Involve Me And I’ll Understand: Using Digital Resources To Improve Learning And Teaching In The Humanities.
With millions of pounds of public money being spent on digitisation projects, it seems reasonable to assume that such initiatives should yield significant
educational benefits. Certainly students gain from being able to access rare or delicate
materials and educators have a rich resource to help them illustrate their lectures.
But the potential of digital resources to support learning and teaching goes much further than the delivery of content. Learner activity is at the heart of learning; as recognised by the ancient Chinese proverb:
Tell me and I’ll forget
Show me and I may remember
Involve me and I’ll understand
and articulated by the contemporary educational theory of social constructivism. At the core of constructivism is the idea that learning takes place not just by exposure to new information but through a process of learners building their own understandings as a result of their interactions in the world.
With long lectures and tutor-dominated seminars now hard to justify in the age of abundant information, the expectation is on the educator to facilitate students’ learning by designing engaging and challenging experiences which will allow them to transform new content into personal meaning. Dialogue, problem solving, and collaborative research tasks are all examples of the kind of interactivity that is on the agenda.
The importance of interactivity and involvement in learning will be the starting point for this paper. Drawing on some of the most interesting and influential thinking in education, it will seek to establish some basic principles about how learning takes place and how best to support it. It will then go on to examine the potential role of digital resources in this process.
Discussion will be illustrated with examples of the ways in which resources from SCRAN can be used in the Humanities. SCRAN is one of the most exciting and extensive digital resource bases for education. Over one million high quality objects – images, sound files, video clips and text records – are available from its. Educational users can download these resources, interact with them and re-use them. The resources on SCRAN have been gathered from a wide range of cultural organisations, such as museums, galleries, media organisations and archives and cover a wide range of subject areas. Collections include artworks from Bridgeman Art Library and and sculptures from the medieval city of Ife in Nigeria, illuminated manuscripts from the Book of Deer and bookbindings by Talwin Morris, objects from the V&A and treasures from the Museum of Antiquities, as well as early photography, mini-movies, old m
By making its resources available as individual objects rather than pre-articulated packages, SCRAN allows lecturers and learners maximum flexibility in engaging with the materials. SCRAN also provides a variety of supports to help its users select, organise, manipulate, and repurpose the data for their own use. These supports range from how-to guides, search tips, and regularly posted teaching ideas on the website, to hands-on training sessions and specialised software tools to aid the creation of individualised learning materials.