Belfast conference opens with radical vision of learning
The new president of Educause, the US-based higher education ICT body, opened the Jisc/CNI conference in Belfast today by presenting a vision of learning in the 21st century as being participatory, collaborative, multidisciplinary and one that generates ‘co-created, sensory-rich’ content with students devising and refining their own learning strategies.
Diana Oblinger opened the 7th Jisc/CNI conference which had as its theme ‘Transforming the User Experience’ and spoke about new generations of students with different expectations and different experiences which require new approaches and new infrastructures to support their learning. 'new generations of students with different expectations and different experiences require new approaches and new infrastructures to support their learning'
According to research, US undergraduates spend only 7.7% of their time in formal learning, she reported, while for graduate students the figures is 5.1%. With around one fifth of US students having their own websites and writing their own blogs, students could be said to have become ‘media creators’, she said.
In such an environment, Web 2.0 resources such as Wikipedia should be seen not as questionable and transient phenomena, but rather emblems of a participatory culture in which ‘amateurs’ become ‘authorities’, and resources whose importance is revealed through the processes behind them rather than the products they become. In turn, she continued, knowledge becomes, ‘not something possessed, but created’, something ‘distributed rather than held’.
She reported on the emergence of ‘science gateways’ which were beginning to support such complex systems of technology-based learning and virtual affiliations, with creative and radical learning spaces further supporting collaborative approaches. Sensory-rich content - visualisation and haptics (learning by touch) - was beginning to offer further possibilities, and Dr Oblinger ended by calling for an enabling infrastructure which could support such highly experiential and interactive forms of learning.
A session followed on the Jisc collaboration with the US’s National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) which is seeing the digitisation of a range of scholarly archives on both sides of the Atlantic. Helen Aguera of the NEH began by suggesting that the power of the internet is not fully exploited if narrow national limits are constructed; the internet demands global approaches, she said, and the Jisc/NEH collaboration was an example of such an approach.
Her Jisc counterpart, Alastair Dunning, spoke about how the collaborative programme’s call for proposals had elicited a different set of responses to Jisc’s national digitisation programme, and that the chosen projects had a greater emphasis on classical and medieval resources than the Jisc programme. He continued by saying that the opportunities for joint US/UK digitisation calls could build on current work and that the potential for uncovering a wide range of hidden materials was immense, suggesting that other ‘shared historical threads’ could include the Titanic, world wars, the birth of telecommunications and the American War of Independence.
Other sessions today included presentations and discussions on repositories and digital preservation, infrastructure activities and strategic content developments on both sides of the Atlantic. The conference continues tomorrow.
For further information, please go to: Jisc/CNI conference