JUMPING ON THE YOUTUBE BANDWAGON? USING DIGITAL VIDEO CLIPS TO DEVELOP PERSONALISED LEARNING STRATEGIES

This poster presentation seeks to explore pedagogically sound strategies for the use of digital video to develop personalised learning and to engage learners in higher level cognitive activities. The poster illustrates work that is being undertaken by a team of developers and researchers based at The University of Hull, U.K. The team have developed exemplar materials, including a framework for the use of digital video in different learning spaces, based around one of the phase I JISC digitisation projects.

This is the Newsfilm Online archive ( http://newsfilm.bufvc.ac.uk/ ), a project consisting of over 3,000 hours of television news and cinema newsreels, taken from the collection of the ITN/Reuters archive covering a period from 1910s to the present day, and is being made available to the further and higher education community in the UK, online in high quality format for teaching, learning and research. Methods At the beginning of the project members of the team developed a working hypothesis around the probable use of this new archive once it was released to the tertiary community. We postulated that most users, assuming they felt there was a value to searching the collection in the first place, would seek to identify ‘content’ (we coined the term ‘stuff’) for their own particular discipline area or subject. It followed from our initial hypothesis that users would be either satisfied with the results of their immediate searches or disenchanted altogether as they failed to discover the precise topic or content they desired. Given the particular nature of the Newsfilm archive which might easily be characterised as a humanities or social sciences resource, we also hypothesised that this approach (one we might characterise as content driven) would leave many users frustrated and disinclined to search further. This line of reasoning led to our early decision to avoid a content driven approach for the exemplars and to identify, instead, a model of use which was driven by ‘learning designs’ and ‘learning spaces’.