A draft report to the elected members of West Sussex County Council
Interactive medieval palaeography: a co-operative venture
West Sussex Record Office and the University of Leicester (Department of English Local History)
The primary aim of the project is to enable the learning of medieval
palaeography at various levels through the delivery of web-based materials
which are interactive and participative. The core of the project consists of
high quality images of documents which are 'image-mapped'. Basically, the
result is that the user can run the mouse pointer over the image of the
document, word by word, and a typescript rendition and additional details of
the word appear in the status bar at the foot of the web page screen. In the
case of a high proportion of words, moreover, there are hypertext links to
other explanatory pages by clicking on the image of the word. The whole
project is thus designed to be interactive, to work at various levels of
learning, to be used at a distance, and by independent learning. Please
note, however, that it is not intended as a distance-learning package in the
financial and commercial sense, but is, in complete contrast, designed to be
free, in terms of no cost and in terms of access, and it is not part of a
formal distance-learning course.
The general educational context of this project is a combination of several
issues:
- the impending broad development of lifelong learning (not quite here yet,
perhaps);
- the rôle within general learning processes of what is now called, in some
circles, ICT, but in others still CAL (computer-assisted learning), to assist
independent learning;
- and the involvement within these two processes of post-16 educational
institutions and local authorities.
Accordingly, a project on medieval palaeography is a desirable point of
departure, for it is a skill which academic historians, local historians and
genealogists are enthusiastic to acquire, combining the interests then of an
institution of higher education and a local record office.
The specific (and immediate) context, nevertheless, is the delivery of a
module (10 hours) on the M.A. course in English Local History at the
University of Leicester, with the following objectives:
- to encourage independent learning;
- to relate to different learning styles -- not everyone learns in the same
way and there are very diverse learning styles; to some extent, the diversity
of those styles is being reinforced by new technology and the expectation that new technology will be one form of the learning experience;
- related to the last point, to recognise that learning, particularly of a
subject like palaeography, for some people will be better achieved through a
more participative experience;
- following from this last point, that independent learning have some form
of self-assessment and feedback, which needs to be integrated into the
learning experience, and which new technology can deliver in an improved way;
- and finally to allow the full delivery of materials in a constricted
timetable.
From the perspective of the institution of higher education, the involvement
of the West Sussex Record Office has produced three major benefits: (a) a
wider constituency and an opening of perceptions rather than a closure; (b)
a high technical and technological input; and (c) motivation and encouragement.
In terms of hard technical skills and effectiveness, without the record
office's provision of high quality digital images of documents, the impact of
the project would have been much diminished, because interactive, electronic
delivery of the learning of palaeography demands images of the highest
quality.
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