners of all kinds to tap into academic expertise by creating a sustainable and flexible resource out of the byproducts of ongoing research. In a nutshell the ‘process’ of ongoing learning and research that an academic does on a daily basis, becomes a ‘product’ in its own right.
This project involves training academics in using social bookmarking tools to make visible what have so far been invisible processes of research and monitoring information – and using the resultant information feeds to make that invisible expertise visible for anyone.
In practice, this means that, as an academic, everything I read and find interesting in my subject area is published in a way that provides a useful learning resource and archive, without me having to do any extra work (and hopefully saving me work in the long run).
The benefit for the academic is a more effective work process – as they ‘tag’ everything that they read with keywords it makes it more easy to access that information again at future dates. If they are teaching a class on methodology, for example, they can direct students to their bookmarks tagged ‘methodology’; if they are specifically looking at the use of methodology in studies of biology, they can point people at ‘methodology+biology’. The academic has control on what they choose to bookmark and tag.
The same advantages apply when writing books, research papers, or fielding media enquiries.
The benefit for learners is that this collection of information is public, and can be cross-published automatically onto a staff or department blog, email newsletter, Facebook page or any other platform. This requires no effort from the academic.
So a student interested in discourse can visit the BCU Media School website and search or browse through staff bookmarks, providing a ‘pre-filtered’ web on a particular topic.
Beyond this very simple beginning there is enormous potential for combining the bookmarks of all staff in a particular field, building a valuable database of interests and specialisms, or across fields, and making new connections which would otherwise not be obvious. It would also highlight the most-used resources within academia and in the process build flexible and constantly updated ‘reading lists’. There is also potential to incorporate the bookmarks of learners into the site.
Technically the project would require very little work: staff would be shown how to place a ‘bookmarklet’ on their web browser (this takes 30 seconds at most) and a website would be created to pull and publish feeds from those (this could be done in a day). Additional material should be produced to show people how to pull feeds onto other platforms such as Facebook, blogs, MyGoogle, etc. and how to tweak the website when required. Open source technologies could be used at all points if required, although the free platform Delicious would be the best option for the initial bookmarking stage. The main focus of the project is one-time training that in turn creates a sustainable model for a dynamic learning resource.
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