We're moving!

Following the OER phase II start-up meeting on 22nd September, we decided to move the blog to the Wordpress platform as this seems to be the preferred option for the OER phase II blogs - please join us at http://csapopencollections.wordpress.com!

Visualisation tools

The C-SAP OER II Collections project hopes to shine a small light on undiscovered or underused social science research methods resources, and create new ways of facilitating the use of these to support teaching on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes - and we propose that one of these ways could be through the use of visualisation tools. To start with, we are putting together a growing collection of bookmarks on delicious tagged with "visualisation" - feel free to explore as many as you can and hopefully you will be inspired to add some of your bookmarks, too. The visualisation periodic table and the Visual Understanding Environment developed at Tufts University are probably our most favourite ones!

Learning from the Learning Registry project

Learning Registry is a project of the US government that’s focusing on how to make federal learning resources more accessible to educators and the learners alike, so that the public can engage with the materials and reuse them in new, unforeseen ways. At the moment, the project team is seeking input from the public and collecting ideas about the project using a social networking platform, IdeaScale. The suggestions gathered so far can be accessed here. At the moment, the idea of using structured data to help with the search is coming across quite strongly - whether it’s a microformat to identify a resource as educational, extraction of metadata, adding information about specific properties (seat time, cost, etc), several ideas are centred around making use of structured data to improve the search experience. As the project brief requires us to deliver both a static and a dynamic collection of research methods materials, we are quite drawn to the ideas expressed in the post on authoritative, generative, and social search as three distinct modes for organizing and finding resources and answers. Following some adaptations. the authoritative approach of applying a top-down, predefined taxonomy might be applicable to the static collection. The dynamic collection might possibly benefit from an amalgamate of generative and social search, since, as the author of the post argues, “a fundamental principle for any search system or knowledge management system is that all three methods should be used and that each one should be used and combined when and where appropriate”. We will certainly explore these and similar ideas quite extensively in the coming months and would welcome any constructive feedback!

Initial thoughts on the collections project

As we already mentioned, we are planning to use this blog space to trace our project progress and that will include documenting how our thinking evolves on the issues raised by the project call. At the moment, we are exploring possible approaches towards tackling the task of putting together a collection of social sciences research methods resources, this post reflects some of our ideas at the outset of the project.

In evaluating ongoing challenges to the growth and impact of the open educational resources (OER) movement, the problem of being able to find appropriate OER on the Internet remains a top concern. In the context of the collections project then, how do we of build solutions that actually work in the universe we live in -  In other words, rather than 'wishing' that people would behave differently, how can we utilize solutions that function just fine given the way people actually behave? 

Moreover, with web 2.0 we are also in a situation where it is not just the content creator who can potentially supply information that makes a resource more discoverable – think of the Amazon rating system. Where do we stand on folksonomies and how useful are bottom-up, user-based tagging systems for our project? What to do about the abundance of already existing resources in social science research methods? For instance, are there any parallels between what we are trying to accomplish and a rather timely debate within the field of scientific peer-reviewed publishing, with US-based academics arguing that “less is more” at least when it comes to high-quality research and issuing a plea to “stop the avalanche” of peer-reviewed research? In response to that plea, Neylon presents a counter-argument, suggesting that the fault does not lie with information overload or a failure to adequately filter the research, instead, he suggests to think in terms of a “discovery deficit”. He argues that:

We don’t need more filters or better filters in scholarly communications – we don’t need to block publication at all. Ever. What we need are tools for curation and annotation and re-integration of what is published. And a framework that enables discovery of the right thing at the right time. (…) A focus on enabling discovery can both deliver for researchers and provide business models that are more aligned with the way the web works.”

The discovery deficit could perhaps become a good working metaphor for the collections project and the central dilemma that we are trying to resolve. 

Welcome to the blog and the Open Collections project

This blog will support the  C-SAP (Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics) project: Discovering Collections of Social Science Open Educational Resources. 

The project will run from September 2010 until September 2011 as part of the wider Open Educational Resources Programme Phase II. It seeks to make available open collections of social sciences research methods by embracing Web 2.0 technology and OER-related, sustainable solutions. The rationale for the project stems from the recognition that there is now a wide range of OER materials available to support social research methods. However, despite advances across the sector, academics and students often have problems locating and accessing good quality, peer-reviewed resources appropriate for their particular needs. The project aims to examine which of the Web 2.0 technologies are best suited to support dissemination of research methods OERs and explore a wide variety of Wikis, Blogs, discussion boards, database interrogators, bookmarking systems etc. The project will examine and pilot various approaches and seek to obtain feedback from potential users about suitable approaches, focusing on issues of long-term sustainability. 


We will use the blog to post updates on the project and communicate with the OER community, share our thoughts, resources and latest discoveries in the field of open education/learning technology. We see this space as a collaborative effort and welcome any feedback - watch this space for more contributions coming shortly!