I've recorded most of today's JISC Collections AGM on twitter: see the tweets at the hashtag #jcagm for my and others versions of the event. However, for some of the day the wifi let me down, and I also wanted to add some thoughts on one of the presentations.
Digital Images for Education is a project funded by a VAT windfall JISC enjoyed to provide recent, that is from the past twenty-five years, digital content for schools and further and higher education. Michael Upshall took us through the project, which will provide 500 hours of video, around 30 terabytes of data, as well as 56,000 still images. His part of the project does not include delivery: the images are to be made available in the summer of 2010, The central problems they had to face are those of duplication, variations in metadata and the amount of time necessary to evaluate images
Michael then showed us pictures of Eric Clapton, the late Queen Mother, Jerry Hall and Giles Brandreth and asked if the audience would accept them for the project. We said no.
I enjoyed James Clay's passionate statement of the case for technology in education, though I found it hard to recognise the further education college I work in, with guns, gangs and knives, in the picture he painted of the sector. I wondered, too, as he spoke of the transforming power of technology with failing courses if that was really the whole of the story. Giving a bad teacher or unmotivated learner an iPod Touch does not of itself change that situation. Heaven knows my own institution needs considerable investment in computing, in the infrastructure and in people with the skills necessary to run college computing in the 21st century and to change the learner experience into something modern. But there's more to it than that.
