Patrick McSweeney

The Language Box: Re-imagining Teaching and Learning Repositories

In this paper we describe the Language Box, a teaching and learning repository for language teachers based on the EPrints framework. Language Box differs from other content repositories in that it is designed as a living space, where teachers and lecturers can keep and manage working documents. It is focused around three key services: Hosting materials online, Organizing materials into collections, and Sharing them with the community so that they can be exploited, remixed and extended through activities. We believe that our novel approach may help to solve the problem of low user interest in teaching and learning repositories, and can inform others working on teaching and learning repositories in other domains.

The HumBox: Changing educational practice around a learning resource repository

The HumBox is a learning resource repository for the Humanities educational community in the UK. Over the last three years the challenge for HumBox has been to act as not only a shared library for its community, but also to change the working practices of individuals in that community by encouraging them to work in a more open way and to actively share their materials and ideas with others. Getting users to engage with and adopt innovative systems is a well-known problem; with the HumBox our approach was to focus on user-experience (UX) design through agile development and ongoing participatory and co-design activities. In this paper we present a mixed-methods evaluation of the success of this engagement over the past three years, focusing especially on the way that users have appropriated the system and its services in order to solve real problems. Our evaluation reveals that for many HumBox users we have been successful in creating a technology that is invisible (meaning beneath the level of notice and concern) and that the result of this is less micro-appropriation (users adopting and using specific features in new ways) and more macro-appropriation (users adopting and adapting the site as a whole). We conclude that in the case of HumBox invisible technology coupled with the social framework of co-design and user engagement activities, has allowed a diffusion of ownership, and created a safe social and technical environment where the community can debate high-level issues, and that this has led to changes in both professional and pedagogical practice.

Phantom Tasks and Invisible Rubric: The Challenges of Remixing Learning Objects in the Wild

Learning Objects are atomic packages of learning content with associated activities that can be reused in different contexts. However traditional Learning Objects can be complex and expensive to produce, and as a result there are relatively few of these available. In this paper we describe our work to create a lightweight repository for the language-learning domain, called the Language Box, where teachers and students can share their everyday resources and remix and extend each others content using collections and activities to create new Learning Objects more easily. However, in our interactions with the community we have discovered that practitioners find it difficult to abstract their teaching materials from their teaching activities and experiences; this results in Phantom Tasks and Invisible Rubrics that can make it difficult for other practitioners to reuse their content and build new Learning Objects.