Antiquity Related Collections Harnesed for Educational Scenarios

Introduction

ARCHES will support and link institutions, departments, courses and modules as they introduce, evaluate and disseminate exemplary, transformative and innovative pedagogy through re-purposing new and existing collections of digital resources pertaining to ancient Greece and Rome.

ARCHES is a collaborative project between the University of Warwick's School of Theatre Studies, Centre for Academic Practice and IT Services eLab together with City College Coventry

This two-year project, which started in January 2003, has been funded by the Joint Information Services Committee (JISC) under the Exchange for Learning (X4L) Programme.

Aims of the Arches Project

Over this two year project, ARCHES aims to imaginatively re-purpose an exciting range of materials on ancient Greece and Rome between three educational contexts (FE, HE, and an International Online Resource), three subject areas (Theatre Studies, Classics, VR Modelling) and seven modules. Using a variety of delivery modes in modules over a range of learning levels in FE and HE and beyond, creative use of these resources will transform aspects of traditional pedagogy and introduce innovative teaching practices.

Development

Lecturers at the University of Warwick and City College Coventry will working collaboratively with educational developers and technologists from the Centre for Academic Practice and the ITS eLab to:

• Collate and catalogue electronic resources within an appropriate metadata scheme;
• Create an online database that tutors and students can both search and browse, and which will seamlessly deliver resources to technically- and educationally-diverse environments;
• Explore ways in which the resources can be re-purposed for a variety of contexts and modes of delivery, and integrated in exemplary fashion into actual teaching practice;
• Implement and evaluate the effectiveness of the pedagogical and technological approaches;
• Systematically document and reflect on these processes in each learning context and extract outcomes that have value for and impact on HE and FE sectors as a whole;
• Incorporate in the collection descriptions of effective learning interactions and user experiences;
• Disseminate project resources and outcomes through generic and subject-specific channels.

Software systems to support the ARCHES project

Three inter-linked levels of software systems have been suggested in support of the ARCHES programme. The inter-relationship between the three systems is shown in the figure below.

The Asset Level

This level will use pre-existing, or easily modifiable, database software, in order that entering of data can begin as early as possible in 2003 and in order to provide the integration of other databases (discussed below). An asset database would be established for storing the images, VR models, audio files, animations and accompanying metadata produced within ARCHES.

Functionality for the database could include:

• support for the different media types
• search on keyword, media type and text within the learning content
• search fields to be selected by the user
• presentation of the data in the form of thumbnails accompanied by relevant metadata
• Additional data can be uploaded by staff
• Data and metadata to be made available for use by staff in a personal folder. This would take the form of a virtual album (or lightbox)

However, it is anticipated that assets from other databases would also be used. Some of these resources are freely available via JISC, other resources (including those owned by the BBC) are currently being negotiated by JISC, or could be included as part of the project.

The major part of the software development required for the project is at the content level. This is because we would like to integrate seamlessly the use of the other databases and the ARCHES database. This means the facility to add pedagogic value and to enable assets to be repurposed between subject disciplines needs to be applied at the content level, rather than the asset level (since we cannot alter the metadata of the other asset databases).

The content level database would be enable users to do the following:

• Link to data and metadata in asset databases
• Present these data and metadata as a series of thumbnails
• Add text associated with each set of data to provide a learning context
• Add learning content metadata
• Edit the "content object" (any alternative names for this would be welcome) to create a new content object.
• Export the content object for use in creating learning objects

The learning objects can be created in already existing, or soon to be developed, software, such as WebCT, the Warwick VLE, webpages using the CMS, Web-board, PowerPoint, etc. The content objects therefore need to be exportable to these, or to an intermediary package (such as Word). We may want to experiment with using EML for creating these learning objects.

However, it will also be useful to archive many of these learning objects as a way of encouraging innovative / experimental practice within and without immediate contexts. These archived learning objects will require their own metadata. If these learning objects are archived, it should be possible to link these to the content objects from which they were derived. Even if the learning objects are not archived, the pedagogical evaluation of their use will be.

Deployment

It is hoped that the work will provide in a broad sense valuable models for repurposing electronic resources for use in teaching and learning. The technical architecture for submitting educational descriptions of the resources and providing effective access is one area the project is addressing during the first year – see ARCHES Software Systems Requirements document

This development platform aims to support facilities whereby staff and students alike can:

• search or browse the resources as thumbnails in a web environment
• choose a selection for their own project or teaching purpose
• save these links to a file or within a web page
• annotate, discuss, edit and so forth the data and metadata descriptions shown, and then
• save this personal collection for publishing to the web.

The project will be deployed across five Programmes

Arch 1: Re-Purposing Between FE and HE

The ARCHES datasets will enhance teaching and learning by enabling tutors and students to explore the value of outstanding and novel electronic resources for the study of ancient drama.

The use of VR in Humanities teaching and learning is in its infancy. By delivering cutting-edge electronic objects (e.g. VRML and fully-rendered 3D models; rendered images and animations; acoustical modelling etc.) alongside more traditional types of electronic resources (digital image collections; texts; streaming video; VLE environments), the capacity of students and tutors synthetically to explore dynamic aspects of ancient theatrical performance (space, time, movement) will be significantly enhanced. ARCH 1 will enable tutors and students working in two similar models in FE and HE to explore innovative ways of deploying these resources in ways appropriate to their distinctive institutional, pedagogical and technical contexts, while enabling detailed, comparative evaluation

Of the many thousand ancient Roman domestic wall paintings that survive, a remarkably high proportion depict theatrical themes or stage buildings. Simultaneously, much current scholarship reads Roman domestic space as specifically "theatrically"-conceived architectural-decorative ensembles. Students in both Classical Art History and Theatre Studies can therefore benefit enormously from having access to advanced research resources created within both disciplines. Arch 2 will re-purpose two original photographic collections and a collection of VR reconstructions of Roman domestic and theatre spaces, all created by the tutors, to support and enhance teaching and learning across both disciplines.

