For the last few months, I’ve been doing some exciting work creating resources to help people in education shape their online practice.
Chris Young and I have worked with David White of the University of Oxford to turn his ideas around online “Visitors and Residents” into something practical that people can pick up and use.
Last week we got the chance to showcase this work at the Jisc Digital Festival and were delighted with the response.
Visitors and Residents workshop(s)
At our Digifest workshop session, we took over 30 conference delegates through one of the practical activities developed from the V&R model – the V<>R mapping exercise. It’s a practical tool that never fails to stimulate interesting discussion – it always starts with talk of online tools, but quickly moves on to the underlying attitudes around the use of the web and education.
The task nearly always reveals the need for deeper consideration of such issues. That’s why, building on Dave’s research, we developed a full-day practical workshop which guides participants through a structured set of activities to analyse and shape their online practice.
We start with the mapping exercise and then build on it throughout the day considering how to make transitions along the V<>R continuum. Participants then design a set of activities around resident practice to carry out to after the event with support from us.
The workshop will soon be part of our ongoing workshop programme, so watch out for one running near you.
Visitors and Residents Videos
To support the workshop, Dave and his team have produced a series of superb videos (embedded below).
The first video introduces the key ideas underpinning the Visitors and Residents model and the second considers how the web is changing academic practice and challenging traditional notions of credibility and authority.
As these are openly licensed (CC-BY), so you’re free to use them to support your own V&R activities. If we can help with that, just get in touch.
Part 1 – Visitors and Residents
Part 2 – Visitors and Residents: Credibility
Colleagues over at Jisc infoNet have also been working on V&R. They have produced an excellent infoKit focused on applying the approach in relation to the services your unit or institution provides.
You can explore the infoKit here:
Evaluating digital services: a Visitors and Residents approach