HEA conference 2012 OER social media content communities within the arts, design & media

Two SCORE fellows discuss OER use of social media content communities and highlight best practice in rich media reuse within the arts, design & media sector.

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Abstract Chris Follows

Embedding OER and Open practice at the University of the Arts London: Chris Follows

Please see presentation slides here.

Chris Follows slides HEA Annual Conference

Institutional VLE's and OER repositories are rarely built to support social media content communities, as a result many learning and teaching materials are being independently dispersed across the web using more familiar and user friendly 'social media' environments such as wikis, blogs, independent websites, youtube accounts etc, there is currently no middle ground to facilitate OER content communities. How can OER communities adopt social media tools and practices to help improve and encourage better rich media OER practice?

Key challenges for the rich media reuse community are finding or being directed to the most useful and usable open content. Random google searches will sometimes get you what you want but the content will be more than likely high risk and non-reusable in an OER sense. Finding OER rich media reusable 'gems' in this granular landscape is difficult and random standalone pieces of media content are difficult to assess in regards to reuse, remixing this content even more so.

How do we share and collaborate in this space and overcome the obstacles of use and re-use specifically when creating and designing complex rich media learning content?

Chris will draw from four different perspectives of developing media content communities within practice based Art and Design subjects including SCORE research, http://process.arts.ac.uk ,the DIAL project (digital Integration into arts learning) part of the JISC UK Developing digital literacies programme and ALTO (JISC UK OER programme).

Abstract Sarah Atkinson

Film and audiovisual media open archives as OER: Sarah Atkinson

The Sp-ark archive is an interactive online project based on the multi-media archive of filmmaker Sally Potter. The archive includes the intuitive visual navigation of films and all of their related assets. Users are able to view and annotate materials using the sites 'pathways' feature, other users are then able to access the annotated pathways, which lead to a deeper engagement with the materials. This lends itself to the critical and analytical study of primary materials intrinsic to both undergraduate and postgraduate study within numerous disciplines.

The benefits that such a resource can bring to higher education academics and students are invaluable. The successful development and utilisation of such a resource has the potential to enhance and enrich teaching and learning practices within these disciplines, to foster the creation of a user-community around the archive's content, as well as to encourage other high-profile filmmakers and organisations to allow online access to their work in the future.

This case study tests and reports upon the archive's OER potential through a number of focus groups of students and academics. These groups are used to demonstrate, explore and evaluate the potential of the archive as a teaching, learning and assessment device. The groups also collaboratively generate, develop and share open educational resources around the content of the archive.

The case study seeks to draw out the benefits and efficiencies of collaborative resource generation, exploring the challenges of sustainability and expansion of both the resources and the encompassing user-group community.