ARCH 3:Transforming the "Online Learning" Paradigm - I

B.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies (ThPS): Society, Stage and Text 2 - Greek Drama Module

Context: an optional, one-term workshop, seminar and research project-based module for 2nd-year students.

Aims: building on the success of innovations in student-directed teaching and learning in this module in recent years, and upon the School's reputation for pedagogical excellence in devised practices across a range of forms (e.g. experimental theatre, Performance Art, video as a creative tool, and community theatre), Arch 3 aims to create a stimulating and holistic approach to the study of Greek drama by synthesizing, in novel ways, elements of "online learning", practical workshops, seminar classes, and students research projects.

MA in Performance Space and VR Modelling: Places of Performance Module

Context: students in this MA course, jointly offered by the Universities of Warwick and Kent, undertake work in ICT-based design and animation, digitally-based research in historical theatre spaces and stage settings, and VR reconstruction of historical sites. The Places of Performance Module considers theatre buildings and structures in their historical contexts, and introduces students to the kind of evidence needed on which to base reliable models.

Aims & Objectives: students will be enabled to discover resources pertaining to theatre-historical VR modelling and contribute content to the ARCHES dataset.

Learning Activities: students will be assigned tasks designed to train them to discover, evaluate and deploy research resources for modelling places of performance, and to study exemplary modelling processes. Students will implement ARCHES standards in tagging their own VR objects, and will contribute original tagged data both to a custom-made VLE (Kent) as part of the learning process, and to the ARCHES dataset.

Arch 5: International Online Study Centre

Didaskalia: Ancient Theatre Today

http://didaskalia.open.ac.uk/index.shtml

Didaskalia is an established and highly-regarded electronic resource dedicated to the study of ancient Greek and Roman drama and its reception, which has contributed to the building of research and educational communities in its subject area. It combines an academic journal, listings and reviews of events and performances, a study area for students, and an online discussion forum for students, teachers, researchers and practitioners.

Aims: to enable international student, teacher and research communities sustainably to use and extend uses of re-purposable, online teaching and learning resources through ongoing online interactions.

Outcomes: through simple search-and-browse interfaces in Didaskalia, readers will be able to access the complete ARCHES dataset; to observe, contribute to, and thus sustain growing subject-area expertise in re-purposing such resources for specific pedagogical contexts.

Learning Activities: Didaskalia will host, and permanently archive, two online ARCHES Symposia. Through spontaneous and planned use of interactive technologies during and after the project lifespan, students and teachers will reflectively share experiences of creating, accessing and deploying online resources. Vols. 6.1 of the Journal will be devoted to assessment and discussion of "Online initiatives" in the subject-area, inviting contributions from resource creators and users.

Who Is Involved

The project will be led by the University of Warwick, directed by Professor Richard Beacham and Dr Hugh Denard in the School of Theatre Studies and managed by the Centre for Academic Practice (Dr Jay Dempster and Mark Childs). The development will involve bought-out time for lecturers in the School of Theatre Studies and the Classics Department at Warwick and at City College Coventry. Technical development assistance will be provided by the elab development unit of IT Services at Warwick.

Dr Jay Dempster, Centre for Academic Practice
Tel: 024 76524670 Fax: 024 7657 2736 Email: Jay.Dempster@warwick.ac.uk

Contacts

Joint Information Systems Committee JISC as part of the Exchange for Learning Program (X4L)

Project Progress

Project Plan

Features

Television programme"Who Killed Julius Caesar?" broadcast on Channel 5 on March 24 at 9p.m. featured some of the digital resources (described as "cutting edge CGI" in the programme notes) that are to be used in the ARCHES project.

Publications in Interactions the web journal on educational technology at Warwick, available locally and nationally:

• Volume 7 no. 2(January 2003): Article: E-Tutoring and Transformations in Online Learning, Hugh Denard, School of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick
• Volume 7 no. 1 (January 2003): Innovations summary
  

• Summer term 2003 issue 24: About the ARCHES work pdf document
• Autumn term 2003 issue 25 (in press): part of the exemplars and resources from projects in Centre for Academic Practice. pdf document

Article in the Association for Learning Technology newsletter (will appear issue 43 due end of September 2003). pdf document

ARCHES report: Creating a shared information environment in higher education

A report giving background information on digital repositories and detailing the issues encountered by the ARCHES project has been written.This draws on the experiences of the project and is intended to provide an introduction to colleagues at the University of Warwick to interoperability standards, IPR, etc. This will be internally disseminated during the autumn term and will contribute to an academic paper: Draft title: Metadata, taxonomy and interoperability issues in developing multi-disciplinary portal systems, Richardson, S., Childs, M. and Dempster, J.A. (in preparation). pdf document

Demonstration at the JISC X4L Programme Meeting, Warwick, June 2003. PowerPoint display

Institutional workshop. The ARCHES project informed an event held on 11th July, 2003 at University College Dublin held as part of their Educational Technology Initiatives programme: Opportunities for Access. PowerPoint presentations

• Association for Learning Technology Conference, 8-10th September 2003 at Sheffield University.
• Networked Learning Conference, 7th April 2004 at Lancaster University.
  

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