YouTube as a repository : the creative practice of students as producers of Open Educational Resources

In this paper we present an alternative view of Open Educational Resources (OERs). Rather than focusing on open media resources produced by expert practitioners for use by peers and learners, we examine the practice of learners as active agents, producing open media resources using the devices in their pockets: their mobile phones. In this study, students are the producers and operate simultaneously as legitimate members of the YouTube community and producers of educational content for future cohorts. Taking an Action Research approach we investigated how student’s engagement with open media resources related to their creativity. Using Kleiman’s framework of fives conceptual themes which emerged from academics experiences of creativity (constraint, process, product, transformation, fulfillment), we found that these themes revealed the opportunities designed into the assessed task and provided a useful lens with which to view students’ authentic creative experiences. Students’ experience of creativity mapped on to Kleiman’s framework, and was affected by assessment. Dimensions of openness changed across platforms, although the impact of authenticity and publication on creativity was evident, and the production of open media resources that have a dual function as OERs has clear benefits in terms of knowledge sharing and community participation.The transformational impacts for students were evident in the short term but would merit a longitudinal study. A series of conclusions are drawn to inform future practice and research

Cartoon planet: Micro-reflection through digital cartoons - a case study on teaching and learning with young people

The young learners of today tend to show little enthusiasm for formal schooling. This does not necessarily mean pupils are not interested in learning or developing new skills and competences. In fact, the opposite often happens in the informal settings they belong to. Finding ways of transferring pupil’s informal learning to the school setting is therefore important. This paper gives a brief overview on the development of informal learning activities to encourage young people’s active reflection on their informally acquired competencies through the use of web technologies. The researchers also explore the role of the teacher, and the need of a participatory learning environment in a less formal classroom. Reflections on the experiences and recommendations are also provided

Development of One and Two Current Transition Amplitudes With Two Body Final States

One of the biggest challenges facing modern day nuclear physics is understanding the structure of states within the hadronic spectrum of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). We have shown this spectrum to be quite rich with hundreds of allowed states; however, if we wish to better grasp the dynamics of QCD, then it is necessary that we start investigating the internal structure of these states. This may be done by probing these states with external currents, but this requires a description of the intersection of QCD with the electroweak sector. This work acts as a stepping stone in this direction. Working to all orders in the strong interaction and to leading order in electroweak effects we present novel formalisms for transition amplitudes with one and two currents with two hadrons in the final state, namely the 2 + J → 2 and 1 + J → 2 + J amplitudes. Our results are valid for spinless hadrons with any number of open channels between two- and three-particle threshold, place no restrictions on the Lorentz structure or quantum numbers of the current, and are independent of any underlying model. We also show how this formalism may be used to rigorously access elastic form factors of resonances which has proven challenging to do experimentally. Finally, we present a toy calculation of elastic resonance form factors using the 2 + J → 2 formalism in which we stress the importance of treating resonances rigorously as poles in the complex plane

Delivering the Maori-language newspapers on the Internet

Although any collection of historical newspapers provides a particularly rich and valuable record of events and social and political commentary, the content tends to be difficult to access and extremely time-consuming to browse or search. The advent of digital libraries has meant that for electronically stored text, full-text searching is now a tool readily available for researchers, or indeed anyone wishing to have asscess to specific information in text. Text in this form can be readily distributed via CD-ROM or the Internet, with a significant impact on accessibility over traditional microfiche or hard-copy distribution. For the majority of text being generated de nouveau, availability in electronic form is standard, and hence the increasing use of full-text search facilities. However, for legacy text available only in printed form, the provision of these electronic search tools is dependent on the prior electronic capture of digital facsimile images of the printed text, followed by the conversion of these images to electronic text through the process of optical character recognition (OCR). This article describes a project undertaken at the University of Waikato over the period 1999 to 2001 to produce a full-text searchable version of the Niupepa or Maori- language newspaper collection for delivery over the Internet

Digital libraries and minority languages

Digital libraries have a pivotal role to play in the preservation and maintenance of international cultures in general and minority languages in particular. This paper outlines a software tool for building digital libraries that is well adapted for creating and distributing local information collections in minority languages, and describes some contexts in which it is used. The system can make multilingual documents available in structured collections and allows them to be accessed via multilingual interfaces. It is issued under a free open-source licence, which encourages participatory design of the software, and an end-user interface allows community-based localization of the various language interfaces - of which there are many