exploring uses of digital archives in research and ... - skeptron.uu.se

Furthermore, the move away from proprietary solutions and towards open standards willoffer better opportunities for teachers and students to benefit from existing digital archivesand other resources, which are today mainly used by research communities and otherspecialists.However, today the benefit of appropriate mark-up is not evident to most users in theeducational sector. On the contrary, teachers and students are prone to accept coursewarebased on ad-hoc categorization, redundant information, proprietary applications andformats such as PDF, non-modularized solutions, and rudimentary mark-up (typically rawHTML). This attitude is quit understandable, for several reasons. The coursewarepublishing houses are reluctant to deliver content in portable formats since they - as well asthe software producers - prefer to keep the costumers tied to the vendors’ proprietarysolutions.A second reason is that teachers are not used to separate what is taught from how it islearnt, that is to separate content from its presentation forms. Therefore, they do notspontaneously applause the opportunities to utilize different filtering and presentation toolsin order to use the same digital archive for different courses and/or for different studentgroups. They do not consider the possibility to accumulate content into archives throughwhich the students might be suggested paths or from which subsets of content modulesmight be incorporated into the student’s portfolios - or even produced by the studentsthemselves. Instead many teachers tend to regard content as hardwired into the syllabus ofcertain courses. 53A third reason why teachers are lagging behind many research disciplines and industrialsectors is the shortage of appropriate and easy-to-use tools allowing teachers and studentsto access portable resources and to create their own content archives or portfolios. 54 Thecreation of structured marked-up and metadata-enriched content still requires skills that arefairly rare within the educational sector. Even if XML editors are available the mark-upprocedures still are too non-transparent and tedious for most users. Even if the currentversions of ordinary web browsers have some support for XML, most teachers do not haveany clue about how to make use of those facilities.In order to find out how teachers and students might benefit from emerging mark-up andmetadata recommendations and standards there is a need for both better tools and moredeveloped methods. The proposed PhD project might be a modest contribution to this end.Both by investigating how existing digital archives are used and both by the application ofa few tools in the digital archive which is developed and maintained within the researchgroup where I participate; Digital Literature at Uppsala University. 55Content design in research communitiesIn order to find inspiration for more general educational applications, I will also explorehow digital archives are in fact used in some research communities.The emerging development of multi-disciplinary fields and heterogeneous audiences atuniversities makes communities even more complicated both in terms of the disparatenature of shared digital resources and because of the more heterogeneous background ofthe participants - as in bioinformatics where PhD students might have their major incomputing science, mathematics, biology, chemistry or medicine.53 See e.g. Broady, 2001 and Flanders, 2002.54 See Sjunnesson, 2003 for an overview of metadata for learning objects on the Web.55 See http://www.skeptron.ilu.uu.se/broady/dl/index.htm for further information.pm-030505.doc utkast avh.pm. Monica Langerth Zetterman 11(34)