[okfn-coord] JISC bid with University of Lincoln

[Jonathan Gray]

As a quick update on this - I've helped refine the proposal into 
something more concrete. The basic idea is to produce an 'information 
pack' for universities, helping them to support students explore public 
domain texts using open source tools (annotation, timelines, etc.). Work 
on the pack will be informed by several 'pilot' cases - at Lincoln, and 
at other partner universities. Lincoln will administer the money, and 
the OKF will support with licensing, research and technical support.

The deadline is 5th May.

Further details below.

Warm regards,

Jonathan

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The summary of the funding call is as follows:

"JISC wishes to fund one year projects and activities that fit with the
vision, outcomes and principles of the JISC e-Learning programme and
support innovative approaches to learning and teaching. This is an open
call, and projects dealing with any aspect of e-learning are welcomed.
To reduce the initial investment in time and resource needed to develop
a traditional JISC proposal and to encourage speculative and innovative
ideas from the community bidders are invited to submit outline proposals
online."

Full details are at:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities/funding_calls/2008/04/circular408.aspx

After a bit of brainstorming, we've come up with an idea. Essentially
the bid would be to construct a pack which would help universities and
teaching staff to support students in using digital technologies to
explore and analyse primary materials in humanities subjects. The 'need'
would be expressed in terms of the growing divide between the
proliferation of new tools and the realities of teaching and assessment.
The information pack would help to bridge this gap.

The pack would be created with close reference to a small number of
pilot cases, where a technical development and support team would work
alongside students and lecturers to enable students to produce resources
that would help them explore their subject matter, and which were
generated by the students for themselves. Academic staff would oversee
the development and help to give direction and focus and to ensure the
quality of the resources, and relevance and usefulness to the course
syllabus.

The technical work would be straightforward, such that effort could be
focused on engaging with students and lecturers and producing
documentation that would actually be useful for other institutions.
Existing 'open source' (i.e. freely re-usable and re-distributable)
software would be adapted, tweaked and integrated to build lightweight,
elegant and robust solutions that would be free and easy to use by
academics and students alike.

The kinds of 'tools' that could be deployed include:
  * annotation systems - so that a primary text could be displayed
alongside an area for notes and comments (students could compare
annotations, as well as search for certain terms which they use to 'flag
up' certain bits of text);
  * time lines - e.g. to represent events in a narrative as they occur
in the narrative, or as they occur in the world in the narrative, or to
represent literary biographical details or historical context;
  * concordances - to automatically generate a list of words and their
occurrence in a text - perhaps excluding a lexicon of common English words);
  * wikis - e.g. to help students working together on a presentation to
collate and collaboratively author notes.

The subject areas that we've identified as being particularly
interesting to do pilot cases with are humanities subjects -
particularly those with corpi that are in the public domain. Hence I
think we are hoping to focus on History and English.

Teaching staff at the University of Chichester have expressed 
provisional interest, and I've just contacted two English Fellows at 
Cambridge University.