Dialog PLUS Project description

Digital Libraries in Support of Innovative Approaches to Learning and Teaching in Geography

The DialogPLUS project combines the efforts of geographers, education specialists, and computer scientists in two UK and two US universities (Southampton, Leeds, Penn State, UC Santa Barbara) [see team members]. It is funded jointly by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United Kingdom Joint Information System Committee (JISC) as part of their Digital Libraries in the Classroom (DLIC) initiative, and the partners at Southampton, Leeds and Pennsylvania State Universities have worked together as part of the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN).

The project partners proposed to develop electronic resources to support teaching and independent student learning at undergraduate levels within their existing programmes. The project specifically looks at issues surrounding the creation, sharing, reusing and repurposing online learning activities that draw on a wide range of available resources. The set of courses/modules cover the particular topics linked to digital geospatial resources, within each of the following areas:

• Human Geography
• Geomorphology
• Geographical Information Science
• Earth Observation

At the heart of learning resourses is the notion of a learning nugget. This term was adopted early in the project, at a time when there was heated debate in the learning technology community about what constituted a 'learning object'. Rather than impose any particular view or definition, when we engaged at our early meetings with the Geography teachers we allowed their vocabulary and definitions to emerge. They proposed the idea of a 'nugget' to represent stand-alone learning activities that would vary in size and scope. It was endorsed by team members from both countries and all three disciplines, Geography, Education and Computer Science [see some example nuggets].

As part of our ongoing commitment to the vision of JISC, we are submitting our nuggets (learning activities) into the JORUM digital library repository where they will be freely to anyone to view and download.