Frustrating Searches

[PeterHartley]

Really interesting post but you left me a bit confused. You seem to have found quite a lot of stuff you might be able to use – in which case, why ‘hate’ the activity? Is there a way of making it less frustrating? Maybe this is something to raise in the webinar (especially as we have one speaker from Jorum)

Best wishes

Peter

 

[GraphDesProject]

Peter,

Yes rather over-dramatic! I think I did find quite a lot of things and if I was just browsing I’d investigate them more fully – but these were things for me not items to fit the purpose (resources for learners). Funnily enough later that day I by chance picked up a Twitter stream of #design #thinking and found quite a few leads!! It’s just knowing where to look and, I think now, researching in a different way from usual, hence the frustration.

Sancha

[ElizabethECharl]

Sancha,

I hope you will be able to bring that point up at the webinar or it may be made clearer during it as to how resources are organised and criteria used to categorise the resources.  If is is going to be difficult I think that would be a shame for all users as that would be another barrier to accessing.

[GrahamRGibbs]

Your comments echo my experience when looking for resources. I’ve ‘wasted’ hours looking through Jorum and Merlot and been put off by some of the low quality of the material I found. The main issue here was that there wasn’t enough reliable and detailed description and meta data to make a judgement about the resource without downloading it and spending time looking at it. The need to spend time looking at the material is still true for YouTube, but I have found that getting to the video resource is very quick, and, as you say, the videos are often quite short. But even more importantly, you know how long they are before you start. I also think the arrangement into channels on YouTube is helpful. Once you’ve found a good video on a topic, you can then look to see what else is on the same channel. I’ve spent a lot of time finding resources for by classes on statistics and SPSS use. Most of what I have found is on YouTube and using the channels once I’d identified some good quality material was a good search strategy. I’ve used this strategy the other way round too. I’ve found some poor and incorrect videos and then avoided other stuff on the same channel. (For those unfamiliar with YouTube, channels are how you post videos onto YouTube so looking at the channel is a way of seeing other videos posted by the same person – or institution).

[GraphDesProject]

Hi Elizabeth,

Sadly I’ve been unable to see the webinars live since the first one as I’m at work at that time.

I don’t think there is a problem per se with accessing resources – but I have more sympathy, I guess, for learners after this activity if they have to research in ways alien to them (and quickly).

Sancha

[GraphDesProject]

Graham, Yes I agree very much. And the same applies to print resources too. For example, there’s a generally good book on design thinking that has some errors in it, which puts me off the whole, so I tend not to use it at all.

And I know this is a course about TEL but is there going to be anything about the combination of technical to non-technical resources, I wonder?

Sancha

[AliSheph]

I had mixed results! I decided to look for resources on groupwork, as I will be teaching on a module next year which involves this.  I used LearnHigher as I had not used it before – I had had a hint from one of the webinars that there were some relevant resources on this site.
·         How easy was it to find a relevant resource?

[LearnHigher] Quite straightforward – and the links from this resource to others were also useful
[TED] – not at all.  Despite several keyword searches, I couldn’t find anything relevant.  I did a search on a completely different topic (corporate strategy) and struggled to find anything on this as well.

·         How could you incorporate this resource into your professional practice?

[LearnHigher] Might adapt some of the handouts/slides for group briefing and when creating peer assessment forms
[LearnHigher] Might read a recommended book on groupwork problems
[LearnHigher] Might embed the weblink to the student resources on groupwork from LearnHigher (a series of videos) into the VLE and refer to in the group briefing, or possibly play the most relevant ones in class
[TED] – n/a

·         Which source did you find more useful (and why) – the ‘official’ resource bank or the open search?
·         Official resource bank
·         Are there any limitations to the use of your preferred resource for your learners (e.g. copyright licence; login requirements)?

[LearnHigher] There’s a wide CC licence and no login requirements

·         Would your own students agree that the resource you prefer is accessible?

Yes, but I don’t think they would look at TED themselves either! 

[ElizabethECharl]

Sancha – hopefully you have been able to access the recordings of the webinars? They are normally posted if not on the same day the next. This week and previous recording are at: http://octel.alt.ac.uk/course-materials/ .

The issue about being able to locate and search through OERs on Jorum was raised and it appears that they have attempted to address this and are currently testing an improved interface at: beta.jorum.ac.uk/find .

The other possible search aggregator was a resource I was not aware of called XPERT (http://xpert.nottingham.ac.uk/ ) – I have not yet had an opportunity to see how well the searching options works but thought I should mention its as well.

[PeterHartley]

RE Groupwork

You might also want to look at a small book for students which I put together with Mark Dawson (we were both involved with the LearnHigher initiative) and there are some resources on the accompanying website which you can download:
http://www.palgrave.com/pocketskills/groupwork/

This is an area I used to teach – drop me an email if you want further suggestions.

There is also a chapter on groups in the book which came out of the LearnHigher CETL and which we mentioned in the webinar,

Best wishes
Peter

[Ted O’Neill]

Yes, Graham, you said “The main issue here was that there wasn’t enough reliable and detailed description and meta data to make a judgement about the resource without downloading it and spending time looking at it.” I think that really is the problem. I spent quite a lot of time searching through Jorum, which I had never used, but finally left empty handed. 

The category structure is not very useful-at least for me. I was looking for English language teaching and learning materials. (I teach English at a uni in Japan with some very high level students.)

I tried looking at the few items that seemed potentially relevant, but it does take a long time to load previews or download and progress though. The file listings are pretty much opaque.

I wonder if a commenting system would be helpful? Users could build up better metadata, perhaps. But it might all be noise.

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